Hi Knightrider, I am not a subscriber, could you post the entire article up. Thanks
Written by Greg Sheriden for The Australian
IT is an open question whether Australia is capable of making a good decision on the most important military acquisition it will make in many years: replacing the six Collins-class submarines.
The crisis is brought about by three policy decisions — three costly mistakes — that the Labor Party has made over the past three decades. The first was to design and build an orphan class of submarines — the Collins — in Australia. The cost was insane, the performance lamentable, the legacy debilitating.
The second was to do nothing about the subs for the six years Labor was in office under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. Rudd’s 2009 defence white paper extravagantly committed to build 12 new subs in Australia.
Impossibly, these were to have range and capabilities far beyond the Collins or any conventional sub, in effect nuclear subs with conventional engines. Having made this grandiose gesture, and stressed its extreme urgency, Labor did nothing of consequence about the subs for its entire term.
The third great Labor policy dereliction has been to frame its response to the Abbott government’s attempt to find a replacement for Collins entirely as a campaign for local jobs in South Australia.
This is critical to the contemporary debate. If Labor wins the next election there will not be a big boost in submarine building jobs in South Australia. Building subs is very expensive. There would be an enormous cost premium, and delay, in designing and building them in Australia. Successive reviews under Labor made it clear that Australia does not have even a fraction of the design, engineering and construction capability such a project would need.
I would bet the house that if Labor is elected next time. the subs policy will be to commit once more to an Australian build but to extend the life of the Collins fleet so that it begins retiring not in 2025 but a decade later. To do that would cost billions and billions of dollars in sustainment and deliver a very feeble, unreliable capability.
But it would allow Labor to claim it had kept its commitment on jobs and on 12 subs, and it would still be much cheaper than actually building or buying new subs.
The Abbott government is trying now with a good deal of urgency to address the Collins replacement. The Collins needs to start going out of service by 2025. You might think that’s a long time. But actually no because Australia’s submarine requirements are so complex.
Because of our geography, because of the sheer size of Australia and the placement of our suitable ports, we need subs with exceptionally long range. There are no long-range conventional subs because every other nation that needs long-range subs uses nuclear subs. We cannot do nuclear subs politically, scientifically and probably also for cost reasons.
The biggest conventional sub is the Japanese Soryu. At present it doesn’t have the range we need. But because it is already so big it would be much easier to give it the range we need than it would be to give any of the other contenders that range.
There are plausible German, Swedish and French options. But the Germans and Swedes do not make a sub anything like the size we need. Their claims at this stage about what they can build and for what price are really just blowing smoke. They would evolve their current subs for our requirements, but the evolution involved is so great it would almost mean designing a new sub. That would probably take quite a few years and the costs would be unpredictable. The French option would be a conventional version of their nuclear sub, but converting a nuclear sub into a conventional sub is also a mammoth engineering task.
So the risk with the European options is that they all involve basically new subs. The risk with the Japanese option is that the Japanese have never exported a sub before so there is a threshold question of whether they would be willing to do so for us. Also, because they haven’t exported subs before, they have no culture of *offering through-life support to exported subs.
If anyone can do this, though, it is the Japanese. The Americans are very keen on this option and would be intimately involved. But a commitment to through-life technical support for Australia would almost require a treaty-level commitment from Tokyo. So there are big technical and political questions about the Japanese option still to be resolved.
Tony Abbott and Japan’s Shinzo Abe want this to happen. It is the sort of imaginative and bold move that could only come about through prime ministerial leadership. If it works it will provide a superb capability for Australia and cement a deep strategic partnership with Japan. All good, even historic. But it might not work. And because there is no time to lose, the government has to be evaluating and progressing the European options at the same time as it is exploring the Japanese possibilities.
That is what the government is doing. I expect some announcements from the government soon, though nothing like a formal decision. A “first pass” cabinet decision is likely early next year, in tandem with the defence white paper, which may still see a couple of contenders in the hunt.
Whatever sub Australia buys, all the deep maintenance and sustainment will be done in Australia. A foreign supplier could indeed build the subs, or at least some of them, in Australia. There would be a massive cost premium even to this, so we would get less capability per dollar of our spend. But any option we choose will involve a great deal of work for South Australia. It is utterly dishonest to present the complex continuum of possibilities as a binary local-made or foreign-bought choice.
The subs are our most important weapons system. They are an asymmetric weapon that imposes enormous costs on an enemy and can do enormous damage. They give us the ability to defend ourselves and they seriously supplement the American maritime position in Asia. We need to get them right. Can we?
