Defence under pressure over submarines, JSF

The next generation Australian submarine will be based on the French-built Barracuda

Australia’s defence outlook is changing rapidly and new defence minister Linda Reynolds faces a daunting task.

She is being bombarded with material from defence officials defending what are increasingly obvious past mistakes or strategies in danger of becoming obsolete.

The submarine contract and the joint strike fighter (JSF) are at the top of the list with yet another defence expert warning over the weekend that technology change is endangering the $90 billion French submarine gamble.

The Australian submarine contract is vital for France and its president.

Accordingly Reynolds was last week feted by President Emmanuel Macron at the historic French port of Cherbourg in Normandy, which was developed by Napoleon and was a key target in the D-Day invasion.

And the international political pressure is even more intense on the JSF front. There are many reasons why our prime minister is being invited to dine at the White House but one of them is to make doubly sure Australia does not follow Canada and turn its back on the JSF.

My readers are well aware of the JSF problems but at least our entrapment is part of the US alliance.

US defence is actually appalled at our incredible costly submarine gamble because it lessens our ability be an effective force in the Pacific and Indian oceans for the foreseeable future.

The ABC reports that former government defence adviser Derek Woolner and fellow researcher David Glynne Jones say that Australia’s objective to produce a “regionally superior” submarine is “now under challenge” and by the time the new submarine hits the water around 2034 “it’s going to be obsolete”.

Woolner says our submarine is to be built with a heavy metal main battery, as part of a process already initiated under a contract signed by France’s Naval Group company and MTU Friedrichshafen for diesel generator sets.

“A number of countries in the region are already proceeding to build boats around lithium-ion batteries that promise something like five to six times the submerged stealthy performance and a great deal more high-speed performance than you can get from a lead-acid battery submarine”, Woolner reveals.

I am not a submarine expert but I have never seen anything like the succession of alerts that surround our massive submarine contract.

They start with the delivery time---crucial to Australia’s defence.

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 closer to 2040. By 2034, let alone 2040, there will be a whole new generation of submarines. Abbott was right they had to start being operational in the mid 2020s.

But Australia was subject to a brilliant marketing campaign by the French.

The French tender for the Australian submarine was led by the then minister for defence, socialist Jean-Yves Le Drian (now foreign minister).

Le Drian’s initial plan was to sell Australia France’s Barracuda nuclear submarine and to offer a link with the French nuclear industry, including fuel rod production, a nuclear energy reactor, and a desalinisation plant in Australia.

He soon discovered that this plan had no hope of being sold to the Australians, but out of that came a plan to use the much larger nuclear submarine hull with diesel electric rather than nuclear power and the pump-jet rather than propeller system. It had never been done before.

Le Drian concluded that the legendary head of the French naval industrial operation Hervé Guillou was the wrong person on push the deal through the Australian defence decision-making system. He appointed Marie-Pierre de Bailliencourt as effectively Guillou’s second in command.

The Marie-Pierre de Bailliencourt vision and selling was magnificent. Guillou’s Naval Group would deliver to Australia the opportunity for a unique partnership with the French to design and deliver a regionally superior submarine over which Australia would have the sovereign capacity to operate and sustain over its life. Not surprisingly she was dumped soon after the selling was done.

In April 2016, in announcing the contract, then Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was definitive and all 12 submarines would be built in Adelaide ---- that was the Marie-Pierre de Bailliencourt deal. But the French headquarters intended to build the first two in France and announced that 4000 people would be required in France.

Malcolm Turnbull, right, with then French Minister for Defence Jean-Yves Le Drian in 2016. Picture: Tom Huntley

Then came the cost. Australia originally announced that the $50 billion cost estimate was after adjusting for inflation. It was a shock figure and more than double the $20 billion firm tender from Germany.

Then last year defence dramatically lifted the cost to around $80 billion (probably because of building the first two submarines in Australia).

Then add $10 billion for the combat system, which is useful for a submarine, and we have a total cost of around $90 billion. Maintenance costs are likely to take it above $200 billion over the submarines’ life.

And as it happens it looks like the Adelaide facility can’t do all the work and defence wants part of it shifted. More cost.

But we have also hit a second technology problem. Hydraulics expert Aidan Morrison’s detailed research paper last year showed that the while the pump-jet system works well with nuclear submarines, at the slow pace required for diesel electric it fails.

After a long delay, defence countered by claiming that pump-jets 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.”

We have just seen in the current trade war between China and the US how important a local supply chain is in defence. The supply chain is more important that the actual assembly. The supply chain has to be integrated into the design. There are few signs that is happening.

Indonesia is buying three South Korean submarines for $US500 million each

Maybe we will be lucky and after spending $90 billion we will have 12 better submarines in 20 or 30 years, but by that time the Indonesians will be buying 2040 technology and they will have had submarine superiority over Australia for two decades.