U.S., Australia, U.K. Launch Maritime Demonstration to Enhance Interoperability

The Maritime Big Play Pacific demonstration is currently underway off the coast of Southern California to advance interoperability among the U.S., Australia and the U.K., as part of the AUKUS trilateral partnership. 

The event runs from Oct. 5 to Oct. 26 and showcases more than 40 government and industry technologies from across all three partner nations, including multidomain autonomous, crewed and uncrewed systems. 

The demonstration is part of a series of integrated experiments and exercises aimed at enhancing capability development, improving interoperability, and increasing the sophistication and scale of autonomous systems in the maritime domain. Through this series, AUKUS partners are testing and refining the ability to jointly operate uncrewed maritime systems, share and process maritime data and provide real-time maritime domain awareness to support decision-making. 

Michael Dodd, the assistant secretary of war for critical technologies, said the Maritime Big Play Pacific series enhances interoperability among AUKUS partner nations, strengthens the relationship and builds deterrence. 

“[Maritime Big Play Pacific demonstrates] the emphasis and the criticality that the trilateral nations have placed into ensuring that AUKUS pillar two and Maritime Big Play Pacific are successful, and that we’re identifying the right project sprints … to deter major conflicts by creating a disparity of technological capability,” Dodd said. 

He noted that participants are evaluating various vignettes involving autonomous systems in multiple domains during the event. 

“It’s certainly all autonomous systems … in the domains from seafloor to space,” Dodd said. Announced in 2021, the AUKUS agreement involves two lines of effort, or pillars.  

Pillar one involves delivering a conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarine to Australia, along with significant investments in the industrial bases of all three partner nations. 

As part of that plan, Australia will buy three submarines from the U.S. to be delivered in the 2030s. Together, the three partner nations will also develop a next-generation nuclear-powered attack submarine platform called SSN-AUKUS, expected to be ready for use by the U.K. in the 2030s and by Australia in the 2040s. 

Pillar two, which involves Maritime Big Play Pacific, focuses on three primary areas, Dodd said: developing operationally relevant advanced capabilities through co-development, coproduction and co-sustainment; integrating multinational capabilities to act as a force multiplier; and testing and evaluating promising solutions for deployment in the Pacific region. 

Dodd said the second pillar comprises capability development projects to address shared operational challenges, strengthen interoperability, and build paths for development, testing, production, sustainment and employment. 

“The objective is straightforward: identify areas where working together delivers an operational advantage that no one nation could achieve as efficiently on its own,” he said. “Maritime Big Play was the first project launched under this new model. Under Maritime Big Play, we’re bringing operators, technical experts and industry together earlier in this process.” 

The series of events, Dodd said, has paved the way for the first AUKUS pillar two signature project, announced in May, which involves cutting-edge payloads and enabling systems for partners’ uncrewed undersea vehicles. 

That project will enable AUKUS partners to, among other things, work together to protect critical national seabed infrastructure; deploy cutting-edge surveillance, reconnaissance and strike capabilities; conduct logistics operations and bolster superiority in antisubmarine and anti-surface warfare, mine countermeasures, electronic warfare and contested littoral maneuvers.