‘Cold feet’: Big problems emerge in controversial US-Australia submarine deal

The US seems to be getting cold feet over giving Australia one of its most secret weapons, with a new report revealing eight critical, unanswered questions.

The first USS Virginia-class submarine entered service in 2004. Since then, another 37 have been built or ordered. And an unknown number of those completed before 2017 incorporate low-grade steel supplied under a quality-control corruption scandal.

Jamie Seidel https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/cold-feet-big-problems-emerge-in-controversial-usaustralia-submarine-deal/news-story/80ffc6683018f7eaa4bf417559fe673e 29 May 23

US Congress appears to be getting cold feet over giving Australia one of its most secret weapons.

Meanwhile, it’s pressing ahead with plans to redesign its nuclear submarines to suit America’s specific needs – not Australia’s.

The Congressional Research Service report, Navy Virginia Class Attack Submarine Procurement: Background and Issues for Congress, pulls no punches about the core project behind former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s 2021 defence collaboration announcement.

The document, issued late last week, specifies eight critical unanswered questions of concern.

• When will the deal be authorised?

• Will it approve the sale of two, or “some other number” of US submarines?

• When will these submarines be removed from the US Navy?

• Will they be old submarines? Newly-built submarines? Or a mix of both?

• How much will Australia pay? And how much will it subsidise the upgrade of US shipyards?

• Can the US meet its own submarine needs as well as those of Australia?

• Will the project make any difference in deterring China?

• What are the risks versus the benefits of giving Australia such immensely secret nuclear and submarine technology?

“Selling three to five Virginia-class boats to Australia would reduce the size of the US Navy’s SSN force by three to five boats,” the report states.

Seller’s remorse?

The report says sceptics of the deal believe “it could weaken deterrence of potential Chinese aggression if China were to find reason to believe, correctly or not, that Australia might use the transferred Virginia-class boats less effectively than the US Navy would”.

That’s not just a matter of the skills and training of Australian submariners.

It’s also an admission of concern that this may effectively mean the US had lost two to five submarines if Canberra doesn’t automatically participate in US conflicts.

“Australia might not involve its military, including its Virginia-class boats, in US-China crises or conflicts that Australia viewed as not engaging important Australian interests,” the report warns.

Defence Minister Richard Marles said as much in March when he revealed Australia had “absolutely not” promised to do Washington’s bidding when it came to Taiwan.

And that would diminish US Naval fleet numbers even further, unless the Australian submarines were replaced.

Sceptics of the SSN AUKUS pathway might argue that it would be more cost-effective for US SSNs to perform both US and Australian SSN missions while Australia invests in other types of military forces, so as to create a capacity for performing other military missions for both Australia and the United States.”

But behind the debate is a simple equation of supply and demand.

“In a nutshell, the challenge for the industrial base – both shipyards and supplier firms – is to ramp up production from one ‘regular’ Virginia-class boat’s work per year … to the equivalent of about five ‘regular’ Virginia-class boats’ work per year.”

It adds that no such additional purchase orders have yet been made and that doubts surround the ability of US naval yards to meet the extra demand. The US has only two shipyards capable of building nuclear-powered submarines.

The report warns that – even under pre-AUKUS plans – the US Navy’s desire to sustain a minimum of 66 nuclear attack submarines is likely to be unachievable.

The current number of 49 is expected to fall to 46 by 2028, with existing building programs only lifting this number to 60 by 2052.

Buyer beware?

But the US Navy has since shifted production towards a bigger version of the submarine. A 25m-long hull section will be added to carry four large vertical launch tubes. This allows the design to carry extra Tomahawk cruise missiles or drones.

The Congressional report puts the cost of these at $US4.3 billion ($6.5 billion) each.

And the US Navy has this year requested another modified version of the submarine.

Designated the “Modified VIRGINIA Class Subsea and Seabed Warfare (Mod VA SSW) configuration”, this design is no longer optimised for the attack submarine role.

Instead, it will be equipped to conduct seabed sabotage operations against infrastructure such as undersea internet cables.

This version will cost about $US5.4 billion ($8.1 billion).

Australia may offset some of the cost of buying US submarines and upgrading US submarine facilities by providing a new base for US and UK operations.

London and Washington hope to begin basing nuclear attack submarines at HMAS Stirling, near Perth, in 2027.

This “Submarine Rotational Forces – West” facility will play host to year-long visits from both nations to provide training for ADF personnel and a support base for operations in the Indian Ocean, Andaman Sea and South China Sea.

“This rotational force will help build Australia’s stewardship,” a senior Biden administration official said earlier this month.

“It will also bolster deterrence with more US and UK submarines forward in the Indo-Pacific.”

High stakes game

The Beijing-controlled South China Morning Post news service has released previously secret details of a submarine incident in January 2021.

Quoting a Chinese military research paper, it says three US surveillance planes had engaged in a “hunt” for People’s Liberation Army submarines.

One of the aircraft, it claims, was met with a “significant” military response when it closed to within 150km of Hong Kong.

“The PLA, which was conducting a naval exercise in the area, responded swiftly by sending out a counter force, the size and nature of which remains classified,” the Post states.

“The two forces were so close that the US military ‘self-destroyed’ its floating sonars to prevent the sensitive devices from falling into China’s hands.”

US Indo-Pacific Command told The War Zone that one of its P-8A Poseidon patrol aircraft had been intercepted in the South China Sea. It denied it had breached any international boundaries.

“The US P-8A that flew on 5 Jan 2021 was intercepted twice in international airspace between Woody Island and Hainan Island roughly 500km from Hong Kong,” a statement reads.

“US and allied aircraft routinely fly in international airspace to maintain situational awareness and reinforce international norms.”

Hainan Island houses one of China’s main naval bases. This includes piers and dry-docks suited to its new aircraft carriers. And tunnels have been dug into the side of a rocky peninsula to house submarines.

Military analysts regard China’s submarine technology as being “decades” behind that of the US and Russia.

But Moscow’s precarious international position after its invasion of Ukraine has raised fears it may be willing to swap the technology with Beijing for material support.

And China’s newest diesel-electric “Yuan” class submarines reportedly demonstrate new levels of quietness, carry advanced sonars and “might be actually pretty good at anti-submarine warfare,” says Hudson Institute Center for Defence Concepts and Technology senior fellow Bryan Clark.

Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @JamieSeidel

May 29, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA, weapons and war

2 Comments »

The usa, is the most evil country in the world. 40 to 60 thousand homeless in every major city, in the usa. RENTS CONTINUE TO GO THROUGH THE ROOF FOR ALL PEOPLE. Homeless people in medium cities. Homeless elderly people in small small towns, dying, every day. An unimagineably brutal evil country, the usa is. Homeless people, every place. Homeless elderly people that die in the streets. 40 cities x 60,000 people per city equals 2.4 million homeless people in cities alone. Homeless that can be viewed, and that can be counted on the streets. Then there are the ones in cars, rvs, the bushes, tree areas, jungles, squatting. The homeless out of view ravaged and dying in the worst circumstances. No medical care. Malnourished. No hygiene. No adequate water. No medicine. No shelter. Bratalized. Murdered. There are probably 6 to 7 million homeless in the usa.
In major cities, school buses pickup children at tent cities, to take them to school. Hundreds of homeless people, die in the streets every day in the usa. Demented, old evil pig biden, don’t care. He’s not even honoring social security. Just pushed limiting citizen social programs for working people and poor people and their children. Beast biden, the liar guarenteed 1.1 trillion in military spending in exchange for cutting social programs. 2 million dollars a bomb , for murder. Biden is fascist devil as bad or, worse, than trump. The pig biden, has sent 500 billion dollars, to ukraine and is sending jets there, to start world war 3.
30 million seniors will not get their social security checks to eat and pay rent for june. Only the most filthy, corrupt, criminals can become president in the usa.

Death penalty for the homeless
EVE OTTENBERG
You can measure the depth of a civilization by how it treats its poor, very young, elderly and mentally ill. By any such metric, ours here in the Exceptional Empire is barbaric. Take New York City mayor Eric Adams and his pronouncements on the homeless destitute. He made a name for himself with stunts like proclaiming he’ll incarcerate people for erratic behavior. Since lotsa homeless are erratic – they either started that way, which was partly how they lost shelter, or living rough eroded their good manners – they are the target population for being locked up. Not to be outdone, presidential candidate Donald “I’m the Real President” Trump swears he’ll ship the homeless to camps outside cities, so they’ll stop “blighting” urban areas. The equation between human beings and trash should cause all antifascist antennae to quiver.

Once upon a time, we had governments concerned about the root causes of poverty and leaders who sought to ameliorate it with good ideas like public housing. Well, after decades of hysterical, lousy press, public housing has received little new funding and the number of poor people it serves shrank pitiably from its heyday in the mid to late twentieth century. This means more people sleeping on sidewalks.

Look at New York City’s housing voucher program to counter homelessness. For some inexplicable bureaucratic reason, it’s ditching renters. The vouchers cover a big percentage of a person’s rent, in a city notorious for astronomical housing costs. “Few tools are as important as vouchers when it comes to addressing New York City’s swelling homelessness problem,” Mihir Zaveri reported in the New York Times April 5, “more than 26,000 households have used the program to find apartments since 2018.” So a city agency’s dysfunction, leading to kicking people out of the voucher program, is a disaster. Many of these luckless souls wind up dwelling in homeless shelters or on the streets. And that’s often lethal.

Over 815 homeless people have died in public places in New York since 2022, most recently and notably Jordan Neely, whose obstreperous destitution offended a fellow subway rider, Daniel Penny, who strangled Neely to death. Penny is white, Neely was Black, though ex-marine Penny claimed May 20 that he is not a white supremacist. The media and mayor Adams downplayed the viciousness of this crime, because, according to Adams, “there were serious mental health issues in play here.” What else would you expect from a former cop? When called to assist people cracking up, police routinely shoot and kill them. Adams unwittingly implies that the Nazi response to schizophrenics is acceptable: murder them.

Surprising no one, the far-right supports the killer. “An online fundraiser for his legal defense,” the Times reported May 19, “amassed more than $2.6 million in donations after it was promoted by conservative politicians.” The depth of hatred of the poor in the U.S. is truly shocking. People willingly contribute to those who heinously rid them of the dispossessed and blithely finance those who choke them to death. There’s one word for this: depravity. And it’s beyond depraved in our neighbor to the north, Canada, which touts state-assisted suicide as a solution to poverty in general and homelessness in particular.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports May 22 that unhoused seniors flood shelters that can’t accommodate their needs. “Nearly a quarter of a million people 55 or older are estimated by the government to have been homeless in the United States during at least part of 2019,” the Post reported, and this year, the number of elderly homeless spiked. Indeed, seniors constitute the fastest growing cohort of the undomiciled. Quite a way to spend your sunset years, snoozing on the sidewalk, alongside the utterly helpless psychotic.

Adams wants to remove those who “appear mentally ill” from public. The purpose is not to treat them or salve their psychological wounds, in which case such removal would be acceptable, even laudable. But no, Adams’ purpose is to incarcerate them, so their shabby selves won’t offend the sensibilities of the well-to-do and mega-rich who regard city centers as their playgrounds. “Policies such as California Governor Gavin Newson’s CARE Court and numerous ‘anti-camping’ ordinances…allow for the removal and detention of people who are unhoused and deemed mentally ill,” according to Truthout May 6, “under threat of involuntary commitment or even conservatorship.” Supposedly compassionate, these policies fall far short of providing appropriate treatment for the insane or adequate housing for those who lack it.

The truly malignant aspect of this is the one that treats poverty as proof of dangerous and savage psychosis. Economic failure in this brutal late capitalist jungle becomes medical and criminal. A deadly combo. And if the homeless destitute manage to evade the cops who want to lock them up in tiny cages, they still face existential threats on the streets, most notably death from exposure or from violent criminals.

The death toll for the homeless destitute, reports the New York Times May 13 “in San Diego County had increased nearly 10 times in the last decade.” That’s the same in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, Denver and Seattle. It turns out not having a roof over your head is fatal. There’s the cold in winter, extreme, climate-change-aggravated heat in summer and the inherent danger of living in public, now enhanced by vigilante fury, stoked by ambitious pols like mayor Adams.

The risks and wretchedness faced by the unhoused don’t count for much to a public inured to their plight by ideology and lies, a public that just wants homelessness to disappear. A public brainwashed by reactionary politicos and their media mouthpieces into thinking the only so-called solution is prison or booting these unsightly vagabonds out of cities and into camps. Housing stipends, vouchers, affordable apartments and the bureaucratic structure necessary to create these aren’t sexy. They don’t win fascist politicians votes. What does is public hysteria over penniless, oddly behaved people, then keeping that frenzy on a steady simmer. It’s called demagoguery.

Lucklessly for these very poor people, we live in the Age of the Demagogue. Most politicians will stoop to it whenever it brings them votes. But those who merit the title full-time are the worst hazard. They don’t want to solve problems and make powerless constituents’ lives better. They want to scream about them, whip up a public convulsion of hatred and ride that spasm of widespread rage to higher office. Not surprisingly, few seem to hold them to account. On the contrary, press outlets nod approval for vigilante justice against the crime of poverty.

“For years before Jordan Neely was killed in New York’s subway, the city had its eye on him,” wrote the New York Times May 13. “He was on a list informally know as the top 50, a roster of people who stand out for the severity of their troubles and their resistance to accepting help.” Thus even the “paper of record” excuses cold-blooded murder of the undomiciled poor. No doubt when the next fascist president breaks ground on concentration camps for those guilty of penury, that same news outlet will excuse it by noting that those incarcerated were a threat to polite society, that the police had their names on a list and that we’re better off without all those unsightly homeless people, anyway. Quite an economic system we got here. It strips millions of people of the means of survival, then blames and punishes them for their dispossession. If you call that civilization, you need to rethink your definition of the term.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Roman Summer. She can be reached at her website.

Comment by Jr | May 29, 2023 | Reply
- Biden is about to kick 35 to 40 million children, some working people, women, men, disabled people, elderly people off food support and medical benefits, in the usa. Half the familiies in the state of lousiana, have to get second rate food, from food pantrys to survive in Louisiana and elsewhere, every month now.
  Biden is cutting Food Programs and Medicaid, to send more money, jets, rockets, drones, bombs, bullets, guns, artillery and personell to the Ukraine and escalate it . It will lead to ww3 and a tactical nuclear conflagration . Biden is also escalating war with china.
  Biden sold off what pithy amounts of public housing, there was in the usa, to wall street in its monsterous inflation reduction act, con. The average rent in the usa is 800 to 1000 a month for small apartments . The rent for small houses1500 to 3000 a month. Most Working people, elderly people, families, disabled people, will not be able to be able to afford basic shelter soon. The number of homeless will burgeone from 7 million to 15 or 20 million. That is comparable what it was during the great depression. Crisis conditions. Societal breakdown. National starvation and genocide. Biden is a 79 year old, demented-psychopath, liar and coward. A monster of unprecedented proportions.
  
  Comment by Juno | May 29, 2023 | Reply

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