The Silent Deep
Page 84
I invite the Guardian to spend time on HMS Astute with me to see at first hand the professionalism of the crew, the confidence they have in their boat and the rigour with which sea trials are carried out and problems addressed.
Rear Admiral S R Lister
Director submarines, Ministry of Defence.21
The Guardian did not take up Rear Admiral Lister’s offer. Ian Breckenridge also defended his boat:
Astute is the most capable submarine I have served in during my 25 years in service. She is a step forward from her predecessors but her new design and first of class status mean that during sea trials she must prove not only the build but also the design – hence sea trials take time. I spent almost 200 days at sea in Astute and no submariner would ever think of going to sea in anything other than a safe submarine.22
There is little in the claims in the Guardian. As we have already seen, the decision to use the PWR2 was taken on affordability grounds, and whereas speed was a paramount requirement in Soviet submarines, it has never been so in Royal Navy submarines. ‘Astute isn’t going to be a greyhound of the ocean,’ admits Admiral Lister. ‘But she’s about half as quiet again as a “T” boat.’23 Regardless of Astute’s maximum speed, what is lost in speed is gained in quietness. The reactor has indeed contributed to Astute’s unusual design, but the bulbous hull form aft to the fin can be explained by an additional requirement that was included in the ‘Astute’ class late on in the design phase. Each submarine is capable of carrying an underwater dock from which Special Boat Service Royal Marine commandos can launch midget submarines to carry out covert missions. Fitted behind the submarine’s fin, the Special Forces Payload Bay (or, as it is referred to by submariners, ‘the Caravan of Death’) allows swimmers to enter and leave the submarine while it is submerged. It was developed under a secret programme known as Project Chalfont.24 ‘That was a real design driver for the boat, and that’s why we’ve got a big sail,’ explains Breckenridge. ‘The shapes and curves [of the hull] help the dry deck shelter sit in the right place.’25
At 0900 on Monday, 15 August 2011, on a clear, fresh Faslane morning, we are piped aboard HMS Astute and formally welcomed on board by Ian Breckenridge who takes us into his cabin and talks about the perils of being the first boat (among other things, lots of training and plenty of visitors): ‘People who don’t know the boat think we’re just a super ‘T’ boat. We’re not. We’re way beyond that. It’s a quantum leap in automation. We can press buttons where you needed three or four sailors before. The optronics are exceptional. We have six torpedo tubes instead of five. I can hold fifty per cent more weapons than a ‘T’ boat … The communications are way beyond a ‘T’ boat. I have three different satellite receivers.’26 We are taken on a tour that begins above Astute’s PWR2 nuclear reactor. We climb into an airlock, the heavy doors close, the compartment is pressurized and the second door into the compartment above the reactor, known as ‘the tunnel’, slowly opens. We climb in and are instantly hit with the strange smell … and feeling. Below us is a nuclear reactor capable of powering a small city for many years. Astute is powered by the latest PWR2 design, known as Core H, the culmination of continuous improvement applied to the previous five generations of PWR1 and PWR2 plant design. Core H represents a ten-fold improvement in core life over the first US and UK core designs. It also has a long life expectancy: the Royal Navy does not expect to have to refuel the submarine throughout its service life. One of Astute’s crew lifts the hatch and we see the metal containers above the reactor which hold the fuel rods. The crew are shielded from the reactor. Two diesel engines and one big battery provide back up.
Standing in the tunnel, above Astute’s reacting heart, we talk about reputations. ‘It’s too early to tell’, says Owen Rimmer, one of Astute’s watch leaders. ‘We are still finding our feet. It’s a matter of using our new capabilities and trusting them. The planes no longer work manually. People were sceptical at first but now they are getting used to it.’27 According to Simon Lister, ‘the character of a boat is defined by its history and the crew, whether it is well looked after and clean. What it’s like when it’s operational is an accident of history. The “R” boats from Cammell Laird were less well put together – that’s the reputation. It shows over time.’28
We leave the tunnel through yet another airlock – the forward and aft ends of the submarine are separated, only accessible through the tunnel – and pass the Health Physics Laboratory where they check the radiation levels from the reactor and monitor for contamination. The Manoeuvring Room, essentially the engineering centre, is separated from Health Physics by a cramped central walkway. The room is slightly larger than the Engineering room on a ‘Trafalgar’ class, but it looks similar. There are a huge number of buttons flashing, digital readouts, touch screen computers. It looks much like a small version of the starship Enterprise. There is a large chair in the middle. The controls are always manned, in three- to four-hour shifts. It is from here that Astute’s engineers monitor and maintain the submarine’s reactor.
One of Astute’s Engineers, Lieutenant Commander Rob Tantam, says that to get the ‘Astute’ class qualification you have to know the whole boat. ‘That’s what sets us apart from the General Service. Everyone has to be able to react, to tell what’s wrong and know where the valves are.’ Tantam has developed a sixth sense. ‘I know what feels right. As a submariner and an engineer that’s what you get. You subconsciously build a picture of what is normal.’29 ‘If you’re an engineer being on a submarine is the bee’s knees,’ says Admiral Lister. ‘It’s the combination of high pressure, nuclear power, explosives, atmosphere. The whole existence of the submarine depends upon your competence. It’s the best job if you are a UK engineer.’30
We pass one of Astute’s escape towers and walk through the bowels of the submarine, past noisy machinery everywhere, greasy and smelly, just like any other ship. We pass Astute’s Water Making Plant and enter the Control Room, the eyes, ears and brain of the boat. There is the cool hum of air conditioning and computer screens everywhere but there are also subtle differences from other control rooms. The most obvious is the lack of a periscope: Astute is the first Royal Navy submarine to dispense with the periscope and adopt phototronic masts that display optronics. ‘The optronics are exceptional,’ explains Admiral Lister.31 ‘Much as I loved my old periscopes, this is much better,’ says Breckenridge.32 We move over to the helm. Gone are the traditional helm controls. Astute is usually driven by a digital autopilot, but on the left hand side of the helm is a small joystick that controls the submarine via fly-by-wire. We are told that it is very sensitive: ‘you don’t feel like you are moving a 7000 ton submarine. On the older submarines you really had to exert yourself by pulling back on the helm. We are still getting a feel for it.’ We ask about the computers, specifically, what would happen if they crashed? ‘The computer is designed not to crash,’ replies one of Astute’s officers. They laugh when we ask if such a thing is even possible. ‘There are safety systems, backups, alternate supplies etc.,’ insists the officer. ‘Everything important is hard wired so if something does happen we are still in control.’33 We are struck by how young Astute’s crew is. The officer in charge of the helm is in his mid-twenties. Astute is his first submarine so he doesn’t know any different. He has no experience of how things are done on the Navy’s older, Cold War-era submarines. ‘It’s a real privilege to be part of such a good project,’ he says. ‘You get a real feeling of pride. We’ve been through the pain, but it helps that we’ve all been through it together.’34
The best way to get an idea of what life on board HMS Astute is like is to sit down with some of her crew. Commander Breckenridge takes us into one of Astute’s messes where twelve ratings have gathered to answer some of our questions. Of the twelve, only one has served on a diesel boat. The other eleven are what the Submarine Service calls FLUNOBS – ‘F****g Lazy Useless Nuclear Orientated Bastards’. We ask what the differences are coming into a lead boat such as Ast
ute. ‘It’s hard work, very hard work,’ answers one rating, ‘proving all this new technology makes the whole process much more difficult.’ ‘It’s high profile, on the same level as the new destroyers are,’ says another. We ask about the living conditions and are surprised by some of the answers. ‘Compared to an “S” boat the accommodation here is much smaller,’ replies one rating. ‘It feels like we have been forgotten about again,’ says another. ‘It’s as if the Navy think all this new technology is much more valuable than the crew. I don’t think the Navy even has enough weapons to fill all the space that is down in the Bomb Shop.’ ‘The Galley is better,’ admits another, ‘and everyone gets their own rack, but the bunks are smaller than on other submarines. You can’t even read a paperback in your bunk properly. Anyone over six feet is going to stick out. The same is true if you’re wide.’35 A price has been paid in habitability because of the method of laying out the hull in rectangular spaces.
We ask about the public’s view of Astute since the grounding and the shooting. ‘We’ve been keeping busy,’ replies one of the ratings. ‘It’s been non-stop, we haven’t really had a chance to think about it, we’ve just had our heads down, we just want to crack on and get over it.’ ‘We tend to ignore the press,’ answers another. ‘It’s the ship’s company that show the boat in the best possible light.’ ‘The bad press really started with the fire in Barrow,’ says another rating referring to the minor fire that broke out in Astute’s conning tower at Barrow in 2009. ‘Since then every little snippet has been commented upon. People outside, who have no idea what went on or what is going on, will tell other people. It’s not us saying all the negative things. The lads will defend the unit if they are out and … there have been some occasions when they have.’ ‘When things were going well we had forty-six days at sea, we were really pleased,’ says one rating, ‘then another incident completely beyond our control happened and we went right back to how it was in the beginning.’ Another interrupts. ‘We are having exactly the same problems as everyone else, that is what sea trials are for, they iron out all the problems, but we have such intense focus on us that our problems get noticed more.’ ‘We are a happy ship’s company,’ they insist. But they are clearly frustrated about the public perception of the submarine. ‘The general public is ignorant about what is going on, but sometimes our biggest enemies are in the Navy. They don’t know about the boat and some spread rumours. Then you have the so-called experts who pop up on TV when some incident happens, constantly spreading rubbish when they have no clue what they are talking about.’36 Admiral Lister is standing in the background, listening. ‘You just need to get on and put her into service,’ he says. ‘My sense is that once that happens she will be well known for the right reasons.’37
When we ask about the Submarine Service and its place in the rest of the Navy a sense of distinction emerges. ‘We are a much more professional service than the Skimmers’ (the submariners’ name for the surface crews), says one rating. Another interrupts. ‘It’s more of a multitasking role,’ he says. ‘Our skills are spread across the whole submarine whereas Skimmers only have one task to do, one specialty, one piece of equipment to manage. Our equipment is the boat.’ Another rating explains another key difference. ‘On a ship, at the end of the working day you down tools and go to the mess. We don’t do that. We do six hours on and six hours off. It’s better that way.’ ‘They think serving on submarines is dangerous,’ explains another. ‘They think we smell, don’t clean and they underestimate how much we have to do. They never seem to ask themselves why do we get retention pay?’38 Submariners receive extra pay in recognition of their skills and the challenges of the job. ‘There isn’t much of a relationship with the Skimmers,’ admits another rating. ‘They can’t afford to drink in the same bars as us.’ It’s not just the Skimmers. The Royal Marines also have a degree of friction with the Submarine Service. ‘They are crazy,’ insists one Rating and the others nod in agreement. ‘We stay away from them when we go on shore. The best Marine is a submarine.’ What about the other armed services? ‘The Army think we are great,’ they insist. ‘They love the technological aspect. It’s the same with the RAF, they understand the technical bits.’ We are very impressed with the crew and ask if they are given any special media training. ‘Yeah,’ replies one rating on behalf of the others. ‘We’re told to shut up!’39
A few weeks after our tour, Ian Breckenridge took Astute to the United States for an extensive series of trials. Astute loaded Tomahawk cruise missiles at the US Navy’s submarine base in Kings Bay, Georgia, and successfully launched two from the Gulf of Mexico onto a missile range at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. ‘Both flew beautifully,’ said Breckenridge.40 The submarine then made its way to a joint US–UK facility known as AUTEC: a bigger and better-instrumented range than the British Underwater Test and Evaluation Centre (BUTEC) range located off Applecross, which the Royal Navy uses for smaller post-refit tests. The relationship with the US is still extraordinarily close. There is ‘very little we don’t share with them’, says Admiral Lister, and with the increasing US focus on the Pacific the relationship has become closer. Admiral Donald [Director, Naval Reactors, US Navy], the modern day Admiral Rickover, reportedly said: ‘We don’t want the Brits to drop out of the game … we want the Brits to do more.’41
While in the United States, Astute was put up against the most advanced submarine in the US Navy, the ‘Virginia’ class attack boat USS New Mexico. So important was the exercise, codenamed Exercise ‘Fellowship 2012’, that both the US Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jonathan Greenert, and First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, both submariners who had reached the highest rank in their navies, were on board. ‘With the Royal Navy getting together with the US Navy you have the best out there operating together with cutting edge technology and cutting edge tactics, and that’s important for each of us to see what we have and see what we’re made of,’ said Admiral Greenert.42 Both Admirals observed the crews of the two most advanced submarines in the US Navy and the Royal Navy spend two days in the Bahamas, trying to out-flank, out-manoeuvre and outwit each other.43 Astute performed exceptionally well. ‘We met and surpassed every expectation,’ says Breckenridge. ‘She is just better than any other submarine I have ever been in.’ Even though Astute was not fully operational at the time of the trial, the Americans were very impressed with its capabilities. ‘Our sonar is fantastic and I have never before experienced holding a submarine at the range we were holding USS New Mexico,’ says Breckenridge. ‘The Americans were utterly taken aback, blown away with what they were seeing.’44
HMS Astute was commissioned into the Royal Navy on 27 August 2010. HMS Ambush was commissioned on 1 March 2013. HMS Artful was launched on 17 May 2014. At the time of writing the fourth, fifth and sixth submarines, HMS Audacious, HMS Anson and HMS Agamemnon were under construction at Barrow. When Audacious is launched assembly will begin of the final submarine HMS Ajax. These seven submarines will keep the Royal Navy in the SSN business well into the 2050s. As of 2015, the seventh ‘Astute’ submarine was planned to enter service in 2024, two years after the last ‘Trafalgar’ class submarine is decommissioned. This will leave the Royal Navy with a shortfall of at least one submarine when measured against projected tasks. A 2011 National Audit Office report concluded, ‘The Astute class submarines will not meet the Royal Navy’s requirement for sufficient numbers of submarines to be available for operations over part of the next decade’, and as a result of the delays the Submarine Service ‘will have to use older boats beyond their out-of-service dates, work the smaller fleet of Astute submarines harder, or reduce scheduled activity for submarines’.45
CURRENT AND FUTURE THREATS
Why does the UK still need a fleet of SSNs? Nearly thirty years after the Joint Intelligence Committee’s paper on ‘Soviet Naval Policy’ circulated in July 1985, several of the submarines identified and analysed in what turned out to be the final phase of the Cold War (the covert intelligence contest has
never ceased), would still feature in any assessment of underwater Russia. As we write, a ‘Delta IV’ ballistic-missile boat of the Northern Fleet is almost certainly in one of the bastions where the Arctic ice and the floes girding its rim creak and groan making sonar detection especially difficult. There may be even one last Typhoon, the ageing matinee idol of The Hunt for Red October, staggering about somewhere under the Barents Sea. The Akulas and the Sierras, as we have seen, still come down from ‘round the corner’ and far into the Atlantic to test the undersea ears of NATO and to add an extra frisson to US and UK test launches of Trident D5 missiles off Florida as part of the two respective navies’ DASO programmes. Though there was a break in continuous at-sea patrolling by the Russians for much of the twenty years after the Cold War, all the indications are that Putin’s Russia has an ambitious programme under way to modernize and improve all three elements of its nuclear ‘triad’ on land, under the sea and in the air.
Since 2009, Russia has gradually stepped up the patrolling (punctuated by occasional moments of attention-seeking behaviour such as an Akula II surfacing off the US eastern seaboard in that same year) to remind the West that, despite the recent collapse in oil and gas revenues, the newly assertive Russian state can afford to indulge old habits by teasing and stretching its old adversaries. In August 2010, Royal Navy submarines were ‘experiencing the highest number of “contacts” with Russian submarines since 1987’.46 One of Russia’s most advanced ‘Akula’ submarines was detected off the west of Scotland, waiting for a ‘Vanguard’ class SSBN to depart on its three-month patrol. In an operation reminiscent of the Cold War and the mid-1990s, a ‘Trafalgar’ class submarine was deployed to chase the Russian submarine out. ‘The Russians have been playing games with us, the Americans and French in the North Atlantic,’ a senior Navy commander said. ‘We have put a lot of resources into protecting Trident because we cannot afford by any stretch to let the Russians learn the acoustic profile of one of our “bombers” as that would compromise the deterrent.’47 ‘We’re still in the Cold War,’ says one senior submariner. ‘The reason we have that Immediate Readiness Submarine is because when the Russians come out we go and find them.’48 In December 2012, a Royal Navy submariner, Petty Officer Edward Devenney, was jailed for eight years for breaching the Official Secrets Act after being caught in an elaborate MI5 sting operation attempting to sell to Russian intelligence highly sensitive details of submarine movements and operations, as well as highly classified code information that could have caused ‘substantial damage to the security of the UK’.49