WASHINGTON — Lawmakers have high expectations for a new trilateral security partnership between the United Kingdom, United States and Australia to significantly boost not only the three allies’ maritime positions in the Indo-Pacific vis-à-vis China but also to accelerate and deepen their collective abilities in next-generation defense technologies.
But senior Republicans and some Democrats say Congress first needs to smooth the regulatory runway to enable defense cooperation in such highly-advanced areas as hypersonic and counter-hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and undersea technologies.
The lawmakers are pushing the administration and State Department to back legislation that would exempt some exports to Australia and to a lesser extent to the U.K. from weapons-related export control rules. Such statutory carve-outs from the current controls are needed to enable timely development and deployment of the next-generation technologies.
