Tag Archive for: air warfare destroyer

14,000 sounds like a lot—down to the docks again

All four blocks have been lifted onto the LHD01 hull at the BAE Systems Williamstown Dockyard.

Earlier this week, The Australian ran a story about delays in the construction of the Navy’s new amphibious ships. At first blush, it looked like a familiar story of poor shipyard performance, with 14,000 defects found in the HMAS Canberra, the first of the two new LHDs, resulting in a delivery delay of seven months. As the newspaper pointed out, the problems come at a bad time for the Australian shipbuilding industry, after a critical report on the air warfare destroyer project and a government decision to outsource the construction of two new replenishment ships to overseas companies:

They come at a time when the Abbott government appears to be paralysed with indecision about how to proceed with the country’s largest def­ence project, the $36bn construction of up to 12 submarines in ­Adelaide.

The delay in the completion of HMAS Canberra at Melbourne’s Williamstown shipyards has disappointed Defence, which says low productivity, poor skills and a shortage of trained supervisors has combined to delay the delivery of the ship until later this year.

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Defence projects, jobs and economic growth

HMAS Anzac under tow as it prepares to re-enter the water from Henderson Naval Base where it spent twelve months undergoing an upgrade.

In a recent post, Andrew Davies explained how the government ignored Defence’s advice and chose the MRH90 over the Black Hawk helicopter—presumably because the former offered more for local industry.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with considering industry factors in defence procurement. As John Harvey reminded us, a local preference can legitimately be based on defence self-reliance and/or broader economic benefits. Consistent with this, government announcements routinely tout the economic benefits of defence projects. For example, this year’s F-35 announcement said:

The acquisition of F-35 aircraft will bring significant economic benefits to Australia, including in regional areas and for the local defence industry with more jobs and production for many locally-based skilled and technical manufacturers.

The message is clear; the more work that’s done in Australia the better. In the case of the F-35, it’s likely true. Rather than rely on offsets, Australian firms compete with foreign manufacturers to supply the global F-35 program so that only internationally competitive firms thrive. In other instances, local sourcing occurs absent foreign competition and at a sizable cost premium, such as the troubled Air Warfare Destroyer Project where we are getting three vessels for the price of four. Read more

What do the AWD problems tell us about the future submarine?

I recently took a look at the ANAO’s audit of the Air Warfare Destroyer (AWD) program. The report is a solid read at 320 pages, but should be required reading for anyone making decisions about the future submarine. And there should be a test afterwards.

The first, and most important lesson is the need for design stability—and for the design to be in a form readily digestible by those who need to turn it into hardware. A great many of the problems experienced in the AWD build have been due to either changes in design details, or the difficulty of translating the design drawings into concrete production activities.

The ANAO’s figure 5.7 (reproduced below) shows the number of entries in the project’s ‘problems and issue reports’ database by category. Nearly half the records related to design issues. The fault for those problems shouldn’t be laid solely at the feet of Navantia as the design house, although there have been attempts to do so. But it’s worth understanding what went wrong.

Figure 5.7: Categories of problem and issue reports, July 2009 - April 2013 Read more

The AWDs and the auditors—round two

A computer generated image of the Air Warfare Destroyer (AWD). The project will deliver three world-class ships and their support systems to the Royal Australian Navy ( RAN).

When the Australian National Audit Office’s audit report on the Air Warfare Destroyer program was released last week, I was told by a veteran journo that it was a bit of a disappointment to his colleagues. They’d apparently been hoping for a story about a Defence managed fiasco that’d make for screaming headlines along the lines of ‘billions wasted says government watchdog’.

That’s an unfortunate reflection on the state of news reporting these days, because the ANAO report is a very important one, and it has implications far beyond the AWD program. It fills out much of the detail hinted at last year in ’round one’. And I’d have thought there are enough titbits in there to make for at least a moderately unhappy story if that’s what required to sell papers (or, increasingly, to draw clicks). But it’s also to my eye the auditor’s best Defence project effort to date, so let me at least put my vote of thanks on the record for an important piece of work.

This report is especially significant because there’s bipartisan support in Australia for continuing naval shipbuilding in country. So despite the shortcomings in the AWD build, more such projects are likely to follow—with costs to taxpayers running into tens of billions of dollars. It’s pretty important to understand what’s happened in this case. Read more

We’ll build ships together

Crane 8 at the old Cockatoo Island dockyards

It’s becoming something of an annual tradition that I get asked along to the Australian Defence Magazine (ADM) conference and get to be the token economic rationalist on Day 2. At an industry-focused conference, that’s a bit like being the crazy uncle at the Christmas dinner table. Last year, for example, I was asked to talk about whether there’s a future for non-sovereign providers of defence material—and decided instead to argue that it’s actually the sovereign providers who are an endangered species.

In other ventures onto the stage at defence industry functions I’ve variously argued that we should take advantage of other countries (PDF) that prop up their defence industries with government funding by buying the below cost products that emerge, and (with partners in thought crime Henry Ergas and Mark Thomson) that we should allow the cold winds of competition (PDF) to blow through the Australian naval shipbuilding industry in the name of efficiency. Read more

It’s time to review the AWD

Senator the Honourable David Johnston, Minister of Defence addresses the invited guests at the keel laying of the second Air Warfare Destroyer at the ASC shipyards.

It’s Australia’s biggest current defence project and a multi-billion dollar headache for Defence Minister David Johnston. The Abbott Government is expected to commission soon a broad scale external review of the $8 billion air warfare destroyer project as concerns grow within the government about cost-blowouts and schedule delays.

The first of the three AWD’s, HMAS Hobart, was originally due to be handed over to the RAN later this year but the delivery schedule has since twice slipped and the Hobart handover is now due in early 2016 with the final vessel, HMAS Sydney, to be completed in 2019. An even bigger concern, according to senior defence sources, is that the AWD project has spent the lion’s share of budgeted funds well before the delivery of single hull, putting the project’s remaining contingency reserve at risk.

Estimates of the projected AWD project cost blowout are now well north of half a billion dollars and counting. An ANAO report, believed to be strongly critical of the management of key aspects of the $8 billion project, is due to be published next month but its findings have been challenged by the DMO and Defence. Read more

Reader response: amphibious capability

The departure of the hull of the first of the Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN’s) new amphibious ships from Ferrol in northern Spain.I substantially agree with Hugh White’s analysis of the overall structure of Australia’s surface fleet—or at least the amphibious assault component of it. One of the original justifications for seeking an LHD of more than 25,000 tonnes was that only ships of this size could simultaneously lift an entire infantry company, which we’re assured requires a minimum of six helicopters in the air at the same time. But why all six helicopters need to operate simultaneously from one large ship rather than, say, two slightly smaller ones has never to my knowledge been convincingly explained. And as White argues, this sort of combat capability is in any case irrelevant to the role of the ships for humanitarian and disaster relief. Additionally, it has never been made clear why a company is some sort of indivisible unit when it comes to airborne assault—surely there are some circumstances when a company won’t be enough, just as there’ll be circumstances where smaller units, and therefore smaller numbers of helicopters, are perfectly adequate.

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