A Ponzi scheme for used periscopes.

Let us now gather to commit the body of AUKUS to the deep, and offer a solemn "bugger me" for the slow, groaning death of Scott Morrison’s last great fuck-up. A deal that promised Australia a fantastical fleet of undersea shootyboats, in a shakedown so brazen the East India Company might’ve said, "Steady on, lads, that’s a bit much, innit?"

AUKUS wasn’t born, it was shanked into being when Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson mugged the French, each for their own reasons, and now, barely three years on, it's being prepped for assisted dying via a 300-slide PowerPoint deck courtesy of Elbridge Colby, the US Undersecretary of Defense and a reminder that not all of Trump’s henchmen are foam-flecked ghouls with hamburger grease under their fingernails. Colby is much worse: smart, competent, ideological, and devout. He’s not a moron, not a drunk, never shot his own dog. His upcoming AUKUS review, ostensibly to ensure the deal aligns with Trump's "America First" ethos…

… will likely be the strategic equivalent of replacing your Uber ride mid-trip with a guy in a monster truck covered in tactical Jesus stickers, who locks the doors and screams, “We’re not going to your destination. We’re going where freedom sings!”

I can give you all the spoilers from the Colby Review right now, because—god help me—I’ve followed this guy’s work for years. It’s weird, maybe even a bit embarrassing, in a Homer eating flowers on the toilet kind of way, but today it pays off.

We're not getting out of this deal with our dignity or our balance of payments intact, but we are getting out of it because there is an increasingly near-zero chance of the US delivering.

That doesn’t mean they want out of it, however.

Apart from the whole submarine thing, it’s a great deal for them. And the submarine thing is… well, we’ll get to that. For now, we’re on the hook to pay billions of dollars, with no guarantees and no refunds, to help rebuild America’s submarine manufacturing base. We’ll spend billions more on training and retraining thousands of our Navy personnel, factory workers, and engineers to reskill for a capacity we’re about to be denied. But the US and UK get home basing rights for their nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed subs in WA and somewhere on the east coast.

If we're lucky, we might get a used Virginia-class sub around 2032, but only if the US submarine industry undergoes a miraculous 100% turnaround in its capacity.

Most likely, what will happen is an offer we can’t refuse.

No submarines for us, because the US can’t spare them.

But with US and British nuke boats sortying out of Australian ports, staffed in part by Australian naval personnel to make up the shortfall the US Navy is already experiencing, Colby will almost certainly propose, and Trump will absolutely insist, that we actually got what we needed. In any case, we can look forward to enjoying those boats the Brits are going to help us build in the 2040s, maybe in Adelaide, maybe in Narnia.

Through all this, Defence Minister Richard "Tickety-Boo" Marles maintains the relentless optimism of a character in a horror story who insists there's nothing to worry about as the walls start bleeding and the floorboards whisper your name. He assured us this week that there's "no need for a Plan B," which should really have been followed by a comically large tentacle exploding out of his mouth.

Marles believes that "chopping and changing guarantees you will never have capability," and he's less wrong than usual in that, but staying the course on a plan that increasingly resembles a Ponzi scheme for used periscopes ignores the other problem that dare not speak its name: our main AUKUS partner is no longer cosplaying fascism, the Trump Administration is tripping over its jackboots in the rush to get there.

So.

Here's a heresy worth entertaining. What if we didn't spend hundreds of billions of dollars on submarines we'll never own? (Calm down, my artisanal welfare spending queens. You’re not getting my precious defence dollars for your favourite therapy possum frisbee league, or climate-justified neighbourhood kombucha garden.) What if we invested a fraction of the AUKUS spend in drone fleets, missile platforms and cyberwarfare capabilities that could actually be deployed on this side of neverwhen? (And sure, fine, okay, you can have some of the spare change for your drag queen kombucha thingy). Ukraine, despite having no functional navy, has managed to cripple the Russian Black Sea fleet using modified speed boats stuffed full of explosives. It's not sexy, but neither is national insolvency or strategic failure.