AUKUS Nations Should Exempt More Tech From Trade Controls, Researcher Says

Tom Corben, a research fellow in the U.S. Studies Center’s Foreign Policy and Defense Program, said defense export control issues have “improved somewhat” since the three countries last year created new exceptions for certain defense-related exports, including U.S. measures to revise the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (see 2412040044). He noted the exceptions have helped expedite exports that previously required licenses, which sometimes took months to obtain.

But those exemptions still may not be broad enough to be “AUKUS-enabling,” Corben said during a webinar last week hosted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “If you looked at the text of what was actually proposed, there was an exemption from the exemption,” he said, and that “basically captured a lot of the most relevant technologies” that the three countries were hoping to loosen guardrails around for defense technology cooperation under AUKUS pillar two and the delivering of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia under pillar one.

Industry groups have called on the State Department to remove items from its Excluded Technologies List, which are technologies that still require a license despite the new AUKUS exemption (see 2410010030 and 2503070029).

“We're not just talking about a capacity to build them or to receive them as [a Foreign Military Sale] or as a direct commercial sale,” Corben said. “We're talking about defense trade controls being something that needs to be addressed if an Australian technician is even allowed to look at that technology.”

ITAR critics have long called for sweeping changes of the regulations, which are viewed by industry as unnecessarily restrictive (see 2303170045).

“If anybody has a kind of PTSD-like reaction to the term ITAR, I completely understand and sympathize with you,” Corben said. “That's where I've been.”

Chris Pratt, President Donald Trump's nominee to be assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, said in May that he was directed to address delays and other complaints that are frequently made about the ITAR (see 2505150053).

Corben acknowledged that “there's probably some more work that needs to be done in Australia around reforming its own list of technologies in that regard.” But he said Australia can’t work in "isolation."

“At the end of the day, this is a multinational collective enterprise,” he said, “and if we're talking about advanced technologies and advanced capabilities, there needs to be some kind of standardization, or at least coordination across the three systems in order to make sure that we're on the same page and that we're not needlessly kind of encountering obstacles that we don't need to.”

Panelists also noted during the webinar that the Pentagon is currently leading a review of AUKUS, although U.S. officials haven’t shared many details about what that review entails (see 2507240044).

Alexander Gray, a National Security Council official during the first Trump administration, said he doesn’t believe the review is a Trump-led negotiation tactic. He said it’s born out of legitimate concerns that the U.S. should first be trying to shore up its own advanced submarine capacity before prioritizing other countries.

“I don't think it's anything other than a math question,” he said, adding that the Navy may not currently have enough submarines, and its needs are growing.

“At some point, the bill has to be paid for the failures of multiple U.S. administrations to do the hard work of tending to our industrial base,” Gray said. Defense Department officials are “looking at that bill, and it’s coming due” on their watch, and so they’re “asking the tough questions about: how do we square the circle to meet all of the demands that we have for the Navy and for the industrial base?”