by Peter Yule
tomers was the product being sold. The reason that Australia was
building its own class of long-range submarine was that no other
country built a submarine that met Australia’s requirements. The
corollary of this was that few countries needed such submarines
and, of the potential customers, only Canada had similar require-
ments. Most countries were looking for smaller, short-range
submarines.
This in turn raised the issue of what Australia could actually
sell, and pointed to an obvious conflict of interest between ASC
and Kockums. The Type 471 being built by ASC was designed
by Kockums, and any sales would be dependent on Kockums’
support in the design area if nothing else. If ASC was to build
smaller submarines in Adelaide to export, realistically these could
only be derivatives of Kockums’ designs for the Swedish navy, and
would rely even more heavily on Kockums’ support. For ASC to
export submarines, therefore, it had to persuade Kockums that it
would be better to work through ASC rather than export directly
from Sweden. As Kockums’ order book shrank and its bustling
yards fell silent, it was hard to convince the Swedes that it would
not be preferable to keep the work in Malm ö.
Nonetheless, in the early years of ASC some serious efforts
were made to market the Collins class, with ASC, Rockwell and
Kockums goaded by Oscar Hughes into cooperating with his sales
efforts. Hughes was the driving force behind pushing for exports
because he was determined to make full use of the capabilities that
had been built up in Australia and sustain the industrial infrastruc-
ture until it was time to replace Collins. The prospect of export
E N D O F T H E H O N E Y M O O N
203
sales also had the effect of maintaining enthusiasm within ASC,
but he realised that ‘to win an export market takes years of work,
a lot of luck and a lot of money’, and that realistically the chances
of success were slim.
Rick Neilson was the Rockwell representative on sales trips
to Canada, South Korea, Italy and Indonesia. He recalls that:
‘Canada was a shambles – the Canadians had no idea what they
wanted to do.’12 The Koreans’ problem was they did not really
need a big blue-water submarine – but the Japanese are their tradi-
tional enemies and the Koreans wanted to have a bigger submarine
than them, so there was cause for some optimism. Neilson had an
appointment to see the chief of the Korean navy one Monday
morning, only to hear the day before that the chief of the navy
was one of five military leaders who had just been put in jail. In
1998–99 there was a push by Celsius, Kockums and ASC to sell a
derivative of the Swedish Gotland class design through ASC into
Korea, to be followed by an unspecified ‘larger than 2600 tonnes
submarine’, supposedly a Collins derivative.13 However, Korea
chose to buy HDW submarines and is now firmly aligned to the
Germans.14
Neilson also went to Indonesia in President Habibie’s day –
‘He’d just bought the East German navy and had delusions of
grandeur, but he was never really serious about Collins.’ The real-
ity Neilson found was that other countries simply did not need a
boat like Collins.
By 1990 Canada had ended its flirtation with nuclear sub-
marines and was once more considering conventional options.
The ASC consortium responded by setting up an office in Canada
to promote the Collins class. Pelle Stenberg was Kockums’ repre-
sentative in Canada, Don Dillon represented Rockwell and Rick
Canham went there for ASC. However, Stenberg soon felt that
the Canadians were unlikely to spend the money needed for new
submarines and that they would probably buy second-hand, as in
fact they did, when they bought Britain’s redundant Upholders in
1998. The ASC office was closed down in 1993.
After Canada, Malaysia was seen as one of the most likely
markets for Australian submarines, but the efforts in this mar-
ket showed that the fragile unity of the consortium was breaking
down. Malaysia wanted small, short-range submarines and was
not interested in a submarine with the capabilities of the Collins
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class. This brought out the conflict of interest between ASC and
Kockums.
By 1992, when Malaysia was inviting expressions of interest,
AIDC was becoming interested in extending its involvement in
military industries. Inspired by Peter Horobin, it attempted to put
together a bid for a submarine for Malaysia, involving a pro-
posal to build the Swedish A19 Gotland design in Adelaide, but
with a Rockwell combat system. This proposal was made with-
out telling Kockums, which submitted a separate bid, also for the
A19, but with a Saab combat system. The consequence of the
disunity between ASC, AIDC and Kockums was that Malaysia
bought French submarines.
A final strange postscript to the export story came with a let-
ter from an unknown merchant banker claiming to be acting on
behalf of the Taiwanese government. In the letter an offer was
made to buy six Collins submarines, with a further incentive
being an offer to buy South Australia’s entire wine production.15
Although this was probably a hoax, it is likely that Taiwan would
have bought Australian submarines if it had been politically pos-
sible. Indeed the only rumours of export sales since 1999 have
been for Collins class submarines to be built in America for sale
to Taiwan.16
An old retailing truism is: ‘You don’t make money yelling
“Stinking fish for sale”.’ Any realistic chance of selling Australian
submarines ended in the mid-1990s when a storm of media criti-
cism made them virtually unsaleable.
But was Collins a stinking fish? While the first submarine had
been taking shape in the shed at ASC, its commanding officer had
been appointed and the crew assembled. Training had been under
way for several years and, with Collins back in the water, the trials process was about to begin. Would the submarine meet the hopes
of those who had worked for years planning and building it, and
the expectations of those who were waiting to sail in it?
C H A P T E R 18
The trials of Collins
Even in its golden era in the 1980s the Australian Oberon
squadron struggled to maintain its numbers and needed every
sailor it had for its operations. The ideal complement of sub-
mariners was over 800 but there were rarely more than 600, and
this meant that the squadron was reluctant to release submariners
to work with the project or to crew the first two boats, Collins
and Farncomb.
In late 1987 the project office prepared a ‘manpower forecast-
ing model’ and told the navy the numbers that would be needed
for the new submarines as they were built. The navy assumed that
sailors would be excited at the prospect of being part of the first
crews and there would be no problems recruiting, but as early
as 1989 the project was concerned that the ‘manpower available
for early training and trials of the new submarines was critically
limited and could disrupt progress’.1
The manpower crisis was a constant problem throughout the
test and trials phase of the project, and the original intention to
have a trials crew and a commissioning crew was abandoned as
there were not enough sailors to make up separate crews.
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Commander Trevor Robertson, an experienced Oberon
captain, was the first commanding officer of Collins, joining the
submarine project in 1990. Robertson’s primary roles were to
assemble the first two crews and supervise their training, and
review the trials and operations procedures developed by ASC and
the project. Robertson was aware that he was the only command
qualified submariner connected with the project and by default
was responsible for telling ASC and the project what the sub-
mariners needed and wanted, although he found it hard to make
them listen.
The first members of Collins’ crew moved to Adelaide in early
1992 and they soon discovered the reality of the Royal Australian
Navy being the parent navy of the Collins class. With the Oberons
all the training programs had been developed by the British and
until 1986 much of the training was done in Britain. However,
Collins required completely new training programs and these had
to be ready for use well before the first submarine was launched.
As with other ‘parent navy issues’ the challenges this involved
were not fully appreciated by the navy.
Under the contract ASC and its sub-contractors were respon-
sible for developing and delivering training programs. As early as
1989 there were concerns about their slow progress. The project
office’s report for December 1989 fretted that:
It is now apparent to the Project that ASC’s current ILS
[integrated logistics support] development program has not
sufficiently recognized the first major milestone of
commencement of Trials Crew training in mid-1992 . . . [It
is] now increasingly probable that continued delay with
maintenance task analysis and documentation produced will
impact on the quality of some of the training courses.
In spite of this early notice, the prediction came true and the
early training was patchy, superficial and often a waste of time.
The chief source of difficulty for ASC was that the late comple-
tion of the design of many systems and the failure of many sub-
contractors to provide information on their equipment made it
difficult to plan the training. It is obviously difficult to train peo-
ple to use a system that has not been designed and of which the
trainer has no knowledge.2
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207
Mike Gallagher, who was the first commanding officer of
Farncomb and the head of the submarine sea training group,
recalls that the training for the combat system was designed
around what the combat system was supposed to be like, but
bore little relation to the patched up system that was put in the
early boats. As a result they trained for a system they did not have
and had to repeat the training for the system they actually took
to sea. He acknowledges that the company responsible for the
combat system training, Scientific Management Associates, ‘tried
their hearts out to make it work’, but it was impossible with the
material they were given.
The simulator for the ship control and management system at
the new submarine base at HMAS Stirling was more successful,
although when the submarines got to sea the crews found that
some of the procedures they had learnt in the simulator did not
work in the submarines. Peter Sinclair, the commanding officer of
Collins during its trials, recalls that:
On our very first dive – having practised this procedure
hundreds of times in the simulator – it was almost the
complete reverse when we dived the submarine – the
sequence of steps practised in the simulator were in the
reverse to reality with the result that the submarine ended up
with the propeller about 20 feet out of the water on her first
dive. We quickly realised that the sequencing taught for
opening the ballast tanks was different to the way the actual
submarine reacted. It was one of the things we fixed quickly
by changing the procedure.
In the crew’s view, the training for Collins presumed that nothing
would ever break down. The levels of redundancy in the sub-
marines were believed to be so great that the crews would need
to know little about maintaining systems while at sea. As a result
there was little training given for this, so when things did break
down the crews had to teach themselves how to repair them.
Marcos Alfonso, the first marine engineer on Collins, joined the
crew in January 1993, and says that they lost some crew because
some older sailors were unable to grasp the ‘fly by wire’ concept
of the new submarines. The Oberons were mechanical and manu-
ally intensive, while the new submarines were electronic and auto-
mated. In the Oberons the crew had to walk around to open and
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shut valves manually; on Collins they sat at consoles and pressed
buttons.
While the new submarines were totally different from
the Oberons they had many similarities with the Swedish
V ästerg ötland class, and most of the officers and some of the
crew of Collins were sent to Sweden for training. Trevor Robert-
son recalls being told by one of the old-style Oberon comman-
ders that he would never learn anything from the Swedes because
they only had a ‘brown-water navy’. However, Robertson found
the Swedish experience invaluable. The Swedes let him act as
commanding officer of one of their submarines and operated it
in English for him. He found they were experts in their shal-
low, freshwater operations and their submarine was brilliant.
The V ästerg ötland’s ‘X’ configuration rudder made it extremely
manoeuvrable: it could turn in its own length and drove like a
sports car. Ulf Edman, the commander of the Swedish submarine
squadron, gave Robertson every assistance and he learned a great
deal from the way the Swedes operated their submarines.
The Swedes told Robertson of some of the problems they had
with the V ästerg ötlands, and he wrote a report on these issues.
He thinks that the report was probably filed away and forgot-
ten because many of the same problems appeared on Collins. He
believes that the Australian submarine project did not get the full
benefit of the connection with Kockums and the Swedish navy,
because of a reluctance to listen.
When Australia’s Oberons wer
e built in Scotland in the 1960s
and 1970s, the crews spent months with their boats during con-
struction and, as Graham White recalls, they ‘knew every nut
and bolt before they went to sea’.3 White joined ASC as sea tri-
als manager and he was disappointed that the crews of the new
submarines showed little interest in their boats while they were
being built. He told the crews that they could have open access
to the boats every night, but few sailors took up the offer. Trevor
Robertson confirms this. He spent a lot of time on Collins during
construction, and encouraged his crew to do the same, but few of
them did so.
Marcos Alfonso agrees that the crews spent little time on
Collins, but thinks that this was not from lack of interest. Much
of the training took place in Sydney and Western Australia and
many senior sailors and officers spent little time in Adelaide. When
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209
they were in Adelaide they were allowed to walk around the sub-
marines but it was strictly a ‘look but don’t touch’ situation. They
could learn about the components and their location but they did
not learn how to operate them – this was learned at sea, ‘where
equipment was damaged due to lack of knowledge of how to
operate it’.
Graham White felt that there was an attitude of complacency
among the crews, which stemmed from the general view in the
navy that the contractor would supply the submarines and the
navy would simply take them over and drive them. They expected
that new submarines would be like new cars, where you just turn
the key and drive away. There was no understanding that the RAN
was the parent navy for the submarines and had a much greater
responsibility for the product than the buyer of a new car.
One week before the launch of Collins Trevor Robertson
resigned his command and left the navy. He felt frustrated that his
attempts to fix the problems on the submarine had been ignored
and more generally felt that he and his crew had been poorly
looked after by the navy. However, the main reason he left was
that he realised he would be posted away from Collins before he
had a chance to take it to sea and, after the excitement of sub-
marine command, he did not want to go and sit behind a desk.
The timing of the resignation was not designed to embarrass the
