The ranking member of the House Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee on Tuesday reported the Australian officials are “buoyant and bullish” about AUKUS moving forward following a Monday meeting between President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) also thinks an ongoing Pentagon review of the submarine agreement is probably focused on improving the industrial base rather than truncating planned U.S. submarine sales to Australia.
“I think there’s a lot that’s going to happen certainly between now and 2030 that I think it really it’s a decision for another president,” Courtney told reporters at the Capitol Tuesday..
“I think that what we heard yesterday in the East Room was just really pretty significant commitment and endorsement by an administration that, again, was from the opposing party from the prior administration when AUKUS was first brought to the public light, and now it’s clearly the policy of the Trump administration, just like it happened in both the U.K. and Australia,” Courtney said. The lawmaker was referring to the meeting with Trump and Albanese. “I mean, this plan has shown some real endurance despite the shifts in political winds.”
Courtney serves as a co-chair of the bipartisan Friends of Australia Caucus and his district includes the General Dynamics Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Conn. That’s where construction of Virginia and Columbia-class submarines takes place. GD shares production of submarines with Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding facility in Virginia.
Courtney also stressed that when asked about the Pentagon review of AUKUS, Trump referred to it as mere details. The congressman said he looks forward to seeing any improvements that may come from the review.
“Not having seen the report and you know, this thing was really kind of operating under the cone of silence, the review… there’s been a lot of work that other outside experts have been brought in over the last five months or so, and whether or not there’s going to be maybe even a consideration of a change of schedule compared to the 2032 year or something remains to be seen,” Courtney continued.
This was a reference to the current AUKUS plan that has the U.S. selling Australia at least three used and new Virginia-class attack submarines in the 2030s, with the first set for 2032. The schedule aims to help Australia compensate for the retirement of the Collins-class sub and act as a bridge until Australia can begin producing and fielding its SSN-AUKUS submarines in the 2040s.
After Secretary of the Navy John Phelan testified before the Senate committee earlier this year, Courtney reiterated the Pentagon is obviously concerned with the production cadence and how to increase submarine delivery timelines for sufficient inventories for the U.S. and Australia.
The Navy’s goal is to reach two Virginia-class submarines per year to meet its own inventory goals, and when accounting for the base level of selling three boats to Australia would need to rise to 2.33 submarines per year to make up for those losses.
“The Secretary, I think, is correctly very impatient in terms of what he’s seeing as far as production cadence, and there’s been, I think, a lot of investigation done by his office, the Deputy Secretary of Defense [Steve] Feinberg, who’s had his own naval experts in the shipyards, taking an independent outside look at the processes and potentially in the bottlenecks that definitely are in the system right now,” Courtney said.
The Pentagon review of AUKUS appears to be multifaceted, with work being focused on both by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby and Deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg.
Congress has already committed $10 billion to improve the submarine industrial base and Courtney said there will be more in the fiscal 2026 budget once that is passed.
Looking at the tone of Trump’s comments, Countney said, the president is looking at minor tweaks to improve AUKUS. “But I don’t think that what’s being recommended in any way truncates AUKUS or obviously stops AUKUS from moving forward,” he said.
Courtney also underscored that it is possible the administration could choose to shift timelines for submarine sales to Australia, adding that would be premature because the decision does not need to be made for years and they should wait to see how government investments in the industrial base shake out to change production timelines.
“When you go back and read the AUKUS authorities, definitely was part of that sausage making when we did that back in 2023. The president has the right to really intervene up to, I think it’s 270 days prior to the actual transfer. So that’s always been there in terms of the flexibility to the executive branch, if there’s issues of impact on the U.S. Navy fleet. That’s sort of the trigger that was written into the law that’s there…But personally, I feel it’s really premature for any of us to try and sort of judge what the industrial base is going to look like five years from now,” Courtney said.
Exchange Monitor affiliate Defense Daily first published a version of this article.