Aussie sailors sub off US repair ship for home visit

Australian sailors brought onboard US naval ship to learn submarine maintenance in time for the nation's incoming AUKUS nuclear fleet. Video via AAP.

Transcript

00:00With AUKUS, the last few years, it's really given a new sense of scale to what we're doing.

00:04So, you know, whereas in the past we might have had one or two Australian sailors perhaps embedded

00:09as a personnel exchange program, I've been very fortunate for the last five months to have 36

00:14Australian maintenance technicians working for me and my sister ship, the USS Frank Cable in Guam.

00:19It's part of the AUKUS initiative to train Australian technicians to work on U.S. submarines

00:24and understand how to interpret our procedures, how to fill out the paperwork properly, and to

00:29figure out what the equivalencies are between Australian qualifications and Navy qualifications.

00:33And so they showed up in January in Guam. We put them right to work. They've been an invaluable

00:37asset to us. About half of them had to stay there and keep working on U.S. ships there,

00:41but I was very privileged to be able to bring 17 with us on this deployment.