The Collins Class Submarine Story

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The Collins Class Submarine Story Page 38

by Peter Yule


  and the politicians who are demanding “when can I make my

  speech?”, and the chief of the navy, who says “I’ll sign off on it

  even though I know it’s not ready but I need to get them to sea”’.

  As a result, ‘everybody was trying to have a slice of me and I had

  no power and bugger all money and hadn’t wanted the job in the

  first place’.

  When Asker took over, the navy was dissatisfied with the capa-

  bilities of the submarines and the continuing mechanical failures;

  the project appeared to be stalled and there was only $400 mil-

  lion left in the budget. Unlike most in the navy he did not blame

  ASC and Kockums for all the project’s problems, conceding that

  in many areas of dispute, notably noise, the submarines met or

  nearly met the contracted specifications but the navy’s operational

  requirements had changed. Nonetheless his job was to get the

  submarines to a level that met the navy’s minimum operational

  requirements, and he would do this even if it involved a more

  confrontational approach to ASC or seeking help from any source

  that would give it.

  The position of Hans Ohff was critical at this stage of the

  project. To the navy, and increasingly to the project office, he

  appeared to be stubbornly resisting their attempts to bring the

  submarines to the minimum level required to carry out opera-

  tions. Lawyers Paul Armarego and Wal Jurkiewicz recall their

  amazement at the games that were played between the project

  office and ASC over fixing faults in the submarines. This was the

  ‘TI338 regime’ and the process would ‘drag on for years’:

  Commonwealth: ‘We are writing to advise X is a latent

  defect.’

  Hans Ohff: ‘We deny that.’

  Commonwealth (a year later): ‘We still think it is a defect.’

  Hans Ohff: ‘We deny that.’8

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  Ron Dicker believes that the ‘TI338 regime’ contributed to the dif-

  ficulties between ASC and the project. The TI338 was the form on

  which warranty defects were recorded and before anything could

  be done they had to be evaluated to decide whether ASC or the

  project would carry the cost. This resulted in endless arguments.

  Dicker found it was not an efficient process for fixing the boats

  and keeping them at sea. In other projects he had been involved

  in there was a system whereby any defect was analysed and fixed,

  and then the responsibility for it was arbitrated by an independent

  body.

  Many people in the navy and the project office tell of their

  confrontations with Hans Ohff during this period. Peter Clarke,

  who was project manager during 1998, deliberately set about pro-

  ducing a harder, tougher relationship with Hans Ohff by insisting

  on ASC meeting its milestones as ‘the overall project plan had

  been lost sight of’. Although he had previously got on well with

  Hans Ohff, within a few weeks of beginning his new job they were

  shouting at each other: ‘Hans Ohff would say things like, “You’re

  only taking this line to get yourself promoted”.’9 Clarke claims

  that Hans Ohff ‘is the only man ever to have hung up on me – all

  the others have been females,’ but that being said, they remained

  friends throughout the project.

  Hans Ohff’s attitude and motives are little understood and crit-

  icisms of him are often made by people with little knowledge of

  his full role in the submarine project. He had a greater emotional

  commitment to the project than almost anyone else involved, and

  those who might match him for commitment – like Oscar Hughes,

  Graham White, Andy Millar and other long-serving members of

  the project team – largely share his perspective on the problems of

  the submarines. Ohff’s entire working life since he arrived in Aus-

  tralia had been devoted to the development of Australian engineer-

  ing, and for him building submarines in Australia was the great

  nation-building project for his generation. He had been the first to

  argue seriously that the submarines could be built in Australia, and

  then devoted much time and money to spreading his vision to gov-

  ernments and industry. Devastated when Eglo Engineering chose

  the wrong side in the selection process, he saw his return to the

  project as the opportunity to ensure its success. When he screamed

  at the crew of a submarine returning to Osborne after a break-

  down, ‘What have you done with my submarine?’ he expressed a

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  263

  genuine feeling of ownership that was hard for senior navy person-

  nel on two- or three-year rotations to comprehend. While Hans

  Ohff always conceded that the submarines had teething difficul-

  ties, particularly with the diesel engines, and that there were some

  issues where compromises on performance were struck between

  ASC and the project office, he genuinely believes that the prob-

  lems were greatly exaggerated by anti-submarine elements in the

  navy and by Coalition politicians looking to damage Kim Beazley.

  For him, the navy and the politicians ‘took the elation out of the

  project’.10

  While the combat system remained the most intractable prob-

  lem with the submarines during 1997 and 1998, on most other

  issues there was clear if slow improvement, and some (such as the

  leaking shaft seals) were dealt with completely. However, in 1998

  a new issue developed with the propellers which proved difficult

  to resolve and led to bitter recriminations between ASC, the navy

  and Kockums.

  For over a year there had been growing concern about cavi-

  tation from the propellers and the usual disagreements between

  ASC, which said the cavitation resulted from the way the sub-

  marines were operated, and the navy, which blamed design and

  manufacturing flaws. However, in August 1998 a crack was found

  in Collins’ propeller during routine maintenance, and checks of

  the other submarines revealed incipient cracking problems. Kock-

  ums and ASC claimed there was nothing wrong with the design of

  the propellers, but the Sonoston alloy demanded extremely pre-

  cise manufacturing techniques and they accepted that some of the

  early propellers were not made to the required standard. The navy

  and the project office, however, believed that the problems were

  more fundamental and argued that the propellers should be re-

  designed. When Eoin Asker went overseas to look for advice, he

  felt that Kockums was a company in crisis, its design expertise was

  declining and its response to the problem was slow. In contrast

  the Americans were keen to help, offering to remodel a propeller

  to try on one of the Australian submarines.

  In response to this offer, a Swedish-designed propeller was sent

  to America. In Asker’s view ‘this was an operational imperative –

  it would have taken ages for the Swedes to deal with it and it

  wasn’t in Australia’s interest to muck around’. A second pro
peller

  was sent later and a third in 2000.

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  The reaction from Kockums to the despatch of its propellers

  to America was one of outraged disbelief that the navy would

  disregard the company’s intellectual property rights. As Kurt Blixt

  puts it: ‘All Swedes were deeply affronted when Australia gave

  away Swedish know-how without consultation.’ They were even

  more affronted when the propeller came back marked ‘Australian

  and US eyes only’ and the Kockums people and even Hans Ohff

  were not allowed to look at it. Hans Ohff recalls that when some

  American engineers came to ASC to look at the propeller, he said

  they could only look at the modified tips but not the rest of the

  propellers. ‘I was only playing games with them but they went

  right off.’

  Within the navy there was full agreement on sending the

  propeller to America. Peter Clarke states simply: ‘The Swedish

  propeller was crook and as soon as we got a decent US propeller

  the performance greatly improved.’ Civilians in the project office

  were divided. Mark Gairey says: ‘I still think that if we had not

  gone to the Americans we might still have found a solution, but

  probably nowhere near as good a solution – the American solu-

  tion basically solved all the problems with the propellers.’ How-

  ever, his colleague Greg Stuart thought that the Americans did not

  understand the Swedish design philosophy which the Collins class

  was based on and they could do little to help. Further, he felt that

  it was a clear breach of the contract to release a propeller to the

  Americans. He agrees that Kockums was often intransigent at this

  time ‘but with good reason’.11

  The dispute over the propellers later merged with the wider

  issue of the ownership of the intellectual property rights to the

  design of the submarines, but the bitterness felt over the propellers

  meant that the issue of intellectual property was discussed in an

  atmosphere of distrust and recrimination.

  The continued problems with the submarines and the increas-

  ingly acrimonious disputes between the parties involved inevitably

  caught the attention of the media, and during 1997 and 1998

  the new submarine project was subjected to a barrage of press

  criticism not experienced by a defence project since the F111s

  in the 1960s. ‘Noisy as a rock concert’ must be one of the most

  remembered headlines in recent Australian history, and it is almost

  universally quoted by members of the public when asked about

  the submarines.12 Even a decade later it is frequently quoted in

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  Melbourne Herald Sun, 28 July 1999 (Courtesy of Jeff Hook.)

  articles on the submarines, often with the bald statement that it

  came from a ‘secret US navy report’ on the submarines. For exam-

  ple, on 27 March 2006, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that

  the submarines ‘acquired the unflattering “dud subs” tag in 1998

  after a leaked secret US Navy report said they were as “noisy as a

  rock concert under water”’. This story has persisted in spite of offi-

  cial denials that the phrase – or anything like it – ever appeared in

  an official report.13 The headlines ‘Dud subs’ and ‘Sub-standard’

  are almost as well known and also regularly reappear.

  For the crews of the submarines and the staff of ASC and

  the project office the impact of the ceaseless disparagement was

  demoralising; for the navy hierarchy it was a daily reminder that

  their largest project was under threat, but for the politicians it

  suggested that there were political points to be won or lost.

  Throughout the life of the Hawke and Keating Labor govern-

  ments the submarine project received unwavering support from

  the government. Kim Beazley left the Defence portfolio after the

  1990 election, but his successor, Robert Ray, always staunchly

  defended the project, most notably when it was the subject of

  a highly critical audit report in 1992.14 The Labor Party had a

  strong commitment to the project because it epitomised many

  of its central themes in that era, such as national independence

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  in economic and defence policy and the encouragement of high-

  technology manufacturing industries.

  Following the election of the Coalition government in 1996 the

  submarine project’s benign political environment rapidly turned

  malignant. The project office and ASC had been accustomed to

  being nurtured and protected by those who wielded political

  power and it was a rude shock when this changed. The new gov-

  ernment showed no feeling of ownership of the project and had

  no hesitation in denigrating the submarines as a means of attack-

  ing Kim Beazley, who was leader of the Labor Party from 1996 to

  2001.

  Members of the project team immediately noticed the change

  in political attitudes. They felt that the government did not see the

  success of the submarine project as vital for the defence of Aus-

  tralia, but rather saw its difficulties as presenting an opportunity

  for political point scoring. For Ken Grieg it was a great disap-

  pointment that ‘instead of saying the submarines were a fabulous

  achievement for Australia, the Coalition could only look at the

  project in party political terms’. At ASC the government’s denigra-

  tion of the submarine project contributed to a steady fall in morale

  in the late 1990s and a breakdown in the relationship between

  the company’s Swedish and Australian shareholders. Hans Ohff

  believes the government was prepared to destroy the project if this

  could help destroy Beazley.15

  This interpretation of the government’s motives was not based

  solely on paranoia. John Moore, who was Minister for Industry

  in the Coalition’s first term before becoming a key figure in the

  submarine story as Defence Minister in the second term, recalls

  that: ‘The general view in the new government in 1996 led by

  Max Moore-Wilton [the Secretary of the Department of Prime

  Minister and Cabinet] was to close the project down and sell the

  submarines for scrap.’

  ASC and the project felt directly threatened when John

  Howard appointed as Minister for Defence Ian McLachlan, who

  was seen as an extreme economic rationalist committed to slashing

  government expenditure.16 Hans Ohff believed that McLachlan

  had been given the job ‘to dismantle the submarine project’. How-

  ever, McLachlan was never an orthodox politician, being commit-

  ted to an ideology rather than a party, and he did not play the party

  game. After assessing his portfolio he became a great enthusiast

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  267

  for the submarine project and, rather than dismantle the program,

  he looked to extend it by taking the option in the contract to build

  two more subm
arines.17

  While McLachlan became a supporter of the new submarines,

  during 1997 he was increasingly uneasy about the problems fac-

  ing the project. Peter Jennings, his chief of staff, recalls that

  McLachlan’s concerns were initially prompted by the navy’s

  request for approval to refit two Oberons to keep them in service

  until the new submarines finally arrived, and then his attention

  was galvanised by the increasingly critical media coverage of the

  project. By the end of 1997 he was looking for suggestions ‘to

  bring the project to finality’.18

  Before 1993 there was little interest in the submarine project at

  the higher levels of the navy. Under Oscar Hughes the project was

  like a medieval city state with nominal loyalty to its titular suzerain

  but in fact operating independently and rejecting any interfer-

  ence. Following Hughes’ retirement the navy moved to reduce

  the project’s independence by downgrading the project director’s

  position from two-star to one-star rank, but it took several years

  before the navy began to accept any responsibility for the project

  and longer still before it began to understand what was involved

  in being the parent navy for the new submarines.

  Rod Taylor, who was chief of the naval staff from 1994 to

  1997, began to be concerned about the state of the project and

  the suitability of the submarines for naval service. He was cau-

  tious and conservative and concerned that there might be a royal

  commission if things went wrong, so he began to document care-

  fully the unfolding situation with the project, and set down the

  major issues in papers that were considered by all the main defence

  committees.19

  However, the concerns in navy and defence at this stage appear

  strangely academic, with no sense of ownership of the project, no

  enthusiasm or excitement and no understanding of the magnitude

  of the challenges that ASC and the project team faced. The Aus-

  tralian navy and the Defence Department seem to have regarded

  the submarines as if they were a standard product ordered from

  a foreign shipyard. It only gradually dawned on them that ulti-

  mately they were responsible for the submarines. If they did not

  work as the navy wanted, then the navy must lead the way in

  fixing them.

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