[Cashie]

With the US's reduced defence spending, there's very little chance they'd be loaning or leasing us much capital hardware these days.
I think sadly it is a smart move, we have proven that we can't sustain an effective and efficient ship building (more so submarine building) industry. It's the economy of scale, you can't setup ship building and only have work for them periodically.
Anyone who has spent time in a US shipyard will see there are almost no parallels to anything we have here. These days South Korea, Singapore, Japan etc are key players in ship building, why not get value for money and a quality product.
Sadly this means our workers suffer, the government should as part of this purchase setup a process to assist this work force to transition into another industry with a future.
Also, the failure of the Collins can not be solely blamed on Adelaide and the builders, this project was flawed before one piece of steel was cut, building an unproven and previously unbuilt submarine here was always a huge risk, the submarine design had major flaws and the combat system didn't work (both issues now largely resolved).