AUKUS

AUKUS is the trilateral security partnership announced in September 2021 by Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It is structured around two pillars: Pillar I covers the transfer of nuclear-powered submarine technology to Australia under the SSN-AUKUS programme; Pillar II covers a broader advanced-capabilities agenda including artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, hypersonic weapons, electronic warfare, cyber, and undersea autonomy. The three nations operate AUKUS through senior defence ministerial and official meetings, with project-by-project decisions made at Pillar II level.

On 30 May 2026, AUKUS announced its first Pillar II Signature Project, a trilateral programme to develop payloads and enabling systems for uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs), with hardware deliveries beginning in 2027. The named platforms are both US-built: the Mission Specialist Defender Mk IV ROV and the L3Harris Iver4 900 AUV. No UK-built platform appeared in the published fact sheet. The project scope covers mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, seabed-infrastructure protection, and contested-littoral manoeuvre. Within nine days, Kongsberg (Norway) and DRASS (Italy) announced a competing undersea-warfare partnership at ILA Berlin, pairing the HUGIN Superior AUV with the DRASS DG-900 submarine-host and explicitly targeting AUKUS Pillar II procurement from 2027, the first organised European industrial counter-bid for the undersea-hardware layer.

The US platforms embedded in the Signature Project continue a pattern visible in earlier bilateral deals, including the HII-Babcock ARMOR Force initiative that positioned a US prime inside UK subsea programmes. The Kongsberg-DRASS counter-bid signals that European defence primes regard the AUKUS UUV pipeline as a real procurement target, not a US lock-in, and that industrial competition for the undersea layer is now open.

On 30 June 2026, Britain's Defence Investment Plan committed more than £5 billion to drones and autonomous systems and named four uncrewed Royal Navy classes for the first time, Type 91 to Type 94; weapons for Type 91 and Type 93 are being developed under the same Pillar II Signature Project. A fortnight later the clean US-versus-Europe framing complicated further: the US Defense Innovation Unit selected Kongsberg Discovery, the Norwegian partner behind the DRASS counter-bid, to design an extra-large uncrewed underwater vehicle for the US Navy's own Combat Autonomous Maritime Platform programme, putting the same firm on both sides of the AUKUS pipeline.