by Peter Yule
framework that gave some protection to Kockums’ proprietary
information without restricting Australian access to US subma-
rine technology.
The sixth and final submarine, HMAS Rankin, was launched
on 7 November 2001. Following its contractor’s sea trials it
was formally delivered by ASC on 18 March 2003 and commis-
sioned into naval service on 29 March 2003. Rankin was delayed
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during construction when resources were devoted to the ear-
lier submarines, particularly the two fast-track submarines. The
project office reported in March 2001 that: ‘ Rankin remained
in the fitting hall for the quarter. Progress in its construction
had suffered from the priority given to improving the other sub-
marines and from “cannibalisation” for spare parts.’13 However,
the delays allowed the lessons learned from the earlier submarines
and the improvements made in the fast-track submarines to be
incorporated into the final submarine. It was a very different and
far superior boat to HMAS Collins.
The delivery of Rankin effectively brought project SEA1114 to
a conclusion, 21 years after the establishment of the project office
in 1982 and 16 years after the signing of the contract in 1987.
C H A P T E R 27
‘We would find that challenging’:
comparison and retrospect
In the early stages of the new submarine project Oscar Hughes
was talking to a senior American admiral and outlined the aims
and ambitions for the project. The American raised his eyebrows
and said: ‘We would find that challenging.’
Building submarines is hard, and getting harder. To build a hull
to withstand extreme water pressures has always been demand-
ing, but the increasing complexities of electronics and computer
systems make modern submarines among the greatest of engi-
neering challenges. Even countries with long histories of subma-
rine construction often have problems, while countries attempting
to build submarines for the first time regularly experience disas-
ters. Dilapidated or abandoned shipyards from Buenos Aires to
Bombay littered with the relics of failed submarine projects testify
to the magnitude of the challenges.
Electric Boat is the world’s most experienced submarine
builder, yet in the 1970s and early 1980s the building program
for the Los Angeles class submarines was such a disaster the com-
pany was only saved by vast injections of government money.
The story of the project’s innumerable problems was chronicled
in Running critical, Patrick Tyler’s masterpiece of investigatory
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journalism. The hulls of several boats had to be ripped apart and
then welded together again when it was found that thousands of
welds were either missing or defective and many more had been
improperly certified. Most of the submarines had major defects:
A lot of men who worked on USS Philadelphia later said that
the ship was built twice because just about everything
installed had to be ripped out at least once due to faulty
workmanship, changed plans, or improper sequence . . .
The forward weapons loading hatch on the USS New
York City had been misaligned so badly that the navy would
not be able to load its Mark 48 torpedo through it. One of
the giant engine-room foundations in the USS La Jolla had
been built backwards, but was still installed. It [had] to be
ripped out.1
At the same time Electric Boat was also building several Trident
nuclear submarines, but progress was ‘truly glacial’ because ‘the
new generation of nuclear submarines was proving so complex,
so sophisticated as to rival in scope the great medieval cathedrals
of Europe, where tradesmen passed their tasks from generation to
generation, each hoping he would be among those to pray inside’.2
The problems with the Los Angeles and Trident classes were
due, at least in part, to specific difficulties within Electric Boat and
its parent company, General Dynamics, at that time. Nonetheless,
the next American submarine project, the Seawolf class, was even
more disastrous. The Seawolf project suffered from substantial
cost increases, lengthy schedule delays and serious welding fail-
ures. The architecture for the combat system proved too hard to
build and had to be completely redesigned.3
Britain has been building submarines for over a century, but
several recent projects have had major problems. Of most interest
from the Australian point of view is the Upholder project, as this
class was touted as the low-risk choice for Australia’s new sub-
marine. Mike Gallagher saw that ‘the Upholders had significant
tales of woe’. He was in England during the period they were com-
missioned and decommissioned and he recalls that they were well
behind schedule (with the first boat taking seven years from build
to in service), they had great difficulties firing their weapons and
major problems with their drive trains. Similarly Jim Ring, in his
account of Britain’s submariners during the Cold War, comments
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321
that Upholder had serious teething problems, with a propensity
for the torpedo tubes to jam open, and the drive train ‘was prone
to total failure’.4
Greg Stuart, who had insisted that the electrical cables used in
Australia’s submarines be changed because of the fire risk, notes
that the Upholders had the same dangerous cables and that this
caused the rapid spread of fire on one of the submarines on its
delivery voyage to Canada.
The first of Britain’s latest class of nuclear submarines, HMS
Astute, was launched in June 2007, four years behind the original
schedule. The following month the National Audit Office reported
that the Astute project was £1.3 billion over budget.5
In the past 30 years several countries have attempted to build
submarines for the first time, most in association with the German
export team of HDW and IKL. These projects have nearly all
involved building the first one or two submarines in Germany
and then assembling later submarines in the acquiring country.
India ordered six Type 209–1500 submarines from HDW in the
early 1980s. The first two were built in Germany and delivered
in 1986 and it was planned that four would be built at Mazagon
Docks in Mumbai, although only two were ever completed. The
first two local boats were laid down in 1984, but when the pressure
hulls were examined by German technicians in 1986 not a single
weld passed inspection and the hulls had to be dismantled and
reassembled. The first Indian-built submarine was not launched
until 1989, having taken more than twice as long and cost more
than twice as much as each German-built boat.
South Korea had greater success with its acquisition of nine<
br />
Type 209–1400 submarines from HDW, ordered in the late 1980s.
The first submarine was built in Germany, the next five were
assembled in Korea from German-made kits, while the final
three had a higher local content level – though nothing like the
70 per cent achieved by the Collins project in Australia, and at
the expense of delayed schedules and increased cost.
One of the more successful submarine construction programs
has been in Turkey, where several generations of HDW submarines
have been built since the early 1970s. Again, the first three sub-
marines were built in Germany, with the next three assembled in
Turkey from kits. However, later submarines have been built in
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Turkey with an increasing level of local content and technology
transfer.
The Australian submarine project was altogether more ambi-
tious than those of India, South Korea or Turkey. Australia was
not assembling a tried and tested design from kits but building a
new design, and the Collins class submarines are far more com-
plex and sophisticated than the Type 209 variants. While the
Australian media never understood the scale of the challenge being
taken on, knowledgeable foreign observers have expressed sur-
prise that Australia attempted such a massive task. The American
submariner Admiral Phil Davis says:
It was no small feat to make a small Swedish submarine with
short range into a large, long-range submarine. It is really a
radical new design. And then to take that design 12 000 miles
away to build it – there is really nothing in the history of
submarine construction that has been done like that. The
Germans will build the first two at home and then send a kit
out to another country, but in the case of Australia, they built
a whole new construction facility – a new yard, with a new
work force. It was a huge undertaking, a monumental feat
and a credit to Australia, to Kockums and to ASC.6
The Collins class submarines each have almost four million parts,
75 kilometres of cable, 200 000 on-board connections, 23.5 kilo-
metres of pipe, 14 000 pipe welds and 34.5 kilometres of hull
welding. These figures are impressive, but even more striking is the
systems integration task involved in assembling the submarines.
Using components from many countries, ASC installed hundreds
of electronic, electrical and mechanical systems and ensured they
worked together as intended. The Collins submarine project was
the biggest systems integration task ever undertaken in Australia.
The submarine project involved far more risks than were
admitted – at least publicly – at the time the contracts were
signed. The original requirement that the winning submarine
design should be in service or close to in service with a parent
navy was quietly dropped and the Swedish design that won the
competition was, as its detractors claimed, a paper boat. Further,
it was a bold and innovative design, as the Swedes had sensed
that their chance to win lay with meeting the high demands of
Australia’s submariners, flushed with the success of the Oberon
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modernisation and the excitement of their Cold War surveillance
missions. Choosing the Swedish design was, as Hans Ohff says,
‘a hugely risky and almost reckless decision’. Overall, however,
the risk paid off, with the result that Australia ended up with a far
more advanced submarine than the conservative German design
or those submarines – such as the British Upholder and the Dutch
Walrus – that more nearly met the original in-service requirement.
However, having abandoned the ‘in service with a parent navy’
concept, the Australian navy took more than a decade to realise
that this meant that it would be the parent navy – the new sub-
marines were treated in the same way as new sinks for the galley
or socks for the sailors.
Buying weapons always means making a judgment of techno-
logical risk. There is no point in buying new spears – cheap and
reliable as they might be – if your opponent has rifles. The risk
of choosing a cheap and easily constructed design was never bet-
ter illustrated than when Australian pilots flying Wirraways were
sent to fight Japanese Zeros in the early months of 1942.
But it is equally dangerous to attempt to push technology too
far and have weapons that do not work or a project that fails com-
pletely – scenarios that Australia flirted with at times during the
new submarine project. In the late 1990s there was a widespread
public perception that the project was a disaster, and several senior
cabinet ministers argued that the project should be closed down.
While the problems with the submarines were exaggerated, they
were nonetheless real. There were many relatively minor faults
with HMAS Collins that can be seen as ‘first of class issues’, but
there were more serious problems that affected the whole class –
a dysfunctional combat system, unreliable diesel engines, faulty
propellers and excessive noise.
In many ways the most serious issue with the whole project
was not the shortcomings of the submarines but the difficulty in
reaching agreement on what the problems really were and deciding
who was responsible for fixing them. The project was carried out
under a fixed-price contract and from the outset there was a deter-
mination to avoid changes that would increase the price. Conse-
quently, the project office and ASC became focused on building
submarines to the performance specifications set out in the 1987
contract. However, it proved difficult during the sea trials of the
early boats in the late 1990s to establish whether performance
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specifications had been met, and even harder to get the parties
involved to agree on whether they had been met. This was further
complicated because the navy’s expectations had changed since
the specifications were established, due primarily to advances in
technology. What the 1987 contract laid down was not always
what the navy wanted in 1997, yet under a fixed-price contract
ASC was determined (and well within its rights) to do no more
than it was contractually bound to do.
There was no effective mechanism for resolving the disputes
over whether the specifications had been met or for meeting the
navy’s enhanced expectations. ASC, Kockums, the project office,
the navy and the newly-established Defence Acquisitions Organi-
sation spent several years shouting at each other and threatening
litigation, while relatively straightforward engineering problems
went unfixed. Not surprisingly, the media and politicians mis-
took the cacophony of noise coming from the submarine project
as showing that the submarines were seriously flawed. Equally
unsurprisingly, politi
cians found it impossible to resist the temp-
tation to use the project’s disarray for political point-scoring.
Many people have seen the fixed-price contract with limited
contingency as the main cause of the project’s problems, arguing
that it meant there was limited money to fix faults and no flexibil-
ity to allow for changed operational requirements or technological
progress. Peter Briggs has noted that of the $1.17 billion allo-
cated to ‘fix’ the submarines after the McIntosh-Prescott report,
only $143 million was for areas where the submarines failed to
meet the contractual requirements (in other words, to fix the sub-
marines); $300 million was for changed operational requirements
and $727 million for technological obsolescence. He argues that
the submarines should have been treated as a research and devel-
opment project, with DSTO, the SWSC and the submarine oper-
ators continuously involved and some form of flexible alliance
contract with the builder.
On the other hand, the contractors themselves, along with
Oscar Hughes, argue that the fixed-price contract had substan-
tial benefits. The greatest of these is that the project was a rar-
ity among military procurements in that the original budget was
still relevant at the end of the project. The general public percep-
tion – encouraged by members of the Coalition government – is
that the project was a financial disaster.7 This is not true. While
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325
there are arguments about the extent to which money allocated to
projects such as ‘fast track’ and the replacement combat system
should be added to the original budget or classified as improve-
ments over the 1987 contract requirements, the fact is that the sub-
marines were built to within 3–4 per cent of the original contract
price after allowing for inflation. Even if all the extra expenditure
on improvements is included then the project came in within
20 per cent of the original budget.8 Few military projects have
been as financially successful.
The contrast between Collins and a genuinely disastrous
project is startling. For example, in 1997 a contract was signed to
buy 11 Sea Sprite helicopters, to be in service in 2003 at a cost of
$750 million. However, the attempt to customize the helicopters