Of the five Astute-class SSNs in UK RN service, only one is reportedly available for deployment at present. Photo: UK MoD.
The UK’s Royal Navy will soon deploy a nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) to Australia for six months as part of its commitment to the AUKUS construct and to its presence in the wider Indo-Pacific region.
The Astute-class submarine HMS Anson arrived in Gibraltar earlier this month after it departed its home base of Faslane in Scotland on 10 January.
The boat is expected to patrol the Indian and western Pacific oceans during its deployment, and will be the UK’s first commitment to the Submarine Rotational Force–West (SRF-West) that was established under Pillar 1 of AUKUS in 2022.
The respected independent online news site Navy Lookout says, of the five Astute-class SSNs to enter RN service to date, HMS Anson is currently the only boat capable of being deployed. The class has suffered from build delays and poor availability since the lead boat, HMS Astute was commissioned in August 2010, and the remaining four boats are laid up at Faslane undergoing various stages of maintenance.
Two more Astute-class SSN boats are planned, with one currently undergoing sea trials, and the seventh boat scheduled to enter service in late 2028. After this, development of the planned SSN-AUKUS class boats – for which Australia will be a partner – is expected to gain pace.
The UK’s Defence Minister Luke Pollard told the British Parliament in December that an Astute-class boat would join SRF-West as “a core planning assumption for the RN under AUKUS”. Despite very low availability of the Astute-class in recent months, Mr Pollard said the government judges the commitment to be “both realistic and manageable within existing force planning”.
SRF-West is based at HMAS Stirling south of Fremantle in WA, and the Australian Government has committed billions of dollars to upgrade the base and the adjacent Henderson shipyard to support not only UK and US nuclear-powered submarine deployments, but also those of Australia from the mid-2030s, and to boost Australia’s shipbuilding capabilities.
SRF-West has taken its first few tentative steps forward, with a US Navy Virginia class SSN USS Vermont having completed a Submarine Maintenance Period at Stirling in November using a mixed US Navy and Australian maintenance workforce.
Other US Navy SSNs have conducted port visits to Stirling in recent years and these visits are expected to increase as the base and its infrastructure become more capable of supporting these vessels.
