BARROW-IN-FURNESS, England — Submarines appear before the town does.

They can be seen from the road next to the factory, where the BAE Systems yard dominates the landscape and workers in high-visibility jackets are a constant presence. Police keep watch for anyone who might threaten Britain’s national security.

AUKUS — a security partnership announced in 2021 linking the U.S., U.K. and Australia seen by many as in a long-term effort to protect democracies against Chinese aggression in the Pacific — is a clear part of the town’s history, and its future.

A local memorial recalls the crews lost or captured sailing the first two submarines built in Barrow for the Royal Australian Navy during World War I, and over the next 15 years AUKUS depends on Barrow’s shipyards building the next generation of nuclear-powered submarines.

But observers, from the British parliament to former cabinet secretaries and prime ministers, say delays in Barrow are not only possible, but likely.

The SSN-AUKUS fleet will be based on a British design, incorporating technology from all three countries. The first examples will be built at BAE Systems’ Barrow yard, then later at Osborne Naval Shipyard in Adelaide, Australia, with Rolls-Royce supplying the nuclear propulsion plants.

And while Britain insists the first SSN-AUKUS class submarine will cut steel in 2027, delays would strain Britain’s national security and test the central promise of AUKUS.

A one-town dependency

Simon Case, the former U.K. Cabinet Secretary charged with regenerating the town, told POLITICO that AUKUS has become a live conversation in Barrow: “Barrow’s fortune has become synonymous with AUKUS.”

A House of Commons committee examining AUKUS went further, calling Barrow’s regeneration “too big to fail.”

That’s because Barrow must support Britain’s Dreadnought nuclear deterrent program and Astute fleet while also increasing output from one submarine a decade to one SSN-AUKUS every 18 months.

Achieving that leap in pace is more than a workforce challenge. It will take thousands of new houses, new higher education institutions, and an urban transformation.

The local college that feeds the shipyard apprentice pipeline was failed by Britain’s education standards body Ofsted in 2024.

If those facts are not daunting enough, Barrow’s regeneration challenge has a wider meaning: Get it right and this small town of 67,000 can claim to be at the center of a British power revival, in its post-Empire, post-EU era.

Get it wrong, and the central promise of AUKUS will go unmet.

The challenges will be constant over the next 15 years.

About 13,500 people work for BAE at the shipyard, roughly one-third of Barrow’s working-age population. While that’s a massive expansion from a workforce of 2,900 in 2003, the company still needs to reach 16,500 workers by the end of 2027.

Adding 3,000 jobs in a small town in 18 months is no easy feat. Adding them to achieve what Australia’s Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy told POLITICO is “the most technically advanced thing in the world,” is even harder.

Conroy has visited Barrow twice and remains optimistic.

Trevor Taylor, director of the Defence, Industries & Society Programme at the RUSI defense think tank, also described the United Kingdom as the least risky part of the AUKUS bargain. Dreadnought and Astute class submarines appear to be emerging without drastic delays, he said.

The unresolved question is experience. “They’ve certainly got the workforce, and I think the infrastructure,” Taylor told POLITICO. “Whether they’ve got the workforce experience is another matter.”

That distinction matters in a nuclear program. Barrow can train welders and other tradespeople. The design engineers, nuclear physicists and systems architects required for SSN-AUKUS will mostly have to be brought in.

And Barrow will be competing against shortages faced in other parts of Britain’s nuclear workforce, from highly qualified specialists to vocational workers.

The town the workforce needs

The production schedule is colliding with the town’s social reality.

Case, the former head of Britain’s civil service who now leads Team Barrow, a partnership dedicated to transforming the town, said the yard’s fortunes declined after the Cold War peace dividend and the town declined with it.

The order book is now strong, with decades of work ahead. Housing, education, health and employment have yet to catch up.

“What is holding the town back is actually the previous 30 years of under investment in housing, education, health and employment,” Case said.

Despite Barrow being situated near England’s Lake District — a major countryside tourist hub and holiday destination — the town itself is not seen as an attractive place to live.

Barrow’s town center has the familiar marks of Britain’s former industrial heartlands. The Commons report records 18.3 percent of working-age people as not in employment, 71.3 percent of adults as overweight or obese and drug and alcohol misuse above national rates. Government statisticians report Barrow residents as having the lowest life satisfaction in the U.K.

BAE provides high-paying work, but deprivation remains interwoven with that prosperity.

John Woodcock, a former Labour MP for Barrow who now sits on the House of Lords crossbench, said the town must become a magnet for engineering, nuclear physics and other high-technology graduates.

Barrow’s relative remoteness makes that harder. The town is more than five hours’ drive from London.

Young graduates often want a major city, and visible deprivation can become a barrier to recruitment, Woodcock said, even when the jobs are among the most advanced in the world.

Housing is the immediate constraint.

BAE has said a stable workforce cannot be transient. A family moving to Barrow needs a home, a school, health services and a reason to stay, making regeneration critical to ongoing defense production.

With 89 percent of the BAE workforce living locally, up to 2,700 new households may be needed by the end of 2027. The district builds about 750 homes a year.

Marina Village, a planned 1,350-home development supported by £24.8 million from Homes England, has yet to deliver a home.

What sets Barrow apart from many industrial communities across England’s North, which have seen deprivation creep in after the closure of the mills and mines that provided jobs in the 20th century, is that Barrow’s industrial future still exists and is set to exist for decades to come.

Barrow’s technical education foundation is improving.

Around 11 percent of the population, about 6,000 people, have been in the apprentice system, the highest proportion in England. BAE received another 6,000 applications in 2025. The young adult population is growing, and a new University Technical College is due to open soon.

No additional funding, no nuclear submarines

The U.K. government has committed £200 million over 10 years through the Barrow Transformation Fund. Case, who leads the public-private partnership established to revive the town, puts the real requirement at £1 billion and says government health and transport departments are yet to make funding commitments. “Some of the most deprived wards in the entire country are here in Barrow, despite the fact we spend billions of pounds a year,” Case told the Commons defense committee.

His conclusion is blunt: “If Barrow does not get it, we do not get our nuclear submarines, which are the cornerstone of this nation’s security. It is that simple really.”

The Ministry of Defence rejects the £1 billion investment figure. It says the £200 million fund was designed to catalyze investment from other departments and the private sector, and points to a £6 billion dedicated submarine investment.

On July 29, Prime Minister Andy Burnham announced £8.4 billion for Dreadnought, including £5.9 billion for BAE and £2.5 billion for the wider supply chain and apprenticeships.

Burnham’s appointment of John Healey — the former defense secretary — as the chancellor, has cheered Australian officials. “That shows to me that they’re putting defense and national security at the heart of their economic agenda as well as their defense agenda,” said James Paterson, the shadow defense minister, who is at the heart of debates about AUKUS accountability.

The military clock

Barrow’s local problems translate into military risk through the gaps in Australia’s submarine capability.

Paterson has identified two potential gaps in Australia’s submarine capability that need planning.

The first comes between the Collins-class submarines and Virginia-class submarines in the early 2030s. The second comes between the Virginias and SSN-AUKUS in the early 2040s.

Australia’s interim options include rotating British Astute-class submarines through waters around Australia and acquiring second-hand U.S. Virginia-class submarines in the early 2030s.

The Commons report says the Royal Navy’s Astute fleet is the smallest the U.K. has had in decades: In the first half of 2024, none of the five Astute-class boats completed an operational deployment, according to the report.

Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow specializing in sea power at Royal United Services Institute, told POLITICO a deployment to Australia would stretch it to the limits of its capacity.

“What I don’t want to see is fatalism,” Paterson said. “These are solvable problems. We’ve got time to get this right, as long as we are honest and realistic about it now.”

A shared industrial gamble

The U.K. is designing and building its own SSN-AUKUS boats before Australia builds its fleet.

That front-loads risk onto Britain and gives the U.K. a powerful incentive to get the program right for its own national security.

Burnham says British money should be spent on British workers, firms and skills in places written off for 40 years. Conroy supports this effort, seeing a stronger British yard as part of northern Britain’s economic rejuvenation, which will ultimately benefit Australia.

BAE says its £25 million Submarines Academy for Skills and Knowledge in Barrow and a Skills and a related Training Academy Campus in Adelaide will support thousands of future submarine builders. The Adelaide campus is scheduled to open in 2028 for up to 1,000 learners a year.

Woodcock argues that more of the early boats should be built in Barrow, creating a faster route to transfer capability and to build Australia’s sovereign capacity.

The future of AUKUS runs through a town where the shipyard has recovered faster than the place around it.

Dave Brat, Australia’s freshly confirmed U.S. ambassador, didn’t need to learn another language to qualify for his new gig. But he’s coming into the job fluent in a niche dialect that could give him a big advantage.

“He can speak Trump,” James Braid, President Donald Trump’s director of legislative affairs, said in a recent interview. “He can understand Trump, and he’s recognized as a longtime Trump ally. And I think that will really help him facilitate Aussie-United States relations.”

This dynamic could be key as Brat gets to work in Canberra, where political leaders have been rattled by the Trump administration’s aggressive trade agenda resulting in the implementation of a 12.5 percent tariff on Australian goods.

A longtime economist and academic, Brat is an avowed free trade advocate, which could quell some nerves on the ground. But Brat has also defended the Trump administration’s tariff regime as a kind of reset of the U.S. economic relationship with the world, telling a local news outlet in his home state of Virginia last year that “these tariffs are an attempt to bring some balance.”

At the same time, he has the ear of the White House, having earned Trump’s trust and respect long ago as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2014 to 2019. There, Brat was a member of the House Freedom Caucus — a contingent of conservative hard-liners known for taking uncompromising positions on federal spending — and in 2016 he embraced then-presidential candidate Trump as other more establishment Republicans turned their noses.

“The president hasn’t forgotten that,” said Braid, who was policy director of the Freedom Caucus during that period.

The Freedom Caucus was, as it is now, perpetually at war with party leadership on Capitol Hill, but the group harnessed Brat’s affable disposition and deft touch in high-stakes policy negotiations. He was obsessed with making sure that the group’s goals would be understood both by negotiators across the table and the public — something his former colleagues expect him to bring to the international stage.

Justin Ouimette, a former longtime executive director of the House Freedom Caucus, said in an interview that Brat’s approach has always been, “here’s the message and here’s where it is coming from” — a tactic that “tends to lower the temperature.”

“He was one of those guys that’s typically dispatched to disagree without being disagreeable,” Braid agreed. “Brat is really effective at stating a position, being firm while also collaborating to reach an outcome, and so that that experience will serve him well in his new diplomatic post.”

There’s hope among some in Washington that Brat’s views on trade, coupled with his ties to the Trump administration, could help soothe existing tensions and result in a positive working relationship between the U.S. and Australia. That optimism is shared by Virginia’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, who supported Brat’s nomination.

“He will be very focused on commerce, trade, and economic opportunity. You know, things that are good for the U.S. and good for the Australian economies,” said Kaine, who as governor once relied on Brat’s contributions to a bipartisan economic advisory panel to build the state’s budget.

“He’ll be very mindful of the commercial relationship, and I think that’s something that will be viewed positively by the Aussies,” Kaine added.

He noted that Virginia’s massive naval base would now have an advocate in Brat amid the continued implementation of AUKUS, a trilateral security pact among Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. in 2021 aimed at helping Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines.

Warner was less effusive, saying he has “disagreed with Dave on a lot of issues,” but acknowledged he also was “a smart guy” he supported for the ambassadorship.

Brat also has long been vocal about the competitive threats to the U.S. posed by China, a concern shared by Australia in its diplomatic engagement with the Pacific region. Ouimette speculated that “his clear-mindedness and alignment with the administration on that particular issue weighed in his favor” as the White House was making its ambassador selection.

There are still some unknowns, however, including whether Brat will be living in Canberra full time and how he’ll handle staffing issues at the U.S. Embassy.

“I understand that Mission Australia’s current staffing and facilities are insufficient to meet the demands of our expanding Alliance activities,” Brat said in a written response to U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, as part of his confirmation proceedings. “Our investment in diplomatic infrastructure reflects our commitment to this vital partnership.”

Brat’s arrival heads a wave of new senior appointments at the embassy including Robert T. Koepcke as deputy chief of mission and Jonathan A. Habjan as counselor for political affairs.

A slew of new military postings at the embassy includes Col. Richard Bush as defense attaché; Col. Pete Roongsang as Army attaché; and Col. Kabir Rao as chief of MILGROUP, which manages security cooperation, foreign military sales and defense relations with the Australian Armed Forces.

Brat also hasn’t spoken publicly or at length about how or why he was recommended for this particular posting, though he said during his confirmation hearing that he “loved the Australian people I have met in my life and appreciate their decency, wit and sense of humor” — as well as being a “tennis fanatic” eager to engage in “sports diplomacy across the board.”

Australian Prime Anthony Albanese is also a keen tennis player, known to invite dignitaries and journalists to play on the court at his official Canberra residence, The Lodge.

“I’m very much looking forward to having a hit of tennis with David Brat,” Albanese told POLITICO, adding that he believes Brat’s appointment will “bolster” the existing alliance.

Brat did not respond to POLITICO’s requests for interviews.

But Braid made clear that sending Brat to Australia is not a vanity posting or just a favor for a longtime Trump loyalist, calling Brat “a serious lawmaker with serious chops.” He conceded that while Brat “comes from a political tradition that may be a little bit unfamiliar to the Australians,” he brings relationships and experiences to the table a career foreign service officer could not.

“This is a serious person,” Braid said.