Sam Roggeveen

speaker

193 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Sam Roggeveen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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ABC News Daily · Why AUKUS delivers second-hand subs · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

And they have a point.

You know, submarines like the Virginia-class are built in what they call blocks.

or trenches effectively.

So they build maybe five or six.

And then the Navy says, well we'd like to add this element, and we'd like to take that part out, and we need this new capability on board.

And so they start building six more of a slightly upgraded type.

And previously Australia would have got two different types of Virginia class submarines.

Now we're only going to get one, and yes that does simplify the process.

Well, the government has signalled that there are some cost savings, but they're actually going to be pretty modest.

So, yeah, I wouldn't expect a lot of cost saving.

Okay.

The cost, of course, is that when you get secondhand submarines, they've got less life on them and we get to operate them for less time.

Well, indeed.

I mean, Senator James Patterson, the opposition defence spokesman, asked a really pointed question here.

If this is indeed simpler, then why didn't we do this from the beginning?

Yeah.

Clearly something else has changed and the most obvious...

explanation here is that the United States is not meeting its own production targets.

So the objective for some time now has been for the US to move from building roughly 1.2 Virginia class submarines a year to 2.3 submarines per year.

And they're really struggling to get up to that number.

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