The success of AUKUS could be at risk unless U.S. lawmakers are prepared to make further concessions toward Australia and the United Kingdom on arms trade regulations, according to a new report from the United States Studies Centre.
The report, titled “AUKUS enablers? Assessing Defence Trade Control Reforms in Australia and the United States,” was authored by Tom Corben, a Research Fellow in the Foreign Policy and Defence at Centre, and William Greenwalt, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
They conclude politicians in all three countries have made “notable progress” in harmonising defence trade control regimes over the past 12 to 18 months.
However, they warn that these advancements may be undermined “if further regulatory adjustments are not made and if lingering barriers to implementation endure.”
They estimate that the reforms already concluded or currently underway would exempt 70 to 80 percent of trilateral defence trade from licensing requirements. This would potentially reduce industry compliance costs and enable easier cooperation on everyday defence industrial and technology exchanges between the AUKUS countries.
More Work Needed on Trade Harmonisation
However, the authors say that if the aim is to realise a long-standing objective of creating a “defence free-trade zone” between Australia and the U.S., then more still needs to be done, mainly on the U.S. side.
For the past two decades, successive Australian governments have long sought to create such a zone.
Previous efforts, such as the 2007 Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty and the 2017 expansion of the U.S. National Technology and Industrial Base to include Australia and the United Kingdom, were intended to bring it about, but ultimately failed to deliver, according to the report.
The authors point out that ITAR’s “enduring structural challenges” and the exclusion of key AUKUS-relevant technologies from U.S. licensing changes will hamper AUKUS Pillar II cooperation, especially on precision-guided weapons.
Australia had argued that its defence trade controls were similar to U.S. regulations, but U.S. officials required Australia and the UK to adopt ITAR-like rules to qualify for AUKUS defence trade exemptions.
“As a result, Australia has enacted reforms to its own defence trade controls, which many stakeholders worry could replicate well-known challenges with the US ITAR system,” the report says. These include “structural disincentives to defence innovation.”
This is mostly due to an Excluded Technologies List (ETL) within ITAR that captures technologies central to both Pillar I and Pillar II projects.
The authors attribute their omission from license-free trade to “reasons of national competitiveness, international treaty obligations, and anxieties over industrial security threats posed by China, Russia, and other competitors.”
To fully benefit from AUKUS, the three countries must address legal, political, and technical challenges, including how licensing exemptions apply to U.S.-originated technology made in Australia and modified foreign commercial products used in AUKUS projects.
