AUKUS0008

Written evidence submitted by Professor Carl Stephen Patrick Hunter OBE.

Background – Professor Carl Stephen Patrick Hunter OBE

Professor Carl Stephen Patrick Hunter OBE is writing is his expert capacity as Director of the Centre for Underwater Acoustic Analysis. Please find his short form biography enclosed below.

Chairman Coltraco Ultrasonics, Director-General the Durham Institute of Research, Development & Invention (DIRDI); Director of the Centre for Underwater Acoustic Analysis (CUAA); Professor-in-Practice at Durham University; Chairman of the Council on Geostrategy Forum; Distinguished Research Fellow, Strategy, Science & Technology, Changing Character of War Research Centre, Pembroke College, Oxford; Visiting Fellow Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre. He advises several Government departments.

His company is a high-exporting, advanced manufacturer, twice-winning the Queen’s Award for Enterprise and his organisation is an integrated research-to-manufacturing organisation, with over 430 senior academics from Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Imperial College, UCL and KCL. Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology , the Durham Energy Institute, and Associate Fellow of the Nautical Institute.

Evidence Submission to the Defence Committee Inquiry Into The AUKUS Partnership:

1. In today’s increasingly complex world, geopolitical situations and assumptions are rapidly shifting. AUKUS is a “Geostrategic and Technological Line in the Sand”, to regain maritime supremacy, and preserve for future generations the next 75 years of the Health, Wealth and Security achieved by the rules-based international order (RBIO), as in the last 80. 

2. AUKUS is the most compellingly ambitious and audacious, geostrategic agreement, since NATO was established in 1949. AUKUS is as important in influencing and affecting adversarial behaviour as CASD. It is about achieving “Strategic Technological Dominance” over “Oscillating Operational Advantage”, so that we secure the Global Geo-Strategic Settlement, against adversarial attempts to disturb it. 

3. We must see the “One Strategic Operating Environment” of an Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic, co-joined by the Arctic. It is only when we see all 3 as one that will we make sense of AUKUS at all. The common geographical factor to both the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic is the Arctic, and the common maritime one is the “one maritime environment”, of the “Global Maritime”, above the oceans, and the “Global Underwater”, beneath them, from which we integrate the “Seabed-to-Space” capability overall.  Recent UK policy successes since 2017 mean that the UK can now view itself at the centre of, and with equal interests in, the USA, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific.

4. To that degree, UK maritime power needs to increase to be able to project and maintain it in all 3 regions concurrently.  I cannot stress enough the importance of the work undertaken in AUKUS P2 to the success of the UK’s SSBN, SSN and underwater establishment in national security terms.

5. Whether in cyber, space, undersea disruptions and air incursions, destabilisation, use of proxies, sabotage on land and underwater, or nuclear, the 4 nations of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, offer systemic contestation and challenge. They clearly see the RBIO as something made in western terms and seek to disrupt it. AUKUS is a strategic response to this threat.

6. AUKUS is a generational change that requires the same 3-Dimensional geostrategic intellect, as one would expect from the most outstanding Submarine Commander. Seeing AUKUS P1 through a “prism of possibility”, offering as it might, a future “One Strategic Submarine Force”, capable of manoeuvring at will, between the Indo Pacific, the Euro Atlantic, and the Arctic. P2 technologies need to be so definitively superior, that they command the sea and oceans with the audacious certainty that Dreadnought did.

7. So great in potential is AUKUS P2 that its aim should be set in the United Kingdom specifically as to achieve “strategic technological dominance, over “oscillating operational advantage”. Should we achieve this, then the opportunities for technological innovation are very high, to the point at which economic growth will be supported and “economic hope” found for those with far less of it than we have ourselves.

8. In Machinery of Government changes, consideration might be given to the creation of a 3-star Director General of Grand Strategy (DGGS) alongside the Prime Minister’s AUKUS Advisor based in the Cabinet Office. These roles would be designed to ensure that we meet the statecraft, strategic planning, and implementation requirements of AUKUS and so that all national means can be cohered to deliver AUKUS. This is because AUKUS is as central to our National Interest as CASD.

9. Whitehall needs to establish a well-staffed Office of Grand Strategy (OGS) to operate with cross-Whitehall authority to deliver UK Strategic Advantage. Its role would be to develop and implement the concept of Grand Strategy for the United Kingdom and include the ability to add Grand Strategy input into departmental strategies. This would ensure that Grand Strategy becomes coherent throughout Government, the Private Sector, and nation, across the long-term, and meet UK national aims at home and overseas, in a shared, national endeavour to succeed. Fundamental to this would be the opportunity to bring greater scientific and technological awareness to geostrategic policy makers and greater geostrategic understanding to UK Science & Technology.

10. More broadly, there are three areas to consider: strengthening successful structures in Government so that it better supports strategic national endeavour; improving the UK Government-UK Society relationship so as to mobilise national awareness and a spirit of collective endeavour; and instilling a national culture to a point of UK Cultural Advantage, to act collectively across the public and private sectors, to secure UK strategic, national interests, at home and overseas.

11. Thought should be given to build on the Integrated Review of Foreign, Defence, Security and Development policy, by conducting an Integrated Review of Domestic Policy, as the foundation to develop a long-term, politically colourless National Strategy for the next 75 years to match AUKUS timelines.

12. A future OGS and DGGS would work to co-ordinate each of the 3 whole-of-government, whole-of-nation, and whole-of-society aims by cohering the roles and responsibilities of the public sector and the private sector to work together in a national, shared endeavour to succeed at home and overseas, including taking oversight of departmental strategies to ensure that they include Grand Strategy awareness, so as to generate UK Strategic Advantage. 

13. Reforming the UK Defence-UK Science-UK Industry relationship is vital to the success of AUKUS. Too often, UK Science is wrongly seen as a long-term capability, conflicting with UK Industry’s shorter term one. Instead, both must combine and build on our Great Universities tradition of excellence. UK science needs an emphatic and structural place in AUKUS. UK Industry can generate the advanced technologies we need, by reforming its relationship with UK Science in a new joint relationship with UK Defence and Security.

14. UK Industry is becoming frustrated with the absence of contracts and demand signals, but these are not yet realistic. Industry needs to ask what it can do for AUKUS and engage with UK Science so that that can bring achievable ideas in support of AUKUS.

15. In this spirit, the generation of scientific and technological dominance sends as important a strategic message, to affect the planning assumptions of Adversaries, as much as an operational level technological one does in the shorter term. Developing the ability to positively impact adversarial planning and assumptions is a key benefit of AUKUS P1 and P2.
     

28th May 2025