Australia’s submarine project shows we’ve learned nothing

Indonesia will enjoy a big strategic advantage while we keep spending billions on questionable hardware that takes forever to arrive.

Australia could be handing our regional rivals a major strategic advantage.

Indonesia is showing Australia how an independent nation can develop a high technology and very effective air and sea defence at a fraction of the cost of what Australia is spending.

Even more serious for Australia, Indonesia’s low-budget purchases will create air and submarine power superior to Australia over the next two decades, even though we are signing open ended spending contracts worth hundreds of billions

We have to hope that the United States comes to our aid.

But just as our defence equipment strategy is the joke of the Asian region, the Americans are also bewildered by our mistakes.

At least in the case of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter disaster, the Americans recognise that they were part of a misleading information game and are grateful that we will take the early JSF’s off the assembly line in the knowledge that the aircraft has a large number of unresolved technical issues. Australia will pay for any solutions that can be devised. The Americans will tactfully call the solutions “an upgrade”. We are paying huge sums for a very noisy and expensive to operate aircraft which has severe drawbacks.

At a fraction of the price, the Indonesians are buying Russian Sukhoi Su-35 jets to replace old aircraft.

But Indonesia will move towards a much larger fleet of even more lethal Russian aircraft in coming years. The Indonesians will then have a large number of flexible fighters which, while they will not have some of the abilities of the JSF, will give provide air superiority over Northern Australia.

We have to join Japan in urging the US to bring back into production the F-22 and upgrade it with the help of technology developed for the JSF.

You would have thought that we would have learned from the JSF experience where we were sucked into the deal and then found it very difficult to get out, because that would have involved admitting serious error.

The French copied the tactics the American used for the JSF and once again the gullible Australians were sucked in. So we will now pay at least $90 billion for submarines that may not be available for 20 or more years, based on technology that is at best dubious and at worst useless. Operational costs will take the final bill over $200 billion.

In contrast, Indonesian officials have entered the final stages of negotiations for a follow-on order of three Type 209/1400 diesel-electric submarines with South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering (DSME). An agreement is expected in the next few months. It’s an excellent and reliable submarine and Indonesia will pay around $A500million for each vessel. Maybe we will be lucky and we will have a better submarine in 20 years, but by that time the Indonesians will be buying 2040 technology and they will have had submarine superiority over Australia for two decades.

The French misleading information started with incredible praise for the ‘Barracuda’ nuclear submarine that the French are designing and building. This would be the base shape of the Australian submarine which would not be driven by nuclear power but by a diesel-electric engine. To emphasise the link to the new French submarine our vessel was given the name ‘Shortfin Barracuda Block 1A’. There would be a pump-jet system that has never before been used with a diesel-electric electric submarine.

The Australian public was also mislead on the timing of the submarine. In February 2015 then prime minister Tony Abbott said the new submarines would enter into service by the mid-2020s. A few months later Kevin Andrews, then defence minister, said it would be 2026-27. It’s now 2034 but it turns out that the Barracuda project in France is a disaster and is three or four years behind schedule so that will inevitably delay the Australian submarine from the scheduled 2034 first delivery date to close to 2040. In addition, the French have backtracked on the pump jet propulsion.

The Senate Economic Reference Committee received a paper from one or our top engineers, Aidan Morrison, showing that the French were right to backtrack because, while the pump-jet system works well with nuclear submarines, at the slow pace required for diesel electric it fails.

The Senate Committee asked our defence people to provide a written response to Morrison’s research. It took them about 10 weeks to work out how to reply. When the reply finally arrived it claimed that pump-jet could be efficient across the entire speed range.

Morrison responded: “It is a bizarre, irrational claim with no basis whatsoever in physics. It is frankly bewildering that such a claim could be made, given how easily its falsehood can be established by even moderate research, or simple logic.”

I do not have the engineering knowledge to know who is right but we are making a $90 billion bet on technology over which a serious question hangs and we leave a two decade gap, enabling the Indonesians, to move to regional superiority in the submarine space at a very moderate cost.

We are in this mess because Australian governments have not always put their most talented people in the defence portfolio. Given border sovereignty, retiree taxes, negative gearing, capitals gains issues etc, there is now no certainty that the ALP will win the next election but thankfully its shadow defence minister Richard Marles seems to be taking a fresh approach.