Nuclear or bust: Australia’s high risk submarine strategy

Twenty years from now Australia could have the makings of a fleet of world-class nuclear-powered attack submarines – or it could have no submarines at all. So what to do?

Realistically we have little option but relying on UK and US help to the greatest extent possible in design. A British Astute-class nuclear-powered submarine, HMS Ambush, near Scotland. Operating a different class of boat to the US Navy, with a different acoustic signature, would complicate adversary anti-submarine operations.

Australia’s recent announcement that it is terminating its contract with the French Naval Group, and instead entering into a partnership with the US and UK to acquire nuclear submarines, was bold and decisive.

But it glossed over the extremely high stakes here. Twenty years from now Australia could have the making of a fleet of world-class nuclear-powered attack submarines – or it could have no submarines at all.

At one level the decision makes perfect sense. There’s no doubt that Australia’s strategic geography is more suited to a nuclear submarine than a conventional one.

The distance from bases in Australia to operating areas north of the Indonesian archipelago eats up most of the endurance of “off-the-shelf” conventional submarines.

That’s the consideration that led us to design and build the large and long-ranged Collins class, and why we signed up to an even bigger conventional boat for its replacement. We’ve been effectively chasing the range and endurance of nuclear attack submarines, while constraining ourselves to diesel-electric drives. It seems that the engineering mismatch finally caught up with us.

But deciding that nuclear propulsion is the answer to our submarine requirement is the easy part.

Producing the submarines on a time frame that works will be a real challenge. And we need to get a lot of things in place to make them work effectively once they’re delivered, including support infrastructure, a logistic supply chain and an effective recruitment and training pipeline.

Nuclear submarines will be more demanding than the conventional submarines we’re used to in every respect.

In that context, it’s worth recalling that we lost almost a decade of Collins class effectiveness because we badly mismanaged the fleet maintenance arrangements.

That’s been sorted now, and we currently have a world class conventional submarine fleet. But the clock is ticking – HMAS Collins was commissioned a quarter of a century ago. We’re about to launch a multibillion-dollar “life of type extension” (LOTE) program to keep the Collins class operational well into the 2030s. That will buy us some time, though it’s not without its own project risks, involving as it does a re-engineering of the submarine’s propulsion systems.

To appreciate the risk here, it’s instructive to look at what happened when the RAN transitioned from the Oberon class submarines it acquired in the 1970s to the Collins. Because the Collins program slipped by a few years, the fleet of six Oberons dwindled to two (which got a rapid refit to keep them effective) and there was an effective collapse of Australia’s submarine capability. More than 20 submarine-years were lost and, with sea days limited, many submariners left the service for greener pastures. The navy spent the next 15 years rebuilding its submarine workforce and rebuilding the precious operational experience it had lost.

A repeat of that experience could be fatal to the nation’s submarine capability, especially since the future nuclear fleet will require a substantially larger workforce.

As has been painfully obvious for a long time, Defence isn’t exactly overflowing with highly-skilled submarine engineering and project management personnel.

Managing the LOTE in parallel with the acquisition of a nuclear submarine is a big ask for any organisation, let alone one that hasn’t got a lot of runs on the board. There’s almost no room for error in the timeline – we’ll need at least a couple of new boats from mid-2030 to ensure smooth transition. So we need to find the lowest risk approach to acquiring nuclear submarines, recognising that the “lowest” might still be pretty risky.

At least our American and British partners in the venture have a long history of designing and building nuclear submarines. Realistically we have little option but relying on their help to the greatest extent possible. We should draw on their own designs (the American Virginia class or Britain’s Astute class) to the greatest extent we can.

A Virginia-class submarine of the US Navy. Picture: USN/AFP

There are pros and cons to each. Virginias would allow us to draw on US support capabilities in theatre but have a crew of 132, compared to 98 on an Astute (and around 55 on a Collins). Given the RAN’s manning problems, the relatively smaller crew would be attractive. And operating a different class of boat to the USN, with a different acoustic signature, would complicate adversary anti-submarine operations.

Given the history of schedule delays when we fiddle with established designs, any temptation to “Australianise” the chosen submarine should be resisted.

The more bespoke our future submarine is, the more project problems there will be and the later it is likely to be delivered. For the same reason, we should also push to have our submarines built in existing nuclear submarine production facilities. It is almost certainly cheaper and faster to expand existing facilities than building new ones – the US has already scoped out and costed an expansion for itself.

There will be local squeals about that suggestion, as the politics of Australian shipbuilding has an established track record of trumping rational decision making. There’s a real risk that the forthcoming federal election will pressure both sides of politics to commit to a local build. Deciding to have Australian submarines built somewhere else will require both political bravery and the willingness to explain the strategic rationale to the public.

Various naysayers and vested interests will argue against the approach sketched above. Some commentators are already saying that we won’t get access to the innermost sanctum of US nuclear submarine technologies, and that we’ll have to work with the British to get the best we can. But many of the same people were once saying that we wouldn’t get in the door at all.

At the very least, Australia shouldn’t ever be in the position of looking back and wondering what might have been had we pushed a bit harder. We should explore the art of the possible to the extent that alliance politics allows.

The American need for capable allies is only going to increase with strategic competition. They need us as much as we need them.

Andrew Davies is a senior fellow at ASPI and the former director of ASPI’s defence and strategy program.