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British defence chief General Sir Nicholas Carter says AUKUS security pact 'not designed to be exclusive'

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AUKUS not as exclusive as originally thought?

Asked whether countries like Japan feel excluded by the new partnership, General Carter suggested the nation could eventually join, along with remaining Five Eyes partners Canada and New Zealand.

 
AUKUS not as exclusive as originally thought?
Due to the trudeau governments quiet submission to all things Red China, I doubt we'll be given any consideration. Not until we can prove to the other four eyes that we can positively deal with the ChiCom threat, we'll stay on the outside.
 
Due to the trudeau governments quiet submission to all things Red China, I doubt we'll be given any consideration. Not until we can prove to the other four eyes that we can positively deal with the ChiCom threat, we'll stay on the outside.

And yet, we're a global leader in the SMR part of the ship, along withe the US and UK (thanks mainly to Saskatchewan! Go Riders!):

Nuclear Enters 2021 With Buoyant Global Outlook for Small Modular Reactors​

SMRs get a boost with policy moves in the U.S., U.K. and Canada.

The nuclear industry is heading into 2021 with increased optimism around small modular reactors (SMRs) after a series of policy initiatives that were announced worldwide in recent weeks. The U.S., U.K. and Canada, three major nuclear markets, all signaled growing support for SMRs in the closing weeks of 2020.

Canada, for example, launched a 27-point SMR national action plan to demo and deploy the technology, update regulations, create employment and leverage foreign market opportunities.

The plan was developed in response to a 2018 SMR roadmap and followed a CAD $20 million (USD $16 million) investment in the Canadian molten salt reactor developer Terrestrial Energy in October.

“This is the government of Canada ensuring that we have every tool possible in our toolbox to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and address the existential crisis of climate change,” Seamus O’Regan, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, said in a live-streamed launch event.

U.S., U.K. back small modular reactors​

Days before Canada’s national action plan announcement, the U.S. Department of Energy said it is awarding an initial $30 million in "risk reduction funding" for five SMR developers.

The cash is part of a $600 million matched-funding package being paid out over seven years from DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP).


 
If I recall correctly, SMR's is a project headed by NB(?). Ontario and some other province(s) have joined the research and development. While I'm sure the feds have input or will try influence it, I don't recall that they are part of it. It's was a provincial initiative. I could be completely off base. I'm going by what I read and think I remember from some time ago. I welcome some clarification.
 
Once upon a time this would have been an ABCA exercise. Now it is an AUKUS exercise.


The take away.

Among the key reasons for moving data at speed to long-range fires systems is to build “human-machine teaming,” the Aussie Army chief said. “They give us scaling and mass advantages, but also because our people are our most valuable asset, how do we move them away from the point of contact? I do not want to be putting our soldiers into a fair fight. I do not want to be trading blood in the counter-battle if we can put machines out of front to do that — ever.”

Exercise demonstration

“Just last week in Camp Pendleton, you saw a perfect example of that where we were able to take data from an Air Force sensor — which we previously wouldn’t have been able to do, not least because of levels of classification — and exchange it and pass it through a decider and then to an effector, both a British effector and an Australian effector, and the Australian effector was actually located in Australia, and that was done in machine speeds,” Saunders, the British general said, offering an example of what the Pentagon calls Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2).

Prospective outcome

The US Army chief, Gen. Randy George, offered an intriguing possible win for AUKUS Pillar 2, leveraging “a common controller” for unmanned systems that would allow the three allies to exchange systems.

Faster. Faster.

In addition to that, he said he’s been talking to Congress about the Army having more flexibility to buy things because electronic warfare and drone software often needs to be updated every “three weeks or three months” and move from research and development more quickly.

“That’s been very hard for us to do right now, for example, with a continuing resolution as far as moving things around,” he added.

And cheaper.

It is an “extraordinarily progressive and an almost revolutionary change in some of the character of war,” Gen. Patrick Sanders, chief of the General Staff, told an audience at a CSIS event Tuesday. “Now, not all of them are working effectively. Up to 80 percent of the drones during one period recently, simply were not getting through because of an extraordinarily contested electromagnetic spectrum and effective Russian use of electronic warfare.”

But if you fire a five round burst of $2000 rounds and one of the five takes out a $1,000,000 tank, or a $100,000,000 aircraft, or a $1,000,000,000 ship you are probably money ahead.


Long Range Fires

As for those long-range fires, Sanders said that Ukraine’s effective use of that capability has clear implication for any fight that might break out in the Pacific.

“So, a land-based missile, PRSM, being fired out of a $30,000 — not a $100,000,000 platform — one which is hard to find, can reach out to previously unthinkable distances and target a maritime platform,” he said. “So that gives you a sense of how I think the innovation that we’re seeing, being developed in places like Ukraine, has got direct transfer and applicability into the Indo-Pacific.”

PRSM is, of course, fired from a HIMARS mobile launch vehicle, of which Australia is expected to buy 20.
 
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