Fed: Collins subs fixed at last

AAP General News (Australia)
04-03-2007
Fed: Collins subs fixed at last

By Max Blenkin, Defence Correspondent

CANBERRA, April 3 AAP - It's taken most of a decade but Australia's Collins submarines
may finally be able to shed the "dud sub" tag.

Prime Minister John Howard today inspected HMAS Waller, the first of the Collins boats
to be retrofitted with a computerised combat system similar to what's in use on US nuclear
attack submarines.

The rest of the Collins fleet will progressively be refitted with this new system by
the end of the decade under a remediation program launched in 2002.

It's been a long voyage but the Collins subs may at last demonstrate the complete range
of capability envisaged when the project was launched back in the early 1980s.

In May 1983 the then Labor government invited tenders for a replacement diesel electric
boat to replace ageing British-built Oberons which first entered service in 1967.

The winner was an Australianised version of the Swedish Kockums Type 471 with a contract
for the deal worth about $5 billion signed in June 1987.

The Collins submarines were named after eminent World War Two fleet commander Vice-Admiral
Sir John Collins (1899-1989).

The keel for HMAS Collins was laid at the brand new factory at Osborne, Adelaide, in
February 1990. It was launched in 1993 and delivered to the navy in 1996.

The last of the six, HMAS Rankin, was delivered in 2001.

There may have been some brief thought about making the new submarines nuclear-powered
but that was never seriously contemplated.

Instead, the Collins boats are powered by electric engines while underwater and large
diesel motors while surfaced. The diesels also charge a vast bank of batteries.

This technology makes the Collins boats not all that different from the German U-boats
which waged war in the North Atlantic during World War Two - except in one crucial area.

That was the decision from the outset to equip the Collins boats with a computerised
combat system.

The plan was to link together the sensors (sonar arrays, periscope and radar) communications,
navigation and weapons systems so that a sailor sitting at a console in the control could
manage all vital functions.

Unsurprisingly, this didn't work very well. Through the 1990s the delays accumulated
as scientists struggled to integrate the disparate elements of this system and get them
to all operate in harmony.

But that wasn't all. Propellers shafts leaked and propellers suffered fatigue failures,
sea water contaminated the fuel, engines proved unreliable and periscopes vibrated excessively
.

Worst of all, the Collins boats were too noisy, a potential death sentence for a vessel
intended to operate in near total silence.

The navy well knew about all these problems - and so too did the taxpayers of Australia
on October 8, 1998 when the Sydney Daily Telegraph published its infamous "Dud Subs" story
which, among other claims, suggested the Collins boats made as much noise as a rock concert.

Justified or not, this served to focus the government's attention. Then defence minister
John Moore commissioned Malcolm McIntosh and John Prescott to review the problems and
propose a way forward.

They reported in June 1999. By this stage various fixes were under way. The US Navy
came to the party, allowing use of its underwater acoustic test range to isolate noise
problems which have now been fixed.

The US Navy also provided some black boxes to augment the combat system to make it
at least usable.

McIntosh and Prescott noted that the combat system remained the principal technical
challenge to be resolved. They concluded that only so much could be achieved with the
legacy system.

One observer explained it in computer terms - Collins was stuck with 286 equivalent
processors when the world had moved on to Pentiums.

In 2002, the government approved a replacement combat system, opting for the Raytheon
CCS Mark II tactical command and control system, known in US service as AN/BYG-1, in a
contract worth $444 million.

This had the effect of cementing the already very close links with the US Navy.

With the new combat system will come new heavyweight torpedoes, the Mark 48 ADCAP (advanced
capability), an improved version of the existing Mark 48 torpedoes.

Each weighs 1.6 tonnes, has a range of more than 40 kilometres and can sink almost
any vessel afloat. The Federation of American Scientists website suggests a price of $US3.5
million each.

AAP mb/sb/maur/de

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