The French grand diplomatic tantrum in response to the Morrison government’s decision not to go ahead with the Naval Group Attack-class submarines is as absurd as it is unjustified.
The French have every right to be disappointed that they are going to lose tens of billions of dollars. They have no right to accuse anyone of acting in bad faith.
Their reaction, in fact, is so over the top and ridiculous, so full of petty insult and juvenile foot-stamping that it probably confirms just what a mistake it was ever to get so deeply involved with the French in strategic matters in the first place.
I was in Tokyo the day the French were awarded the Australian contract: good luck with your partnership with France, was the bitter and sarcastic response from an extremely senior Japanese.
The French have no rational ground for complaint.
When the agreement with them was made, it was structured as a series of commitments, or “gateways”, and Australian explicitly had the full right to withdraw at any new stage, that is, to terminate the project if it were unsatisfied after any particular stage was completed.
Of course such termination involves compensating payment from Australia.
The French complaint that they were not consulted in advance is positively idiotic. It is an almost miraculous achievement that the US, UK and Australian governments kept this evolving agreement secret. The idea the French system, in contemplating a potentially dreadful outcome for them, would have kept these considerations confidential is wildly unrealistic.
The French have already made many hundreds of millions of dollars out of this project.
It is not unusual for big defence projects to be structured as a series of contracts, one to be completed before the next begins.
This was doubly necessary for the Attack-class submarines because the then Turnbull government, under its Competitive Evaluation Process, decided to down-size to one supplier long before anything remotely resembling a mature submarine design, or even a detailed outline of one, was available.
That meant that once the French had been selected, there was no competitive price pressure in the process.
The only way to keep the French commercially honest was to assess each stage of work as it went along and then agree to the next stage of work.
The French shoulder a large share of blame for not keeping their customer happy.
On the other hand, they found our Defence Organisation slow, liable to change requirements and difficult to deal with in numerous other ways.
The Australian performance at every stage of this submarine saga has been woeful … but the French reaction remains absurd and does them no credit.
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