Defence’s biggest-ticket warfighting capabilities – ships, planes, and submarines – are procured, operated, and retired on cycles far longer than those of parliaments, Ministers, and governments. The Collins-Class submarines were ordered when Kim Beazley was Defence Minister in the Hawke Government, entered service during the Howard government, have been unreliable ever since, and their replacements may not be ready until 2030 – after the Collins class is scheduled to be decommissioned. The “classic” F/A-18 Hornets were ordered in 1981, arrived in service between 1984 and 1990, and will operate until some time between 2015 and 2020. Because of the long, long lead times, a decision on the replacements for these two combat vehicles will have to be made soon.
These issues are not new. the impending obsolesence of Australia’s fighter fleet has been a topic of political discussion since the early retirement of the F-111 strike fighter and the in-a-hurry purchase of the F-18 Super Hornet to cover a perceived “gap”. While the procurement process was rushed and the long-term potency of the Super Hornets against high-end threats debated, the net result was a product that has actually been delivered and is ready for use if needs be. The RAAF’s preferred long-term replacement for its entire fleet, the F-35 Lightning, is perhaps the most pathologically bad piece of military project management of all time. Australia is not completely locked in to the F-35, and has delayed the purchase of its first. That’s partly in search of the magic surplus, it’s also because of the huge cost, schedule, and capability problems the project has. The US military, particularly the Air Force and Marines, are locked in to what has been described as the “unkillable project”. Three branches of the US military are watching the schedule for their increasingly dissimilar versions of the aircraft slip further and further into the future, at ever-increasing cost and decreasing capability.
Meanwhile, the 2009 defence white paper stated that Australia should immediately get cracking on a replacement for the Collins-class submarines. The subs would be along the lines of the Collins – a large, long-range, diesel-powered submarine. No such beast is available on the global market; they would be built and maintained in Australia. Furthermore, Australia would buy a dozen of them, twice the size of the Collins fleet. And, for the first time, Australia’s navy, including the submarines, would be equipped with land-attack cruise missiles.
As the Australian Strategic Policy Institute noted back in 2012, that hasn’t happened. The Gillard government remains, nominally, committed to the 2009 submarine proposal; with the lack of action since, it’s simply not possible to design, build, and put into operation the new class of submarine by the time the Collins Class is scheduled to be retired. Even ignoring the timeline issues, the costs are enormous, and the risks of another dud high.
Furthermore, while it’s worth noting that future governments will have some flexibility in the numbers of each platform they purchase, and how they are operated (and there are very big tradeoffs in capability and costs that can be made there), decisions on platforms – including the decision “none of the above, thanks” – are very difficult to undo once they are made.
The lack of enthusiasm for Defence’s ever-increasing budgetary demands under Gillard represents a distinct change from her two predecessors. But the postponement of the big platform decisions will have to end in the next term of government, and the consequences will be with us for decades to come.
Rather than buying the F-35 (or Sukhoi, or other n-th generation fighters), it might be time to consider military drones. They’re far cheaper, and they can hit accelerations that no human pilot could do.
Drones have a bad rep for killing civilians in Afghanistan – so let’s not use them there; domestic duties only.
I suspect the most sensible sub purchase would be US off the shelf nuclear subs. But they have a large complement and we’ve never run anything like that system before so is risky. Also, conniptions! As for the F35, it really is true that piloted planes seem to be on their last generation.
curiously, the LHD s kept their ski ramps. Fleet Air Arm anyone?
Commenting on the merits or otherwise of particular weapons systems – or, again, the option of not buying weapons – is something I might save for another time.
I will make the point that, with regards to the subs, the ASPI has expressed some doubt that the Collins-class is actually an effective weapon of war at all, given the problems it is still plagued with.
You mean killing Australians? … But seriously, as the US Navy develops drone stealth fighters, it’s hard not imagine that any fifth generation fighter jet any country produces or buys will end up fighting robots.
Looks like Macross Plus was too optimistic about space colonisation and too conservative on humans-vs-drones.
Wilful:
That wouldn’t be politically feasible here, but more broadly
a) of what possible legitimate use to Australia could submarines be?
b) given that the Collins Class are lucky to have two in circulation at any one time — due largely to the inability to find submariners, who, for some reason, find life on such vessels tedious and not as well-rewarded as land-based jobs, wouldn’t there be enormous redundancy?
Betting that subs that can be deployed perhaps by 2030 will still be useful in 2045 is an enormous gamble — far bigger than other gambles people on the right in Australia say they are unwilling to make — on climate change and energy/urban infrastructure, the NBN etc …
It all sounds mad to me.
Australia doesn’t need fighter jets and it doesn’t need subs. There’s simply no legitimate use for them. There is no enemy which Australia could do more than annoy with such equipment. What Australia needs is good civil defence — for floods, fire that sort of thing. A coast guard capable of restraining poaching and fishing people out of the ocean is useful — along with some ships to transport and relieve Australians caught up in some drama in the Pacific, or perhaps to supply relief and aid in a natural disaster, or in extremis to deliver troops/police to support a legitimate government as in Timor L’Este or perhaps the Solomons.
Beyond that, buying big defence toys is expensive bluster.
I’m surprised there isn’t more talk of maritime drone warfare. It seems like the combat aspect of it is easier to handle than for airborne craft – for starters, surface craft would be much slower and therefore have more room for human error – and for smaller countries the large crew complements required for ships would surely make small, mobile remote-piloted systems competitive? At the very least, the defense role played by submarines seems like it could be done by some kind of drone system. Is it the engine size that makes it impossible?
Fran, while I agree with your last two paragraphs, if you stay within the mindset of Australia requiring conventional forces, then subs are pretty much at the tippy-top top of the list of the sort of thing that Australia should buy if we want any indigenous defence capability.
There’s no serious speculation that they will be obsolete by 2045, no one says that – a small gamble indeed. As to what they can do, they can perform extremely valuable monitoring of sea lanes and communications, they can insert special forces, they can launch cruise missiles, they can sink ships. A lot of bang (for a lot of bucks).
Also, while crewing is definitely a problem, it’s not the Collins Class’ main issue, it’s not a major limiting factor. Twelve Los Angeles class subs would definitely be an issue.
The two LHDs we’re getting will be excellent for humanitarian missions, they will make a massive difference for another Bandar Aceh, another Solomons islands type scenario. I thouroughly approve of them. The three AWDs, well they’re just crazy expensive crap.
Wilful:
,
And bearing in mind that this can be done with conventional vessels, many of them not even crewed by us, that is valuable to Australia because?
Fran, if when you see a submarine you see a floating target, my guess is that the Captain of that target has done something wrong. I think you should, strictly speaking, be not seeing a submerged target. Your analysis of their usefulness should proceed from the assumption that they are doing what they are designed to do.
I can’t make a judgment as to whether the Collins submarines do that.
faustusnotes:
Well I didn’t mean ‘see’ literally. I might have said ‘envisage’ or ‘imagine’ or ‘picture’. It would be a fairly simple matter to build uncrewed marine drones equipped to track submarines from their engine sounds, digital signal, heat trail etc. They’d be small, highly agile and fast and capable of taking out a sub with what they could carry in ordinance.
Trying to salvage a sub sunk in deep water would be a complex exercise and it’s hard to imagine what in practice Australia could do about it, even allowing there was high certainty as to the culprit.
Really apart from military keynesianism, there’s no argument for subs. If we are keen on sinking $35 billion into engineering and manufacturing in SA (and why not?) I’d say there are any number of better options that would produce a better return — (easy since subs will produce no return at all).
faustusnotes: communications may be a big problem. It’s easy to communicate between a desk jockey and an airborne drone, because the medium is air. A submersible drone would be in salt water, which is a conductor of electricity, and thus a terrible medium for radio signals. I found this pdf about amateur radio underwater. It states:
Low frequencies reduce the amount of information transmitted between desk jockey and drone. There would be no real time camera, although that would probably be redundant underwater. Maybe there’d be enough bandwidth to transmit sonar to the operator, but that sounds dicey.
It would be a fairly simple matter to build uncrewed marine drones equipped to track submarines from their engine sounds, digital signal, heat trail etc. They’d be small, highly agile and fast and capable of taking out a sub with what they could carry in ordinance.
There are drones that are fully automated, but as far as I know, all combat drones have a human operator in control at all times. There’s a reason for that. You don’t want the electronic equivalent of the anti-tank dog.
Maybe you program the drone to behave like an electronic pointer dog. It tracks the sub and follows it, giving location data. Maybe it simply fires a missile on command when it gets the operator authority.
The problem with maritime drones, particularly underwater drones, is range.
Pushing things through water at speed uses a lot of energy, which means a lot of fuel, which means a big fuel tank, which uses a lot of energy to push through the water….
Therefore, the idea of lots of small, autonomous and cheap maritime drones isn’t likely to work so well if you’re going to require them to move a lot.
That said, there is a lot of interest in launching uncrewed mini-subs from military subs for doing intelligence collection and the like.
Another point is that you don’t need to go fully autonomous to get some of the benefits. Every crew member you don’t need is one you don’t need to feed, water, and berth – not to mention train, pay, and put at physical and psychological risk. If I were Australia’s next generation submarine designer, I’d be trying very hard to figure out every which way I could use technology to cut the number of crew it will require to operate.
Doubtless that’s so, but if it’s uncrewed, as you say, you don’t need either the space for humans of biosupport. You can save an enormous amount of bulk and weight and power and therefore fuel. A lot of the time (out of wartime) they’d be purely for surveillance, so you’d not carry ordinance and they’d perform a fairly narrow programmed circuit at low speed merely gathering data.
That information on sea lane use that Wilful was considering could be gathered by craft such as this. In the meantime, you get working on real time comms to improve their tactical utility.
The beaut thing about submarines is that they’re great for denying the enemy access to your sea lanes, and pretty good for insertion of small teams into hostile territory. Not so good at force projection (so you need LHDs and maybe AWDs to move the big stuff). Still, if you can crew them (a big if: I’ve met a few submariners and they’re … unusual) you get a lot of bang for your buck.
Fighter jets? Submarines? Are we about to be invaded?
It’s borderline criminal how much money we shovel into the Defence Forces and they keep saying it isn’t enough and the government of the day will write another cheque and on it goes.
I resemble that remark DI(NR)
Collins was before my day. I understand they’re pretty good from colleagues who stayed on, unlike the rot you hear in the press. And very much the better than the Canadian experience (and we had briefly considered the Upholder class as replacement).
I was amazed to hear Rudd consider a squadron of 12 a few years back. We can’t crew the 6 we have .. besides what additional capability does the extra 6 will give you?
I was watching a top video on WA marine research from WAMSI and they have a couple of marine drones, UMVs if you wish. Top bit of kit – goes for upto a month at a time doing data runs on temps, salinity etc. surface, transmit, dive, collect, repeat. They have to be autonomous below the water, and they are. As mentioned before, essentially no comms underwater – very low freq .. we had given that up even in my day, think dial-up modem baudrates and then divide by 100, and then needed to drag a wire antenna 100meters behind.
I agree with Fran too on that marine drones will play a huge part in the future, as will UAVs. I can’t see them pushing a warhead about, payload need to be big. But detector sensors, control and comms can be tiny allowing for small fuel and propulsion needs – cheap as chips.
And agree with wilful – LHD’s was the sanest defence decision in a long time.
Welcome back.
This is a deeply entertaining thread, thanks Robert for putting it up.
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[please read the comments policy - 3 paragraph rule (not 11+ paragraphs). Please write this on your own blog and provide a link. Thanks ~ Mods]
So you don’t want substantive comment from someone who actually know what they are talking about on this subject?
OK. No skin off my nose, and your loss.
Can you say it in three paragraphs?
To be fair to MarkL, he’s no doubt been commenting mostly at Catallaxy for some time, and forgotten even the most basic tenets of civility – let alone harsh leftist strictures like the 3-para rule.
Just so long as he gives credit where due for other people’s work, I say give him a chance.
Maybe a guest post?
I didn’t know you’d been a submariner, Dave. Kudos. I couldn’t do it.
I met a PO submariner at HMAS Kuttabul about 15 years ago, when I was over there for a couple of weeks. (The Navy really does have the best views – the senior sailors’ mess looked out over the harbour, a lovely sight over your cornflakes.) Nice bloke, but from the point of view of a military cartographer-turned-loggy, a bit weird.
mindy, a guest post for MarkL would be a good idea. I’ve often disagreed with him, but he knows what he’s talking about.
Fran @ 6
“a) of what possible legitimate use to Australia could submarines be?”
- intelligence and covert operations (as they are hard to detect)
- sea denial (especially conventional boats in the littoral)
- force protection
- strike
Why does Australia need these things? We are surround by water. The “we have no enemies” line is false. What do you think China could be? An advanced liberal democracy that is in no way arming itself up nor threatening its neighbors over its territorial claims. And China, is very defendable against, especially should it chose to bring its conflicts anywhere near us. Admittedly, we are not invading China. But we must be able to make them at least think twice in consideration of the associated risk should they chose to seize or threaten (for example) N.W. gas and steel production areas.
“b) given that the Collins Class are lucky to have two in circulation”
Right. To me this just shows how little you have considered this subject. With a fleet of six, two is exactly what you expect to have “in circulation”. That’s the reason ships are nearly always bought in lots of three. One in refit, one in working up trials, one on operations.
If we want to buy twelve, the planners see scenarios where they need four at a time.
The problem with the boats – and the big American attack boats especially – is the crewing. The silent service is volunteer only.
“An advanced liberal democracy that is in no way arming itself up nor threatening its neighbors over its territorial claims.” Obviously a sarcastically phrased rhetorical question missing the ?