Introduction
The extent to which ties between the United States and Australia have deepened recently has surprised many. However, the AUKUS partnership, which emerged in a September 2021 meeting between President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison, should not come as a surprise. After all, the connections upon which AUKUS is built stretch back to 1942 and the SIGINT collaboration that developed during the War in the Pacific.
The United States and Australia are both English-speaking, continent-spanning, bicameral, federal, and constitutional democracies. However, Australia’s ties with the United States go beyond cultural commonalities. This relationship includes the ANZUS security pact (considered the heart of the broad and mature US-Australia relationship) and the Quadrilateral arrangements (addressing health, security, climate, and infrastructure). This is matched on the economic front, as the US is the largest source of foreign direct investment in Australia. However, as a part of the Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), ‘Five Eyes’ security and intelligence ties, trusted and highly classified cooperation has played a key role in deepening US-Australia relations. Due to such past collaboration, the trilateral AUKUS pact, which covers nuclear propulsion for submarines, advanced technology, critical minerals, and climate-related technology should be viewed as a continuation and deepening of US-Australia military collaboration.
The History of US-Australia Intelligence Cooperation
The breadth and depth of security ties are well captured in Australia’s American Alliance. However, a seldom discussed aspect of US-Australia relations lies in the domain of SIGINT. Understanding the implications of SIGINT for contemporary US intelligence and foreign policy helps explain the AUKUS decision.
Since 1942, US-Australia collaboration has laid the foundations of trusted engagement and sensitive information sharing. That year, US General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia to establish the Headquarters Southwest Pacific Area (HQ SWPA), backed by the Australian SIGINT enterprise that was integrated under US leadership.
These combined bodies were given non-descript titles to deflect attention from their military purposes. Working under HQ SWPA, the Central Bureau, for instance, was the combined Australian Army, Royal Australian Air Force, US Army, and US Army Air Force SIGINT agency. By 1945, it employed thousands of Australians and Americans to fight the Pacific War. This wartime collaboration would have an enduring legacy and strengthen US-Australia bonds for generations to follow.
During the Pacific War, the US Navy, working mostly with Admiral Chester Nimitz in Hawaii, combined its SIGINT elements with those of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) in the South Pacific to form Fleet Radio Unit Melbourne (FRUMEL). Together they broke codes and interpreted messages that aided in the decisive Battle of Midway. The close and trusted collaboration made a difference in the progression and outcome of World War II (WWII). That impact was so profound that the United States and the United Kingdom extended their trusted and secret collaboration to Australia once the Cold War set in.
SIGINT revealed signs of Soviet duplicity. For example, SIGINT uncovered that the Soviet Union had been passing information about Allied plans to Japan, hoping to increase Allied casualties and extend the war in Asia.[1] Venona, the cover name for US efforts to decode Soviet diplomatic traffic, pointed to a nest of Soviet spies in the United States and Australia. For Australia to remain ‘in the club’ for intelligence sharing after the war, it had to assure the United Kingdom and the United States that it would reform to strengthen its domestic counter-espionage efforts. To do so, Prime Minister Ben Chifley established the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in 1949.
Meanwhile, another new intelligence collection organization emerged from the wartime Australian SIGINT elements. The Australian Signals Intelligence Centre was established but given an anodyne cover name–the Defense Signals Bureau (DSB), now the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD)–intended, again, to deflect attention from its secret purpose.[2] With early British support, covering cryptographic and computing shortfalls left by the evacuation of American forces from Australia, DSB became a trusted partner of an intelligence network spanning five countries. Only officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, later known as the ‘Five Eyes,’ were permitted to view DSB reports.
Australia’s SIGINT enterprise would provide support to US military forces on operations in Korea, Vietnam,[3] East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. Along the way, ties and collaboration between the United States and Australia deepened.
Technological Developments in SIGINT
Electro-mechanical IBM computers aided Allied decoding and helped shorten WWII. These machines relied on intuition and deep knowledge of the target language and its etiquette to unpick the opening threads (often polite greetings). They helped sift through millions of code permutations.
By the mid to late 1990s, the digital revolution had arrived, transforming communications. Analog radio transmissions were overtaken by digital transmissions, but the digital revolution reached much further. [4] Cray computers helped crunch millions of potential code-breaking solutions. US-Australia collaboration on this happened as a matter of routine, building on decades of trusted exchanges.
The introduction of personal computers, laptops, personal devices, and mobile cell phones meant that society, industry, and the military transitioned from being web-enabled to web-dependent and, in turn, web-vulnerable. Cyber security needs, therefore, grew exponentially. Working closely with US counterparts, Australian mathematicians and cryptographers developed defensive computer emergency response teams, which became known as cyber security teams.
Businesses and civil society also realized the need for cyber security expertise. As a result, SIGINT, a once secretive organization, went from serving government intelligence needs to engaging with the public, providing a web portal and advertisements to warn of potential cyber threats.[5] As the concept of the ‘Five Eyes’ became commonplace, the breadth and scale of SIGINT cooperation brought trust and respect for Australia in Washington DC.
The Significance of AUKUS
US-Australia trusted collaboration has survived over eighty years and continues to impact current affairs. AUKUS exemplifies such long-lasting ties. After being passed by the US Congress in 2023, AUKUS has led Australia to contribute to resourcing the US nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) production line. Australia is interested in SSNs because its aging fleet of diesel-electric propulsion submarines (SSKs) has become vulnerable. Such submarines are no longer viable for Australia because of their vulnerability to aerial detection and strikes. Satellite coverage, drones, and artificial intelligence (AI) can detect the wake of the submarine funnels when they raise their snorkel to recharge their batteries. Given that stealth had been their only advantage over surface warships, SSKs are no longer useful for long transits. Thus, nuclear propulsion and SSNs are the only viable options for countries with vast ocean distances to transit even to cover their own exclusive economic zones. For Australia, an SSK cannot transit from any domestic or foreign major port to the submarine base in Western Australia without possible detection.[6] In wartime, that presents a great risk.
Operationally, the benefits of SSNs are considerable. Australian submarines are intended to help defend vital shipping lanes for both US and Australian companies. SSNs can travel faster than SSKs (about 20 knots instead of 6.5 knots) and stay on station for longer. A fleet of SSNs should generate three times the effective deployable time compared to the current Australian SSKs because SSNs can deploy faster, loiter longer, and remain undetected without needing to recharge batteries.
Through AUKUS, Australia has entered into an arrangement with the United Kingdom and the United States expected to last decades. Australia pursues strong deterrence against coercion or attack on its security partners and interests in Southeast Asia and the Pacific to maintain the status quo. This involves having US SSNs operate in and around Cockburn Sound on rotation on an interim basis, while efforts to supply Australian SSNs are underway (Pillar I of AUKUS). It also involves collaboration on advanced military-related technology, critical minerals, and climate-related technology (Pillar II). AUKUS is the only model that is politically feasible domestically for Australia and which helps bolster international security.
SSNs are particularly useful to deter the challenge emerging from an assertive, coercive, and expansionist China, which is expected to peak in the coming decade. US and UK SSNs are forming a Submarine Rotation Force-West based at Garden Island on Cockburn Sound in Australia, and a Virginia class submarine visited the island in late 2023. This force will be supported by advanced maintenance facilities, which are already being built.
The geostrategic significance of those submarine facilities echoes their utility from eighty years back–when trusted SIGINT connections first emerged during the Pacific War. Most may not yet fully appreciate that Australia’s current importance to US interests in the Indo-Pacific echoes decades of past cooperation. The strategic rationale and the trusted collaboration, upon which AUKUS builds, is now well-established.
Conclusion and Policy Recommendation
With present geostrategic challenges echoing those from earlier generations, trusted collaboration on SIGINT and now AUKUS is more important than ever. Passed in 2023, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) made considerable progress and displayed US bipartisan support for collaboration with Australia. That has been matched by legislative changes in the United Kingdom and Australia. Such legislation seeks to open the path for a surge in trusted collaboration on science and technology and enhance each other’s defense industrial capacity. The benefits for all three nations are expected to be greater than the sum of their parts.
Unfortunately, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) continue to restrict trade in defense-related items and services. Such regulations inhibit trusted collaboration on research and bolstering each other’s industrial capacity. ITAR presents a significant obstacle to AUKUS cooperation. The US State Department, supporting agencies, and Congress must remove ITAR restrictions to realize the full promise of AUKUS. Bureaucracy has its own inertia, which often enough requires visionary leadership to overcome. Lifting ITAR restrictions for Australia and the United Kingdom would enable the transfer of nuclear propulsion technology to Australia. In addition, it would enable the increased manufacturing and stockpiling of advanced defense-related technologies and munitions – reflecting a growing awareness of the need to bolster industrial capacity and resilience.
For more than eighty years, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom have shared their most sensitive intelligence secrets. That trust has been matched by military practitioners on battlefields around the globe. Now, ITAR restrictions to collaborative research and design must be removed. This is necessary to strengthen and deepen military capacity amongst these like-minded security allies and deter authoritarian challengers to the established order.
[1] Desmond Bal and David Horner, Breaking The Codes: Australia’s KGB network 1944-1950 (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1998), pp. 73-114.
[2] David Horner, The Spy Catchers: The Official history of ASIO, Vol. I, 1949-1963 (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2014), p. 39.
[3] John Blaxland and Clare Birgin, Revealing Secrets: An Unofficial History of Australian Signals Intelligence and the Advent of Cyber (Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2023), pp. 222-261.
[4] Blaxland and Birgin, Revealing Secrets, pp. 301-331.
[5] Blaxland and Birgin, Revealing Secrets, pp. 313-321.
[6] The distance from Fremantle to Darwin, for instance, is 4024km or 2172 nautical miles. A Collins Class submarine is reputed to be able to travel 480 nautical miles submerged before a snorkel or full surfacing is required to recharge batteries. See https://www.seaforces.org/marint/Australian-Navy/Submarine/Collins-class.htm
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Professor John Blaxland is the newly appointed Director of the Australian National University’s (ANU) North America Liaison Office in Washington DC. He teaches “Honeypots and Overcoats: Australian Intelligence in the World” and is co-author of Revealing Secrets; An Unofficial History of Australian Signals Intelligence and the Advent of Cyber (Sydney, UNSW Press, 2023). See his ANU bio here.
Email: john.blaxland@anu.edu.au
Image Credit: picryl
