"I would think, in the next little while, we will have more British sailors serving on our naval vessels, Australians and the like, more of our forward-deployed assets in Australia," Kurt Campbell, the White House National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific affairs coordinator, said Friday. "This leads to a deeper interconnection and almost a melding, in many respects, of our services and working together on [a] common purpose that we couldn't have dreamed about five, 10 years ago."
That alignment figures to be a mainstay of U.S. efforts to counter threats from China, where communist officials are at the helm of an economic heavyweight intent on building a world-class military. And while nuclear submarine technology sits at the center of the pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, or AUKUS, as the deal is known, officials remain conscious of the need to field military capabilities that would be relevant in a conflict well before those nuclear submarines are constructed.
"We realize and recognize that there are some immediate and medium-term challenges and that we can't simply wait for long-term solutions," Campbell told the United States Institute of Peace. "And I think there's a deep recognition that that's the time frame we're working on."