The Collins LOTE: The Once and Future Strategic Military Capability - Part 1
Part 1
Policy imperatives for sustaining Australia’s currently most important defence capability development program
The program to extend the lives of the RAN’s 6 Collins class submarines is currently intended as, but should not be, a maintenance and replacement job to allow the Service to keep training personnel until the new boats of the Attack class come along. Assuming that all goes as currently planned with the Future Submarine Program (FSP), the Collins class will still provide the backbone of Australia’s strategic military capability for at least the next two decades. Therefore, the policy focus of the LOTE (Life Of Type Extension) program should be ensuring that the boats are developed to overcome the threats that might negate their capabilities and endanger their crews in the period out to around 2040.
That period seems likely to be one of the most challenging to Australia’s security for many decades. The global and regional strategic situation is becoming more unstable. New technologies are developing rapidly and seem likely to challenge many of the assumptions on which submarine warfare is based. New generations of conventional submarines with highly advanced energy systems seem likely to proliferate throughout the Indo-Pacific region. The LOTE Collins will need to be able to overcome these challenges if they are to retain their effectiveness.
Little in the LOTE program will be easy. Even the process of replacing apparently mundane items, such as the diesel electric charging units, carry significant risk. Hence the program will become the first test of the sustainability of the policy that underpins the acquisition strategy for the RAN’s next class of submarines - that the objective of the program is the building of a “sovereign” submarine enterprise. Consequently, there is little scope for deviation from the central objectives of the LOTE program and any considerations of removing full cycle maintenance activities (which will become synonymous with the LOTE) from Adelaide should be put aside.
The Collins Class Life Of Type Extension
The service lives of the RAN’s 6 Collins class submarines are to be extended to allow them to operate for 10 years beyond what was to have been their date of retirement. The decision is usually viewed as needed to sustain the Navy’s submarine capability, including crew training, due to the delayed delivery of the Collins class’ successor, the Attack class. This threatens a period when the Service would have access to few operational boats.
Hence the government has initiated a program to extend the service lives of the Collins class by replacing and modernising certain systems, principally their electric motors, diesel electric charging units and electrical distribution systems. Other systems such as sonars are currently in the process of being modernised. The LOTE upgrades will be installed over the two year period of a full cycle docking (ie, the complete overhaul of a submarine after it has been in service for 10 years). Hull surveys of the 6 vessels verified in 2012 that all can safely serve another 10 years after the LOTE. The first of these will commence in 2026 and the boat should be returned to the RAN two years later. The second will commence in 2028 and so on, producing an upgraded boat every two years.
The builder of the Collins class, ASC Pty Ltd, has already been engaged on the system design phase for the incorporation of the new equipment and has submitted formal proposals for the three main system replacements plus assessment and repair to the hull. ASC expects the government to make a formal commitment to the program before the end of the 2020-21 financial year and authorise funding to allow detailed design to commence (Senate Estimates, ASC Pty Ltd, 23 March 2021).
Hence, it appears that policy for the Collins LOTE is focused on preserving the RAN’s existing submarine expertise until the new vessels are available.
Yet the Collins class will remain the backbone of the RAN’s submarine fleet for another two decades - out until after 2040. Consequently, we would argue that policy should be forward looking, seeking to further develop the role of the Collins boats as Australia's current primary military strategic assets because that is the role they continue to be playing. It seems an unavoidable conclusion that, from early in the program, such an objective would force the adoption of new technologies. These will inevitably include a light metal battery energy storage system, especially as additional energy capacity will be central to incorporating emerging operational concepts into the Australian submarine fleet.
Increasingly, this outcome will be promoted by the pressure of advances in electrical and digital technologies. These forces will be made unavoidable by the extremely long schedules envisaged for both the Collins LOTE and the Attack class Future Submarine Program (FSP) because the submarine warfare world will have changed considerably during the times they are expected to be in service. Acquisition programs with time scales stretching over decades will demand the ongoing adoption of a range of the latest technologies if the Australian submarine force is to remain safely deployable and operationally effective.
The Numbers in the Future Force
The government recognised that Australia needed to rely more heavily on its submarine warfare capability when it approved the acquisition of 12 vessels under the FSP. Yet, counterintuitively, the extraordinary length of the program means that this objective will not be reached until into the second half of this century, following the Navy’s acceptance of the first boat in the mid 2030s (some quarter of a century after the program was initiated).
The consequence of this schedule is that, if the Collins class were to be retired at the end of their currently planned service lives, the RAN would be down to 2 boats by the time Attack was commissioned (or one, if this milestone slipped by only a year). Hence the government’s approval of the Collins LOTE program.
Assuming everything proceeds as planned, the RAN will possess 7 boats upon commissioning of HMAS Attack but, assuming the then retirement of each Collins at the end of their 10 year life extension, the number of vessels available would never exceed 8 until about the beginning of the 2050s. In about 20 years time, at the beginning of the 2040s, half of this 8 boat force will still be provided by the Collins class (Australian Defence Magazine, 21 January 2021).
With the Collins boats progressively retiring, there would still be a further 15 years of Attack class construction before the RAN reached its objective of a 12 submarine fleet. Alternatively, it is entirely conceivable that this situation may never eventuate. Around 2040, with only 4 or 5 Attack class boats completed, the Collins class might instead remain as the biggest operated by the RAN in the 21st century. We can’t yet tell, but it is possible (as discussed below) that by the 2040s the potential of uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUV) will have become so compelling that the best approach to submarine warfare would be to use existing submarines (whatever Attack class had been built to this stage plus those Collins with enough hull integrity for further service) to extend the range and mission of UUV use.
At this time the utility of crewed submarines would probably be reviewed and by then it is possible that further construction of the Attack class might be cancelled in favour of extended use of UUVs. The ADF has already adopted something of this approach in replacing its AP-3C aerial maritime surveillance capability by a mix of fewer P-8A Poseidon aircraft supplemented by MQ-4C Triton high-altitude long endurance drones.
In this scenario the Collins LOTE would provide a risk management strategy, providing a bridge to a new model of automated submarine warfare at a lesser cost than the massive investment required with the Attack class. Whatever future developments eventuate, without the life extension of the Collins class the objective of the RAN remaining a significant submarine operator would become a mid-century mirage.
Strategic Imperatives
Trying to conduct major materiel programs across such extended timeframes immediately invokes serious amounts of uncertainty and risk. It seems to have become accepted that one area of uncertainty is being created by changes in Australia’s strategic circumstances. When launching the 2020 Defensive Strategic Update in July 2020, Prime Minister Morrison declared :
Now… we have moved into a new and less benign strategic area, one in which the institutions of patterns of cooperation that have benefited our prosperity and security for decades, are now under increasing - and I would suggest almost irreversible - strain
And later,
previous assumptions of enduring advantage and technological edge are no longer constants and cannot be relied upon.
He embellished these official formulations with the more personal observation that the combination of global, economic and strategic uncertainty were such as had not been seen since Australia faced “existential threat” in the 1930s and ‘40s.
There can probably be extended debate as to whether the attempt of the Peoples Republic of China to enclose the South China Sea by fortifying reefs and shoals in defiance of international law is some sort of parallel to the Mukden Incident that was Japan’s pretext for occupying Manchuria by 1932 or, perhaps, closer to the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937 which brought on the Second Sino-Japanese War. Certainly, Vladimir Putin’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 has echo’s of Nazi Germany’s occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938.
Whether these parallels will actually converge at some time in Australia’s strategic future, there appears one little bit of history bound to be repeated. In 1919 the British Cabinet Committee of Imperial Defence instituted the “10 year rule”. This was promoted by Winston Churchill and simply stated the obvious, that British military preparations could be based on the expectation that its forces would not be involved in a major conflict within the next 10 years.
The policy had its detractors but continued to be implemented, with particularly added vigour during the austerity measures of the early years of the Great Depression. It was abandoned in mid 1932, following the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and a policy of rearmament adopted that graduated from fitful to serious as the European strategic environment deteriorated. Despite the economic and public health uncertainties associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Morrison government appears determined to adhere to a path of Australian rearmament, underpinning its ambitious submarine warfare programs.
Why the Future Submarine will Remain a Measured Program
Perhaps the greatest irony of the FSP is that its acquisition strategy has included risk management measures to protect it from some aspects of this evolving global insecurity, but that these intrinsically provide one of the highest of hurdles to the submarine becoming part of Australia’s military response to that situation.
Well before the failure of globalism to allow many nations to to find the medical supplies they needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic - prompting Government calls for Australia to expand its “sovereign” manufacturing capabilities - the FSP office had identified “sovereign” capability as a central objective of the program. That is why the role of Naval Group in the program is as a design partner to assist the RAN in developing and delivering 12 submarines constructed in Australia. The objective of this acquisition strategy and of the large number of vessels to be built is as much to create “a sovereign submarine enterprise” as it is to deliver boats in the water.
This is an approach to manage the risks of the strategic uncertainty that the Prime Minister emphasised in his 2020 speech. The FSP needs to manage strategic and political risk as much as those more familiar challenges of technology and schedule. There is little sense, let’s say for example, in creating an Australian strategic defence capability that is dependent upon Japanese manufacture and support when, early in some possible strategic scenarios, that industry may be absorbed in supporting more compelling Japanese national security priorities.
Similarly, there is latent political risk when the politics of the country from which you are buying your technology continue to sustain the possibility of a government with more far-right influence (The Guardian, 04 May 2021) from a party with close ties to Vladimir Putin (BBC News, 03 April 2017).
The problem with developing a sovereign submarine enterprise is that it takes a long time, especially after processes that have gone a long way to de-industrialising the nation - 7 years to identify a design partner; another 8 before construction can begin; and, should all go well, a further 10 before the enterprise presents the RAN with a warship. This is a shaky management strategy for dealing with the risk, at some time along this extended period, of the strategic situation deteriorating to the point where the submarines are required for their intended purpose.
The FSP is proceeding with all due deliberateness because submarine construction has to be exactingly fault free. Yet, when launched almost all submarines reveal faults. The submarine enterprise has to know enough about the boat it has designed to be able to locate and correct these faults. When HMAS Collins began its sea trials “there were problems we didn’t expect” (Peter Yule and Derek Woolner, The Collins Class Submarine Story: Steel, Spies and Spin, Chapter 19, pp. 221-234) and not much capacity to investigate and rectify them.
Drawing on Collins experience, the FSP Office seems to be focusing on providing an engineered platform that won’t need the extensive corrections required by the Collins class and gaining command of all the intellectual property (the fundamental goal of “sovereignty”) needed to fix those that do emerge. In the end this might have a boat commissioned in a shorter time frame than a less exacting approach and should produce a design that can be sustained, repaired, modernised and evolved in country to allow sovereign responses to deterioration of the strategic environment.
The Collins LOTE as a Management Option Against Technological Risk
However, such care in minimising technical risk opens the Attack class to suffering the detriments of technological risk. This is simply the obvious consequence of the world not standing still over the time a new class of warship is being developed. Unfortunately, there are some extremely potent technologies unwinding with accelerating speed over the next decade-and-a-half before HMAS Attack becomes a commissioned RAN vessel.
One of these is the growing ubiquity of the digital revolution. The increasing growth and availability of computing capacity and the improved performance and resilience of sensors enabled by digitalisation, should make it increasingly possible to record data from passing submarines and localise their positions. This, in general, would imply that submarine operations will be pushed further from hostile shorelines, particularly where an adversary possesses competent and quickly responding countermeasures, including antisubmarine forces. This would particularly degrade collection of covert intelligence, one of the central peacetime objectives of submarine operations.
Such developments imply that, for the safety of crew and the integrity of the mission, many submarine operations will in future be performed by UUVs. Some commentators are already suggesting that Australia should be planning to acquire such vessels. Even the largest of these, the XLUUV Orca being developed by Boeing for the USN is somewhat short on range in an Australian context, quite slow and has limited capacity for payload.
However, it could already perform the delicate task of inshore intelligence gathering and the RAN sees the utility of UUVs increasing significantly. The Navy’s plan for the integration of an expanding artificial intelligence capacity into its combat structure RAS-AI Strategy 2040: Warfare Innovation Navy, [where RAS stands for robotics, autonomous systems and AI for artificial intelligence] calculates that UUVs will be capable of launching strikes against land targets by 2040 (p.11).
The human/machine teaming model seems likely to be followed for the early introduction of the technology. It appears to be the best way to exploit the capability of UUVs to overcome an adversary’s counter measures while maximising the safety of crew in the conventional submarine. It also provides an approach to minimising limitations of early AI in command and control and of maintaining oversight of ethical considerations.
If it is inevitable that the Collins class will provide the backbone of the RAN’s submarine warfare capability over the next two decades, policy for the Collins LOTE will have to focus as much on responding to such developments as does planning for the FSP. Application of emerging concepts to the Collins boats should help.
The problem is that the electrical energy capacity of the class is limited - to the extent that the (then) DSTO for many years ran a project to economise the use of energy across the submarines’ systems. If the LOTE is meant to produce a submarine that is operationally effective over the next 30 years, planning for it will soon have to envisage a means of significantly increasing on-board submerged energy supplies.
The solution lies in drawing on the opportunities arising from the spread into submarine design of the rapidly growing technologies of the electrical revolution. The use of light metal batteries for the main energy storage system of conventional (diesel electric) submarines has been thoroughly researched in East Asian countries over most of the past two decades. Japan and South Korea now have endorsed programs to build new generation designs using lithium-ion batteries (LIB) for main energy storage. Japan already has two such boats in service, JS Oryu and Toryu, the last of the Soryu 16SS class . The first of the new 29SS class, JS Taigei, was launched in 2020 and the second-of-class is scheduled to be launched later this year.
South Korea has endorsed acquisition of the KSS-III class, of which the first will have conventional energy storage. However, Block 2 vessels will be equipped with LIB main storage systems and are scheduled to be delivered from the mid-to-late 2020s. They will be followed in the 2030s by Block 3 boats with more advanced LMB storage. The Indian navy has now funded a study for the development of lithium-ion submarine energy storage systems.
Although considered to be risky developmental technology by many of the more traditional submarining Navies, especially regarding crew safety, introduction of LIB storage in the Japanese Navy is occurring without any sign of disruption. It continues to commission a new submarine each year with the adoption of LIB submarines proceeding at the same pace as the earlier lead-acid battery boats. The US Navy’s large UUVs are also equipped with LIB.
This first generation of LIB equipped submarines have around twice the submerged patrol endurance of a lead-acid battery submarine and about three times the submerged high speed endurance. The LIB energy systems weigh about half that of the preceding lead-acid system. At the current rate of light metal battery development the performance advantages already achieved by the early Japanese LIB submarines are expected to double by 2030. The adoption of LMB will allow conventional submarines to operate an expanded range of systems, enjoy greater periods of discreet patrolling and sustain high speed avoidance tactics to confound localisation by adversary forces.
As a well understood and soundly engineered platform, the Collins class provides an option for the RAN to start exploring this technology and its potential for more effective operational concepts. Some of the risks Australia might have faced in adopting this technology have already been mitigated by the Swedish Government. FMV, the Swedish defence materiel organisation, initiated a research program with Saab into the use of LIB for submarines energy systems and Saab in turn contracted PMB Defence (builders of the Collins class LAB batteries) to support the research, particularly in the areas of module design and integration (pp.12-14). PMB have built and tested a demonstrator system in South Australia and now offer complete LIB battery units for submarine use.
Conversely, if policy fails to focus on such issues the technology will morph into prohibitive restrictions on the scope of RAN submarine operations. Both Japan and South Korea are large producers of lithium-ion batteries and are able to draw on domestic industries to advance the technology and offset risk. As China is in a similar position to its East Asian neighbours, being the largest producer of lithium-ion batteries in the world, it can be expected that the Chinese will be commissioning LIB equipped submarines in the near future. With this in mind, we predict that the Indo-Pacific region could be home to some 30 of these high-performance submarines by the early 2030s.
Some years later still, HMAS Attack will be expected to survive in such an environment, with little prospect of a competitive energy storage system for the class before the 2040s. Instead of being able to utilise the superiority of LIB storage, RAN submarines will find the technology amongst opposing forces, severely limiting their operational options.
The high rate discharge performance of LMB allows a sustained high speed of advance covering enough distance to change the operational envelope of conventional submarines. Littoral ASW defence, for long an unproductive use of conventional boats, becomes an effective option with LMB equipped submarines. So much so, that states with no need for trans-oceanic performance could saturate their ASW defences by around 2030 with smaller, less complicated and cheaper all-battery submarines. This concept has already been found to be feasible for close and confined waters at current levels of LMB performance and will only improve by 2030.
By then only the second LOTE Collins will have been delivered and the remainder of the program will be completed in an increasingly hostile environment for RAN submarine operations. Clearly, any policy that does not address the impact of these technological risks will not be focused on keeping the Australian submarine force safely deployable and operationally effective.
Can Australia Operate a Sovereign Submarine Enterprise?
After consideration of all these issues, the question of whether Australia has the capability to perform the life of type extension program remains. The Navy’s plans will involve a complete change of some of the major systems of the vessels - unlike a maintenance docking, the LOTE will not be replacing like with like. The new equipment will not conform to the same spaces as those being replaced, may not perform in the same manner and will require changes to other aspects of the boats’ design.
However, as a result of its system design studies ASC is confident that it can successfully complete the work (Senate Estimates, ASC Pty Ltd, 23 March 2021). Confirmation of its expertise was given when Saab awarded ASC contracts for design work on the new Swedish A26 submarine in October 2019 (ASC media release). Saab is now the owner of Kockums, the designers of the Collins class, which makes it privy to intellectual property garnered when Kockums began using MTU diesels in the 1990s.
Nevertheless, the engineering for the Collins LOTE will not be simple. For instance, the replacement generator sets will be powered by MTU 4000 series diesels that will be sitting in a space designed to accommodate 3 Hedemora generators abreast. The Hedemora diesels are larger, longer, of higher capacity and more powerful than the MTU replacements. It has been claimed that sea trials of HMAS Collins showed that the submarine could maintain an energy cycle under patrol conditions that required it to recharge for “less than a few minutes” in every 24 hours (refer Endnote 75). The economy of the Hedemoras also allowed the Collins to meet the specified range performance of around 10,000 nautical miles.
Although they are modern units (signified by being designed to charge both LAB and LIB batteries) the MTU 12V4000U83 generators must be capable of replicating the performance of 3 Hedemoras. If more MTU units are required to retain performance but cannot be engineered into the existing spaces (which might be as much for vibration control as for physical geometry) Collins submarines will have lost a key element of their performance - one considered so superior that it removed the need for the class to incorporate the AIP auxiliary systems common on smaller European submarines. A similar caveat exists with the need to match previous range performance.
To increase the challenge, all of the engineering changes have to be accommodated into an envelope of predetermined volume and mass. For instance, as originally designed, the Collins class had a weight margin of only 20 tonnes (Yule and Woolner, p. 240), not much for a vessel of over 3,000 tonnes to accommodate weight increases over the lives of the boats. Nevertheless, during detail design of the class, weight savings had to be found and the mass of the platforms on which the diesel generators sit was reduced. This later contributed to some of the noise problems from which the design initially suffered and required some redesign to rectify. It might therefore be assumed there is little capacity in the design of the machinery spaces of the Collins class to absorb any increase in the weight of its generators and that damping machinery vibration might become a challenge.
Gaining excess displacement can, of course, be terminal for a submarine design. In the early days of the FSP, when off-the-shelf designs were still being evaluated, a prominent contender was the Spanish S-80 class. The first of these was laid down in 2005 and was to have been launched in 2013, at which time it was discovered that the design was so heavy that it could not surface after a dive. The S-80 had to be completely redesigned, extended in length and its entry to Spanish naval service delayed to 2023. Needless to say, the S-80 contender was an early scratching for consideration in the FSP.
However, adoption of LIB for the Collins LOTE would be an effective risk control strategy for preserving weight margins. The LAB battery of a Collins class weighs around 425 tonnes for a nominal storage capacity of 15 megawatt hours. For comparison, the LIB system evaluated by the South Koreans for the KSS-III Batch 2 would weigh around 160 tonnes (the battery is modular so capacity in the Collins hull is volume limited) but store 25 megawatt hours. By the time of the first Collins LOTE this capacity should have risen to something like 35 megawatt hours. Thus it should be possible to reduce the vessels’ displacement by something like 265 tonnes to provide a significant margin to cope with weight penalties in other parts of the refit or provide potential for incorporating new systems that might be approved in the future.
These and related technical issues involved in the Collins LOTE program will be discussed in greater detail in Part 2.
This section is a discussion of merely some of the complications that may arise during the Collins LOTE. Whatever the the actual experience, it is important that this program succeeds not simply because of its consequences for national security but because it represents the first real test of the concept of an Australian sovereign submarine enterprise. Failure, or significant complications, might call into doubt the entire rationale behind the FSP, if not the government’s entire national shipbuilding agenda.
For this reason, it seems wise that the proposal to move full cycle docking to Perth be delayed. With the full cycle docking to become the Collins LOTE it would seem wise to retain all work in Adelaide until such time as the industrial processes are fully resolved, the outcomes fully understood and any rectification required fully achieved. Anything else would qualify as “a courageous decision Minister”.
Derek Woolner & David Glynne Jones
May 2021
Comments
Post a Comment