Australia’s Looming Submarine Disaster

That Sinking Feeling …

Submarines are no longer the Das Boot-style hunters of slow cargo ships, but are themselves the hunted, as dangerous to those who sail in them as to those they target. The anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities of advanced nations are now so good that submarines are on virtual suicide missions, the best result likely to be one kill before their own crew’s next-of-kin are notified.  The statistics concerning their effectiveness on a risk-benefit analysis are not good.  There were ‘happy times’ for German U-boats in the early part of World War Two until ASW defences became well organised.  After that their effectiveness was limited.  Germany, with the largest, most technically advanced and aggressive submarine fleet found that none of those qualities was any protection. In the last 30 months of the war they lost a staggering 616 submarines!  From the beginning of 1943 until May 1945 an average of two boats went down every three days.  In four of those months they were losing more than one boat a day.

Australia currently has a fleet of five operational conventional submarines, though finding crews to sail them is proving challenging. How much harder will it be to find crews for twelve outdated diesel-electric boats that must regularly expose themselves while their batteries are being recharged?

Just for argument’s sake, let’s posit the nuclear-powered Barracuda as the best submarine in the world (please stop laughing;  we’re talking hypotheticals). But we aren’t going the nuclear route. What we are doing is asylum-quality crazy: ripping out the reactor and replacing it with an old fashioned diesel. Our alleged ‘state of the art’ submarines will have 80-year-old technology driving them at 35 per cent the underwater speed of a nuclear Barracuda. And that is but the start of the problems.

This will then require new space for fuel, plus a re-balancing of the whole vessel in order to maintain underwater trim, and all the plumbing required to achieve this. All this to be achieved in 14 years?  That whooshing sound you hear is the pigs flying by. Were this but another case of squandering billions of dollars on the wrong weapon, then that would be regrettable but understandable. We have seen such folly many times before. Unfortunately, at this point the situation deteriorates.

Underwater Horse Cavalry …

Long after cavalry had become ineffective, horsed regiments and horse-mounted cavalry continued to exist in armies.  The last charge by sabre-wielding cavalry is reputed to have been in 1939, when Polish cavalry took on German tanks.  It did not end well for the Poles. Bravery is no antidote to bullets.

Australia is staking $200 billion of its meagre defence budget on an unproven design that can only produce an outdated weapon, the first of which will not be available (if you believe in fairy tales) for 15 years.  Let’s assume the fleet of twelve all arrive by 2050, and that our enemies are sufficiently considerate to delay hostilities until then.  What are the chances our boats, led by HMAS Pyne Box, will deter our enemies?  These new boats will be quieter, able to dive deeper and will have new capabilities, but they will still not be able to function in tomorrow’s undersea battle space.  By 2035, there will be a range of rapidly evolving autonomous submarine weapon systems, such as the recently unveiled Chinese HSU drones pictured below, that are designed to find and sink them. And find and sink them they most certainly will.

What is the Future for the Submarine?

In the Fifties it was recognised that the concept of wolf packs hunting freighter convoys was no longer viable. To continue to have a role, the strategy of submarine warfare changed with the introduction of nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines designed to annihilate any country that made a nuclear first-strike on the US or its key allies. A second class of submarine also emerged with the creation of the hunter-killers designed specifically to find and destroy enemies’ submarines, including their ballistic-missile ‘big bangers’. A game of cat-and-mouse between the USSR and the US was played for decades with ever more sophisticated electronic and acoustic systems and devices introduced.  Among these was a sonar array stretching from Greenland to Norway capable of detecting any Russian submarine passing through the Greenland Gap and into the North Atlantic.  An American hunter-killer submarine would then be assigned to shadow it.

Strategic naval planners have recognised these difficulties and proposed three solutions to permit undersea warfare to continue without incurring the level of casualties suffered in World War Two.  These are:

1/ Unmanned autonomous submarines;

2/ Manned mother submarines equipped with standoff ‘smart torpedoes’ that can strike at distances of up to 60km; and

3/ Swarms of robotic mini-torpedoes and mines