AUKUS Pillar Two ‘lacks focus and delivery’ say MPs

AUKUS Pillar Two came under sustained pressure from MPs during the Defence Committee’s final evidence session, with ministers and officials repeatedly challenged on whether the technology pillar is producing meaningful capability or drifting into an open-ended process without clear outcomes.

While witnesses defended Pillar Two as an inherently long-term effort focused on emerging technologies, committee members argued that nearly four years after AUKUS was announced, industry still lacks a clear demand signal and government cannot point to scaled, fielded capability.

AUKUS Pillar Two is the part of the trilateral pact focused on advanced military technologies rather than submarines, covering areas such as artificial intelligence, autonomy, cyber, undersea systems, hypersonics and electronic warfare. Its purpose is to allow the UK, US and Australia to co-develop, share and deploy cutting-edge capabilities more quickly by removing regulatory and security barriers that have historically slowed cooperation.

Unlike Pillar One, it has no single flagship product or delivery date, which makes success harder to define and has increasingly drawn scrutiny from MPs concerned about focus, accountability and tangible outcomes.

Ian Roome MP said evidence heard during the inquiry showed that early enthusiasm among companies across the UK, Australia and the US was now being undermined by uncertainty about what Pillar Two is actually meant to deliver. He warned that firms were investing on the basis of partial information, with significant financial risk for smaller suppliers.

“No one is telling industry exactly what AUKUS wants them to deliver, and they are spending money on assumptions,” he said, adding that for SMEs the consequences could be severe.

Luke Pollard MP accepted that criticism in principle, confirming that the government had accepted Sir Stephen Lovegrove’s recommendation to narrow Pillar Two to a small number of “signature” or “marquee” projects. However, he could not provide a timeline for when those projects would be announced, indicating that meaningful clarity was unlikely before 2026.

Senior officials pointed to experimentation and trials as evidence of progress, including underwater autonomy work and remote-control demonstrations during multinational exercises. Air Marshal Tim Jones acknowledged, however, that these activities had not yet translated into operational capability at scale.

“We are not scaling these things yet,” he told MPs, describing Pillar Two as having generated promising early work but lacking a clear path to deployment.

Several MPs questioned whether interoperability experiments should be described as success at all, noting that recent exercises involved different platforms developed independently rather than jointly. Fred Thomas MP said that presenting such activity as a Pillar Two achievement risked lowering expectations compared with the original ambition of co-developed capability.

Officials also conceded that governance arrangements for Pillar Two remain underdeveloped. Jones said there was clear scope to strengthen oversight, introduce firmer deliverables and improve measurement of progress, while stressing that informal collaboration between project teams often ran ahead of formal structures. Pollard accepted that Pillar Two lacks the clarity of Pillar One, arguing that its diffuse nature reflects the complexity of emerging technology rather than poor management. MPs countered that diffusion was precisely what was preventing accountability and delivery.

Questions of responsibility ran through the session, with Emma Lewell-Buck MP pressing ministers on who would be held accountable if Pillar Two failed to deliver over the long term. Pollard said responsibility ultimately rests with ministers and the government of the day, a response that did little to reassure committee members concerned about the programme’s multi-national and cross-departmental structure. MPs also raised concerns about UK Defence Innovation, questioning how it would generate a clear demand signal for industry and who would lead it.

The possibility of expanding Pillar Two to include other countries, including Japan, Canada and South Korea, prompted further caution. Pollard said expansion could only proceed where it delivered clear benefit to the UK and existing partners, while MPs warned that widening participation before establishing focus risked further dilution.

By the end of the session, there was broad agreement on one central point. Pillar Two has created activity, engagement and experimentation, but without sharper priorities and clearer ownership it risks remaining a pre-capability space rather than becoming a driver of deployable military advantage.