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WASHINGTON — House lawmakers are poised for a debate on what restrictions should be placed on the administration before it can legally send any Virginia-class fast attack submarines to Australia as part of the trilateral security pact dubbed AUKUS.
The amendments in question were filed last week with House Rules Committee and will be part of the chamber’s upcoming debate on the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. It is not yet clear when the bill will be brought to the House floor.
On one side are a group of Democratic lawmakers, led by Rep. Gregory Meeks, N.Y., which is offering what it calls the AUKUS Undersea Defense Act, meant to ease the administration’s way. The legislation, its authors say, is the first step to disentangling the complicated legal parameters that restrict the White House’s ability to provide Australia with three, or potentially five, Virginia-class submarines to help bolster the country’s navy as it works to build SSN-AUKUS.
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The amendment also creates a gateway for the US to accept funding promised by Australia to boost the American defense industrial base — something that administration officials have said under current laws, the US has no way to accept.
Reps. Joe Courtney, Conn., Ami Bera, Calif., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ill., are co-sponsoring the amendment. Meeks, Bera and Courtney previously published the legislation as members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which shares jurisdiction with the Armed Services Committee in overseeing certain components of the AUKUS agreement.
On the other side, Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., submitted an amendment that would impose an additional restriction by barring the transfer of more than two Virginia-class submarines until the Navy secretary is able to certify the US domestic industrial base can produce three Virginia-class boats per year. The Navy’s cadence for producing new Virginia-class boats in recent history has been roughly 1.2 per year.
When the AUKUS agreement was unveiled earlier this year, administration officials said the deal proposes sending three Virginia-class submarines to Australia because that is the right number to keep one boat operating continuously; the option to send two additional boats is a hedge in case SSN-AUKUS production becomes heavily delayed.
In a statement to Breaking Defense today, Wittman reiterated his support for the security pact but said lawmakers must “ensure that appropriate investments are made in the US domestic submarine industrial base to support a net gain in the number of attack submarines operating in the Indo-Pacific” under American and Australian control.
“Leveraging AUKUS investments to scale our own domestic industrial base to produce three Virginia-class submarines per year as rapidly as possible will advance the shared security objectives of the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom,” he added.
Notably, the dueling amendments put Courtney, a senior Democrat and vocal Navy hawk in Congress, and Wittman, a senior Republican who for years swapped the chairman and ranking member seats with Courtney as they led the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee, at least obliquely at odds. Despite being on opposite sides of the aisle, the two historically have been in agreement on most Navy issues.
Eric Sayers, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Breaking Defense that while AUKUS is “critical,” it should not result in a reduction of the US attack submarine fleet. The Navy’s longstanding goal for its attack submarine inventory is 66, but recent long-term shipbuilding plans do not forecast the service meeting that objective within the next 30 years even under optimistic funding scenarios.
“Given this, before the Congress rushes to grant a submarine transfer authority to the [the Pentagon] they should first demand a clear plan with a budgetary strategy to ensure US submarine production can at least remain flat or even grow in the decade ahead,” he said. “This is the best chance in decades to actually grow the US submarine industrial base, [and] Congress should seize this leverage opportunity with the administration.”
Even after Congress settles this year’s defense policy bill, an effort of the size and scale of AUKUS reaches multiple congressional jurisdictions. How other panels such as the House and Senate Foreign Affairs Committees handle the legal issues facing AUKUS is yet to be seen.
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