The record of the RAN’s Oberon- and Collins-class submarines shows that diesel-electric submarines can perform valuable long-range operations. However, Australia’s range and endurance requirements are much closer to the operating profiles of other nations’ nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) than they are to those of any existing conventional boat. The case for acquiring an SSN will become even stronger as other regional navies—in particular, China but also India—begin to operate such boats more regularly in our region. So it’s unsurprising that suggestions for moving to a nuclear submarine keep popping up.  And unlike its 2009 and 2013 predecessors, the 2016 Defence White Paper doesn’t explicitly rule out nuclear propulsion from consideration.

The apparent good fit of a nuclear capability needs to be balanced against what’s feasible today, given Australia’s industrial, engineering and regulatory capacity, the cost of nuclear submarines and their supporting infrastructure, the availability of technology, and public attitudes about nuclear energy. After a lengthy struggle, Australia now has the elements needed to manage its fleet of conventional submarines in place, but little experience or capacity for providing the additional fundamental inputs to capability needed to support nuclear-powered submarines. The time to put these pieces in place for the Collins-class replacement has long passed.  The announcement of a continuous acquisition model for Australia’s submarines in the 2016 DWP, however, does raise the question of whether that program will always and forever be based on conventional propulsion.

In principle we could acquire nuclear reactors for submarines—the transfer of marine nuclear propulsion systems is allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But it’s not clear that even our closest allies would necessarily assist our efforts. We’d need to demonstrate a clear strategic rationale for such a step, backed with a long-term strategic and industry relationship. And we’d need to engender confidence that Australia was successfully developing the ability to operate and maintain nuclear-powered submarines to the highest standards of safety. No supplier would want to risk the reputation and domestic political support of its own domestic nuclear submarine capability through an accident caused by the Australian Navy. Naval engineering in RAN and Australia’s wider nuclear engineering expertise are today almost certainly far below the levels of capacity and sophistication that a supplier would expect before even considering a transfer of nuclear reactors.

Regular surveys and maintenance of every component of reactor machinery (some radioactive) are essential elements of the maintenance cycle of an SSN, requiring an expert nuclear-trained workforce. Even if major refits and refuelling of Australian nuclear-powered boats could be done offshore, routine maintenance would still place considerable demands upon local support facilities. The safe design, construction, operation and maintenance of SSNs therefore depend on extensive understanding and experience of the underpinning science and engineering. Operating naval reactors would require a significant expansion of Australia’s nuclear establishment writ large, including academia, industry, ANSTO, ARPANSA and the Navy itself.

Given time, there’s little reason why Australia couldn’t make nuclear propulsion a realistic option for future generations of its continuous submarine acquisition program. SSNs are more expensive to acquire and operate than conventional submarines, but a decision to acquire them would be only taken because the strategic environment demanded it.  Building the successor to the Collins-class should significantly strengthen Australia’s expertise, capacity and reputation in submarine technology. Bipartisan support for acquisition of SSNs would be needed, but the South Australian Royal Commission shows that the politics of nuclear industry more broadly are shifting. And the 2016 White Paper does mention a review of the ‘specifications’ of Australia’s submarine design in the late 2020s in light of developments in the strategic environment and technology.

However, to make the acquisition of SSNs a realistic option, Australia would need to enhance its cadre of experts and engineers well before such a decision is even seriously contemplated (both to ensure that we’re an intelligent buyer and to be seen as a competent possible operator). Today, we have a small national cadre of technicians in support of the sole Australian nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, but that’s a far simpler design. It’s true that modern nuclear submarine technology is more ‘user friendly’ than it used to be. For example, some modern reactors will run for the lifetime of the submarine on their initial fuel, greatly simplifying a part of the maintenance cycle. But each of the three possible suppliers of propulsion reactors—France, Britain and the US—has taken different approaches to the reactor design, and we’d need to have the expertise to assess the advantages and disadvantages of each in Australia’s particular operating environment and industrial landscape.

Being able to consider SSNs in the late 2020s thus wouldn’t be a small step; it’d require Defence to start spending money to build up Australia’s cadre of nuclear engineers, to reach out to ANSTO and ARPANSA, and for government to make the case for considering SSNs to the Australian public. A first step could be a study to examine the broader implications of even studying nuclear propulsion for Australia and its nuclear establishment and workforce, including the necessary regulatory (and perhaps voluntary safeguards arrangements) that would need to be put in place. So there’s a cost to making an SSN a realistic option. But as Australia’s strategic environment continues to become more challenging, it might be money well spent to set up Australia’s underwater capability for the future.

There’s one number that every conventional submarine commanding officer calculates day and night: the percentage of the Main Storage Battery (MSB) that remains. Let me bring a submarine operator’s perspective to the points made recently by Andrew Davies and Geoff Slocombe.

Dived endurance, the ability to remain submerged without having to expose the submarine by recharging the battery, is a critical (I would say life or death) characteristic of submarines, particularly to meet Australia’s requirements to operate in areas where the sea and air space isn’t under our control. It improves tactical mobility, effectiveness, flexibility and survivability in both transit and patrol area operations.

A dived submarine requires energy to cover propulsion and the ‘hotel load’ (e.g. air purification, cooking, lights, cooling, combat system). At slow speed (below 5 knots) the hotel load predominates energy consumption, hence a great deal of design effort goes into reducing it.

The full-to-empty performance given for a lead acid MSB is misleading., The reality is that the charging rate must be reduced progressively as the MSB passes 80%—at this point the exposure by snorting simply doesn’t justify the slow gain in battery charge. Hence, the lead acid MSB will never be fully charged when the need arises; 70% is more realistic. Once the MSB charge drops to around 20%, conserving/re-charging it as soon as possible becomes the priority. So realistically the submarine will then have about 50% of its lead acid MSB capacity available for tactical use.

Compared to a lead acid MSB, a lithium-ion MSB offers a range of benefits, including:

•         A useful endurance improvement at low discharge rates (ie low speeds), and a significant improvement, depending on the lithium battery chemistry used, at high discharge rates (high speeds);
•         No hydrogen emissions;
•         Higher charging rates throughout its range until almost full, providing a greater practical range, say 75%;
•         Significant weight reduction for individual cells;
•         Less battery maintenance; and,
•         Significant advantages during a snort transit, where the battery will be successively charged and discharged at high rates.

This last point is particularly relevant for Australia. Long snort transits in or through tropical waters are a particular feature of Australia’s requirement, differentiating it from the environments in Europe or the North Pacific. Both types of MSB need to be cooled to avoid high battery temperatures—that’s a significant engineering issue in tropical waters. High temperatures quickly reduce the life of a lithium battery, and can cause explosions and thermal runaway, even after breaking the charge. That must be avoided by selection of the correct chemistry in the battery and its control arrangements; the design must eliminate the risk of such a catastrophic failure.

CEP designers, Australian industry specialists and the Defence Science & Technology Group are currently conducting R&D into lithium MSBs. Energy density in lithium batteries depends on the chemistry selected by the battery designer. There are many options and new ones are continually sought.

The lithium battery materials, battery design and control circuits must be chosen to avoid any chance of a thermal runaway leading to an uncontrollable fire. That particular problem achieved notoriety after fires in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, the US Navy’s mini submarine, the Advanced Swimmer Delivery System vehicle, and some laptops, (recalls were issued most recently as February this year). Boeing, the US Navy and Sony are hardly novices in safety management, which serves to demonstrate the complexity of this issue.

We should proceed cautiously; experienced users continue to be taken by surprise by lithium battery failures/fires. Sensible risk management also requires designing in the ability to manage the low probability but catastrophic event of a fire in the submarine’s MSB—its main energy source!

It seems highly likely that lithium ion MSBs are the future for Australia’s next submarine fleet, but only once R&D has delivered a well-tested, safe design for submarine applications.

In a second piece, I’ll examine the possible role of Air Independent Propulsion in increasing dived endurance for Australia’s FSM.

Our modern navy needs to be increasingly a national enterprise, bringing together the private and public sectors of the economy to deliver a fundamental national objective—security above, on and under the sea.

That means Navy isn’t just about our ships or our sailors. Our Navy, Australia’s Navy, is also about the national effort required to have a Navy, to maintain it and sustain it.

That national endeavour will ultimately manifest itself in a new industrial landscape for Australia. This endeavour underpins Navy’s approach to continuous shipbuilding.

Continual shipbuilding will draw industry, education, R&D, finance and skills sectors and our Australian and international defence partners together in ways never previously seen. The strategy enables us to ensure we have ships ready for future demands. It allows us to build agility into our system. It allows us to imagine the future and prepare for it.

Indeed, continuous shipbuilding is the system whereby Defence and industry working together are able to generate the innovation that the Prime Minister has identified as central to Australia’s future economic development.

The foundations we lay together (industry, Defence and Government) to build our ships won’t be just concrete and steel. We have an opportunity at this juncture to invest in the Australian people—their ingenuity and their resilience.

Continuous shipbuilding provides the ability to look at analysis, design, construction and sustainment collectively, or, as I would prefer to describe it: thinking, designing and doing, not as a series of sequential activities, but as concurrent activities.

The old way of acquiring ships and planning for mid-life upgrades no longer provides a solution to our larger more complex warships. It’s unmanageable at best. We cannot plan a fleet we cannot afford to build, sustain and evolve through the life of type and into the next generations.

For the first time since we built warships in the country we’ll be building not just for the life of one project, but for sustained capability into the future. I’m already thinking about the next frigate after the future frigate.

Defence is currently negotiating a way forward to reduce the depth of skills loss across the ship building workforce and mitigate against a ‘cold re-start’ after the completion of the current three ship Air Warfare Destroyer program.

If we get this right, future investment by industry will have no deadline or u-shaped valley of death into which CEO’s are expected to charge without an exit strategy for their workforce.

It’ll take a completely different approach to achieve this (acquisition strategies, approaches to industry, investment profiles, infrastructure plans, even class basing)—but it also provides an opportunity to set a new paradigm.

To this end, with respect to our major surface combatants, I see our greatest opportunity existing if we approach our shipbuilding capability as a continuous program of building the fleet of major ships, not just considering each individual project. That’s a true programmatic approach.

At some point in the future we’ll need to consider replacing our Air Warfare Destroyers. We have an opportunity to include that in our calculus now, as we start the first serial in the continuous shipbuilding program that the Government announced on 4 August 2015—our future frigate program.

I aim to hand over to the next CN, and his or her successors, a schedule of ship construction that’s such that their diary will be full of keel laying and commissioning ceremonies, as naval vessels will roll off the production line at a steady drum beat.

As a result, I’m looking for partners in industry that won’t only deliver the required levels of readiness but, will translate cost effectiveness into enhanced readiness. To support that outcome, industry in partnership with the tertiary sector needs to understand the importance of optimising the readiness of the current systems and capturing and managing the required knowledge to support the future system.

Industry needs to understand technology growth paths and the long-term implications of systems and technology providing operational availability at an affordable cost. And industry needs to invest in itself; not just invest for the next project. I call it horizontal enabling—programmatic planning for the long-term.

I cannot over-emphasise the importance of this point, because in my mind it is not just about the first ship to roll off the production line. Rather, it’s about the many generations of ships that will follow in the decades ahead.

This is inherently about availability. Looking beyond the build, we must design with sustainment in mind and build it as a package. This means taking advantage of new technologies and systems, whether they are domestic or from the global market so that they can be integrated into both the build and sustainment activities.

That will enable the continuous building plan to evolve because, while the program will be enduring, the technology will advance. This will be one of this nation’s greatest strategic investment campaigns.

The continuous build plan provides a critical opportunity to reorient our national naval enterprise to address the strategic demands of the 21st century. As I’ve stated before, this is a make or break opportunity—we either realise it together, or we fail together.

2015 is the year that saw Government announce that Continuous Shipbuilding will be a permanent feature in the nation’s industrial landscape – surely, this is not an outlandish notion for a maritime nation.

To understand why that decision marks the beginning of a new maritime and naval era, I want to briefly look back over the century of the RAN’s existence.

Let me start by reflecting on the writing of my learned colleague Rear-Admiral James Goldrick.

In a speech to the Australian Naval Institute in 2011, he spoke of the Australian Navy and the way that its capabilities have developed.

He suggested that the last century saw the progressive evolution of four generations of Australian ‘fleet units’. Each fleet unit was designed to meet fundamental changes in both the strategic environment and in the contemporary technology of naval warfare.

He opined that we were now at the start of a fifth generation of national naval capability. This assessment, though fundamentally simple and obvious, is of profound importance. Four years on, I contend we are well advanced in the move to this new, fifth ‘fleet unit’.

The leap in capability that we are currently making can be compared to that achieved with the first unit of 1913—centred on the battle cruiser Australia but including two of the new long range submarines—and also the third Fleet unit of 1948 which included the light carrier Sydney.

But I would argue that this fifth ‘fleet unit’ is an even greater advance, both relatively and absolutely, because it affects so many areas of warfighting and operations—and because it will be integrated and networked with the Air Force and Army and with other Defence assets to a much greater degree than ever before.

Let me emphasise here that this is very much a joint effort, indeed it is an endeavour ‘beyond joint’, because its achievement involves very much more than just the three combat services. Getting the enablers of intelligence, communications and logistics right will be core to achieving our ambitions—a view that I know is fully shared by my fellow Chiefs of Service, the Vice Chief and the CDF.

That said, you have only to look at the ships that form the vanguard of our change to understand the magnitude of what is being done, and not just by Navy.

Ships Canberra and Adelaide will allow the Australian Defence Force—a term I use deliberately in this context—to deploy and project both hard and soft power around our maritime region (and around our own coasts) in many ways and in many different contingencies, to a degree and with a level of confidence we have never before enjoyed.

We have already achieved a level of capability with the company strength Amphibious Ready Element which will provide us with a more robust and sustainable amphibious response than at any time in the ADF’s peacetime history, a capability which will have real utility in humanitarian assistance and evacuation operations.

The amphibious exercises off Cowley Beach in August this year with HMAS Canberra exceeded our expectations. Just yesterday I declared her to be at Initial Operating Capability. We will commission her sister ship Adelaide next month and with that will continue the certification process of the ADF amphibious capability.

With the full battalion based battle group, that is the core of the Amphibious Ready Group, we will have the potential, at relatively little notice, to deploy substantial combat power from the sea, something which has already repeatedly proved so important in the stabilisation operations which we have conducted in the region.

In terms of maritime combat power, we already have more than a taste of what is to come in the modernised Anzac class frigates. Their new CEA radars (very locally produced) and combat systems are world leading technology that will allow our surface forces to operate with a much greater degree of confidence against the airborne anti-ship threat.

This is not just idle speculation. HMAS Perth’s performance at the Pacific Missile Range facility last year proved the worth of the recent modernization and demonstrated the ANZAC’s capability as an escort for the LHD.  That said ANZACs are approaching the limits of development margins and the government’s commitment to the future frigate is timely.

As an aviator I am well pleased with the introduction of the MH 60 Romeo helicopter.  It is now at sea in the Anzac class and is a leap in anti-submarine capability—a tremendous asset which the most modern submarines will find very difficult to counter. It also provides new elements of anti-surface capability in its sensor fit and Hellfire missiles

It could not be more timely. As I speak here we have a major fleet concentration period happening off the east coast, where a number of our submarines are involved in rebuilding our latent Fleet ASW skills.

And I eagerly await the arrival of the new Air Warfare Destroyers. I have made my point before about the delays in this project and will not repeat them here.

But this cabability is critical is we are to meet the demands government has on us in the region.  The DDG will provide a capability to dominate the maritime battlespace through their AEGIS system and their SM-2 missiles in a way that we have never had before.

But importantly this will also be a capability that will complement, and be complemented by, the Air Force’s Wedgetail.

The ability to share sensor and tracking data that these two major platforms bring to the battlespace will allow them to capitalise on the full capabilities of the long range SM-2 missile and its successors to an unprecedented degree. No longer will our anti-air weapon range be confined to the radar horizons of our surface ships.  A cooperative engagement capability is essential across the ADF and indeed across our Allies.

This is an important point. I have talked elsewhere of our need to focus on the lethality of our systems because it is lethality which creates combat power and true deterrent effect.

And it is not about the vulnerability of individual platforms to individual weapons. It is a about a systemic approach to collective defence and offence. A force centred on an Air Warfare Destroyer and our other seaborne elements, supported by Wedgetail and other airborne systems such as the JSF, Super Hornet, Growler and the P8 maritime patrol aircraft will have the ability to dominate an area in which it operates.

The Collins class submarines, now providing a far greater availability than they did 3-4 years ago, and their successor will have an equally significant part to play, whether operating independently to attack and destroy the adversary’s capabilities, or in support.

What we are developing, in sum, is a maritime capability which will be able to operate as a coherent national task force, or as a major element—often a leading one—within a coalition. It will be a collective capability that will be able to deal heavy blows to an adversary and at very long distances.

Defence budgets in our region are rising in relative and absolute terms and new ships and submarines are being launched every month.  The precautionary principle requires that Australia has a fleet that keeps pace with those in the region because we cannot know where, and under what circumstances, our ships will be operating in the 2020s and beyond.

That is not going to be easy but the alternative is a slow withering on the vine of our maritime capability.

It is my view that continuous shipbuilding now provides us, for the first time, an opportunity for ‘evolution’ to become an underpinning factor in the strategic calculus for our fleet’s design and delivery. In this vein, the fleet unit can continuously evolve in a managed, deliberate and affordable manner.

This week’s release in the ADF capability snapshot series takes a look at the Royal Australian Navy. (Here’s a link to last week’s RAAF paper.) Again, there’s a lot more good news than bad in this survey. That’s particularly encouraging, because Navy wasn’t in a great place when we did the previous capability snapshot in 2010. So before getting to the good news, let’s set the time machine for 2010 to remind ourselves how things looked then.

The surface combatant fleet was the one bright spot, after the upgrade to the Adelaide class frigates was (eventually) completed. The 2010 review also noted good progress on upgrading the Anzac frigates with a new Saab combat system and Australian-developed CEAFAR radar. That was a good call; the new review notes that, in terms of air defence, the Anzacs are probably the most capable 3,000 tonne vessels in the world today. (A less good call was the statement that the air warfare destroyers would be in service in 2014—the first of those is now expected in late 2017.)

But elsewhere the trend in capability was downwards, including some key force elements. Submarine availability and manning were both problems, resulting in operational submarine days being in short supply. The Navy was also struggling to maintain the old Bravo model Seahawks and their increasingly obsolete systems. The failure of the lightweight torpedo program to provide an air launched weapon and the cancellation of the Super Seasprite meant that the Navy’s combat helicopter capability simply wasn’t up to scratch.

A consequence of those collective shortcomings was that the ADF’s anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capability continued to decline. And with the benefit of hindsight, we could’ve added to the list of problems the hollow nature of the amphibious capability, which effectively collapsed in 2011 when the Navy had no available ships to assist in the response to Cyclone Yasi.

But that was then and this is now and the Navy has made good progress in remediating those issues. The 24 new Romeo model Seahawks have started to deliver real capability to the fleet’s combat helicopter fleet, including a dipping sonar (for the first time in 20 years) and a lightweight ASW torpedo that’s much more capable against modern submarines than the old ones. These are good steps in rebuilding a modern ASW capability, although the final components won’t be in place until the future frigates come on line, probably around the middle of next decade; as good as the Anzacs are above the water, they aren’t as capable beneath it.

The availability of Collins class submarines, which we’ve been tracking, has increased substantially since its 2009–10 low point, when the six boats produced only 380 days of availability, and at one stage no submarines were available for operational tasking. While the current figure of around 800 days falls well short of the Coles report benchmark of 1,200 days, it shows that some serious attention is being given to management of this expensive national asset. HMAS Farncombe is the latest boat to go through deep maintenance, and ASC is on schedule to complete the process in well under two years. In comparison, previous overhauls generally took three years, and HMAS Rankin was laid up for almost five years and HMAS Sheean for four.

The Canberra class LHD amphibious ships provide a quantum leap in capability and capacity compared to their predecessors. A single LHD can embark as many troops and more vehicles and equipment than the previous three ships combined. With this acquisition the RAN moves into the front ranks of naval amphibious capability in the region. Of course, there’s a resources bill to be paid for such capability, and getting the Army/Navy combination working smoothly to take advantage of the new capability will be a challenge.

Looking ahead, it’ll be interesting to see how the Abbott government’s promise to bring forward the major and minor vessel shipbuilding projects plays out. The frigates have got most of the press, but the pressing need is actually the minor vessels. The rate of effort required to keep up border patrol work over the past few years, often in pretty tough conditions, has taken its toll on the Armidale class patrol boats. And the Huon class minehunters have also often been pressed into service at the maritime border, to the point where the Navy’s minehunting capability is marginal.

All in all, Navy has made great strides in the past five years. Some smart acquisitions have helped, but there’s also been a better focus on managing the fleet and its people, and in working with industry to bring the various elements of capability together. There’s plenty of work to do, and the future submarine, minor vessel and frigate projects will require plenty of attention, but credit where it’s due.