The Year-End AUKUS Push

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Jack and Robbie here. Let’s start with the news of the day: Henry Kissinger, the (depending on who you ask) renowned, reviled, controversial, and arguably most influential American statesman, has died at age 100. Read about Kissinger and his legacy here.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The Pentagon is taking a field trip to California to give AUKUS a boost, China hawks find a bipartisan roost on Capitol Hill, and NATO is accelerating its tech game.

AUKUS Field Trip

Break out the yellow school buses and get the chaperones ready. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is going on a field trip to California.

With the Biden administration facing two wars—helping Ukraine fend off Russia’s full-scale invasion while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken does crisis diplomacy in Israel as the cease-fire in the Gaza Strip is set to expire on Friday—the U.S. Defense Department is spending the bulk of its time this week trying to stop a third from kicking off by arming its allies in the Indo-Pacific.

With Congress challenging the Biden administration to double down on funding the shipyards that will build nuclear-powered submarines, Austin is set to play host to his AUKUS teammates, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles and British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps, at Moffett Field, a superfund site on the edge of the San Francisco Bay that’s home to the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). The whirlwind of bilateral and trilateral meetings also follows U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks traveling to the United Kingdom for meetings with her British counterparts in London.

Your SitRep host Jack will be at the Reagan National Defense Forum while Austin makes his annual speech to the conference, at the 40th president’s library in Simi Valley. It’s also the place where lawmakers decamp to hash out the final details of the Pentagon’s annual authorization bill that’s weighing in at a hefty $886 billion this year. The bill has passed every year for the past six decades but got through the U.S. House by a razor-thin margin this summer.

Relevant to our interests here: The House has wanted to give DIU about $1 billion in throw weight. The Senate is a little bit reluctant to do that.

High-tech stuff. Even as the Biden administration is dealing with a lot of other foreign-policy challenges and the U.S. president is losing steam in public opinion polls as the presidential campaign is set to kick off in earnest, Austin’s trip to California is a sign that the Pentagon is trying to keep its eye on the ball when it comes to building new tech and competing with China.

DIU, as the nascent Pentagon agency is known, is also helping AUKUS build its second pillar that’s focused on getting three of the Five Eyes nations to more closely collaborate on electronic warfare, command and control, artificial intelligence, and hardening cyberdefenses. Austin will also see demonstrations from DIU, an Obama-era innovation hub that didn’t get a lot of love from the Trump administration.

Them’s the rules. That’s where AUKUS will get (even more) hairy. American allies have long complained that strict U.S. intelligence-sharing and export control rules, including the decision to classify many national security documents at levels that other nations can’t see, have hampered collaboration. Congress is working on export control reforms to smooth over the bumps, while Australia is enacting tougher national security controls on exports that exempt the United States and United Kingdom.

That could get even more complicated if AUKUS expands: Japan’s former prime minister said earlier this month that his country should join AUKUS. U.S. officials have also hinted that other countries could be involved. JAUKUS, anyone?

It’s the people, stupid. But even as Austin is going to be looking at a lot of high-tech gadgets this weekend and talking about big-brained grand strategy, the Biden administration is thinking about how to get the workforce together, across three nations, to build all of this stuff (Australia won’t field its U.S.-made Virginia-class nuclear submarines until the 2030s, when your SitRep hosts will be very old. Australia won’t launch its own nuclear-powered subs until the 2040s.).

“We’re going to need qualified people,” Bonnie Jenkins, the State Department’s top arms control official, said earlier this week.

Give me a sign. The Pentagon may be talking a big game about high-tech capabilities, including AUKUS and the agency’s Replicator initiative that aims to field thousands of low-cost drones, but defense companies say that Washington has yet to send a clear signal about what they actually want to buy, and how much.

“This is all about production,” said Chris Brose, the chief strategy officer of California-based Anduril, which focuses on building autonomous systems. “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of work that we and others can do from a research-and-development standpoint to move quickly and field new capabilities. What we really need the government to do uniquely is to buy it at scale.”

Oh yeah, and the Pentagon is going to need a budget first. Without one, officials are warning, the Pentagon would be nearly $6 billion short on troop pay, would lose an attack submarine contract, and would have to delay nuclear procurement. Yikes.

Let’s Get Personnel

Matthew Pastore is now the deputy associate director of legislative affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.

On the Button

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

China, China, China. Robbie sat down for a lengthy interview with the leaders of the House China committee for their views on how this new Cold War, if you want to call it that, is shaping up. Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher and Democratic Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi lead the committee, and the interview offers a rare insider’s window into one of the last bastions of functioning bipartisanship in Washington. But not everyone’s on board with the United States’ hawkish new footing on China. Read on here.

The space race heats up. And speaking of China, the new Cold War is leaving Earth’s orbit. “The [U.S.] intelligence community now assesses with confidence that China is poised to succeed in landing humans on the moon and constructing a permanent base camp at the lunar south pole by the end of this decade,” four intelligence officials told McClatchy News in a new deep dive on the 21st-century space race. Your move, NASA.

DIANA makes a move. Another defense accelerator with transatlantic heft just picked its first set of would-be tech champions. NATO’s DIANA (which stands for Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic) announced 44 companies that the alliance will help to build, scale, and fund their products. The companies, selected from over 1,300 applicants, have been selected across fields such as robotics, quantum technology, and ocean sensing.

Snapshot

Taiwanese service members work on their combat skills at a military training base in Taichung, Taiwan, on Nov. 23. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images

Put on Your Radar

Thursday, Nov. 30: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, warning the Israeli leader to limit damage and civilian casualties as the Israel Defense Forces prepare to resume their invasion of the Gaza Strip to the south. Bhutan holds primary elections. The two-week United Nations Climate Change Conference—known as COP28—kicks off in Dubai.

Friday, Dec. 1: Brazil starts its presidency of the Group of 20—better known as the G-20—taking over from India.

Saturday, Dec. 2: U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaks at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California.

Wednesday, Dec. 6: Republican presidential candidates hold their fourth debate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The United States hosts a two-day U.S.-Ukraine Defense Industrial Base Conference in Washington.

Thursday, Dec. 7: Brazil hosts a leaders’ summit for Mercosur.

Quote of the Week

“Gray squirrels are the Hamas of the squirrel world.”

—Jim Shannon, a U.K. member of Parliament, in a recent parliamentary debate on how to control the country’s gray squirrel population.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

While we have you here. The United Arab Emirates is hosting the major international climate change summit known as COP28 this week in an effort to end the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, but on the side it is apparently using the summit to strike new oil and gas deals, as the BBC reports.