Problems stack up with confused nuclear subs plan

Senior strategic and defence experts agree the first of the new boats must be built overseas.

Former defence minister Christopher Pyne with a model of the British Type 26 frigate. Picture: AAP

The Morrison government’s commitment to build eight nuclear-powered submarines under the new AUKUS arrangements will probably leave Australia with a critical capability gap as the navy’s six Collins-class boats age.

If the government persists with the idea of building the submarines in Adelaide, they will face enormous difficulties, come in years later, and cost billions of dollars more than if bought overseas. It is by no means clear they can be built in Adelaide.

However the nuclear subs ­arrive, they will be too late to have any bearing on the security challenges Australia faces over the next decade and a half.

Canberra should consider leasing nuclear-powered subs from the US or Britain as early as possible, whereas Scott Morrison ruled that option out in comments in the US.

Nuclear-powered submarines became possible because of the strategic risk posed by China. ­Beijing’s aggressiveness led the US to decide to make nuclear propulsion available to Canberra, and the Morrison government obtained bipartisan support from Labor, because of China.

But in an irony both exquisite and bitter, the new subs will make zero difference to Australia’s military capability in the years when the China challenge is most acute. They will, however, absorb a vast amount of attention – and, in due course, money.

These conclusions are inescapable from a series of interviews with the elder statesmen of Australian strategic policy on the centre right, from the highest levels of the bureaucracy and from industry and think tanks.

All of these people offer high praise to Morrison for crossing the nuclear Rubicon, but raise a series of questions so troubling as, in my view, to cast doubt on the whole project.

Former prime minister John Howard strongly backs AUKUS. “I support it. Operationally, strategically and politically it was a very good decision,” he said. “The public quite likes the concept of AUKUS. I have no difficulty with nuclear power for power generation as well as submarines.

“I’m in favour of everything being on the table. I think it’s consistent to look at leasing submarines (from the US or UK) before the submarines we’re talking about come online in 20 years.”

Howard is generously assuming that it might be possible to build nuclear subs in Adelaide, while many experts think that is not feasible at all.

Without adjudicating on that, he is telling the government that 20 years is too long to wait for new subs and we need to move quickly to lease subs.

Dennis Richardson, the former secretary of the defence department, like Howard, supports nuclear subs in principle, but is sceptical about building them in Adelaide. He tells Inquirer: “The decision to acquire nuclear-powered submarines is seminal. It will be essential, however, that the government does not allow domestic political considerations to compromise what will be a national enterprise. In terms of both cost and schedule, it would make sense for the first one or two boats to be substantially built overseas.”

Former deputy prime minister John Anderson likewise supports nuclear-powered subs and pays generous tribute to Morrison for the basic decision to go nuclear. However, he is even more forthright about the implausibility of the plan as it stands.

Anderson wants defence policy separated from industry policy. He tells Inquirer: “We are no longer a manufacturing country. That is tragic, but a reality that we have consciously allowed to evolve. I believe we are being less than forthright if we think we can build something as complex as nuclear submarines here in an effective and timely way. We can’t build them quickly and efficiently here. The question is: who can?”

Anderson wants the Australian order for subs to increase the total number of allied subs.

He calls for leaders to have the vision not to try to reinvent the wheel. “We cannot hope to match the brilliance of those who have had decades of designing and building nuclear subs. Just buy the best, our people deserve nothing less,” he says.

Anderson thinks we need to substantially increase the size of our defence force.

He is also critical of the government’s inability to craft any convincing defence narrative: “We must learn from the politics of the French submarines. The government never advocated ­effectively for them and never drove the project with conviction. It simply fed the perception here and internationally that even the government itself wasn’t sure. Conviction is everything.”

Anderson makes a devastating point shared by many analysts. It’s just unrealistic in terms of timing and capability to think we can move seamlessly from the ageing Collins boats to a fleet of nuclear-powered subs. In effect, we need a transitional conventional submarine capability. He says: “There is still a (lesser) role for diesel-electric subs in our particular situation. Even as a budget hawk, and a strong supporter of Australia obtaining nuclear subs, I think we should have considered continuing on with at least a few Barracudas. We have just spent $300bn on Covid. What price freedom?”

The most tough-minded and direct reaction from a senior ­centre-right figure comes form Coalition senator and former major general Jim Molan. Molan has, by a vast distance, the most defence policy and operation experience of any federal politician. The failure of the Liberals to make him defence minister, preferring instead political lightweights who carried no element of the public debate and offered no challenge to the defence establishment – a situation belatedly corrected by appointing Peter Dutton to the portfolio – was in retrospect a telling sign that for all the rhetoric, they didn’t take defence seriously.

Molan supports nuclear submarines but asks this astringent question: “What good is it having an eye-pleasing defence industry in 20 years time if we lose the next war? The operational need must trump the industry need.”

Molan tells Inquirer: “The PM’s prediction on getting the nuclear submarines in one or two decades means we will fight the (hypothetical) China war, itself variously predicted within three to 10 years, with the Collins. The nukes are a worthwhile long-term strategic objective, but they are not the one answer to our ­national security needs. The next 18 months will be key. Can the PM find more subs sooner?”

And here is the killer line, though phrased politely as a question: “Can we perhaps build some subs overseas to begin with, then in Adelaide?”

Because the nuclear subs are so far away – on the government’s best estimate, one might conceivably be available at the end of the 2030s – he looks for alternative sources of strategic weight: “Can we bolster the submarine force with a range of aircraft in the shorter term? Remember, it is not having the subs that is critical, it is the vessels we need to sink, the surveillance we need to do, the adversary actions we need to persistently deter. Subs are not the only answer, and obviously not the short-term answer.”

Yet, there is no sign of an Air Force build-up to compensate for our manifest submarine weakness, which will only get worse as the Collins-class subs start to go in one after the other for their life-of-type extension, which will take two years for each sub.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott, like the others, offers strong words of praise to Morrison for making the nuclear breakthrough. However, he tells Inquirer: “Speed is of the essence here, even more important than a local build.”

He strongly urges the government to try to lease boats from the US or Britain “that could be Australian flagged even if manned with a composite crew”.

Peter Jennings, the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, himself a former deputy secretary of the defence department and whose think tank has studied submarines for years, also judges it unrealistic to imagine Australia can build eight nuclear submarines in Adelaide and deliver them in a meaningful time frame.

Collins-class submarine HMAS Sheean arrives in Hobart in April. Picture: Getty Images

He thinks, notwithstanding that we have ditched the French, we will ultimately need a new conventional submarine to bridge the gap between the elderly Collins and a fleet of nuclear-powered boats. He says these – Collins Mark II – could be built in Adelaide. They could have the same capabilities as the Collins and, ­although notionally long range, would be conceived of as mainly carrying out security tasks closer to Australia than the South China Sea. Jennings thinks Australia could build four such subs while developing the nuclear submarine option.

He is also an advocate of building one or two more Air Warfare Destroyers.

All this work, combined with the wickedly delayed frigate replacement program, would give Adelaide as much work as it could possibly cope with and would well and truly form the credible substance of an Australian naval shipbuilding industry. It would also produce vitally needed military capabilities.

But as for nuclear-powered subs, Jennings believes these should be built in the US. The Americans have two shipyards building Virginia-class subs and are thinking of opening a third. Australia’s subs would represent tens of billions of dollars work for that yard and could help finance it to such an extent that Canberra would have some influence on its development.

Canberra should then negotiate with Washington so that a range of certified Australian suppliers could be integrated into the US supply chain, at least for the subs intended for Australia, hopefully for the wider American subs build. This would be similar to the work we do on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The F-35 is the most advanced fifth-generation fighter in the world and no one ­even remotely suggests Australia should build it here.

But Australian companies have got a great deal of work as part of the F-35’s international supply chain. This is just the sort of arrangement which AUKUS ought to be able to produce. It is ­infinitely more realistic, and will be many tens of billions of dollars cheaper, and take many fewer years, than if we go down our regular and insane route of first modifying a design to make it unique, and then trying to build it entirely in Australia.

I spoke to many other industry and defence figures who believe three crucial propositions: an ­Adelaide build is impractical; if we go with a local build, the time line will be much longer than the ­government now contemplates; and keeping the venerable and ­antique Collins-class boats as our sole frontline submarine capability well into the 2040s and perhaps the 2050s is an intolerable, perhaps deranged, level of risk.

The former long-time head of the submarine-building ASC, Hans-J Ohff, writes this week that the nuclear sub could never be built in Adelaide, and it is quite likely – because we are taking so long to acquire it – that the nuclear sub we are planning could well be ­obsolete before we get it.

A depressing but inescapable reflection arising from eight years so far of conservative government is that Defence has succeeded in imposing its culture on the government, while the government has failed in imposing its culture on Defence.

Take the troubled frigates. The government, driven to wretched self-reflection by the history of a hundred bungled acquisitions, ­determined that navy should acquire a replacement for the ANZAC frigates that was a mature design, in the water and in service.

There were three finalists. One was a modified version of the AWD. We had built three of those and knew how to build them. It didn’t have the new Australian radar we wanted, but it did have US weapons systems and everything else we needed.

The second finalist was the Italian Fincantierri Fremm. It was a successful ship, in the water, in service, and a type of it was even selected by the US navy. We would have had to add the ­Australian radar and US weapons system.

But the one we finally chose, the British Type 26, was not a ­mature design, was not in the water and was not in service. It still isn’t in service in Britain. Then we wanted to add all our little extras. So now, it is delayed and delayed and delayed. Physical work on it has not begun in Adelaide and it won’t come into meaningful service until the mid-2030s.

There is a technical term for this as military strategy – it’s called nuts.

The frigates are delayed to the middle of next decade, and the submarines are now just an idea. In 2009, we were 16 years from having a new submarine. Now we are 20 years away.

Here’s the most important reflection of all. Morrison and Dutton have repeatedly and justly told us that we face the most dangerous strategic environment since the 1930s.

Yet there is not one single defence platform, which could have any effect in a maritime conflict, which was not planned long before this strategic assessment became current, or which we have added to our armoury as a result of our dire strategic environment.

The frigate replacement program was in the 2009 Defence White Paper. The only new capability we began work on – the French ­Attack-class submarine – has now gone the way of all flesh.

Defence, undisturbed by strategic reality or the mere passing whims of passing politicians, has proceeded plod-like and ever so slowly to replace like for like, ­serenely to pursue its long-term modest and irrelevant plans.

This is national dereliction on a massive scale.