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Canberra Today 15°/18° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Griffiths / Subs and that sinking feeling

THE submarines have been the subject of incidents and technical problems since the design phase, including accusations of foul play and bias during the design selection, improper handling of design changes during construction, major capability deficiencies in the first submarines, and ongoing technical problems throughout the early life of the class.  

Wikipedia on the Collins Class submarines

The once biggest Collins Class submarine HMAS Rankin… weighing in at a comparatively tiny 3100 tonnes.
The once biggest Collins Class submarine HMAS Rankin… weighing in at a comparatively tiny 3100 tonnes.

The announcement last week that a French bid had won the biggest defence contract in the world in 2016, Australia’s own selection of a submarine contractor for a new fleet of 12 boats, came as a bit of a surprise.

Most of the chatter had been around the Japanese bid, which uniquely was based on an actual successful class of well regarded operational submarines, or the Germans who were promising to transplant badly needed 21st century industrial manufacturing to Australia to build their design.

The first distant alarm bell is that the winner, DCNS and its subsidiary Thales have been caught up in corruption scandals around the globe. This made the ABC’s reports that Defence Minister Marise Payne’s partner and NSW Trade Minister, Stuart Ayres, had been in France trying to organise his own meetings with the company eyebrow raising. Of course, we assume this is merely an unfortunate look.

Of more concern is that the winning design, the “Barracuda Shortfin” doesn’t exist. Prime Minister Turnbull admitted as much on the “7.30” TV program. Let’s go to the transcript:

“Well, Leigh, the submarine has not yet been designed, so it is – we are working with the French as a design partner. It is going to be based on their latest submarine, their Barracuda submarine, but it is going to be an Australian-French partnership to design a new submarine.”

So what is the Barracuda? Turning to Wikipedia it’s a 4765-tonne nuclear submarine. Design work started in 1998, construction on the first one began in 2007 and, extremely concerningly, it’s still not finished.

For reference, the Collins Class when they entered service were the biggest conventional (that is non-nuclear) submarines in the world and weigh in at a comparatively tiny 3100 tonnes.

For more comparison, the biggest conventional submarine in the world is the experimental Chinese Type 032, of which only one has been built, which is still small by comparison at 3797 tonnes, nearly 1000 tonnes less than the unfinished Barracuda.

The problem appears to be that, as always, we want the moon on a stick. Other navies have similar requirements to ours, and when faced with them they turn to nuclear power.

Nukes are expensive and complicated and even a bit noisy (due to coolant pumps), but they provide lots of power for a long time and, crucially, don’t need to breathe air to generate power like a diesel engine does. Air is in short supply 300 metres under the waves.

It gets better, turning to page 91 of the 2016 Defence White Paper we find the requirements for this submarine:

“The key strategic requirements for the future submarines include a range and endurance similar to the Collins Class submarine, sensor performance and stealth characteristics which are superior to the Collins Class, and upgraded versions of the AN/BYG-1 combat system and Mark 48 MOD 7 heavyweight torpedo jointly developed between the US and Australia as the preferred combat system and main armament.”

The range and endurance requirements are what’s driving us to the behemoth size of the design. But the armament is problematic for the French design as news.com.au’s breathless reporting put it:

“Weaponry can include F21 torpedoes fired from eight tubes, Exocet anti-shipping missiles, SCALP Cruise missiles, A3SM anti-helicopter missiles and sea mines.”

So it’s designed for French weaponry we don’t actually have.

One hopes the process has, as promised, been driven by steely eyed paragons of competence.

But to the outside observer it looks like a whole bunch of contending interests have stuck their two bob’s worth in (Faster! Shootier! Stealthier! Better sensors! More frogmen! More range!) and they’ve gone for the design that doesn’t disappoint anyone, because it doesn’t actually exist, and cannot exist.

One has to pity the poor Japanese, who foolishly sent a real working submarine for evaluation, with all the real compromises of a completed and functioning design.

And for today’s decision makers what’s the risk? They’ll all be long retired when these chickens come home to roost.

 

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