by James Jinks
As Breckenridge searched for a suitable ice polynya through which Tireless could surface, the crew quickly determined that the flood alert was a false alarm which had probably been triggered by the explosion. In the Forward Escape Compartment Holleworth located Huntrod and attempted to kick open the doors to the escape hatch. ‘I thought I would just grab Tony and carry him with me,’ said Holleworth. ‘But it was futile. I had a moment of clarity that I was trapped in there. I knew I was going to die.’122 He staggered to an oxygen relay point and pulled on a mask. ‘All I remember is slumping to the floor. I accept that I must have just passed out.’123 He was found forty minutes later when the ship’s company breached the Escape Compartment. If it had not been for the stamina and presence of mind of Tireless’s crew, particularly Holleworth who used ‘all available means to extinguish’ the fires, the consequences of the incident could have been much worse. Tireless later punched a hole though the ice pack and surfaced and Holleworth was airlifted to Anchorage in Alaska by an American helicopter and a transport aircraft. The Board of Inquiry into the incident determined that the explosion was caused when a self-contained oxygen generator, known as an SCOG, used to supply extra oxygen to the submarine exploded. Although the inquiry was unable to determine beyond doubt why one of the canisters exploded, it concluded that the most likely cause was that oil had seeped into and contaminated the oxygen generator. The Ministry of Defence accepted responsibility for the incident and a series of recommendations relating to damage control, firefighting and equipment were quickly implemented and a new design of oxygen generator issued to the fleet.
Since Tireless’s operation in the Arctic the Navy has been unable to send another submarine up to the region. There is, however, still a need to maintain an intimate knowledge of the area and the skills required to operate in it. The Arctic is likely to become even more important than it was during the Cold War. Climate change may melt the Arctic’s ice cap to such an extent that in this century it will become a navigable ocean for commercial shipping, as well as mineral and oil exploration. Territorial disputes are already taking place. Russia has already made extensive claims on the region, based on its continental shelf, way beyond the usual twelve-mile limit from the coastline. The US Navy’s most recent exercise took place in March 2014 when the USS New Mexico fired a simulated torpedo against a simulated submarine in order to maintain its Arctic submarine skills. ‘In our lifetime, what was [in effect] land and prohibitive to navigate or explore, is becoming an ocean, and we’d better understand it,’ noted Admiral Jonathan Greenert, the US Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations, who was in the Arctic to observe the exercise. ‘We need to be sure that our sensors, weapons and people are proficient in this part of the world’ so that the US Navy can ‘own the undersea domain and get anywhere there’.124 A Royal Navy officer was assigned to the US ICEX and the Navy still aspires to send a ‘Trafalgar’ and ‘Astute’ class SSN back under the ice at some point in the future.125
The Submarine Service also continues to keep a close eye on Russia. (In the office of a senior British intelligence figure with connections to the submarine world there stands a bronze statue of Lenin some 3 feet high.) Whether or not it continues to collect intelligence about Russian submarines, is an open question. Every living CO who has operated against the Russians would emphasize that collecting intelligence about Russian submarines was – and remains – Champions League play for the Queen’s submariners. It is what gives the final sharpening to their dark-blue competitive edge. That edge depends on a multiplicity of moving parts – human, technical and industrial – all working as they should do all the time. It is expensive, precarious and, especially in stretching circumstances, fragile. Can – should – the UK devote the substantial and top-of-the-range human, financial and technical resources to Submarine Britain that its sustenance demands? What might the future hold for the patrollers of the silent deep?
11
And the Russians Came Too: Today and the Future
The UK has always been a reluctant nuclear power
Sir Kevin Tebbit, Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, 1998–2005, speaking in 2009.1
THE ‘ASTUTE’ CLASS
The future of the Royal Navy Submarine Service depends on a new class of SSN and a new class of SSBN. By the early 1990s there had been little progress in the programme to replace the ‘Trafalgar’ class. After a lengthy period of abeyance, as a result of work on the ‘Vanguard’ class, a Staff Target was issued in March 1986 and Full Feasibility Studies were carried out by VSEL between 1986 and 1989.2 The Staff Target was not translated into a Staff Requirement until August 1989, and the Programmed Acceptance Date of the Follow On SSN slipped by eighteen months to the year 2000. By 1990 the extent to which the new class would be an improved or ‘stretched’ Trafalgar rather than a genuinely new design had yet to be decided and several possibilities were under discussion within the Ministry of Defence.3 The Naval Staff eventually revisited the requirement for the Follow On SSN and renamed the entire programme ‘Batch II Trafalgar’. The aim was to design a submarine with similar capabilities to the ‘Trafalgar’ class, but rather than developing new technology, as was intended with SSN0Z, ‘Batch II Trafalgar’ would incorporate the best of existing technology already in use in the ‘Trafalgar’, ‘Vanguard’ and ‘Upholder’ submarines that had been built since the 1980s. The submarine would be powered by the PWR2 reactor used in the ‘Vanguard’ class, as well as carrying the new combat system for the ‘Swiftsure’ and ‘Trafalgar’ classes and a number of systems from the ‘Upholder’ class.4
From the outset there were problems. The MOD felt that the owners of the Barrow shipyard, VSEL (Vickers), had made excessive profits from the ‘Vanguard’ class and a consensus developed in the MOD that competition would lead to lower acquisition costs. At the same time high overheads also contributed to the belief that the roles traditionally performed by the MOD could be carried out by industry more efficiently and effectively. As a result, design authority, traditionally the responsibility of the MOD’s in-house naval constructors, the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, was transferred to the submarine design contractor.5 There was no planning for the transfer of responsibilities from the MOD to the prime contractor, management of which in any case changed when British Aerospace bought GEC-Marconi in November 1999 and created BAE Systems. There was a lack of cooperation and coordination between the prime contract office and the MOD and high turnover of personnel, especially at management level at VSEL, GEC-Marconi and then BAE Systems, led to numerous changes in leadership there and at the shipyard.6 The MOD also lost its ‘ability to be an informed and intelligent customer’.7 During the construction of the ‘Vanguard’ class, fifty MOD staff had been based at the shipyard, but during the early stages of the ‘Astute’ programme the MOD’s on-site presence was just four people. The shipyard also struggled to meet the requirements of the programme. By the time work on the ‘Astute’ class began in the late 1990s, it had been almost twenty years since the ‘Vanguard’ class was designed by the MOD and years since the last ‘Vanguard’ class, HMS Vengeance, was delivered. Employment at the shipyard at Barrow had dropped from over 13,000 during the ‘Vanguard’ and ‘Trafalgar’ builds to just 3000, with consequent loss of experience and expertise.
While most of the workers who departed were craftsmen, many highly trained engineers and constructors skilled in submarine design and construction also left. The shipyard tried to maintain a set of core shipbuilding skills by designing and building surface ships such as HMS Ocean, HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, and a civilian oil tanker, but the skills involved in constructing relatively simple surface ships were very different from those required by nuclear submarines. When the ‘Astute’ contract was signed in 1997, Barrow was forced to split its resources to meet its existing commitments, meaning only a third of the available designers were employed on the submarine programme.8 Both the MOD and GEC-Marconi underestimated the impact of the long gap between the design of t
he ‘Vanguard’ class and the start of ‘Astute’.
Although the ‘Vanguard’ class was first conceived as a modest upgrade to the ‘Trafalgar’ design, the PWR2 it used demanded a wider and longer hull and the requirement for lower radiated noise signatures led to a more complex design. At 97 metres in length, with a beam of 11.3 metres and a draught of 10 metres, the ‘Astute’ design came in at 7000 tonnes surfaced, 7400 tonnes dived. The Navy fought long and hard to ensure the new design was large enough to carry sufficient weapons and reloads. The increase in capability is substantial. The ‘Astute’ class is fitted with six 21-inch torpedo tubes, one more than the ‘Swiftsure’ and ‘Trafalgar’ classes. More importantly, the new boats are capable of carrying up to thirty-eight weapons, Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles or Spearfish torpedoes, a 50 per cent increase compared to previous SSNs.
Although the keel of the first of class, HMS Astute, was laid in January 2001, the first years of the construction programme were beset with problems. One of the biggest was the introduction of 3D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software. Although the designers at Barrow had used 3D CAD software for the design of some surface ships, these designs did not compare to the complexity of a densely packed nuclear submarine. Previous submarine designs had been produced in 2D on paper by hundreds of draughtsmen; wooden mock-ups were then used to understand the layout of the submarine and the access routes for pipes and cables. The CAD software required extensive modification before it could be used to design a submarine, which was difficult because of the shortage of UK designers with 3D CAD experience.9 As a result of the delay, physical construction of HMS Astute began with very few complete drawings and those that were produced by the CAD process were to a level of detail with which the shipyard workers were completely unfamiliar. In previous construction programmes they had worked from drawings that contained little detail; they had then used their years of submarine construction practice and experience to decide how to build what was represented on the drawings. There were therefore further delays in the programme as the ‘Astute’ class workforce learned to work with the new drawings.10 By August 2002 the ‘Astute’ programme was more than three years late and several hundred million pounds over budget.
These delays and cost overruns resulted in a revised contract in December 2003, with the MOD abandoning the ‘eyes on, hands off’ approach it had adopted in managing the requirements of the programme and asking the US Navy’s primary submarine builder, General Dynamics Electric Boat, for assistance. As a result over 200 experienced designers and managers from Electric Boat began to help BAE Systems with the design effort. A secure link was established between Barrow and Groton, Connecticut, to pass the detailed drawings necessary for construction. Electric Boat also helped Barrow to emulate the modular construction techniques that it had used for the US Navy’s ‘Ohio’ and ‘Virginia’ class submarines, outfitting submarine rings using a vertical method rather than the traditional horizontal process used in all previous Royal Navy submarine construction, and assisted BAE in tracking programme progress; a senior Electric Boat employee was eventually based in Barrow and assigned to BAE Systems as the ‘Astute’ Project Director, with responsibility for all aspects of delivery.11 The approved in-service date for HMS Astute was 2005, but this was moved back from 2005 to 2008.
As Barrow was incorporating these US techniques and relearning how to build a nuclear submarine, the construction of HMS Astute proceeded in a somewhat uncoordinated fashion. Testing and commissioning caused more delays as it had been ten years since anyone at Barrow had tested and commissioned a nuclear submarine.12 HMS Astute was finally launched in June 2007 and left the Barrow shipyard to start operational trials in November 2009. During the sea trials, three kinds of problems were identified: flaws in design that only became apparent once testing began; equipment with poor reliability; and problems relating to construction. ‘In the programme of testing over three years we have identified issues in all of those categories. And got on and fixed them,’ wrote the then Director Submarines, Rear Admiral Simon Lister. ‘Is this normal? Where is this on the spectrum of scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money? Is this what we could expect? Is this the normal endeavour of dragging any ship out of the dockyard? You will have to make your own mind up.’13 However, the delays to the ‘Astute’ programme must be set against the context of previous submarine-building programmes outlined earlier in this book. ‘Point me to any submarine building yard that produces a first of class and I will show you a process that is extraordinarily challenging,’ said Lister. ‘The level of challenge in Astute I don’t think has been any more than in the level of challenge in the first of class in other submarines.’14
Shortly after commissioning into the Royal Navy, on 22 October 2010 Astute was marooned on top of a sand bank off the Isle of Skye while conducting sea trials, very close to the Skye Bridge, allowing dramatic filming and photography by the media. Early attempts to free the submarine failed and Astute remained aground until shortly before the next high water. During the recovery there was a minor collision with the towing vessel Anglian Prince, which damaged Astute’s starboard foreplane. According to the official report of the Service Inquiry the causes of the grounding were ‘non adherence to correct procedures for the planning and execution of the navigation combined with a significant lack of appreciation by the OOW [officer of the watch] of the proximity of danger’. A number of other additional factors also contributed to the incident, including some deficiencies with equipment.15 The Panel found the failures were specific to HMS Astute and were ‘not indicative of wider failings within the Submarine Service as a whole’.16 As a result, Astute’s then CO, Commander Andy Coles, was relieved of command.
The following year, in April 2011, Astute’s new CO, Commander Ian Breckenridge, had docked his submarine in Southampton on a goodwill visit when one of her crew, 23-year-old Able Seaman Ryan Donovan, angry over losing the chance of a deployment on a surface ship after disobeying an order to help clean the submarine, opened fire with an SA80 rifle with which he had been issued to stand guard on the submarine’s casing, and shot dead Astute’s Weapons Engineering Officer, Lieutenant Commander Ian Molyneux, and badly injured a Second Officer, Lieutenant Commander Christopher Hodge. Donovan’s ‘murderous onslaught’ was only stopped when two civilian dignitaries, the leader of Southampton city council, Royston Smith, and the chief executive, Alistair Neill, leapt on him in the submarine’s Control Room. Donovan admitted murdering Molyneux and attempting to murder Hodge, as well as two other men who escaped unhurt, and was given a life sentence.17 Breckenridge is very stoical about the press portrayal of Astute as a jinxed boat. He knows it will take a long while to get its reputation back and that the press will seize upon all the inevitable teething troubles. He said in an interview with a US magazine:
The media will always jump at an easy target. So we’re an easy target, they’re having a field day … ask any of my ship’s company, any of our supporting personnel, anyone in the Navy, any of our families, any of our friends in the U.S. submarine force; in fact, anybody that basically understands what a first-of-class submarine’s got to go through, and they’ll recognise that the term ‘jinx’ is just a very easy one that the media jumps on. Does it bother me? Used to, initially. Not bothered by it anymore. There are much more important things to deal with. It’s a fantastic submarine to deliver to the front line as soon as possible. And I’ve got a really good team helping me do that.18
As Astute continued on her sea trials, reports of further problems reached the press. On 16 November 2012, an article appeared in the Guardian: ‘Slow, leaky, rusty: Britain’s £10bn submarine beset by design flaws.’ The article went on to list a number of alleged problems that had affected the boat, including: ‘flooding during a routine dive that led to Astute performing an emergency surfacing’; ‘corrosion even though the boat is essentially new’; ‘The replacement or moving of computer circuit boards because they did not meet safety standards’; ‘Concern over the instrum
ents monitoring the nuclear reactor because the wrong type of lead was used’; ‘Questions being raised about the quality and installation of other pieces of equipment’: and ‘Concern reported among some crew members about the Astute’s pioneering periscope, that does not allow officers to look at the surface “live”.’19 The article also alleged that the ‘Astute’ class was ‘doomed from the start’ and that ‘flawed thinking and design’ had led to a submarine that lacked in both speed and capability. One ‘insider’ criticized Astute’s performance: ‘ “The PWR2 was shoehorned into the Astute, and it meant the submarine’s initial designs had to be changed,” said a source. “That is why the Astute has a slightly bulbous look about it, not the clean lines that you might expect. The reactor was never meant for an attack submarine and it is supplying power to machinery whose designs have not greatly changed for 50 years. In very simple terms, it is like hooking up a V8 engine to a Morris Minor gearbox.” ’20
The Navy did its best to counter the claims. The day after the later article in the Guardian, Rear Admiral Lister wrote to the newspaper:
As the Royal Navy officer responsible for the delivery of the ‘Astute’ submarine programme, I must respond to your claims about the performance and potential safety of HMS Astute (Report, 16 November). All those involved in the delivery of our submarines have a duty to the submariners that serve on them to ensure that we provide a safe environment in which to live and work. As a submariner myself, I am acutely aware of the need to meet the exacting safety standards we demand and we are committed to meeting them both for HMS Astute and for the remaining submarines in the class.
I would never allow an unsafe platform to proceed to sea and the purpose of the extensive sea trials HMS Astute is undertaking is to test the submarine in a progressive manner, proving that the design is safe, that it has been manufactured correctly and that she is able to operate safely and effectively. This process reflects the nature of HMS Astute as both a prototype and an operational vessel. We have always known that it would be necessary to identify and rectify problems during sea trials and this is what we have done. All the issues noted in the story have either already been addressed or are being addressed. In particular, while we do not comment on nuclear propulsion issues, or the speed of our submarines, I can assure you that, once HMS Astute deploys operationally, we do not expect there to be any constraints on her ability to carry out her full combat role for the Royal Navy.