by Peter Yule
by putting highly sophisticated weapons systems into Vietnam
War era bodies has been a complete failure. By 2007 the heli-
copters had cost over $1 billion and would not be operational
until at least 2011, if ever.9
Given that the submarines were the most complex and ambi-
tious military project ever undertaken in Australia, its financial
success can only be regarded as an extraordinary achievement.
The project was less successful in keeping to its schedule,
although again it compares well with other major projects. On
average the submarines were delivered about 26 months behind
schedule.10 However, the timetable for the withdrawal of the
Oberons from service did not allow for any delays with the Collins
project. One of the main reasons for the atmosphere of crisis
around the project in the late 1990s was that the last Oberons
were due to be withdrawn before any of the new submarines had
been accepted by the navy as being fit for operations.
By far the most significant problem of the Collins class was
the failure of the combat system. If it had been delivered on time
and with the capabilities asked for by the navy and promised by
the contractors, then the teething problems with the submarines
would have been regarded as being normal for a ‘first of class’. But
while the combat system caused great difficulties, the ship control
and management system, which was initially regarded as a greater
risk, has been a notable success.
An often forgotten reality is that, of the myriad systems that
make up the submarines, the vast majority have worked smoothly
from the first; a small proportion of systems had problems that
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were quickly resolved, and an even smaller proportion – diesel
engines, propellers and hydrodynamics – had more serious prob-
lems. These problems lay at the heart of the dissension of the late
1990s and were eventually resolved with vital contributions from
the technical staff on the project team, Australian defence scien-
tists and the US Navy. It is often forgotten, in the rush to apportion
blame for the things that went wrong, that the vast majority of
things went right and that Kockums as the designers and ASC as
the contractors – with the guidance of the project team – were
responsible for these. If the project was a success, the greatest
credit should go to the designers and the builders.
Much of the dissonance within the submarine project stemmed
from the differing aims and ambitions of groups and organisations
involved. At the two extremes: the submariners assumed that the
only purpose of the project was to give them fabulous new sub-
marines, but to the left of the Labor Party and the trade unions,
which gave the project critical support in the early days, the central
purposes of the project were to give jobs to metal workers, revive
manufacturing industry and forge closer links with Sweden, the
socialist paradise. The navy was divided between the submariners
and the surface sailors, many of whom saw the submarines as tak-
ing money that could be used for surface ships, while within the
Defence Department many bureaucrats opposed the fundamental
premises of the project, notably the requirement for large, long-
range submarines and the arguments for building in Australia.
These differences were compounded when the project became a
political punching bag after its godfather, Kim Beazley, became
opposition leader in 1996.
In spite of the difficulties, problems and obstacles, there is an
overwhelming consensus among military insiders (in stark con-
trast to the view of the general public) that the submarine project
was a great success. It is now regularly claimed that the Collins
class are ‘the finest conventional submarines in the world’.11 This
claim is difficult to assess, if only because they are like no other
conventional submarines as the navy demanded, and received,
unique submarines for a unique strategic situation. There are now
newer submarines with some features that are clearly superior
to the Collins class, but Collins will have the range, submerged
endurance, battery recharging rate and speed to suit the needs of
the Australian (and American) navies for many years to come.
C O M P A R I S O N A N D R E T R O S P E C T
327
The other claim made by enthusiasts for the Collins class is
that the submarine project ranks alongside the Snowy Moun-
tains Scheme as a nation-building engineering achievement. This
proposition is partially negated by the inherently unproductive
and wasteful nature of military spending (however necessary it
may be), which diverts resources from more productive uses.
The Snowy Mountains Scheme was totally paid for with the rev-
enue from hydro-electricity, allowing an average of over 2 mil-
lion megalitres of water annually to be supplied to the states at
no charge. In stark contrast, the submarines were a charge on
taxpayers and they continue to demand huge amounts of money.
Large and continuing spending is needed to maintain the effective-
ness of all complex military equipment, and there are few systems
more complex – or having higher demands for safe operation –
than a submarine. During 2007–08 the submarine fleet will cost
$322 million to maintain, 38 per cent more than the eight Anzac
frigates and the single most expensive class of equipment in the
defence force.12
Nonetheless there are parallels between the projects. The
Snowy Mountains Scheme was the headline project of Australia’s
rapid economic development in the years after the Second World
War, while the submarine project was a centrepiece of economic
restructuring following the malaise of the 1970s and early 1980s.
At a time when Australian manufacturing industry appeared to
be in terminal decline with outdated technology and equipment,
poor industrial relations and dependence on tariffs and subsidies,
the Collins project was deliberately structured to demonstrate an
alternative approach. When choosing the consortium to design
and build the submarine, issues of modern construction tech-
niques, technology transfer and Australian industry involvement
were as important as the design itself. A central and startling aim
of the project was that 70 per cent of the money should be spent in
Australia. Previous projects had uniformly failed to meet far less
ambitious targets, but the Collins project achieved its Australian
content ambitions with a margin to spare. This money was paid to
many sub-contractors large and small throughout Australia, and
with the money came new technology and training, and an empha-
sis on quality control previously foreign to Australian industry.
The Collins project was the first time that Australia developed
a unique design for the country’s specific military requirements
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R Y
rather than buying a product designed for another country’s needs.
This presented great challenges to the navy, which took many
years to understand and accept the demands of being the parent
navy for the Collins class, but it had the consequence that Aus-
tralian industry was forced to expand its horizons in many direc-
tions. ASC and its sub-contractors developed new skills in project
management, design, manufacturing and systems integration, and
ASC built up the management abilities and systems to construct
six submarines in Australia and manage the hundreds of overseas
and Australian suppliers. This involved the development of a myr-
iad of relationships between overseas and Australian companies
embracing 10 countries with diverse cultures, standards and prac-
tices. Australian companies and Australian workers successfully
completed a wide array of challenging processes, perhaps most
notably the manufacture and fabrication of steel for the pressure
hulls. The welding on all the Australian-built sections of the sub-
marines is probably better than has been achieved anywhere else
in the world.
In many areas of the project Australian research and develop-
ment was crucial, notably in the work of DSTO and the techni-
cal staff of the project office. In many different ways the work
of DSTO scientists focused on dealing with the unique nature
of the project. In earlier days it provided the technological basis
to do things never before attempted in Australia. In later times,
DSTO grappled with and overcame the unexpected problems that
inevitably arose when doing things for the first time. This effort
demonstrated the importance of sustaining in Australia a body of
technical knowledge, a mode of operation and links with indus-
try and overseas colleagues and institutions to provide a range of
options and answers.
The submarine project did not achieve all the high hopes held
out for it in the mid-1980s, but given the scale of the ambitions this
is not surprising. Perhaps if the ambitions had not been pitched at
such a high level the true scale of the achievement might be recog-
nised, because there are many things in the Collins story that are
remarkable. For the first time the Australian navy has sustained
a submarine force from one class of boat to another. Even if not
entirely accepted throughout the navy, the role and effectiveness
of submarines in Australia’s defence has been established. That
this should be done through a full-scale industrial program to
C O M P A R I S O N A N D R E T R O S P E C T
329
produce what Australia had never before produced is even more
remarkable. Australia now has a type of submarine with a range,
endurance and speed that cannot be matched by any other con-
ventional submarine. That the accomplishment was marked by
acrimony, controversy and bitterness perhaps simply reflects the
magnitude of the project and the scale of the achievement. That
there is a pervasive public perception of failure is an irony that
the many people who dedicated years of their lives to the project
find hard to comprehend.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the project is that the crisis of
the late 1990s paved the way for not only building another class
of submarines in Australia, but designing them here as well. The
problems of the submarines, and the impasse reached between
Kockums and the Commonwealth over the solutions to the prob-
lems, forced Australia to look to its own resources. This resulted
in a great expansion of research and development capacity on
submarine issues and ASC’s recognition as the design authority
for the Collins class. Both major political parties now feel owner-
ship of the submarines – Labor for building them and the Liber-
als for fixing them – and there is a consensus that the next class
of submarines should be designed and built in Australia. In the
heat and noise of the late 1990s this would have been almost
unimaginable.
N O T E S
Introduction
1. It remained so until the goverment’s decision in 2007 to spend $6.6 billion on F/A18 F Super Hornets and $8 billion on air warfare destroyers.
Chapter 1. ‘The one class of vessel that it is impossible
to build in Australia: Australia’s early submarines
1. Melbourne Age, 12 July 1928, Sydney Sun, 12 October 1928.
2. Michael W. D. White, Australian submarines: A history, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1992, p. 157.
3. Letter of 20 April 1904, in Lord Fisher, Records, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1919, p. 175.
4. Creswell to Minister for Defence, 13 December 1907, National Archives of
Australia (NAA) Series MP178, item 2215/3/95; also NAA series MP178/2,
item 2286/3/54.
5. Jan Rueger, ‘The last word in outward splendour: the cult of the Navy and the imperial age’, in David Stevens & John Reeve (eds), The navy and the nation: The influence of the navy on modern Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2005, p. 51.
6. ibid.
7. John Jeremy, Cockatoo Island: Sydney’s historic dockyard, 2nd edn, UNSW
Press, Sydney, 2005, pp. 30–1.
8. Letter from A. Dawson, a director of Vickers, to Captain Robert Collins
(Australian naval representative in London), 24 September 1907, NAA series
MP178, item 2286/3/54.
9. The full story of AE2 and its crew is told in Fred & Elizabeth Brenchley, Stoker’s submarine, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2001. Commander Stoker gave a dramatic first person account in H. G. Stoker, Straws in the wind, Herbert Jenkins, London, 1925. For an assessment of the strategic significance of AE2’s achievement see
T. R. Frame & G. J. Swinden, First in, last out: The navy at Gallipoli, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 1990, pp. 101–3.
10. NAA series MP1049/1, item 1920/0416, ‘Submarines AE1 and AE2 –
replacement of.’
11. Chris Clark, ‘Vice Admiral Sir William Clarkson, KBE, CMG, RAN: building
ships for the navy and the nation,’ in Stevens & Reeve, n 5 above, pp. 314–16; C. Forster, ‘Australian manufacturing and the war of 1914–18’, Economic
record, XXIX, 1953, pp. 211–30.
12. J. D. Perkins, ‘The Canadian-built British H boats’,
http://www.gwpda.org/naval/cdnhboat.htm.
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N O T E S T O P A G E S 7 – 1 6
331
13. Commonwealth parliamentary debates, House of Representatives,
27 May 1915, p. 3498.
14. ibid., and Jeremy, Cockatoo Island, n 7 above, p. 144.
15. White, Australian submarines, n 2 above, chs. 10 and 11.
16. Chief of Naval Staff to Third Naval Member, 23 November 1920, NAA series
MP1049/1, item 1920/0416, ‘Construction of warships in Australia, 1914–19’.
17. Third Naval Member to Chief of Naval Staff, 25 November 1920, ibid.
18. General manager, Cockatoo Island Dockyard to Secretary, Department of the Navy, 16 December 1920, in ibid.
19. Quoted in White, Australian submarines, n 2 above, pp. 123–4. The source is given as a report in NAA series MP981, item 603/223/305. Unfortunately, this
file has been missing since 1994, so it has not been possible to read the full report.
20. Oxley was torpedoed in the North
Sea by another British submarine on 14
September 1939; Otway survived the war and ‘ended her days as a hulk abandoned on a mud bank somewhere near Dar es Salaam, Africa’. White,
Australian submarines, n 2 above, p. 164.
21. John Jeremy, ‘Australian shipbuilding and the impact of the Second World War’, in Stevens & Reeve, The navy and the nation, n 5 above, pp. 185–209.
22. David Stevens, The Royal Australian Navy, The Australian Centenary History of Defence, vol. III, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 168–70.
23. Jeremy, ‘Australian shipbuilding and the impact of the Second World War’, in Stevens & Reeve, The navy and the nation, n 5 above,
pp. 197–8.
Chapter 2. Australia’s Oberon class submarines
1. John Jeremy, Cockatoo Island: Sydney’s historic dockyard, 2nd edn, UNSW
Press, Sydney, 2005 , pp. 146–7.
2. Attachment to Chiefs of Staff Committee Minute 19 October 1959, NAA series A8447, item 113/1959, ‘Composition of the Forces – proposed introduction of a submarine force into the RAN’.
3. Commonwealth parliamentary debates, House of Representatives,
27 March 1962, p. 946.
4. Information from Henry Cook and Bill Owen. These former Royal Navy
submarine commanders became the first and second directors of submarine
policy in the RAN.
5. Weymouth to Opperman, 23 January 1963, NAA series A1945, item 243/3,
‘Construction of submarines for RAN’.
6. The secretary of the Department of Defence explained to his minister on 31
October 1963, ‘It is considered important to be able to demonstrate that every effort has been made to ascertain whether at least some portion of submarine
construction could be undertaken in Australia . . . the Navy considers this action will merely waste time’, in ibid.
7. Melbourne Sun, 24 January 1963.
8. Melbourne Age, 12 February 1963.
9. ibid., 16 February 1963.
10. Canberra Times, 11 February 1963.
11. Melbourne Age, 13 February 1963.
12. Department of the Navy, 4 February 1963, NAA series A1945, item 243/3,
‘Construction of submarines for RAN’.
13. Report for the Joint War Production Committee by the Department of the Navy, October 1963, in ibid.
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14. Secretary, Department of the Navy to Secretary, Department of Defence, 14 June 1963, in ibid.
15. Joint War Production Committee Minute, 29 October 1963, in ibid.