Australian and U.S. personnel successfully tested AUKUS Pillar II subsea and seabed warfare capabilities during Exercise RIMPAC 2026 off Hawaii in July, according to an Australian Ministry of Defence release, bringing together the Royal Australian Navy, Australia's Defence Science and Technology Group, and the U.S. Navy to trial autonomous and remotely operated undersea vehicles focused specifically on protecting critical undersea infrastructure. The activity paired Australia's Kongsberg HUGIN Superior autonomous underwater vehicle with a Schilling work-class remotely operated vehicle for complex seabed search and navigation tasks, while the Lightfish Seasat uncrewed surface vessel and the L3Harris-developed Rock Lobster underwater acoustic communication relay demonstrated cross-navy interoperability between American and Australian systems. Commander Paul Clark of Australia's Directorate of Undersea Warfare and Data framed the exercise as evidence AUKUS Pillar II, the technology-sharing half of the trilateral pact, is accelerating capability development through genuine allied collaboration.
Taken at face value, that's a reasonable claim, and worth situating against this blog's own coverage of the broader undersea-infrastructure protection problem this exercise is explicitly built around. This blog's earlier coverage of Ultra Maritime's counter-UUV sonar demonstration already established why exactly this mission set matters, the sustained wave of suspected sabotage against Baltic Sea cables and pipelines, and the detection gap NATO analysts have flagged between surface-ship monitoring and the small, quiet autonomous vehicles increasingly implicated in seabed threats. AUKUS Pillar II's RIMPAC trial, testing precisely this kind of layered detection-and-response capability, complex undersea search, cross-platform acoustic communication, autonomous vehicle interoperability, is a legitimate and useful contribution to that broader problem, one this blog has already tracked as a live concern well beyond the Indo-Pacific.
What the Australian MoD's celebratory framing conveniently leaves out, though, is how starkly Pillar II's apparent smooth progress contrasts with Pillar I, the actual submarine transfer program AUKUS was originally built around and the pact's far more consequential pillar. Reporting through 2026 paints a genuinely troubled picture: Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle told Congress the current Virginia-class production pace would need "a 100 percent improvement" just to meet AUKUS Pillar I's basic delivery timeline to Australia, and CRS reporting confirms the actual production rate has never reached the Navy's own two-boats-per-year target, running at just 1.1 to 1.2 boats annually since 2022. More than two years after Congress authorized a major multi-year submarine construction contract specifically to stabilize that production pace, the contract remains unsigned, with Rep. Joe Courtney, the AUKUS Working Group's founding congressman, stating plainly that "there are clearly parts of the Trump administration not committed to upping the pace of production." Compounding the problem, Trump's separately announced "Golden Fleet" battleship program has drawn direct committee criticism for threatening to consume the same limited shipyard capacity Pillar I submarine construction depends on, a program Courtney described as going from "an AI-generated poster board in Mar-a-Lago" to competing for steel and workforce against an already-strained submarine industrial base.
That gap between the two pillars' trajectories is worth naming directly rather than letting a single successful RIMPAC exercise stand in for the health of the broader pact. Pillar II, technology and information sharing, autonomous systems, joint exercises, is inherently lower-cost and faster to demonstrate progress on than Pillar I's actual industrial commitment, building and transferring physical nuclear-powered submarines against a production base this blog's own coverage of the Finland Model has already established is stretched thin even for America's own Navy's needs, let alone an additional three-to-five-boat commitment to Australia. A successful undersea drone interoperability trial is genuinely good news and shouldn't be dismissed, but it's also the easier half of AUKUS to keep succeeding at precisely because it doesn't require the same shipyard capacity, congressional contract approval, or multi-decade industrial investment that Pillar I's submarine transfers do.
None of this means AUKUS Pillar I is doomed, the Pentagon's own December 2025 review reaffirmed the pact and Trump's team has publicly committed to moving it "full steam ahead," and Australia's government has repeatedly expressed confidence the deal will proceed regardless of periodic reviews. But reading this RIMPAC success story in isolation risks obscuring the more consequential trend line running underneath it: a trilateral partnership where the collaborative, technology-sharing pillar is demonstrably thriving while the pillar actually meant to put nuclear-powered submarines in Australian hands keeps slipping against a production base that, as this blog's shipbuilding coverage has repeatedly shown this summer, is already struggling to meet America's own fleet needs before Australia's submarines are even added to the queue.
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