Australia’s leaky submarine program

This week some interesting leaks have suggested that Australia's six Collins Class submarines are facing serious (read expensive) risks that might make extending their operating life difficult (read really expensive) or even impossible.

Originally the first Collins Class submarine was scheduled to be retired in 2024, with the remainder to be decommissioned by 2031. They were to be replaced by 12 Future Submarines, which have a largely bespoke or developmental design, and will be assembled in Adelaide.

The Future Submarine was the centrepiece of the 2009 Defence White Paper. The implementation of this ambitious plan to reorganise the nation's defences has languished due to systemic underfunding and heel dragging on the part of government decision makers. Nowhere was the delay more evident than the Future Submarine project.

It takes 15 or more years to bring the first boat of a developmental class to operational status. If work on the Future Submarine had begun promptly in 2009, it would have been theoretically possible to meet the original timeframe. But it didn't.

By the end of 2012 many fundamental decisions and preparatory steps still had not been taken. The likelihood that the Future Submarine would be in service before the Collins Class became obsolete was very low.

It was at this time that the Gillard government released findings that the Collins Class service life could be extended for another full operating cycle (seven years), regaining the four years they had wasted through inaction since the 2009 Defence White Paper. It was a fortuitous finding, but what would the cost of the extension program be?

The Collins Class has very low reliability and high costs compared to its rivals (as detailed in my 2012 report). With the news that 68 major systems aboard the submarines pose a high to extreme risk of preventing the fleet from reaching its life expectancy or being extended, it seems that the bill for keeping the Collins Class subs operational will get even larger.

The Defence Department has commented that 'identify[ing] potential issues and risks … is a common and normal process to be followed if consideration is being given to the life-extension of any system.'

If this was a common and normal process, why was the existence of these risks (and the expected cost of dealing with them) not released to the public before the election? Operational security should not be invoked as a shield to hide poorly performing defence programs from public scrutiny.

Taxpayers are entitled to know whether the Collins Class currently represents value for money. They are entitled to ask whether the service life extension of the Collins is a good investment, before we commit tens of billions of dollars to replicate the Collins Class process for the Future Submarine.

They are also entitled to ask whether there are other options, but that is a story for another day.

Simon Cowan is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.