Honest question: china has the goods on biden clan, why poke the panda with sub deal?

China missed the last payment. This is a reminder.

Maybe Biden really is illegitimate.

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Obviously China wants this. The question is why?

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China wants to be 'provoked into war. That way they aren't the agressor

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Obviously China wants this. The question is why?

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I was an officer on a nuclear sub. Proudly. But this is a better deal for China than Australia getting the French subs. Nuclear sub crews spend 75% of their time worrying about the reactor. Inspections, maintenance, training. Long in port periods doing things that are unique to nuclear boats. That takes focus away from tactical proficiency. They should've gotten air independent propulsion subs. They are less than 20% the cost, are quieter, and the crew can focus mostly on warfighting. As Tom Clancy said - a submarine is a warship. It is not an excuse to build a nuclear reactor.

What will happen to Australia is they’ll need a large, expensive shoreside nuclear infrastructure to support the boats. Large facilities, a design bureau, contractors, sailor training pipelines that will have to be extended to include all kinds of reactor plant theory, and a bunch of dorks with bow ties that come down to the waterfront all the time to make sure the crew is proficient at reactor operations and who have authority to ground the sub if they catch something out of place. If it is anything like ours, it will run the submarine navy with an iron fist, always keeping the focus on the reactor plant and engineering over what the submarine is actually in existence for. I foresee a huge culture shock to the rest of their navy once the nuclear element throws its weight around - it will always get its way and will be a distraction. Tactical proficiency will be less important than engine room operations. CO’s are mostly graded on the ORSE (Operational Reactor Safeguard Exam) grades than tactical prowess, for example. The Australian nuclear mafia will focus on constantly adding more nuclear requirements, micromanaging the commanding officer selections, pushing for expensive mid life upgrades (SHIPALTs) that force the ships into more time in drydock, etc. They will never view it as a warship. They will always view it as a nuclear reactor plant, and they will do everything they can to make sure the rest of the navy thinks similarly.

Nuke proponents tout the range of these boats. Availability is the real metric. You need 3-4 boats total for every one on at sea doing missions. The others will be in local ops training, dry dock for repairs, etc. If all out war breaks out, you'd be lucky if 40% of your nuclear sub fleet is available to deploy in the first week. You could get 4-6 AIP boats for cost of 1 nuke boat, and each one can spend more mission days at sea annually as maintenance cycle is way simpler. If I were Australia I’d lean into my Pacific neighbors who are all anti-China - Philippines, India, Vietnam, S Korea, Japan.. and find someone to allow me to base half my AIP fleet there while basing the other half at home. Secondly I’d take a French or German model and then have it specifically designed for extended range. They’d have more forward deployed days in theatre that way and they can all be tactically focused instead of doing endless reactor drills at sea.

Australia honestly should have looked at us and realize we’ve lost our way in nearly everything our government does. Sadly these days when I see nations working with us I fear they'll eventually be let down. Militarily our surface navy especially is struggling. Our defense contractors are too powerful, turning a war into a giant money laundering scheme and insanely overspending and underperforming on projects like the F-35 and Littoral Combat Ship. It will be a matter of time before poor performance is likely revealed in the submarine force and probably already is but just not widely known. Choosing to work with us means they’ll excel at the only thing left we’re good at, finding ways to enrich people in charge at the expense of taxpayers and actively suppressing solutions that would work better for all so they can go the route that almost helps the elites.

Meanwhile Australia doesn’t need to deploy to the Middle East, S America, or operate under the polar ice cap. So they don’t need the single biggest advantage of nuclear subs. They should focus on their region, namely China. They’re making the same mistake the Soviets did who collapsed under their military spending. Nuke boats are for global powers that need to project strength all over the world. Sure you can buy your way into some “superpower club” having nuclear ships. But you’ll pay through the nose. It will actually weaken what should be Australia’s real ambition to operate well in their region and help the alliance against China.

Furthermore, it will take twice as long to put a nuclear sub in operation as AIP ones. China will likely have Taiwan before the first Australian boat ever seals it’s reactor core (meaning it’s still a few years away from being built). So China won big here - they have a longer window before Australia fields their boats.

Lastly, as any submariner knows, having a quiet diesel or AIP sub going against you is scarier than a noisier nuclear sub. At cost parity, that would be a picket of 5 AIP boats against 1 nuclear boat who has 5X the area to cover and therefore may not even locate any enemy sub in an all out war. That's a way better counter to China's navy. Also the alliance of nations against China really needs a SOSUS type array - a permanently installed passive sonar string in the ocean that can hear anything. You get that up and running and then you can track their subs and take them out with patrol aircraft and helicopters.

So just 30 days after the Afghanistan fiasco we’ve further eroded trust amongst friends in getting Australia to renege on a legitimate deal. As I’ve laid out Australia will be the worse off for this, I’d argue even the US will be too - so we make some money on all this but we’ve cheapened our trust even further. How does countries like India that we desperately need to work closely with in the future to align against China view our trustworthiness in light of these betrayals?

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Some pieces are missing that we arent seeing.

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Australia isn’t running Australia… China is. Anything going to Australia is going directly to China. So essentially Biden gave China our sub secrets. However the media tries to spin it

Exactly corchjay. My post was already too long I didn’t include that. But yeah, let’s give our nuclear technology to another country that 1) doesn’t really need nuclear subs and 2) is heavily infiltrated by China. Let’s make it easier to steal

“The adults are back in charge”. France would disagree

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China will likely have Taiwan before the first Australian boat ever seals it’s reactor core (meaning it’s still a few years away from being built). So China won big here

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This

These subs won't have the same capabilities as the ones we have so China isn't worried about them. Trust me Biden cleared this thru China before the deal was made.

Milley will tell the Chinese the passwords to hack into the subs program and reroute the missiles to hit Japan.

Or the nukes will be duds and the Chinese notified of this.