The Collins Class Submarine Story

by Peter Yule

  really loves and he hopped into the portfolio with great enthu-

  siasm’. Beazley was well aware of the strategic value of sub-

  marines, holding the view that: ‘Basically submarines are the poor

  man’s weapon to cause maximum angst to a bigger enemy.’17

  More fundamentally, he was a strong supporter of the Amer-

  ican alliance and appreciated that intelligence exchange could

  build trust and influence with the United States. Beazley under-

  stood how the strategic intelligence gathered by the Oberons had

  improved Australia’s standing with the Americans. Although he

  was working in a government where some members were wary of

  such activities, he was determined that the capability should be

  retained.

  Beazley deliberately worked to raise the profile of the subma-

  rine arm. He felt that it was one of the components of the defence

  force that was habitually undervalued, and he recalls that at one

  stage he threatened to promote no more naval officers to flag rank

  unless the next recommendation was for a submariner.18 It was

  not a coincidence that the first (and only) submariner to become

  chief of the navy, Ian MacDougall, was appointed by Kim Beazley.

  Soon after taking office, Kim Beazley commissioned strategist

  Paul Dibb to conduct a thorough review of Australian defence

  policy and told Dibb he had ‘open slather on investigations and

  the power to negotiate a consensus on force structure with Defence

  and the service chiefs’. The only thing that was off limits was the

  submarine project – Beazley would not allow Dibb to revise the

  project objective, numbers or capabilities.19

  Kim Beazley agreed with the analysis of Sir Alan Watt that:

  ‘Many nations must depend on others for their ultimate security

  but in most cases they try to maximise their own independence

  within a relationship of dependency. Australia has seemed intent

  on doing the very opposite: of maximising its dependence, first on

  Britain and lately on the US.’20 While strongly committed to the

  American alliance, Beazley’s primary aim as defence minister was

  to increase Australia’s self-reliance within the framework of the

  alliance. In his view, self-reliance meant armed forces structured

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  and equipped to defend Australia rather than to participate in dis-

  tant wars as part of an expeditionary force; equally importantly,

  it meant a strong manufacturing capability to support the armed

  forces.21

  Graham White recalls that the first office Minister Beazley vis-

  ited was the submarine project office in Fyshwick, and the first

  vessel he went on was a submarine. Traditionally ministers dealt

  with the uniformed members of the forces through the secretary

  of the department, so Rod Fayle remembers to his surprise one

  day answering the phone in the project office and finding Kim

  Beazley on the other end of the line. Fayle said, ‘I’m not allowed

  to talk to you’, but Beazley said that he was being given a lot

  of contradictory information about the submarine project and:

  ‘I want to speak with someone who knows what’s going on. Come

  over and speak to me.’ Fayle replied, ‘I’m not allowed to. I’ll

  get into trouble’, but the minister told him, ‘You ring Admiral

  Hudson [the chief of the navy] and tell him I want to speak to

  you about the project.’ Rod Fayle did this, and he and Graham

  White went on to spend many hours talking with Kim Beazley,

  often remaining with him late into the night. The results were, on

  the one hand, that Beazley was fully informed of the project and

  came to see the force of the arguments for building in Australia,

  and on the other, that White and Fayle became deeply unpopular

  with the navy hierarchy, who felt they were being bypassed and

  losing control of the project.

  By 1984 the idea of building submarines in Australia had gone

  well beyond the initial vague aspiration to become an important

  part of the procurement process. The eventual decision to award

  the submarine contract to a Swedish-led consortium owed at least

  as much to the Swedes’ commitment to building in Australia and

  their advanced design and building techniques as to the actual

  merits of their proposed design. Jim Duncan observed in his diary

  on 21 November 1984: ‘VSEL [the British bidders] are bitter that

  they are being beaten by a production technology . . . they claim

  that Canberra is obsessed with production technology rather than

  submarine technology.’

  When the Labor government came to office in March 1983,

  its Senate leader, John Button, became Minister for Industry and

  Commerce, a position he held for 10 years. He recalled that when

  he came into office: ‘Many of the major industry associations

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  sought subsidies and tariffs. The unions were locked into protec-

  tion as the solution to job losses in manufacturing.’22 To Button,

  the cures for Australia’s economic woes did not lie in increasing

  protection but in ‘revitalising manufacturing by means of better

  technology, a skilled workforce and flexible work practices’ – a

  similar mantra to the one coming from the submarine project

  team.

  John Button found Graham White ‘the most impressive of the

  navy people’, and he accepted White’s arguments for building the

  submarines in Australia. Button was ‘strongly opposed to buy-

  ing “off-the-shelf” submarines or anything else’ and he believed

  that the project could have enormous spin-offs for the revitalisa-

  tion of manufacturing. Although he feels the claim that he was

  responsible for the decision to build the submarines in Australia

  overstates his influence, most people close to the project feel that

  his role was crucial and he was one of the submarine project’s

  staunchest supporters in the cabinet.

  In 1984 John Button was one of several cabinet ministers to

  visit Sweden. One of his meetings was at the Federation of Swedish

  Industry, and he recalled that: ‘At lunch I found myself sitting

  next to Mr Roger Sprimont, a former naval officer and a director

  of the shipbuilding company, Kockums. It was not, I think, an

  accident.’23

  C H A P T E R 7

  ‘But how will you judge them?’: the

  tender evaluation process 1984–85

  There appear to have been two virtually separate histories of the

  new submarine project running in parallel during the mid-1980s.

  On the one hand there was the campaign around Australia led

  by Hans Ohff, John White, Graham White and Jim Duncan that

  put forward the submarine project as a major catalyst for indus-

  trial regeneration. On the other there were the bureaucratic pro-

  cesses of defence procurement among a small circle within the

  Department of Defence and the navy, with political involvement

  in the critical decisions. Within the defence bureaucracy there was

  great uncertainty abo
ut the submariners’ requirements and the

  proposed purchasing strategy and little enthusiasm for building

  in Australia.

  It was not until December 1982 that the procurement method

  was endorsed by the defence source definition committee, allow-

  ing the release of formal proposals to industry. However, the

  force structure committee, which assessed budgetary allocations,

  imposed strong caveats on the project. It insisted on continued

  investigation of the suitability of smaller submarines, and of post-

  poning the project if the Oberons’ service could be extended.

  Further, Alan Wrigley, the committee’s chairman, insisted that

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  59

  Australian industry involvement should be limited.1 Wrigley con-

  sidered that building an industry around the project unnecessarily

  complicated the selection processes for no good reason. He was

  sure that a submarine industry could not be sustained because the

  type of submarine the navy wanted was too big to interest foreign

  navies. Wrigley energetically pushed this view in the last months

  of the Fraser government, but the change of government in March

  1983 meant that he was swimming against a fast-flowing tide.2

  The project team proposed a new strategy for acquiring the

  submarines. The tenders sought in early 1983 would not be for

  the provision of equipment but, instead, for designs and proposals

  from which the two most promising would be selected for a

  detailed, funded study. This stage – the project definition study –

  would allow the project team to seek answers to the many

  questions that could affect the viability of the project. Usually

  contractual obligations enforced the manufacturer’s performance

  claims. With the new submarine, the navy wanted to make its own

  judgments on how the equipment would perform.

  Tenderers were to explain how they would promote partic-

  ipation by Australian industry in the project. The submarine

  builders were required to evaluate the technical risks of building in

  Australia and to put together a viable consortium capable of

  becoming prime contractor for the project. The contractors were

  expected to provide a product and then assist the navy to find

  ways to build it locally.

  In January 1983 manufacturers of ‘modern integrated combat

  systems’ were invited to register interest in the project, followed

  in May by a request for tenders to submarine builders. While the

  former was an open request to survey the market responses, the

  tender document was issued only to the seven submarine design

  companies identified by the project team as viable contenders. This

  was an unusual process in the regulated world of government

  contracting, where open competition was usually unavoidable,

  and it needed special authorisation.

  The tender request stipulated that the submarine should meet

  as closely as possible the navy’s required ship’s characteristics and

  also be a design already in service or due in service by 1986. This

  would allow the project to take advantage of sea trials conducted

  by the parent navy, an area in which Australia had little experi-

  ence. As a minimum, the design should be based on a submarine

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  already proven in service with a foreign navy, with any modifica-

  tions required to meet Australian specifications to be of low risk

  and cost.3 The request also stated that it would be an advantage

  for a company to have had experience in building submarines in

  other than their home nation.

  All seven companies responded to the tender request. The

  proposal from the Italian firm Cantieri Navali Riuniti was an

  enlarged version of the Sauro, a design of the early 1970s. The

  French company, Chartiers Dubigeon, presented a design for

  a conventionally-powered version of its Rubis nuclear-powered

  submarine.

  Many submariners liked the design by the Dutch consortium

  of designer United Shipbuilder Bureaux and shipyard de Rot-

  terdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij (RDM). This was a well-

  established Dutch team that had adapted the experimental ‘tear-

  drop’ hull shape of the USS Albacore for modern conventional

  submarines. In 1983 the Walrus, the first of a new class of sub-

  marine for the Royal Netherlands Navy, and two submarines for

  Taiwan, based on the earlier Dutch Zwaardvis class, were under

  construction. This was the design considered by Hans Ohff as the

  best but most difficult to build.

  Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering put forward the Type

  2400 Upholder design. Since the late 19th century Vickers had

  been one of the world’s great armaments manufacturers, but,

  along with other major British shipyards, it was nationalised in

  1977 to avert financial disaster. Vickers had built every British

  nuclear submarine but no conventional boats after the 1960s,

  except three German-designed Gal class for Israel. It had no expe-

  rience of managing submarine construction programs overseas

  and, even with its connections to Cockatoo Island Dockyard,

  appeared less than interested in Australian production.4

  Ingenieur Kontor L übeck (IKL) was a German design company

  that teamed with builder Howaltswerke-Deutsche Werft (HDW)

  and trading company Ferrostaal AG to successfully export sub-

  marines worldwide. It offered the IKL Type 2000 design, a devel-

  oped version of a submarine that it had proposed earlier to the

  United States Navy. IKL was a private submarine design company,

  founded in 1946 by Ulrich Gabler, which had three customers:

  the German government and the commercial submarine builders

  HDW and Thyssen.

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  61

  Even after re-armament in the mid-1950s the West German

  navy ordered few submarines, so IKL and HDW turned to foreign

  markets, becoming the world’s largest exporter of conventional

  submarines. Between 1964 and 1984 they sold 46 submarines to

  11 countries, representing over half of Western conventional sub-

  marines, and they had built submarines in both India and Turkey.

  Most of their exports were of the small Type 209, with the first

  of the larger Type 1500 submarines still under construction for

  India. In the early 1980s IKL and HDW were working on two new

  types of submarine for the West German navy and were experi-

  menting with fuel cells as a form of air-independent propulsion.5

  The IKL/HDW bid was headed by Juergen Ritterhoff, the senior

  designer of IKL. A short jovial man, Ritterhoff was a protégé

  of Ulrich Gabler and was widely respected for his encyclopaedic

  knowledge of submarine design.

  Another German contender, Thyssen Nordseewerke, was part

  of the Thyssen Group, one of West Germany’s largest industrial

  companies. For its Australian bid Thyssen was linked with ship-

  builders Blohm & Voss, experienced in managing export projects

  in Norway
, Nigeria and Argentina. Like HDW, Thyssen’s subma-

  rine business survived on export sales. In the early 1980s it was

  building two Type TR1700 submarines for Argentina in its own

  yards, with a further four boats to be assembled in Argentina from

  kits.

  Kockums, the Swedish submarine designer and builder, was

  founded in the earliest years of Swedish industrialisation, starting

  as a mechanical engineering workshop in 1840. It began ship-

  building in the early 1870s and built its first submarines for the

  Swedish navy in 1914. The company developed a reputation for

  innovation, building the world’s first all-welded merchant ship in

  1940 and the first super-tanker in 1962. From 1945 to the mid-

  1970s Kockums was a major commercial shipbuilder, building

  many of the world’s largest vessels with advanced modular con-

  struction techniques. However, shipbuilding collapsed with the oil

  crisis of 1974, and in 1978 Kockums passed into state ownership,

  eventually becoming part of Celsius, a government-owned defence

  company.6 Kockums’ submarines were designed for short-range,

  shallow water operations. The V ästerg ötland class, then the lat-

  est Kockums design, displaced only two-thirds as much as the

  Oberons.

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  Kockums’ bid was headed by Roger Sprimont, an adventurous,

  buccaneering former submariner, whose charismatic leadership

  and bold decision-making was a major reason for the company’s

  success in winning the contract. He had been one of Sweden’s

  youngest submarine commanding officers, and was the only

  Swede to complete the British Perisher training course, with the

  Australian submariner Rod Fayle as a classmate. In 1977 Spri-

  mont was navy liaison officer at Kockums, which two years later

  made him naval division marketing manager, and in 1982 head of

  division, where he was involved in the Indian submarine competi-

  tion. When the Australian project began he was initially sceptical

  about Sweden’s chances, thinking the British would win automat-

  ically, but when he was convinced that Sweden had a chance he

  threw himself into the campaign.

  Admiral Bill Rourke, chief of navy matériel, developed the

  evaluation of the responses. Specialist teams assessed how well

  each contender met the requirements in the areas of operational