Risk of failure is growing for AUKUS Pillar Two, the mechanism intended to turbocharge technology cooperation and deliver advanced military capabilities to the armed forces of Australia, the UK and the US. Lacking momentum and a credible pathway to outcomes, it may become no more than a collection of good intentions.
This risk has been highlighted by Abraham Denmark, who played a key role establishing AUKUS in the Biden Administration, and Charles Edel in a 25 August report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Denmark and Edel warn that Pillar Two’s ‘priority technology areas’ are ‘too broad and unfocused.’
The observation isn’t new. ASPI’s Jason Van der Schyff and Courtney Stewart have similarly argued that Pillar Two must shift from aspirational frameworks and communiques to the urgent delivery of operational capability. The risk is not simply that Pillar Two will miss its goals but that it will fail to generate any military advantage within the timelines Australia’s deteriorating security environment demands. The Australian Defence Force cannot afford to spend the rest of the decade caught in working groups rather than fielding usable systems.
The CSIS report proposes concentrating on three capabilities: autonomy, long-range strike and integrated air and missile defence (IAMD). These align closely with ASPI’s own analysis, but the point is not just identifying priorities; it is delivering them at speed.
Autonomy gives the ADF an opportunity to break free of the trap of brittle and boutique exquisite force structures of limited numbers of high-end and expensive crewed equipment, such as ships and fighters. ‘Quantity has a quality all of its own,’ Joseph Stalin is supposed to have said, and the ADF needs a larger and more resilient military. Achieving that through traditional crewed equipment would need too much money, too much time and too many people, so Australia must move to embrace a substantial employment of autonomous warfighting capabilities as rapidly as possible.
For Pillar Two to deliver effective autonomous systems operationally and do so rapidly to meet Australia’s deteriorating strategic outlook there is a requirement to exploit high-volume, low-cost rapid production. Australia’s defence industry must adapt accordingly. It’s not just about the technology of the product.
The success of Pillar Two’s approach to autonomy must also match Australia’s operational circumstances in terms of geography and a demand for reach across a vast maritime and archipelagic operational environment. That means long-range, high endurance and high-performance systems that can be effective against the Chinese military. It’s likely to be quite different from those employed so effectively by Ukraine against Russia. But the dilemma here is to avoid cost of such capabilities increasing to the point where high-volume rapid acquisition becomes impossible and we end up re-creating the existing force structure but with uncrewed systems.
Autonomy also lends itself to long-range strike, the second major technology area that CSIS’s researchers urge Pillar Two to focus on. Australian defence planners should closely study Ukraine’s use of drones in strike operations. But, since Australia’s operational circumstances are different from Ukraine’s, the CSIS report understandably highlights the importance of hypersonic weapons and counter-hypersonic capabilities.
With China rapidly deploying long-range hypersonic weapons operationally for attacking ships and land targets, the AUKUS partners need to accelerate their efforts to develop similar capabilities and defences against them. It’s not clear in the report whether this is about accelerating programs with current developmental capabilities, such as the Dark Eagle (also called the Long-range Hypersonic Weapon), or would it open opportunities for other partners to contribute on a project-by-project basis? Certainly, Australia’s current approach to enhancing long-range strike under the 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS) and its associated spending plan is inadequate to meet this current threat or ensure that Australia can effectively carry out a strategy of denial against a rapidly growing Chinese capability for power projection.
This brings into focus the third recommended technology area, IAMD. Despite advice in the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) to accelerate the deployment of IAMD, the government is delaying acquisition of IAMD interceptor systems until after the 2026 update of the spending plan, the Integrated Investment Program (IIP). This is despite immediate availability of operationally proven capabilities. The CSIS report notes that there will be ‘increasing demand for air [and missile] defence capabilities to protect … critical positions’ related to a greatly expanding rotational presence of US military forces in Australia. It should not be up to the United States to defend Australian military bases in the north of the continent.
Under a more focused approach to Pillar Two, Australia needs to fast track IAMD acquisition and deployment and decide on deploying long-range systems. Pillar Two should be expanded to IAMD, even though it is not now a priority technology area in AUKUS. Furthermore, the future challenge lies with countering hypersonic threats, so the AUKUS partners also need to accelerate investment into new approaches to meet this adversary capability too. The CSIS report highlights the importance of the proposed US Golden Dome missile defence system, echoing an article I wrote in June.
Another challenge is the effect of restricting Pillar Two to the three AUKUS countries. For example, Japan has worked with the US and Australia on missile defence and, in Pillar Two exercises, autonomous systems. Is it to be excluded? And what of South Korea, which could bring advanced long-range strike capabilities and missile defence into any collaboration? There are potential diplomatic risks in narrowing the focus of Pillar Two too quickly.
All of this makes for a challenge in terms of ensuring Pillar Two is relevant to the 2026 NDS and IIP. If the next six months are crucial for Pillar Two’s success, as suggested in the CSIS report, then real progress in mitigating risks is needed before the release of the next NDS and IIP, probably in April 2026.
Commentators such as Peter Dean and Alice Nason, as well as Ian Langford, have all warned that, without near-term delivery, Pillar Two risks fading into irrelevance—or worse, becoming strategically dangerous. The chorus of concern is growing into a crescendo.
The task now is to move beyond pure research to deployment. Pillar Two will not be judged by communiques or roadmaps but by whether it delivers real capability into the hands of warfighters in the second half of this decade.