Of the three partners - the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia - Australia has the most to gain. AUKUS is another "tie that binds" - keeping the United States close has been the motivating impetus to much of Australia's foreign policy over the last 80 years. It enables access to the even-more exclusive club of nuclear propulsion. And it strengthens Australia's position in the region against the continuing pressure of Chinese power.

Critically, Australia hopes that the AUKUS technology accelerator will help it overcome its own deficiencies and growing technological backwardness.

Australia has much to make up. Though the Australian economy is the world's 13th largest, it is essentially extractive - and increasingly so over the last 20-30 years. Australian investment in R&D has declined, to well below the OCED average, and in 2019, total expenditure lay below every other G20 nation except Mexico, South Africa and Argentina. Total gross R&D was a respectable 40 per cent of UK expenditure but a measly 3.4 per cent of US expenditure.

Turning available knowledge into economic power is even worse. Australia's economic complexity - a measure of the knowledge content of its product and services - has plummeted over the two decades, leaving it an increasingly laggard outlier amongst Western and developed nations - from 33rd globally in 2000 to 74th in 2020. By comparison, South Korea, ranked 32nd in 2000, is now ranked 5th.

Major economy-wide reform is needed. But we should be wary of seeing AUKUS as a silver bullet: the level of complexity involved in realising the opportunity represented by AUKUS should not be underestimated.

That complexity derives from three main sources.

There's the defence establishment itself. Defence institutions are notoriously resistant to fundamental change and Russell Hill is no exception. Despite Defence being under almost continual review - well over 35 major and numerous supplementary reviews since 1973 - ministers and industry continue to express frustration with Defence's ability to innovate and realise change.

Beyond a normal bureaucratic reticence, however, lies the harder problem of the translation of technological innovation into military capability, then into strategic and operational effect. That entails heavy lifting around doctrine, ways of working and organisational structures, plus changes to logistics, support and training. Under tightening resource constraints, that means making hard, often unpopular calls.

Defence programs attract much attention in an otherwise arid funding landscape. Yet such programs typically don't translate into hoped-for new industries or fuel broader economic growth. Security, tech transfer constraints and a tight focus on military needs limits the prospects for broadening the aperture to commercial applications and building expertise outside Defence's walls.

Then there's the nature of technology and of technology development. Much of the language used by ministers and officials implies a degree of certainty, linearity and tractability that is not borne out by experience.

The wavefront of technologies of interest involves more than simply "hypersonics", for example. A broader ecosystem, including deep tech in a range of other fields, will be needed to realise development, translation into capability and production - not to mention production engineering, technical product management and business acumen.

More of the same won't deliver the mindsets, conceptual frameworks, or mechanisms needed for a step-up in scaling or scope in the Australian technology environment. Without that, AUKUS's technology aspirations are unlikely to evolve beyond shopping lists.

Last, AUKUS operates across three allied, similar but different governance, economic and social systems. The closeness of the Five Eyes and bilateral defence relationships is not replicated elsewhere in government - as illustrated by the continuing ITAR trade restrictions, a source of ongoing frustration amongst US allies.

Further, the respective private sector companies compete, rather than collaborate, for government funding and market share. Australia has few commercial players and most lack broader market weight. It will take more than the normal defence industry programs to generate the type of collaboration, institutional structures and market conditions that might help create and sustain sovereign Australian technology development and production sector.

A first step is to separate civilian development of technology from the translation of useful technologies into military capability: they have different drivers and needs.

DEFENCE REVIEW MUST-READS:

Then there's institutions. As economic historian Joel Mokyr argues, institutions shape useful knowledge, through supporting the generation of new knowledge, influencing the diffusion of that knowledge, enabling its mapping for useful effect - typically through structures and incentives for innovation - and encouraging its adoption.

Canberra's existing policy frameworks and decision-making bodies reflect earlier eras and technology environments. The realisation of AUKUS, given its complexity, needs new institutions that bridge nations, embrace risk taking, understand the breadth and dynamism of technology development, and that can sustain patient effort, in each of Mokyr's four areas.

Last, there's the people. That's not "simply" researchers and engineers, but knowledgeable users, operators, production managers, policy advisers, analysts, and decision-makers. Every domain - not simply Defence - is short of savvy people with skills, experience and know-how, from the practical "how things work" to the systems-level "how to think about the challenge". Arguably, that's the real nation-building effort: designing a response that centres on enabling people more than finding the "right" technology.

Nonetheless, it remains early days: asking the right questions is probably more important now than delivering the answers. Given the importance of AUKUS to building Australian national capability, building the necessary bracing will need imagination, commitment, and a sustained whole-of-nation effort. That's too big a task to be left to Defence alone.