by Peter Yule
led to poor morale throughout the project. The capability team
hired Brisbane public relations consultants the Philips Group,
whose principal, Stephanie Paul, became an integral part of the
submarine ‘get-well’ program. She saw the submarine project as a
crisis situation, with urgent action needed to break the downward
spiral.
Paul drew up a comprehensive public relations plan based
on responding to the criticisms and repairing the damage to the
submarines’ reputation. They had to acknowledge the faults and
establish the credibility of the capability team with the media.
Previously there had been an information void on the project and
there had been no effective response to the extreme and sensa-
tionalist stories in the media, but gradually the Philips Group’s
strategy built up trust by presenting the media with factual and
verifiable material. Stephanie Paul emphasises that she did not see
the work as ‘selling something’, but as carrying out an essential
part in getting the project back on track.
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Briggs found that morale at ASC was a serious problem: the
workforce was reeling from the barrage of bad publicity and
apprehensive that the project would be shut down. He tried to
convince the workers that the problems were not their fault and
they were part of the solution.
Kockums he felt to be a more serious obstacle. The fast-track
timetable relied on getting rapid approval from Kockums, the
design authority, for the design changes. However, approval was
always slow, possibly through an unwillingness to accept that
changes were necessary, although Briggs felt it was due to a decline
in the company’s design capability. In the end most of the design
changes were done in Australia and only approved retrospectively
by Kockums.
ASC responded warily to the capability team. Peter Briggs char-
acterises Hans Ohff’s reaction as being: ‘What are you here for?
There’s nothing wrong with the submarines.’ In Briggs’ view ASC
had not looked beyond the delivery of six submarines to see that
there should be 20 years work for the company in looking after
the submarines, but a better relationship with the customer was
essential before this could happen.
Hans Ohff’s views were very different. He saw the whole
McIntosh-Prescott report and the establishment of the capabil-
ity team as being ‘totally political’. He sees ‘that villain Briggs’
as creating many of the problems with the project, from his early
involvement in drawing up the requirements to his later role in aid-
ing and abetting John Moore’s attacks on the project. In his view
most of the problems with the submarines were either already
solved or well on their way to being fixed. However, Moore
wanted to spend money on the submarines so that he could claim
to have fixed them and Briggs was happy to take the money, even
though the improvements he put on the submarines made only a
marginal difference to their performance.
In spite of his strong opposition to the process as an unnec-
essary waste of money, Ohff ensured that ASC cooperated fully
with Briggs’ capability team. Doug Callow recalls that after the
company’s management had its first briefing from Briggs, ‘we all
looked at Hans and thought, “How’s he going to take this?”’. But
when Briggs left, Hans Ohff simply told his managers: ‘Do what
he wants.’4
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The key requirements for the fast-track submarines were seen
as being reliable diesels, a quieter hull shape, new propellers, a
working combat system and new electronic surveillance equip-
ment. Two other vital issues were the support structure for the sub-
marines and the shortage of submariners. Peter Briggs called the
manpower crisis ‘the big sleeper issue that McIntosh and Prescott
had not identified’ and he emphasised that ‘none of the other issues
were relevant unless the manpower problem was fixed’.
All but the need for new electronic surveillance equipment and
the manpower crisis had been identified in the McIntosh-Prescott
report and other reports on the submarines, and in most cases the
remedies had also been decided and were well under way. The
contribution of Peter Briggs and his capability team was to kick
heads, break down doors, ignore excuses, bully laggards and get
results. Regardless of past bitterness, all the groups involved were
made to work together to improve the submarines. The govern-
ment had provided extra money so ‘there was a need to get people
to stop arguing about the submarines and fix them’.
Peter Briggs spent much time and energy dealing with the man-
power crisis and forcing solutions through the system. Through
measures such as giving priority to those volunteering to begin
submarine training, forcing 20 per cent of qualified crews into
shore billets to give relief from continual sea service, reducing the
size of the trials crew at ASC, and introducing a large retention
bonus, submariner numbers began to grow. By the end of 2000
‘qualified Collins manpower had increased from 37 per cent to 55
per cent of the numbers required for six operational submarines’.5
Progress on the mechanical improvements to the submarines
was rapid ‘because the engineering staff in the project office
already had developed design change specifications by the time
they were needed for negotiations with ASC’. Many of the pro-
posed changes had already been made on one or more of the sub-
marines before McIntosh and Prescott reported and Peter Briggs
was appointed.6 Consequently, the central issue was not deciding
what needed to be done but reaching agreement with ASC and its
sub-contractors on who should pay for the work, and ensuring
that it was done promptly and without further dispute.
The diesel engines suffered from numerous problems, which
were mostly minor and fairly readily fixed, but the fact there were
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so many of them meant that the engines were inherently unreli-
able and frequently disrupted the submarines’ trials and opera-
tions. The final straw for many submariners was in 1998 when
Farncomb had a horrific passage back from Timor with no diesels
working and the crew living on orange juice and then spending sev-
eral weeks stranded in Darwin waiting for spare parts. Nonethe-
less, by the time ‘fast track’ started many of the minor problems
had been resolved and the diesels were becoming more reliable.
Possibly the most important action taken during the ‘fast-track’
period was increasing the strength of the engine mounts to prevent
twisting and distortion and reduce the excessive vibrations, which
the DSTO experts had advised were behind many of the failures.
Peter Briggs and his team fast-tra
cked the modifications to
the casing designed by DSTO and the Americans to reduce flow
noise. There is general agreement that these changes improved the
noise signature of the submarines, although strong disagreement
remains as to how significant the improvement was.7 The installa-
tion of American-modified propellers was also fast-tracked, with
similar disagreement on the significance of the changes.
Peter Briggs accepted the McIntosh-Prescott recommendation
that the combat system should be scrapped and the best ‘in-service’
system should be bought for the Collins class. In his view the orig-
inal Rockwell combat system (by early 2000 owned by Raytheon)
‘did not even provide a foundation for where we needed to go’.
Consequently an agreement was reached with Raytheon to end
the production of incremental improvements to the system, with
the last ‘drop’ taking place early in 2000. The submarine capabil-
ity team then began the process of choosing a new combat system
but, since this would clearly not be completed in time to install
it in the fast-track submarines, these were to be fitted with an
‘augmented’ combat system to bring them up to the required min-
imum operational capability.
The augmented combat system owed much to the contingency
work already done by the project team and DSTO’s combat system
research team, complemented by the SWSC and the US Navy. The
process of adding ‘black boxes’ to the combat system was already
under way and the capability team continued this process. The
links between the new submarine project and the SWSC were
renewed in the late 1990s, after the centre had been cut out of
the project since the late 1980s when most of its senior staff left
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293
to join the companies involved in building the Rockwell system.
The centre had quietly continued its work with the Oberons and
responded with enthusiasm to assisting with the new submarines.
The augmentation package was made up of commercial off-the-
shelf consoles with equipment from the US Navy and Australian
companies.
Todd Mansell of DSTO remembers the rather informal circum-
stances of the undertaking:
Installation of the initial augmentation system was pretty
hairy. ASC had utilised connectors for data cables that were
done to military specifications but the computers used by
NUWC were mostly commercial-off-the-shelf. When DSTO
was called on by the project to ‘groom the combat system’
prior to formal testing, we discovered that physical
connection had been achieved by simply stripping the plugs
and splicing the cables together with plenty of electrical tape.
Ted Vanderhoek, who had been at SWSC and the submarine
project before setting up a consultancy with former submariner
Mike Gee, had studied ways to use commercial off-the-shelf equip-
ment in an open system environment before becoming involved
with the augmentation project. He recalls that:
With fast track it was a matter of ‘here’s a bunch of stuff
we’re going to put on the sub – make it work’. The project
was working in shifting sands and at first we were told not to
worry about the process – just get it happening by the
deadline – but then we had to go back and fill the spaces to
appease the regulators.
There was a lot of politicking in fast track. It was an
opportunity for Australian companies to get their products
on the submarines . . . We were given all these products to
put on board and some of them overlapped. No-one really
knew what they wanted on the subs and they overdid it a bit
in what they did put on. There was lots of political pressure
to include the Australian systems and this led to overlaps
with the American systems. To some extent it became a demo
of the products at the expense of a concise system for the
submarines. The augmented system has since been
rationalised and the later submarines were more pragmatic.
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Although the augmented combat system reached the minimum
operational requirements set for the acceptance of the submarines,
it was still well short of the capability envisioned when the require-
ments had been drawn up in the early 1980s. Peter Briggs agrees
that the augmented combat system was probably not as good as
the Oberons’ combat system. He says: ‘A submarine on submarine
fight is like a knife fight in a dark alley and in an Oberon versus
[fast-tracked] Collins fight, the Oberon might well win.’
One issue dealt with by the capability team that had not
been discussed in the McIntosh-Prescott report was the electronic
surveillance equipment on the submarines, which is vital for the
work done by Australian submarines. The equipment for the
Collins class had been state of the art when it was purchased
but was obsolete and inadequate by the late 1990s. Six sets of
equipment had been bought in the 1980s but the sets for the last
three submarines ‘didn’t get out of their boxes’. The submarine
project team bought, installed and tested new equipment, initially
in the two fast-track submarines and then in the other four.
The issue of the electronic surveillance equipment highlights
one of the central features of the fast-track project. In the eyes of
the public and the politicians the aim of fast track was to fix the
‘dud subs’ but in fact more time and money was spent upgrading
the technology on the submarines than fixing faults. Peter Briggs
analysed the position:
Operational growth from the fixed price, minimal
contingency contract over 12 years was the biggest source of
issues. The strategy of no prototype, no technology insertion
and no revision of operational requirements led to a backlog
of issues. The notion that you froze the contract, you froze
the requirements and you kept the operators the hell away
from it so you didn’t get any change orders – the chickens
came home to roost when the operators said ‘bloody thing
doesn’t do what we want it to do’. The operators were not
involved from 1987 to 1999 and things changed over that
time.
An important step forward came when Peter Briggs and Hans
Ohff agreed to assess the work that needed to be done, and divide
the issues into black, white and grey: black where the contract
specifications had not been met and ASC was responsible for
fixing the problem; grey where there was mixed responsibility
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295
or where responsibility could not be agreed on; and white where
the requirement had changed or the specified technology was out
of date and the Commonwealth was responsible. In August 1999
there were 120 issues, of which 28 were rated as black, 61 as
white, 20 as grey and 11 were uncategorised – more than half the
issues were accepted as
being the Commonwealth’s responsibility.
Lawyers Paul Armarego and Wal Jurkiewicz suggested the
approach the capability team followed in negotiating the
fast-track changes. They analysed the position:
Looking back at the contract, one of the main problems was
that the specifications were 1987 specifications and they were
trying to get them to fit the situation in 2001. The only
obligation ASC had was in terms of the 1987 specifications
and the only chance the Commonwealth had of enforcing
them was in terms of the 1987 specifications. Yet by 2001
some of the original suppliers were no longer in business and
many of them no longer made the equipment that was being
complained of in 2001. Yet by 2001 the navy wanted 2001
standards, not 1987 standards so we suggested that ASC
should pay to get the submarines to the level of the 1987
specifications as set out in the contract and the
Commonwealth should pay the extra required to get them up
to 2001 standards. ASC would do the work and the
Commonwealth would pay the difference.8
In early June 2000 the submarine project office prepared this
report as a potential press release:
Aloha HMAS Waller – Australia’s submarine
success!
As part of her longest overseas operational deployment, the
Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN) Collins-Class submarine
HMAS Waller has played a significant role in the highly
successful anti-submarine warfare exercise conducted
27–30 May 2000. During the recent exercise HMAS Waller
became the first RAN submarine to be fully integrated and
work in direct support for an USN Carrier Battle Group
[CVBG] . . .
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Throughout the exercise, HMAS Waller’s mission was to
search and locate an opposing submarine, and provide
reports to the CVBG. The opposing force was successfully
tracked, targeted and attacked by the Australian submarine
on a number of occasions. The Royal Australian Navy’s
submarine crew provided timely intelligence to enable the
CVBG to alter its course through a narrow sea passage and
avoid the opposing submarine threat. The Australian
Collins-Class submarine’s successful involvement ensured the
CVBG came through the recent exercise unscathed . . .