Navy chief hits out at Collins, AUKUS critics

Australia’s Chief of Navy Mark Hammond has blasted ‘criticism and doubt’ over the nation’s Collins-class submarines and their planned AUKUS replacements.

Australia’s Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Mark Hammond. Picture: David Gray/ AFP

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Australia’s Chief of Navy Mark Hammond has launched a testy defence of the nation’s ageing ­Collins-class submarines and their planned AUKUS replacements, lashing what he described as a “pattern of criticism and doubt” over the programs.

Days after The Weekend Australian reported five of the six Collins boats were out of action, Vice Admiral Hammond claimed the submarines were still “meeting the operational requirements of the Australian government”.

Admiral Hammond hit back at critics of AUKUS’s $368bn price tag, saying nuclear submarines “cost about the same” as high-end surface warships, and “perceived setbacks” to the program were proof of its “ambitious, sophisticated” nature.

His comments came as the government’s submarine corporation, ASC, revealed it was losing 1000 Collins maintenance hours a week due to industrial action at its Adelaide yard, which equates to 24,000 lost hours since the dispute began six months ago.

ASC managing director Stuart Whiley told Senate estimates the pay dispute had caused serious setbacks to the maintenance schedule, revealing one of the boats that was due to complete a major upgrade in June was still “months” away from returning to service.

Admiral Hammond said the Collins – the first of which is now 30 years old – remained “world class diesel boats” that continued to conduct successful operations.

He said would be jailed for ­revealing further details, while ­lamenting the lack of media headlines “when we have four submarines at sea at the same time, as we did just a few months ago”.

Declaring himself the first head of Australia’s nuclear navy nearly a decade out from the arrival of the nation’s first nuclear boat, Admiral Hammond said the service’s “grit and determination” would ensure AUKUS’s success.

“To the critics, I submit that where Australia has succeeded ­before, I am confident we will again,” he told the Submarine ­Institute of Australia on Tuesday.

At the same time, he sought to play down the scale of the AUKUS challenge, describing it as an “evolution, not (a) revolution” of the ­nation’s submarine fleet.

“We are just changing the propulsion system which enables them,” Admiral Hammond said.

A Collins-class submarine undergoing maintenance at ASC’s Henderson shipyard in Western Australia. Picture: Defence

His comments came as US ­ambassador Caroline Kennedy likened the trilateral submarine partnership to her father John F. Kennedy’s quest to put a man on the moon.

“At that time, the longest space flight that the US had undertaken was five minutes, and he committed to send a man to the moon in 10 years,” she told the institute’s biennial conference in Canberra.

“So I have absolutely no doubt, and I know that I speak for my colleagues in the US government, that this is the same kind of thing.”

British high commissioner Vicki Treadell said a major fire last week at BAE Systems’ main submarine yarn in northern England – where the first AUKUS boat will be built for the UK – would not set back the program’s timeline.

“It is not yet being built, so how can it be derailed?” she told the conference.

Britain and Australian governments have been tight-lipped on the impact of the fire, but two British officials told The Australian it had caused only minimal damage to the Barrow-in-Furness plant and to a single Astute-class submarine that was inside at the time.

Defence Minister Richard Marles said AUKUS was “a big horse we are trying to get on”, and Australia had “the biggest task” of the three partner nations.

Mr Marles said while “everything is not perfect” with the program, he was confident AUKUS was progressing well and that it would not be undermined by a Trump election victory in the US.

He said the support of Republicans in congress for the program showed AUKUS was favoured “across the political spectrum” in the US.

Mr Marles defended the government’s decision to axe a $7bn military satellite project designed to connect every element of the ADF in real time.

The government dumped the nation’s biggest space program just 18 months after naming US defence giant Lockheed Martin as the preferred tenderer.

But Mr Marles argued the program had not been cancelled, and was instead being “re-scoped” to make it more resilient. Rather than a planned three to five satellites, he said Australia would move to “a more distributed solution” to counter the risk they could be “shot out of the sky”.

But a space industry expert said geo-stationary satellites like those cancelled by Australia orbited at more than 30,000km above the Earth, which was too far away to be hit by a missile. “The only ­option is cyber hacking or jamming closer to Earth,” the source said.