Tag Archive for: Hunter class

When is a corvette not a corvette?

The defence strategic review highlighted the need for the Royal Australian Navy to have two levels of surface combatants to provide ‘increased strike, air defence, presence operations and anti-submarine warfare’. While the DSR doesn’t directly recommend changes to the structure of the surface combatant fleet, it says: ‘Enhancing Navy’s capability in long-range strike (maritime and land), air defence and anti-submarine warfare requires the acquisition of a contemporary optimal mix of Tier 1 and Tier 2 surface combatants, consistent with a strategy of a larger number of smaller surface vessels.’

The requirement for more smaller vessels, combined with the need for strike and anti-submarine warfare, has fuelled public discussion on whether the RAN requires corvettes to deliver the range of effects the DSR describes. The discussion has intensified following the release of the Australian National Audit Office report on the Hunter-class frigate program, which confirms that the cost of the nine vessels has already increased by 50%, years before the first is to be delivered.

In late 2022 there were reports of offers to the RAN of corvettes from TKMS and Navantia, which are delivering such vessels to Saudi Arabia, and Luerssen, which is overseeing the construction of offshore patrol vessels (OPVs) for the RAN and has delivered K130 corvettes to the German navy.

In considering corvettes for the RAN, it’s fair to ask what a corvette is, and what the navy needs them for. A corvette is not as simple as it would first appear. Although naval history buffs will likely baulk at the comment, there’s no strict definition of a corvette—and the RAN has a history of not sticking to strict definitions of types of ships.

The hierarchy of ship types is generally determined by the size, weight, firepower and employment of each vessel. One might accordingly define the hierarchy from smallest to largest, with associated growth in firepower from a patrol boat to a corvette, then a frigate, then a destroyer, then a cruiser, and so on.

The RAN’s fleet structure demonstrates that this hierarchy isn’t strict. The 10,000-tonne Hunter-class frigate is to be almost three times the displacement of the Anzac-class frigate at 3,600 tonnes. On the other hand, the RAN’s Hobart-class destroyers are based on the design of the Spanish F-100 frigate and have a displacement of about 7,000 tonnes, which makes them more akin to a traditional frigate. A modern corvette can range anywhere between 500 tonnes and 3,000 tonnes, almost the size of an Anzac-class frigate. You can see the conundrum.

Picking the term ‘corvette’ and attaching it to a particular naval task doesn’t help.

Any discussion about the RAN’s force structure must focus on the effects it needs to deliver, balanced against its key constraints.

The DSR recommends: ‘Australia’s immediate region encompassing the northeastern Indian Ocean through maritime Southeast Asia into the Pacific, including our northern approaches, should be the primary area of military interest for Australia’s National Defence.’

This highlights what the RAN has known for some time, that force generation no longer relies on producing one major surface combatant to deploy on a unique operation in a far-off place. The RAN fleet requires flexibility and persistence. Australia has the world’s third largest economic exclusion zone and achieving flexibility and persistence requires scale—a surface combatant fleet much greater than the 11 vessels now in service, or the 12 planned for the future fleet.

In heralding the ‘missile age’ in modern warfare (although decades late), the DSR by implication also highlights that the littoral zones of Australia’s immediate region will likely be a contested environment. By implication, not only does the RAN need flexibility and persistence at scale, it also requires its platforms to have a minimum degree of air-defence capability. This puts the Arafura-class OPV in the firing line both literally and figuratively, noting its extremely limited armament.

In addition to flexibility, persistence, scale and self-defence capability, the RAN also has challenges in the number of missiles it can put to sea from an offensive-capability perspective. This has been explored in the ASPI publication The Hunter frigate: an assessment and won’t be revisited here, except to say that it will need to be a key consideration of the fleet mix. The RAN must be able to get more missiles to sea than it can now. This uncomfortable fact has led to calls for more Hobart-class destroyers to be produced, and offers from Navantia to do so. While the acquisition of further destroyers, or ‘Tier 1’ capabilities, is not the subject of this article, it must be acknowledged that the ability to put missiles to sea in as many platforms as possible must be a key consideration for the RAN.

Given the distances the RAN will be required to project across, a key ingredient of persistence and presence is speed. Another limitation of the Arafura OPVs is their maximum speed of 20 knots, slow for a modern naval vessel. The transition to a ‘focused force’ in light of the DSR must not lose sight of the reality that Australia’s maritime strategy still requires the RAN to deliver a constabulary function while the Australian Border Force fleet remains constrained. The rightful focus on warfighting capability for the RAN must not ignore the fact that, under the current construct, the RAN’s smaller vessels, be they patrol boats, OPVs or corvettes, will be required to undertake constabulary roles. The RAN couldn’t trade this role away without it having to be resourced elsewhere.

While this all points to solutions requiring several new platforms, the RAN’s key constraints of workforce and strategic warning time must be taken into account. The DSR reinforces the finding in the 2020 defence strategic update that Australia can no longer rely on having 10 years’ warning of a major conflict. That means the fleet to support the DSR’s requirements—noting the limitations of the current fleet—must be acquired quickly to be strategically relevant. So, is it possible to modify the Arafuras to meet the capability the RAN requires, or should a new platform of a developed design be acquired quickly through some form of commercial off-the-shelf agreement?

The DSR acknowledges that the RAN faces significant workforce constraints. Increasing the number of surface combatants will require a large increase in the number of personnel to crew them. That will come on top of the need to expand the submarine workforce to crew the nuclear-powered submarines coming under the AUKUS agreement. Each US Virginia-class boat will require three times more personnel than the RAN’s Collins-class boats. Consequently, the RAN is unlikely to be able to support significant growth in the requirements to crew surface combatants. Transitioning some of the roles assigned to the RAN’s fleet to uncrewed capabilities may be a future option, but it’s unlikely to resolve some of the key challenges faced by the RAN fleet in the near term.

All this demonstrates that rather than focusing on a specific type or class of ship with dubious definitions such as a corvette, we should focus on the effects that need to be delivered. Flexibility, persistence, scale, self-defence, offensive-strike capabilities and constabulary operations must be weighed against the clear constraints, delivery timeframes and workforce constraints. Consideration of these elements will lead to some clear conclusions about what is in the art of the possible for the future fleet mix.

Hunter-class frigates won’t meet the RAN’s needs

Since the British Type 26 was announced as the reference design for Royal Australian Navy’s nine Hunter-class frigates, the program has been controversial. The recent leaked report on the system design review was extremely negative, giving rise to calls to cancel the program.

So, what does the navy require of its surface combatants and will the Hunter be able to deliver it? This is a critical issue in an era where large warships have become a threatened species. Analyst Hugh White recently said, ‘Finding a ship is now a cinch and sinking it is now trivial.’ Some other experts agree.

Yet, despite these negative views, technologies to counter new threats continue to be developed and the navies of the world are commissioning new surface combatants at a rapid rate. The US Navy is building the latest Flight III version of its Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, a 40-year-old design, as quickly as it can while designing its even larger successor, the DDG(X). China’s navy is delivering large, heavily armed surface combatants at a rate of which the West can only dream.

The US Navy clearly believes it can counter the missile threat. Rear Admiral Paul Schlise, director of surface warfare, said recently that a fight against an adversary like China would be a ‘missile-to-missile game’. The US Standard Missile (SM) series of precision-guided weapons, which has provided the RAN’s main missile firepower for more than 50 years, now includes long-range anti-missile defence that can engage both ballistic and hypersonic missiles.

When evaluating the capability required by the Hunter in a missile-to-missile game, the similar sized Arleigh Burke provides an object lesson. Its SPY phased-array radar detects incoming missiles, while the Aegis weapon system with a vertical launch system (VLS) of 96 full-size missile cells can engage them. Importantly, the US Navy’s development of network-centric warfare, represented by the Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC), provides a significant force multiplier.

The CEC system of an Aegis-equipped ship will select the best quality tracks from the sensors of all ships and aircraft in the network to produce tracking data for the launch and control of missiles. Missiles are then fired from whichever ‘shooter’ in the network is best placed to give the highest probability of defeating an attack. All this occurs automatically, according to preset protocols, because a split-second delay even at great ranges can be the difference between life and death.

Australia’s Hobart-class destroyers, equipped with Aegis, SPY-1 radar and 48 VLS cells, are the only non-US ships that participate in CEC. The Hunter is designed to follow in the Hobart’s footsteps and, despite its limited firepower (32 VLS cells), will possess one significant advantage, not only over the Hobart class but over the standard-setting Arleigh Burke as well. The Hunter will employ the fully digital CEAFAR2 active phased-array radar, using leading-edge Australian technology.

Yet the selection of the Hunter to replace the Anzac-class ships was a mistake. The operational requirement for Defence’s Sea 5000 program took inadequate account of the magnitude and nature of the developing strategic threat to Australia. On the basis of the Australian Defence Force’s usual like-for-like approach to replacing platforms, the initial specification was for a lightly armed warship, albeit one that specialised in anti-submarine warfare.

While the addition of Aegis, SM systems and CEA radars to the Sea 5000 operational requirement was sensible, the selection of the Type 26 as the reference design then made it highly risky. These systems had never before been integrated on a British warship. Indeed, the obvious choice from among the competing platforms for Sea 5000 now became the Spanish F-5000, which was a development of the Hobart class and already embodied Aegis and SM weapons. It also had 50% more missile cells than the Hunter and we knew how to build it.

The question now is whether the Hunter’s obvious shortcomings can be rectified or if the program should be cancelled at significant cost. There are four main areas of contention that need to be addressed.

First, deploying a frigate optimised for anti-submarine warfare is contrary to RAN doctrine and at odds with how anti-submarine warfare is conducted in the Indo-Pacific. While the British use surface ships to track submarines in the Atlantic and to protect their ballistic missile submarines from hostile subs, the RAN’s doctrine is similar to that of the US Navy’s in using aircraft and submarines as the main assets to track hostile submarines. Deploying a frigate to engage a submarine has been compared to sending a chicken to kill a fox.

Second, with a battery of 32 VLS cells, the Hunter would lack the firepower to contribute effectively in any great-power maritime conflict in the region. Although the requirement for the Hunter was changed to include both Aegis and American SMs, there was no consequent increase in firepower. Following his description of a future conflict being a ‘missile-to-missile game’, Schlise warned that even US destroyers lack the ‘magazine depth’ for that kind of battle. Acquiring three large warships to provide equal firepower to one similar sized Arleigh Burke, at a far higher cost, makes no sense.

Indeed, Australia is paying an enormous premium compared with other countries to put VLS missile cells to sea. US analysis based on publicly available information suggests that the cost of one missile cell on a new Arleigh Burke is US$22 million, compared with US$119 for the Hunter class. The South Korean KDX-III is even more cost-effective.

Third, with the weight added to the ship to accommodate Australian requirements, the Hunter’s speed will lag well below operational standards. It appears to need significantly more power in order to keep up with the fleet, both in terms of maximum and economical cruising speed. Constant use of its gas turbine may be required, which will compromise both the ship’s vaunted stealth abilities as well as its range. A ship of the Hunter’s size should have two gas turbines to provide redundancy in case of failure or battle damage.

Last, a 3% design margin for growth in the weight of the ship is so low that it leaves no scope for future upgrades. At a time of rapid technological change, a new warship with a life of perhaps 30 years will require at least one substantial upgrade in its life.

Even if feasible, rectifying these problems would require a new design. In principle, the changes required could be accommodated in a 10,000-tonne design, as exemplified by the Arleigh Burke. Australia is already paying an eye-watering $6.27 billion for the redesign of a ship that Defence once classified as ‘mature’.

If the necessary design changes prove impossible, however, the government should move rapidly to cancel the Hunter and order more Hobart ships to an updated design. This must include the installation of CEAFAR2, and the contract with Lockheed Martin to integrate it with Aegis should continue. Alternatively, we could seek to construct in Australia the Flight III version of the Arleigh Burke destroyer, again with the CEAFAR2 and Aegis. We could then use that as a basis for seeking involvement in the DDG(X) program. But time is of the essence. If nothing changes, the navy won’t deploy a single additional VLS cell for another decade.

Hunter-class frigate report indicates Australian naval shipbuilding in disarray

The latest revelations about the Royal Australian Navy’s Hunter-class frigates confirm much of what we knew about the problems besetting the program, but add a level of granularity far beyond the general admissions made by Defence Department officials at earlier Senate committee hearings.

This new evidence is contained in the system design review exit report written by the Hunter program’s own engineering team in November 2021. It’s coming from the coal face and is as close to the ground truth as you can get.

A system design review is a key milestone that is meant to demonstrate that the project will meet the system’s requirements—or, in other words, that the elements of the ship make a coherent whole that will deliver the capability the navy seeks.

Unfortunately, the exit report indicates that the design is far from coherent. We’ve known that the substantial modifications that Defence imposed on what was an immature design to start with have driven substantial problems. First among these is a growth in the size of the vessel from around 8,000 tonnes to over 10,000 tonnes. The laws of physics mean that if you increase the size of the vessel by 25% without increasing the power plant, performance will suffer. The exit report puts some detail around that, stating that ‘maximum speed will be lower than comparable RAN surface combatants’ and the vessel will face ‘increased fuel consumption and running costs’.

Lack of power also has a direct impact on warfighting capability, with the commander needing to ‘prioritise power allocation to either the CEAFAR2 radar or the propulsion system depending on the ship’s operational requirements’. In the middle of a fight when you need to go fast and run your radar at full power to detect incoming missiles, you can’t do both. The list of problems goes on, suggesting that ultimately a feasible ship design may not be possible.

The future frigate selection process was meant to pick a mature design that was in the water and in service. Instead, it picked an immature design as its reference ship (the UK’s Type 26 frigate) that had barely started construction and was far from being in the water, let alone in service. The government also agreed to five major changes to the design, including installing the Australian-made CEAFAR radar and the US Aegis combat system. There’s no such thing as a completely off-the-shelf warship design, but the point of picking a mature, in-service design is to minimise changes and the technical and schedule risks that accompany them. Instead, the path Defence has taken has generated risks that are now being realised.

One key irony is that the now-cancelled Attack-class submarine program had completed its system functional review—a milestone further along the design path than the system design review—and was ready to commence detailed design. In essence, the Attack class was considerably more mature than the Hunter and its technical, cost and schedule risks better understood.

Senior Defence leaders are predictably saying that solutions to the Hunter’s design problem are well underway. However, Defence’s assurances have minimal credibility in the shipbuilding space. For years Defence assured Senate committees that the Attack class would provide a regionally superior capability throughout its life, yet after the cancellation the prime minister stated that the Attack class would have been obsolete almost the minute it went in the water and ‘we formed the very strong view, the unanimous view of all the Chiefs of our services and Defence Force, that this was a capability that was not going to meet our needs’.

So, where does that all leave us? The delays in the Hunter program mean that the start of construction has slid from 2020 to 2022 and now to 2024, with the exit review warning of further possible delays. At the business end of the project, initial operational capability—when the first vessel is ready to fight—is now 2034. Even the most optimistic view of the nuclear submarine program doesn’t see it delivering any capability any earlier than that, and unless AUKUS finds a way to short circuit usual project timelines, it could be considerably later.

The government’s $575 billion expenditure on defence in the 2020s, which includes $270 billion on new capability, will not get any frontline warships to sea this decade and likely none until the middle of next decade. Meanwhile, the Anzac and Collins fleets will need to serve on into the 2040s, hopefully (but not assuredly) ageing gracefully. But if the brand-new Attack class wasn’t going to be the undersea warfare capability we need, it’s hard to see the 40-year-old Collins providing it.

The RAN’s entire warfighting capability is at risk.

We simply can’t afford to cross our fingers and hope that Defence can sort out the problems in the Hunter-class program. Even if it can, the capability it delivers is too little, too late, at too great a cost—and may be irrelevant in the face of future threats. ASPI and others have suggested alternative and complementary courses of action, from building more of the proven Hobart-class air warfare destroyers, to arming the Arafura-class offshore patrol vessels (which don’t even have a main gun) with anti-ship missiles, to investing more heavily in lethal uncrewed and autonomous systems, to acquiring strike systems such as the B-21 bomber.

So far, Defence’s focus has doubled down on the shipbuilding program; indeed, the SSN program is sucking even more people and attention into that space. But anybody with a basic familiarity with crew resource management will tell you that if everybody in the cockpit focuses on the flashing red light on the panel in front of them, the aeroplane will fly into a mountain.

Australia’s new frigates will be fit for the future. Our submarines should be too

One of the pearls in my memory of working in a big bureaucracy showed how things that make sense inside it simply don’t in the outside world. It’s a corrosive dynamic that applies to how the Defence Department’s decades-long megaprojects—whether frigates, submarines or even armoured fighting vehicles—are designed and implemented. And it must be addressed—probably by external pressure and ministerial direction.

I was returning to Defence after a couple of years in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and at the time had a pretty racy BlackBerry mobile, the latest version. Arriving back at Defence I was told to hand it over and take an older, chunkier model instead. When I asked why I couldn’t keep the new phone from the same manufacturer, I was told, ‘We don’t use them here. Defence bought a job lot of this [chunky old] model a few years ago at a discount and we’re giving them out until we’ve got none left.’

After muttering about how if I went home to proudly tell my wife I’d bought a decade’s supply of mobiles for the family because I got 10% off, she’d say something predictable and unsupportive, I took the phone. It did less, less well, than the one I gave up.

Unfortunately, this mindset of setting requirements today that don’t make sense in the future seems to apply to how the Defence architects of the $79 billion future submarine project are working. In better news, the BAE designers of the Hunter-class future frigate seem to understand that, if the design is going to last beyond its early days in the 2030s, it needs to have large, inherent flexibility. This is to give the design some solid future-proofing to accommodate changes and capability additions that we don’t even know about now.

The nine frigates Australia will get for its $35 billion are to be equipped with the latest US Aegis combat system, missile launch cells and advanced passive and active sonars, and an acoustic array for underwater search, as well as an embarked anti-submarine helicopter and CEA’s fabulous phased array radar. But that’s all so 2019. Because the designers—and the Royal Navy lead customer—know that military technology—along with civil technology with strong military applications—is evolving so fast, they know these state-of-the-art systems by themselves, even upgraded, wouldn’t guarantee the frigate’s combat edge in the 2030s.

So, unlike the two other frigate designs in the competition, BAE took a distinctive and smart approach to building flexibility into the core design of the frigate. This was smart because the painful history of large-scale redesigns of platforms to retrofit significant new capabilities fills the archives of various countries’ auditors of big defence projects. It is much harder and much more costly to do a major redesign than to incorporate flexibility early on.

That’s why the Hunter-class frigate has a large multi-mission bay. The integrated mission bay and hangar will be ‘capable of supporting multiple helicopters, UUVs [unmanned underwater vehicles], boats, mission loads and disaster relief stores. A launcher can be provided for fixed-wing UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] operation’. The designers have allowed for the ship’s systems to generate extra power for whatever is operated from the mission bay, and the ship’s centre of gravity has been set to allow new systems to be carried in the bay without affecting overall ship performance.

This means that the frigate is very likely to be able to launch, recover and operate with a wide range of types, sizes and configurations of armed and unarmed UAVs (drones), unmanned surface vessels and even unmanned underwater vessels. Some may well be launched from the missile cells near the bow.

Turning to the Attack class, we’re told it will be a ‘regionally superior’ submarine. It will evolve over the course of the build; the first of the 12 delivered sometime after 2035 will be quite different from the last one in 2054. And it will adapt to new technologies over this time. That all sounds great until you unpack what it doesn’t say.

We already know that a key element in the new submarine’s design philosophy is to only have capabilities that are already ‘proven at sea’ in the design for the first boat. That has led to the program office staying with lead–acid batteries, which have powered submarines since World War I, for now, even as other navies and even Naval Group, the submarine’s designer, say that new battery types are ready for safe operation in its submarines already, let alone by the 2030s.

Beyond this overall aversion to opportunity, though, in a briefing a couple of weeks ago to journalists, the program office confirmed that the future submarine would only be able to launch and recover UUVs that fit through its torpedo tubes or between the inner and outer hull skins.

That’s an incredible limitation on the sizes, shapes and numbers of unmanned underwater systems other than torpedoes that this weapon system costing $79 billion (ASPI’s ‘out-turned’ dollars estimate) will be able to launch and recover.

Interestingly, the Swedes have taken the design that became our navy’s current Collins-class submarine and ‘evolved’ it by doing things like fitting a new section into the hull so it can launch missiles from large vertical tubes. And they’re bidding to build an evolved ‘Son of Collins’ for the Dutch, with the first submarine to be launched in the late 2020s. Modularity is key to the Swedes’ approach. They are using their existing Gotland-class submarines to trial modules they’ll put into their new submarines.

The big vertical launch tubes will allow the Swedish design to launch and recover lots of different configurations of missiles, UAVs and UUVs. And, if it turns out that missiles are less valuable than other unmanned systems, it’ll be much easier to use this vertical launch space as a flexible launch bay than to try to contort weapons into torpedo-shaped items.

On top of this, the Swedes are fitting air-independent propulsion to allow the submarine to operate without surfacing for long periods of time. They’re also designing in a ‘multi-mission portal’ next to the torpedo tubes in the nose of the boat which will be large enough for the launch and retrieval of diverse mission payloads, from special-forces divers to manned and unmanned vehicles. Sounds like the future-proofing approach being taken with Australia’s frigates.

It won’t matter if the Attack class is ‘regionally superior’ in a submarine-against-submarine battle in the 2030s if the boats get found and sunk by novel UUVs operated by an adversary that’s more imaginative with its submarine design than Australia is being.

There’s still time for the future submarine to really live up to its label. But it means thinking more imaginatively than any submarine program office that the big Defence bureaucracy seems able to put together.

It’s time to get some other ideas into the submarine program and into the design of the first boat. That’s so that we don’t end up with a high-risk project that does something worse than run over budget and schedule—that produces a submarine and broader undersea capability program that is not ‘regionally superior’, and does so by design.