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