Australia could be a testing ground for US hypersonic and other long-range precision weapons under the AUKUS pact, a senior Pentagon official told AFP on Wednesday.
US Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said Australia’s contribution to the AUKUS tripartite agreement, which includes Britain, “doesn’t always have to be in dollars.”
The pact was signed in late 2021 and is seen as a way to counter China’s growing influence in the Asia-Pacific region.
Work under AUKUS has so far focused on supplying Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, a fleet capable of stealthy travel great distances and attacking enemies at long range.
But the pact is increasingly focused on developing advanced capabilities like long-range precision fire, artificial intelligence and hypersonic weapons.
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Wormuth said Australia could be a testing ground for these weapons.
“One thing Australia has in abundance is long distances and relatively sparse land,” he told AFP in a telephone interview from Washington.
“A challenge for us in the United States when it comes to hypersonics or even some of our things like the precision strike missile, which is not a hypersonic weapon but has very long ranges in some of its increments, so we can find open spaces in the United States where we can test these weapons, it’s a challenge.
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“Obviously Australia has a lot of territory where testing is a bit more feasible, so I think that’s something unique, as an example, that the Australians bring to the table.”
China has denounced that the AUKUS pact undermines peace in the region, an accusation that Washington, Canberra and London reject.
But critics have also questioned whether it is truly cooperative or whether the United States, due to its size and overwhelming military power, will dominate.
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Wormuth said he hoped the two smaller partners would collaborate and “get skin on this game, and they do.”
“Certainly the feeling I got from talking to senior Australian officials is that they’re not doing this to make us happy, they’re not doing it just for fun,” said the Pentagon official, who visited Australia last week for the multinational Talisman Saber. military exercise.
“They’re doing this because they see it as in their own national interest in terms of being able to deal with the different challenges that they see in the theater.”
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Faced with Russia’s war in Europe, threats from North Korea and a more bellicose China, the United States has sought to strengthen its defense alliances and put more advanced capabilities in the hands of allies such as Australia, Ukraine and Taiwan.
For much of the Cold War, Washington’s policy was to be able to fight two major wars at once.
Wormuth conceded that today, budget constraints, American public opinion, and the relative strength of Russia and China make such a doctrine impossible.
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“I think there’s a recognition that when you look at the size of our military, when you look at the size of the defense budget that the American taxpayer is willing to pay for, we… don’t plan to fight more than one major war at a time.” said.
Instead, the United States hopes that its alliance and its nuclear arsenal will “discourage opportunistic aggression.”
“Given the sophistication of the Russian and Chinese militaries today, trying to size our militaries to hypothetically handle two wars at once would be prohibitively expensive.”
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