Submarines: Studying the Future Submarine | ADM November 2012

In May, Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Defence Minister Stephen Smith and Minister for Defence Materiel Jason Clare announced a range of detailed scoping studies in support of the Future Submarine program. The announcement flagged the spending of $214 million on detailed analysis to better inform the Government on the design of the new boats.

Further measures include the launch of a Future Submarine Industry Skills Plan to identify, build and sustain necessary skills within industry and the appointment of a General Manager, Submarines to oversee both Collins sustainment and Future Submarine development.

Most recently, a Future Submarine Systems Centre has been established in Adelaide, to house DMO, DSTO and industry personnel from both local and international companies.

Together, these measures are intended to avoid repeating the problems of the Collins submarine, in terms of serviceability and sustainment, by ensuring a set of key user requirements are developed to inform the selection of a design which most suits Australia’s needs and local industry capability to build and support the Future Submarine.

Industry skills plan

Announced at the same time as the scoping studies, the Industry Skills Plan will ensure industry is positioned to cope with the design, construction and sustainment phases of the Future Submarine program, Sea 1000.

Specifically, it will determine the required skills and the size and profile of the future workforce. It will study the capacity and capability of the local shipbuilding industry and the future naval shipbuilding program, to ensure there are no conflicting requirements.

Other areas to be put under the microscope include the productivity of local industry compared with overseas and the requirement for education and training programs to ensure the long-term viability of a skilled workforce.

The plan will be overseen by DMO Chief Executive Officer Warren King and supported by an Expert Industry Panel led by David Mortimer, Chair of the Defence Industry Innovation Board and Director of the Strategic Reform Plan Advisory Board.

The Expert Industry Panel will include DMO, Navy, Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research & Tertiary Education, Skills Australia, union representatives and the CEOs of ASC, Austal, BAE Systems and Forgacs Engineering. Naval systems integration industry will be represented by the CEOs of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Thales, SAAB Systems and BAE Systems.

General Manager Submarines

Also in May, the Ministers jointly announced the appointment of David Gould to the newly-created position of General Manager Submarines, responsible for all materiel-related aspects of submarine support across Defence.

Gould is well-qualified to take on the role, having spent around 35 years in the UK MoD, half of which was in support of the Royal Navy. He has been involved in many of the UK’s major procurement and sustainment programs, such as the Type 45 Destroyer, Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers and Astute nuclear submarines.

After leaving the British Public Service to run his own consulting business he held a management role with Finmeccanica before being lured to Australia to take on the latest role.

According to Gould, replacing the Collins submarines is a very complex and multi-dimensional problem, in which time, cost and performance are all interdependant, and the scoping studies are therefore critical to support informed decisions in the early days of the Future Submarine project.

“For something like the Collins replacement, this is a very difficult set of interrelationships, because you have to look at what performance you want to achieve in the 2020s and well beyond, but you also must consider what other submarines in the region will be capable in that sort of timescale,” he said.

“You also need to think about what a reasonable period of time to get from where we are today to the design and construction phase might be. Then you must define the cost involved in doing these things.”

Scoping studies

The range of studies announced in May are in addition to the Requests For Information issued to DCNS, Navantia and HDW last December, and the six-month contract with Babcock to examine a possible future benefit of a land-based Submarine Propulsion Energy, Support and Integration Facility (SPESIFy) to de-risk propulsion technology.

Other studies will examine such aspects as the operational environment of the Future Submarine, the type of missions which will be critical to strategic requirements and emerging technologies which may improve performance and reliability.

“Today we have a good idea of what capabilities the Collins replacement ought to deliver, but inevitably at this stage there’s quite a broad baseline to look at,” Gould said. The studies will provide the scientific structural work to progress from this initial broad baseline to a set of quantifiable risks which can be understood, in terms of capability of design and the ability to construct the boat.

“This will not be one step, but a series of steps and what these studies are intended to do is better understand the risks involved in the program and narrow the amount of uncertainty involved in undertaking it,” Gould explained to ADM.

The scoping studies fall under four broad categories: Design Studies, Scientific and Technological studies, Submarine Project Management and the aforementioned Future Industry Skills Plan.

The Design Studies phase which will compare a Military Off The Shelf solution (involving DCNS, HDW and Navantia) with that of an updated Collins class submarine, in conjunction with Kockums, and new designs. An analysis of options will then be undertaken, in conjunction with an expert submarine design entity. Capability modelling will also be undertaken by US companies under an agreement between the American and Australian Governments. Systems Planning & Analysis and Electric Boat will undertake the work under an FMS case.

“Those are the types of studies we are undertaking and we’ll narrow down our range of options as time goes on,” Gould told ADM. “We’re also involving the RAND Corporation and the US Navy in helping us understand what our real design capabilities are in Australia.”

Scientific and Technological studies, conducted primarily by DSTO, will look at propulsion and energy storage, signatures and stealth performance, Combat Systems and hydrodynamics, propellers and pumpjets. Future battery technology is one area where DSTO, government and industry is focussing, in an attempt to mature and ‘future-proof’ the technology before it is designed into the Future Submarine.

“DSTO are engaged in a great deal of things, in terms of structure, propulsion, batteries, signature management etc,” Gould said. “One of the advantages of DSTO is that they can work both nationally and with close allies in very highly classified areas. There’s quite a range of related technologies they’re working on and it’s actually quite impressive. I’m really encouraged by what I’ve seen.”

The propulsion system of the dieselelectric submarine is going to be one of they key parameter of design and performance in the future and was the logic behind the study carried out with Babcock on a land-based test facility.

“The more work we can do in terms of test and evaluation and R&D to look at options for the future will help,” Gould added. From an industry standpoint, Gould says Australian industry has a lot to offer.

“There’s some pretty useful work going on at ASC and of course they have a lot of submarine experience and knowledge,” he said. “And there are locally and foreign owned companies in Australia that can do a lot of work on combat management systems for example. All the experience from Collins tells me Australia has to be the parent Navy of this Future Submarine. We can’t depend on someone else to do it, so we have to bring those national and international companies to Australia to sustain the submarine for the next 30 or 40 years.”

Timing

Current Sea 1000 timing calls for decisions to be made on combat systems, sensors, weapons systems and torpedos in 2013 and First Pass Approval to follow in late 2013 or early 2014. Second Pass is projected to occur sometime in 2017 and construction to begin shortly thereafter.

Gould says the decisions taken over the next two to three years, as the scoping studies return their results will manifest themselves in control over the timeframe, cost and performance of the submarine when it’s built.

“The point I’d like to make is that I can produce the science and the structural analysis that underpins this, but quality, timely decision taking is crucial,” he concluded.