The Collins Class Submarine Story

by Peter Yule

felt, had ‘a delightful indifference to government’.1

  From the beginning Moore was wary of the advice he was

  given by the department and looked for counsel to Sir Malcolm

  McIntosh, then chief executive of the CSIRO. A career public

  servant, McIntosh had been involved in the submarine project as

  a deputy secretary of defence in charge of acquisitions in the late

  1980s before achieving fame and a knighthood as head of defence

  procurement in the United Kingdom from 1991 to 1996. Moore

  found McIntosh ‘was a source of enormous comfort in explaining

  complex matters in a way that was easy to understand’.

  At the time he became minister there was enormous publicity

  about the problems with the submarines and ‘the Americans were

  poking their noses in the project and wondering what was hap-

  pening’. Malcolm McIntosh told him there was a major problem

  with the submarine project and ‘the whole thing is out of con-

  trol and needs a broom through it’. Consequently Moore asked

  the secretary of the department, Paul Barratt, for a report on the

  submarines to explain why they were built, what was wrong with

  them, how they were going to be fixed, and how much it would

  cost. The report came back but Moore saw it as ‘a complete white-

  wash’ so he asked for further reports – one to be signed by Barratt

  and Chris Barrie, the chief of the defence force, to confirm that they

  both agreed the answers were correct – but in Moore’s view they

  were ‘all whitewashes’. Moore showed the reports to Malcolm

  McIntosh, who agreed that they skated over the surface of the

  problems. Asked what should be done, McIntosh said: ‘Appoint

  me to investigate.’

  Not surprisingly, Paul Barratt has a different perspective on

  these events. Even before the new ministry was announced, it had

  been suggested to him that he might like to move from defence,

  but he rejected this as he enjoyed defence and saw much that

  needed to be done. When Moore was appointed, Barratt and Chris

  Barrie asked when they could brief the new minister, but were

  told this would not be necessary, and when the new minister met

  the departmental executive a few days later he was continually

  quoting Malcolm McIntosh on the deficiencies of the department

  and how to fix them.

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  Melbourne Herald Sun, 28 June 2000 (Courtesy of Jeff Hook.)

  As requested, Barratt and Barrie prepared reports on the sub-

  marine project setting out the situation as they saw it and the way

  forward that had been developed during the first half of 1998.

  Barratt recalls that when one of the reports was presented, Moore

  said he wanted more on the history of the project and less on the

  way forward, saying he was determined to ‘get to the bottom’ of

  the Collins story.

  Paul Barratt is convinced that John Moore and his chief of

  staff, Brian Loughnane, saw the submarine project in largely polit-

  ical terms and were determined to use the project’s problems as

  a way of embarrassing Kim Beazley. He recalls saying to Lough-

  nane that the minister should go on one of the submarines, and

  being amazed when Loughnane replied: ‘He’s not going to do that

  because someone from the media might take a picture and then

  they would become Moore’s submarines rather than Beazley’s.’

  To Barratt, the involvement of Malcolm McIntosh as an unof-

  ficial adviser to the minister was ‘extraordinarily improper’ and

  ‘crazy public administration – a recipe for a complete breakdown

  of trust and accountability, and ultimately for chaos’. The conse-

  quence was that McIntosh was providing the advice, but Barratt

  was responsible for the outcome.2

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  The chief of the navy, Don Chalmers, held similar views to Paul

  Barratt on John Moore’s approach. He says:

  My view is that he took a very political stand on the

  submarine. This was a Bomber Beazley contract – it wasn’t

  working and he was going to get as much political mileage

  out of it as he could. He wanted a submarine that worked

  but he was going to get as much as he could out of it.

  . . . I quite often had difficulty talking with him. I didn’t

  get on with his chief of staff so I didn’t get in the door . . . As

  we moved ahead talking to the minister about the submarine

  became really difficult . . . On one occasion he told me that

  he got more information on the Collins class from his

  newsagent than he did from navy briefings. It was a prickly

  relationship, one might say.

  One important factor in the relationship between the navy and the

  minister is that John Moore always had a struggle with dyslexia.

  He found reading difficult and preferred to get information ver-

  bally or in a one-page précis. The lengthy reports sent to him by

  the department and the navy went unread, while those with the

  gift of succinctness like Malcolm McIntosh gained his attention.

  Garry Jones, Eoin Asker, Paul Barratt and the admirals believed

  that they understood the problems with the submarine project and

  were confident that, with American help, they had developed a

  viable plan to overcome them. Their problem was that the minister

  did not believe them.

  Convinced he was not being told the full story by the navy and

  the Defence Department, in March 1999 John Moore decided to

  follow Malcolm McIntosh’s advice and appointed him to inves-

  tigate. As McIntosh was already terminally ill, Moore appointed

  John Prescott, formerly managing director of BHP, to work with

  him on the report.

  Paul Greenfield was selected to support the investigation and

  provide technical submarine knowledge. After several years work-

  ing on the submarine project based in Adelaide, he had recently

  been appointed to command HMAS Cerberus at Flinders, but he

  had not been there two months when he was told he had been cho-

  sen to help McIntosh and Prescott. He went very much against his

  will as he felt it would be a disastrous career move – he recalls a

  navy colleague telling him, ‘I see you’re part of the Tainted Team’!

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  However, it turned out to be a highly educational experience that

  ‘recalibrated’ his views on the submarine project.

  Greenfield is convinced that McIntosh and Prescott were not

  party to any ‘Get Beazley’ plot. He recalls Prescott saying, ‘I’m

  going to be honest and tell it as it is – I don’t have any barrows to

  push’ and McIntosh agreeing, saying: ‘I’ve had a good career, I’m

  dying of cancer and I’m going to lay it on the line.’

  The report was due by 30 June 1999 so, allowing time for writ-

  ing and printing, the actual investigation had to be completed in

  about 10 weeks. The report lists 53 interviewees from the navy,

  from ASC and other military related industries, Kockums and

>   its parent company Celsius, from defence science and the defence

  bureaucracy. The only significant gaps appeared to be that neither

  Paul Barratt nor Chris Barrie (the chief of the defence force) was

  interviewed3 and Eoin Asker was the sole interviewee from the

  project team. John Prescott recalls that they found general agree-

  ment on the facts and even on the fixes needed but there were few

  ideas on how to make them happen.

  By coincidence or otherwise, an extraordinary flurry of adverse

  stories appeared in the press and on television in the weeks before

  the release of the McIntosh-Prescott report. The most damaging of

  these was a report on Four corners on ABC television on 24 May

  1999. The tone of this report was established in the first sentence,

  which talked of ‘the scandalous state of the navy’s new Collins

  class submarines’, and it mounted a scathing attack on almost

  every aspect of the project from the selection of Kockums to the

  submarines’ noise and combat system problems. Many of the most

  sensational claims were made by the recently-retired Commodore

  Mick Dunne, whose appearance startled many of his former col-

  leagues, most of whom were unaware how anti-Collins his views

  were. While the program made use of brief sound bites carefully

  edited to make defenders of the project look foolish, Dunne’s tes-

  timony taken as a whole was damning for the submarine project:

  I had access to performance information on the Collins class

  submarine specifically in my last job as the Director of Naval

  Plans and Policy in Canberra. And I spent the last three

  months I was in the Navy producing a document for the

  Chief of the Navy as to what might be done to recover some

  of the situation . . .

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  The Collins class submarine is a superb piece of

  engineering and it’s a great submarine if you just want to roar

  around the ocean, but as far as having the operational

  capabilities that are much more important, this submarine

  falls down in that area.

  All you’ve got to do is look at the bulges and shape of the

  exterior of the boat to realise that at any sort of speed, you

  are going to get turbulence and eddies and noise that both

  affect your ability to hear your opposition or your targets,

  and give away your own position . . .

  The man with the fastest draw – or the submarine with the

  fastest computer solution – is going to win the showdown,

  and unfortunately the chances of the system in the Collins

  coping with that fast moving situation is not very good.

  It’s going to be very difficult to deploy this submarine

  operationally until substantial work is done to fix the

  acoustic problem.

  Interviewer: How long do you think that’ll take?

  Dunne: Well, other nations have tried to retrospectively fix

  acoustic signatures without success. My worst fear for the

  Collins is that we’ll lose one, because of the shortcomings

  that the submarine has got in its sensor and processing

  capabilities.

  Interviewer: When you say, ‘we’ll lose one’, what do you

  mean?

  Dunne: I mean that one will have an accident if we haven’t

  done something seriously about reducing their noise

  signature and increasing their ability to use their own

  sonar systems, we’ll have an accident.

  Interviewer: What kind of accident could you foresee

  happening?

  Dunne: Oh, running into a surface ship as the submarine

  comes from deep up to periscope depth, when it has to use

  speed to come up through layers of water, when by using

  that speed, it can’t hear a frigate that is making very, very

  little noise.

  Interviewer: Why can’t it hear?

  Dunne: It can’t hear it because by using speed itself to move

  through the water the turbulence around the hull reduces

  the capability of your own passive sonars to hear. It’s like

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  trying to use your ears to hear a faint noise while

  somebody is ringing a bell next to your nose. They’re the

  sorts of things that could and can happen.4

  Mick Dunne is adamant that he did not say anything on television

  that he had not told the navy, and that while in the navy he had

  never leaked anything to the newspapers. He admits he has a slant

  on the Collins story and a view that may have been misinterpreted,

  but he holds his views strongly. He believes that the project had

  acquired a life of its own and that many people had become depen-

  dent on it, so attacking the project was attacking their livelihoods –

  their careers and their pensions were threatened.

  One of Dunne’s motives for speaking out publicly on the

  Collins project was to put pressure on McIntosh and Prescott ‘to

  get it right’. In this he need not have been overly concerned, as

  the views of the investigators seemed to be developing along the

  same lines as his own. McIntosh himself said on Four corners that

  the submarines could barely go to sea safely ‘and you certainly

  couldn’t possibly go to war in [them]’.

  While few, if any, people with knowledge of the project shared

  all of Dunne’s concerns, many of his misgivings were widely held

  in the navy. Further, the interviews on Four corners emphasised

  the differences between the navy and ASC on the noise signatures

  of the submarines and cast doubt on the credibility of the defend-

  ers of the project. Most importantly, the public airing of Dunne’s

  views on national television and their apparent credibility rein-

  forced John Moore’s determination to take firm control of the

  submarine project while greatly weakening the project’s defend-

  ers. The overwhelming public view was that the submarines were

  seriously flawed and the kudos for a politician lay in fixing them

  rather than defending them.

  It was in this atmosphere that the McIntosh-Prescott report

  was released on 1 July 1999. The authors stated that their task

  was not to probe into the past or ascribe responsibility for any

  failures, but to examine the problems and put forward ways to

  solve them. They emphasised that:

  Notwithstanding the well-publicised technical problems,

  much good work has been done. In fact almost everyone we

  met was totally committed to the project and doing what

  they believed would bring maximum benefit – at least within

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  their terms of reference and responsibilities. Rather the

  difficulties we will describe stem from a lack of overarching

  capacity to deal with the scale and complexity involved,

  given the changes in mission and technology that should have

  been recognised as inevitable in a project of this ambition

  and duration.5

  The report concluded that ‘the essential and visible problem with

  the Collins Class submarines is that they cann
ot perform at the lev-

  els required for military operations’. It acknowledged that in some

  high-risk areas such as the high tensile steel, the Australian weld-

  ing and the ship control and management system, the submarines

  ‘exceeded expectations’ and that some serious defects such as the

  propeller shaft seals had been fixed. The authors also accepted

  that some technical deficiencies were inevitable ‘in a new class of

  equipment as complex as a submarine’, but they were ‘astonished

  at how many there still are some 6 years after the first boat was

  launched, the range and extent of them, the seriousness of some

  of them, the areas in which they have occurred, and how slowly

  they are being remedied’.

  The report identified the most serious remaining defects as

  the diesel engines, noise, propellers, periscopes and masts, and

  the combat system. While accepting that on some issues such as

  noise there were significant differences between ‘the contracted

  requirements and the Navy’s current operational requirements’,

  McIntosh and Prescott concluded that there were serious defi-

  ciencies in the design and manufacture of the submarines. The

  authors also accepted that in some areas, such as the propellers

  and periscopes, problems were due in part at least to inappropriate

  requirements, notably the use of Sonoston for the propellers.

  McIntosh and Prescott emphasised that the combat system was

  the central problem:

  Basically the system does not work, the quality of

  information from individual sensors has been compromised

  and their display on screen is inferior to that of the signals

  actually processed. Relatively routine interrogation of targets

  causes failures in the displays and inordinate delays occur in

  bringing multiple sets of information together in the manner

  planned. The number of targets that can be dealt with at one

  time is far less than specified or required. In fact the tracking,

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  classification and display of sonar targets is less effective than

  on the Oberon class. No overall satisfactory solution is yet

  committed.

  They argued that these problems arose from the unique military

  specifications and the decision to include the combat system with

  the platform in the single prime contract, with the subsequent

  refusal to change course or modify the contract. In contrast,