Pacific 2012: SIA on past, present and future challenges | ADM Dec 2011 / Jan 2012
Julian Kerr | Adelaide
More money and years of hard work will be needed to rectify problems with the Collins class fleet and establish the effective procedures necessary to create a credible sustainment baseline for the Future Submarine program, according to the man responsible for achieving this.
Speaking to the Submarine Institute of Australia (SIA) Technology conference in Adelaide in November, Air Vice Marshal Chris Deeble, uniquely heading both the Collins and the Wedgetail airborne early warning and control programs for DMO, detailed numerous shortcomings in Collins class support but remained confident they were fixable over time.
His remarks reflected general recognition among the more than 200 conference attendees of the challenges ahead, both in improving Collins class availability, and in assessing and acting on the multiple complexities involved in the replacement and eventual doubling of the RAN’s submarine force under Project Sea 1000.
AVM Deeble said he had been surprised at what he described as the animosity that existed among the key stakeholders in the Collins program, making it hard to negotiate contracts and deliver outcomes.
However, he hoped that a new in-service support agreement would be signed with ASC before the end of the year, reflecting in some respects a team disciple that had been missing since Collins construction began, and the closeness of his relationship with ASC Managing Director Steve Ludlam and Sea 1000 program head Rear Admiral Rowan Moffitt.
Supply support for the six Collins boats was fundamentally broken, AVM Deeble commented. Cannibalisation was taking place at a level he had never previously experienced, costing at least three times and potentially four to five times as much as having spares on a shelf.
“We’re going to have to change the philosophy that we remove, refurbish and replace. We need to optimise the supply chain and have the right person responsible for delivering the required outcomes so we can get maintenance done in a timely fashion,” he said.
Another vital requirement was determining the logistic cost of ownership – “the reality is we haven’t got this right in the past and we must understand that if we’re going to move forward.
“I’ll be able to tell the Chief of Defence Force and Chief of Navy what it costs; it’ll be up to them to determine whether that cost is appropriate for the capability we will be delivering.”
Evaluating the service life of the Collins fleet was being accelerated – “we probably don’t have a lot of the evaluation data that we need and we’re going to have to go to this very rapidly and make some very smart decisions about what we need to do and when we need to do it and we need to get the funding to complete those outcomes.
“We’ve got to confirm the original design work, we’ve got to understand the priorities for remediation if we need to extend the life beyond its current 28 years,” AVM Deeble said.
One piece of good news – although full cycle dockings to date had averaged about 1 million hours, HMAS Sheean would return to sea early next year after 900,000 hours and AVM Deeble believes this time could eventually be further reduced to 800,000 hours.
For his part, RADM Moffitt eschewed any comment about the possible design of the Future Submarine, instead hitting out at pessimism regarding the intended construction of the 12 or more new boats in Australia.
“I assert that the Collins class submarines are very well manufactured – there is no problem with Collins that was caused by poor Australian workmanship. The problems with Collins, I contend, were all either imported from overseas, or relate to project management,” he said.
“The issue of building the submarines in Australia is important, a matter of serious national significance because this will be, and needs to be framed as an endeavour that will hinge not just on the capacity and capability of Defence, but on the capability and capacity of our nation to articulate a clear vision and then stay focussed on achieving it”.
Australia was now able to draw on a significant body of its own experience in submarine construction and the many lessons that had come from it – some of them very positive, others expensive and painful, and yet more that were still emerging.
RADM Moffitt referred without embellishment to the following aspects of the Collins program:
That it was perhaps not such a great idea to build six unique, ‘state of the art’ submarines that were a developmental platform with a developmental combat system, developmental main motor and developmental diesel generators;
in a city with no contemporary naval shipbuilding pedigree or Navy presence or expertise of any consequence;
which was also distant from then existing national centre of submarine expertise and activity, as well as also being distant from the proposed new home of the submarines;
in a program that guaranteed that the industry established for the building task would not have ongoing business through which to survive after the build program was finished;
while at the same time relocating the Navy’s small and highly specialised submarine capability work force to the other side of the country;
where we could predict with confidence that we would face a major struggle to establish a viable submarine sustainment activity.
Rear Admiral Steve Lloyd, Chief Strategic Systems Executive at the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) and closely associated with construction of the Astute nuclear hunter-killer, the preceding Vanguard ballistic missile submarine and its planned Successor program, warned of the difficulties caused by gaps in construction.
“It’s taken us more than a decade to realise what we had given up in the design and build cycle between Vanguard and Astute,” he commented.
“At the height of the Vanguard program there were 15,000 people working at Barrow-in-Furness; as we entered the Astute program this had gone down to 4,500. Nevertheless MoD had relentlessly pursued the idea of competition and tried to transfer risk to industry.
“There was a significant reduction in the amount of in-house expertise. Industry simply had no experience of taking a concept design through to construction. We had lost the estimating rules -they weren’t valid with a 10-year gap in the program - and there was a recognised fragility in the supply chain. We also started on Astute far too soon, the production drawings were somewhere around 35-40 per cent complete when we started building.”
With a reduced industrial base leaving no realistic opportunity in the UK for competition in the Successor program, key industry parties had been brought together under MoD leadership in a so-called Rainbow team to carry out the pre-concept work.
“They worked fast, there were 15 full-timers with about 30 additional people and within 15 months they had produced a high level integrated program, a program of technology demonstrators, estimated budgets, identified the milestones and gates, and come up with a high-level balanced submarine design. They had identified the trade base requirements and also identified where other niche skills were needed to support the enterprise, such as hydrodynamics, shock and acoustics,” said RADM Lloyd.
“This collaborative approach worked extremely well, and it’s now the model for subsequent phrases of Successor. What’s essential overall is a collaborative approach between Defence and Industry, executed through an integrated program management team delivering to an integrated master schedule, and controlled through an agreed set of Design Management Arrangements with clarity of roles and responsibilities.”
Whatever is built for Sea 1000 and by whom, Rear Admiral Peter Briggs RAN Rtd, was in no doubt that there was no MOTS (Military Off The Shelf) option.
“There is nothing on the shelf that carries the load, carries the people, goes the distance, does the job and gets home again,” he declared. “Anyone who talks about adapting a MOTS or modifying a MOTS means it’s no longer a MOTS, it’s a developmental program on a submarine that was designed for something totally different and you’re not even going to know the half of your problems.”
Describing Collins as the logical, lowest-risk starting point, RADM Briggs said it involved plenty of challenges “but we’ve been working and operating this submarine in the environment we have to work in, we know an awful lot more about it than any other candidate and at 3,300 tonnes it’s by far the closest to where we’re trying to head.”
One essential move was to involve the Defence Science and Technology Organisation from the start of the program rather than, as had happened with Collins, bringing it in, generally far too late, when problems occurred.
As the Australian representative of Thyssen Krupp Marine Systems, Jim Duncan was speaking on behalf of a company, which as owner of both Kockums in Sweden and HDW in Germany, has aspirations to sell Australia extended variants of the Kockums Type 61 or the HDW 216 submarines.
Both are in the concept design stage, but Duncan made the point that Australia’s Future Submarine capability requirements are probably not as dissimilar to the future requirements of other navies as many think.
“The worldwide trend is generally towards bigger submarines, far longer ranges, enhanced communications, deployed as part of a task force, crewing to maximise the advantage of vastly-improved submarine operational reliability and hence availability,” he said.
As a salutary reminder of the complexity of submarine design and construction, Professor Stephen Cook, Director of the Defence and Systems Institute at the University of South Australia, pointed out that the Collins class prime contract involved 22,000 pages of text and drawings, weighed 95 kg and occupied 2.5 metres of shelf space. Total documentation was measured in tonnes and involved 600 sub-contracts pursued in nine countries; 1,500 work packages, 250,000 scheduled events, more than one million parts, and 1,600 suppliers.
For the first time the conference concentrated on submarine science, technology and engineering. The 36 technical papers were directed into four streams – hull, mechanical and electrical; combat systems and communications; systems engineering, safety, design and logistics support; and submarine energy and UUVs.
Unsurprisingly and encouragingly, the majority were contributed by representatives of Australian industry and institutions.
Surprisingly, given the close cooperation between the Australian and US submarine communities, there was no US speaker at the conference and only two papers of US origin.