Australia's Collins-class replacements

Hmmm.

My masters was on the Australian strategic defense problem with respect to logistics from WW II to the present, so there is at least one of us who understands how "weapons programs" in Australia are very like the same in the United States, "jobs programs". Refer to the F-22 or the KC 46 as examples.

Now as to this discussion:

Some facts that are not generally well known or understood. See maps.



Australia...



Pacific operations area 

1. The lighter the blues, the shallower the depths.  The operating areas off China are extremely shallow and the ASW problem for the Chinese is comparatively simple. Diesel electric boats have to snort and they are easy to find and kill in the shallow waters off an enemy seacoast. ASW planes sniff for hydrocarbons and use magnetic anomaly detectors. Air independent propulsion boats put out heat that can be detected shallow. 

2. Now the other facts not discussed

a. The reason for fission powered steam turb0-electric submarines is patrol time on station and dash speed to clear datum, when detected. They can outrun surface pursuit and dodge sonar buoy fences. If the Collins class tries to fight near China, she dies. Modernization does not help. 
b. Nuclear boats have a useful hull life measured in dive cycles as to depths and times dived. That is because of compression-expansion loading on their pressure hulls. This is not years  in service but how many times a boat submerges and ascends. Each time the tonnage pressure per square meter applies a live load on the pressure hull. The LA boats have been used hard. Their operating cycles left are unknown, but every sortie means more dives, more hull stress and less useful cycles remaining. Expect that the safety floors (How deep a boat can dive, to be degraded or become shallower as well as the flank dash speed to diminish over time.)
c. Australia, for political reasons, will not opt for a submarine that will be refueled in Australia (or anywhere else.). This holds true for the United States as a policy decision. Two reasons, to prevent the danger of spent fuel from falling into the wrong hands to be turned into bomb grade fissionables or "kernels" and it makes no sense to design a refuellable reactor to outlast the hull, when the average nuclear reactor as a power egg can be designed and built as a heat bulb to last just as long as the hull. How long is that? US boats are expected to last a minimum of twenty-five years. This is new US technology shared with the British and soon with the Australians. The power egg is built in the US. The Australian boats would be fitted with such "power eggs". 
c. The British Astute class would have to be modified with US weapon systems, sensors and interfaces. This is what the RAN has now. They do not use British (Read French.) sensors or interface systems. The British do use a British version  of the American torpedo, but the Australians go one better and BUILD Mark 48s in country. (Jobs program.)
d. SSN(X) looks to be an updated or modernized Seawolf. If Australia opts for the Virginia replacement, it will be a FAT submarine. It will require new docks and piers and weighs. The ASC LLD corporation will have to build an entire new and much larger assembly yard and maintenance facility. The same would be true for an Astute Block II, or Virginia Block III or Block IV. The SSN(R) is likely a VSEL updated Astute.
e. The Virginias were designed to fight in the shallows with a secondary blue water mission. The Astutes are blue water boats.
f. Another thing about the Astutes, if one looks at them bows on, one notices the planar slab sided almost faceted hull profile. This is sonar "stealth" based on angle refraction deflection to diminish enemy active sonar echo return offset, a type of range gating obfuscation against supposedly quieter enemy diesel boats who wait for an Astute to trundle into ambush rate. The idea is that the diesel boat will not ping a range accurately or at all, and this gives the British boat the first torpedo out of the tube in an underwater shark-fight. Theory put into practice. 
g. The American answer to the problem remains sheer power of transmission and the golf-ball, other active arrays and a classified range extension detection technique. I would be very surprised if American boats become as facetted as Norwegian and German boats are about to become.   

======================================================

Cancellation.

The reason the ATTACK program died was "jobs". The Australian government thought it had a contract with Naval Systems Group where the French government owned company would prototype a training boat: but also build a from the keel blocks up submarine construction facility in Australia, train Australians how to build this redesigned Amethyst nuclear submarine into diesel electric powered boat and do it all by 2030 originally. The program was scheduled for 40 billion Australian dollars, sold as a package deal for that amount and then the bow wake showed up.  Naval Systems Group sent an advance party to build survey the requirements for the navy yard to start anew the Australian submarine building industry. The sunk costs that both the Australian government and NSG put into the effort up to the moment of contract cancellation came to about 1 billion Australian dollars total, before Canberra pulled the plug. A lot of money, French and Australian had been spent.       
         
Bow Wake.

An American term, this means to underbid the true costs and misrepresent the true program parameters to get funding from the legislature to approve the program in the first place (KC-46 and F-35 programs are American examples.). The ATTACK program doubled its initial estimate to 80 billion Australian dollars. NSG took one look at Australian facilities and work forces offered and told the Australian government that it would take 20 years to build the shipyard submarine fabrication facility. Otherwise to meet the deadline, the submarines would have to built in France. ALL of them. Incidentally, the reason the Japanese option was scuppered, besides memories of WWII, was because the Japanese were more directly honest and told the Australian government the exact same thing upfront without French caveats and "promises".  The Tokyo government was prepared to finesse "article five" to sell their boats, but the boats to meet program costs had to be built in Japan. This was not going to swim in Australia. Incidentally the Germans told the Australians the same thing. I do not know what the Koreans said. 

Enter AUKUS. 

The Australian government had to do something once the ATTACK program started to resemble Collins 2.0. They had made many mistakes, but to the program managers, dealing with domestic politics, an Australian PM who had bungled the Japanese source negotiations and now this French boomerang of date in service delays and cost escalations, this looked like the Kockums fiasco, again, where the Swedes involved in the Collins prototype had taken their small coastal submarine, inflated it to 250% over original size, botched the power train, and created a hull form full of non-correctable sound shorts and managed to completely bollix the sensors / fire control system interface and then presented it as the prototype.  The Australians home-built three more duplicates of it before they fully realized what a pig of a boat they had on their hands. The RAN called in Electric Boat to fix the mess. 

Better to pull the plug on ATTACK and reset to zero. Who is left in the vendor queue and what do they offer?      

Two choices. General Dynamics and VSEL. What is the offering? Virginia and Astute, still building, both proven and both probably costing about 3.6 billion Australian dollars per unit in 2021 dollars. 12 x 3.6 = 43.2 billion dollars ... on paper. 

Problems:

The US has two yards running flat out. They take 2 to 5 years to build each boat. They will have to build a 3rd yard. Either in the US or Australia, but they will have to build another yard to build the hulls. The power egg has to be built in the US. 
     
The UK has one yard winding down and awaiting the SSN(R). They could keep going with at least two prototypes of the Astute, but the British boat has to be built with US systems to meet RAN current technical requirements. Or the RAN has to completely retrain and refit their submarine force. Add that it takes the British 7 years to build a boat from first plate bent to getting her wet. Plus the British power-eggs have to be built ... in the US.   

The Astute would be a marginally better option. It can be prototyped and ready as a training boat or pair of them (Two slides at the VSEL facility.) as early as 2032 if it is pushed.  The US boats would show up around 2035. Either case would be foreign built.   

It will take the Americans a decade to stand up a new naval yard if they start now. The British may take longer. Say 15 years. The American style yard "could" build an Astute but American and British module assembly practices differ... radically. The Americans welding practices appear to be much more through hull and are inherently safer. Lose Thresher and Scorpion and those lessons stick.  

I am reluctant to suggest the fact at this point, but the Australian government has locked itself into at least two or possibly FOUR foreign built boats before their jobs program puts a hull into the water. To meet their deadline and to support their 12 (now 8) hull program by the date we expect war with the PRC (2035?), the first boats will be built in the UK, because my money is on the Astutes, again for domestic Australian politics reason.       

The "doves" in the United States could be considered hawks anywhere else, but it would be an exaggerated view of the situation in either country to suggest that there exists a "quality" of reluctance to use the stuff once it is there. East Timor was not that long ago. Current Australian politics seems to regard their north as something about which to be worried and then there is this:

Australia to buy surplus M1 tanks.

Why?

It has notably been explained to me, that Australian defense policy has been centered around the notion that for Australia to be invited to the table or guarantee that her "ally" will show up when she needs help, she makes herself "useful" or at least shows up when the ally asks for participation, even if the shooting matter has nothing to do with central Australian interests or political concerns. Mind you, this is internalized by the professional governing class and the civil service and the professional military, and therefore is not out in the wild among the voting Australian public until election time, but it does explain why Australia bought a heavy armored battalion equipment set for two billion Australian dollars. Where do they expect to use that battalion? Fighting dingoes and rabbits?

Two sides of a policy.

In reference to the above, the "liberals" (Americans would call them populists or socialists.) in Australia tend to argue that defense policy should be localized to Australia and the waters around the continent, and that monies should be spent for sea control and air patrol to the continent's approaches. Note that this includes the "green" element in Australian politics and if the populace does pay attention at all between elections or white papers, this appears to be the polity's favored course.

Then there are the "special interests" and the "concerned citizenry" who while a decided minority are the voices who clamor for Australia to be participatory at least in the broader global issues and to "punch above their weight" and make their influence felt. They favor a "power projection" approach to military affairs.

Awareness

Now look at the submarine issue. The Collins debacle did hold Australian public or at least professional news media attention for the life of the program, which is to state, that the technical problems and the politics is common knowledge among Australians more-so than the catastrophes that are the F-22 Lightning, and the KC-46 Pegasus are among the American electorate as a comparison (Clinton Administration and I will get to it in a moment.) Not even the Littoral Combat Ship is as well-known as a problem among the average American voters as the Collins is among Australians, which is not to say that your average Australian voter pays / paid much attention to it at all until he is told the sticker shock price of what it will cost to replace or possibly life extend (LOTE) the Collins class because the ATTACK program has gone to the dogs.

The presence of the topic on this forum shows that the issue has gone "global", with global interests and concerns. The bumbling Clinton administration never had a "global interest" in its military procurement decision making mistakes like this. France did not howl when the Airbus air tanker to be built by Northrop in the US was nixed in favor of the Boeing entry. There is a "jobs program" for you and a



example for you in the American context. That was a "Democrat" jobs program based on an offering of a decidedly inferior air-frame to be built in Seattle, Washington; as opposed to the Airbus version (EU rather meaning France led aviation consortium, with Northrop Grumman as the American window dressing.) to be built in South Carolina, a Republican state. Neither plane was any good as a combat tanker aircraft, but at least the Airbus AR 330 MRTT pretended to meet actual US power projection and sustainment needs with faster refueling in the air, more burden aloft and more hours aloft and more aircraft refuelable per fuel transfer cycle over time. Republicans were "power projectionists" and democrats were "stay at home" and do not use the tools.

Now look at AUKUS.

Does it not strike one, that the Australian political factions had their latest political set-too and that the ATTACK program came afoul of the lastr election cycle? The "Australia needs to punch above her weight and she needs to show up when asked" so that her ally will show up to help her when called is what this observer sees.




This is a wrong read. What has happened is that the Americans let their navy run down hoping for a peace dividend and then the Chinese began to build access denial systems and started to assert control and sea denial off their coasts and then they power projected into trade lanes and choke points vital to American survival as a free state. See Map.



That is what the American admiralty sees.

It is not that the Americans could not run local coverage around Australia. It is that the Americans asked Australia for help in the global coverage, particularly IN THE INDIAN OCEAN. The ATTACK class was actually able to cover that area with the types of blue water boats, NSG offered. Believe me, if the French could have fulfilled what they promised, Washington would have been ecstatic with the results.

But then Australian domestic politics and the "jobs program" intervened.

So the Australian government with their "conservatives" (Americans would call them liberals, always one has to remember that Australians are more leftist than your average American voter.), had to figure a new way to make it work and get in good with the ally to boot. The conservatives saw an opportunity to buy a heavy armor battalion on the cheap and create an even bigger jobs program and possibly get the ally to pay part of the tab as part of their own defense needs. It is ridiculous. Who needs a nuclear-powered submarine to defend Australia unless the patrol areas are north of the Indonesian archipelago, or off the coasts of east Africa? In other words, become an adjunct to an allied global coverage effort?

This is called "leverage", political and military. Australia will have a seat at the table as important as the UK or France if she has her own coverage area in the global scheme of things.



Publicly.

How is the Battle of the Coral Sea remembered and commemorated in Australia?
Each year since 1946 Coral Sea Week has been celebrated in Australia with marches by service personnel from both Australia and the USA, and official functions for visiting American dignitaries. These celebrations express gratitude to the United States for its part in the battle, and the support given to Australia by America in World War 2.



Americans hardly celebrate Midway or even remember it as well. But they remember Pearl Harbor. I think that "anti-something" always taints politics and clouds the ability of rational folks to meet at the common center. This is precisely why the AUKUS combine was set up, because the three nations involved do not want "them" to avenge "the century of shame" upon us.

The Japanese had the first go at it. Notice that the Japanese (And the Indians.) were not invited into the AUKUS combine? There is talk that Canada will be.

As for the costing...

My suggestions are based on published UK and US defense estimates. The British option is more blue water, less expensive and probably delivers sooner , much sooner if the British build the first four on the Clyde. The US build option could see Fremantle become its WWII self again. The naval yard (Is Port River deep enough for a fat Astute or Seawolf derivative?) at Osbourne; Australia has to be enlarged maybe 5x to build the Australian hulls.

It will be one of the largest regional government jobs programs by manpower / costs per worker spent (20 billion AusD estimated to build the yard and train the new workforce, for 2,400 current boosted to near 10,000 new strength with economic knockon effects worth maybe 100 billion Australian 2021 dollars. That is huge. One can see that cost spread over a decade at 2 billion AusD a year. It is about what a new US based assembly facility would cost if built on the Pacific coast.

It is a very complex topic with many twists and turns in the history. I try to summarize, but the explanations become expository to cover the issues. 



To transport that 70 tonne tank one needs sea lift; for Australia is an island as well as a continent. I do not remember the Howard government buying the specialized deck reinforced cargo ships or making STUFT lease arrangements to transport the tank battalion. Would it not have made more sense to buy equipment for marines or light infantry if the East Timor excuse was invoked?



Hard realism would have made cognizance of the logistic totality from a to b in the procurement rational of M1 tanks. The Howard government plainly intended for the Australian army to have an expeditionary battalion of heavy armor that could be employed outside Australia. Who was going to lift and carry it? Where? Why? These are questions the "stay at homes" would and should have asked. I think they did ask those questions. Those questions have never been answered. The "wets" have a practical point, even if all they ask the other side; "Why do we have a tank battalion; if we cannot move it to where we want it?" The answer of "So we can show up." in light of the reasoning of "punching above our weight" is kind of fantastic without strategic transport. The Australian army is going to the Middle East? A Red Horse battalion of airfield engineers might make sense in a show the flag exercise in such combined allied operations. It would make as many jobs in Australia and is actually militarily useful in any conceivable context for both sides of the political argument. And the ally would see it as being extremely helpful, too. More on practicality and common sense in a moment.



Ahhh. Social security, servicing the debt, paying off the health insurance and drug companies, taking care of Silicon Valley, buying off the labor unions, and the ideological intelligentsia, "rebuilding the infrastructure" (jobs programs) and so forth in the American context is why we have our own problems. Defense has not received any attention either. At least the polity has perked up ears and asked; "Why are the PRC running Port Los Angeles? Why are they running the Panama Canal?" Why cannot I buy what I want?" This awareness happened because our shelves were somewhat empty this Christmas and a lot of Americans were introduced to logistics in a manner they could understand as the denied end-user of a supply chain. Turkeys that cost $100.00 dollars made an impression as well as no videogames, no fresh produce and other items. The political fall-out has been hilarious. To blame it all on our current real-life version of Elmer Fudd is far too simplistic. And yes; many people are mystified. Why build submarines HERE when I cannot get fresh tomatoes and my turkey costs as much as a microwave oven?

Then one explains that if a foreign nation controls your overseas supply chains, and infrastructure, then you have to build submarines to choke them in return as well as take other actions (See the Ukraine thread where I discuss Mearsheimer's thesis, about pawn sacrifice to bring Putin onside to choke the Silk Road project, *See map.). Tit for tat.





That program is dead. AUKUS may go the same route, but I would lay odds that Xi Ping is as stupid as his belligerent actions represent him. So AUKUS may just lurch ahead.



Coral Sea may be as effervescent as Lexington and Concord or Gallipoli, but there is still residual memory.



The civil service never forgets ancient enmities.



The comedy of it is that while one might suggest so, reality is that as in the case of Britain and France (See video.), there is a certain residual negative feeling about buying one's defense from an "enemy". The naval example I will use, and it is comedic, is the Type 42 frigate. The ASTER SAM missile and its associated radars had to be Britishfied to a extended boost version, because the French MN were not going to tell the British RN how to arm "their British frigate".



Amazing. Wish I had you as a primary source when I was researching what went wrong with the Collins program. 

Edit.




Upholder disaster.



One would like to be cautious about buying "used submarines".



I have commented on life cycle wear and tear of submarines measured in numbers of dives and stress on the hulls.



It is managerially complicated.



This would be the state of affairs if the ATTACK program was on time and on budget. The planning date for war is 203o BTW.



No data, but 12 Astutes with blue/gold crews and 10% padding = 7,000 men. Twice the current Collins force + 1,000 men.



It was an "evolved" Collins class.



True.



300 dives? I would not bet my life on it. The JMSDF trains hard and patrols hard.



The Japanese replacement schedules is 1/3 , 1/3 , 1/3. it actually is a holdover from IJN practice. The one a year is in rough six year increments. So squadrons are supposed to be cycled for 18 years service and roughly 550-700 dive cycles with a 300 dive cushion on the estimated 1,000 dives in a boat. One can push the safety margins if one is Canada or Indonesia or Argentina, but I would not gamble my life on it.



More Chinese at sea. Squadrons have grown from 6 boats to 8 boats in the JMSDF.



Arguably fine boats when new. Dimensionally the Oyashio boats might be a bit of a human factors problem. How "big" is your average Australian submariner? The Japanese boats are "tight".



They are evolved Barbels. It is likely that their combat systems will be dated, but their planform and physical plant is superior to what their enemies have now. Hull? Maybe 300 dives per average. Safety margins will be reduced from "new" condition.



I have provided maps to show why this will not work.



Not an assumption that fits the actual replacement cycle.



Same again.



This is a situation, where inspection of the prospective boat must be undertaken. As the Canadians discovered, used submarine salesmen and used car salesmen are remarkably similar the world over.



Ask the Canadians about that one.



Ask the Canadians or the AMERICANS about that one.



A frigate is not a submarine. Submarines are critical never fail systems in a one-time fail only environment.



Assumption. The subs would have to nursed along in a LOTE program. Where is the economy in that choice?



By my mathematics it is actually 9 boats.



Why not?



But they are found in the American navy and thus a vendor with a stockpile of spares is available a telex away.



Ask the Canadians about that notion.



Australia is about to embark upon nuclear submarines. Australia would pay for plant and training to create elaborate domestic support infrastructure.



Why turn to AUKUS? Why not short circuit the second-hand boat problem and buy new boats from Japan?



If one does not know the answer to that question, (Ask the Canadians.), then one should not be buying or building submarines. The RAN professionals can run the numbers and calculate to within 10%.



Pessimism. With submarines and submariners, the glass is half empty. I have an interview published on this forum with the captain of the I-58 about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Hashimoto was a "used sub salesman" who tried to con his interrogators. He almost got away with it.



Upholders. Canadians. Complete refit and validation, cubic centimeter by centimeter.



Americans.



They already know English.



Who wrote this article? Schematics have to be in the language of the usage.



Same again. Ask the Americans who operated a Swedish submarine for a decade.



Same again. Ask the Americans who operated a Swedish submarine for a decade.



Airpower Australia level of cognizance. This option was probably considered and rejected.

You are right stevep, the WE should be Australia.