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Subject: RUSI prsentation by Wooner on Collins
gf0012-aust    11/4/2009 2:57:04 PM
http://www.rusiaust.org/states/act/PRES_TRANS_from_1999/Woolner_Derek_4Feb09.pdf
 
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Volkodav       11/5/2009 4:14:58 AM
Thanks for that gf, very interesting especially the Q&A at the end.
 
Ex O boat guys have told me similar previously, recruitment and retention were major issues and availability was shocking due to the lack of a domestic TLS capability.  People forget how bad industrial relations and project management used to be in Australia prior to the sub program being used to update the whole show.
 
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Aussiegunneragain       11/5/2009 4:20:21 AM

Thanks for that gf, very interesting especially the Q&A at the end.

Ex O boat guys have told me similar previously, recruitment and retention were major issues and availability was shocking due to the lack of a domestic TLS capability.  People forget how bad industrial relations and project management used to be in Australia prior to the sub program being used to update the whole show.


The sub program was used to update our IR system eh? And here was me thinking that had more to do with the accord, then enterprise bargaining, then the first round of workplace relations laws. Go figure.
 
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Aussiegunneragain       11/6/2009 10:50:24 AM
Was Wooner involved with the project? I can't finding anything on the web other than references to the book he co-authored and his appointment at ANU.
 
Anyway, I'm not that impressed with this paper. He spins the stats on the Collins Class project to highlight it in the best possible light. For instance, the claim that the subs were "only" on average delivered 26 months late neglects the point that the first boat didn't have a fully operational combat system until 2004, more than 10 years after the Collins was launched.
 
The constant references to how other projects that have done worse doesn't impress me either. We've had two decades worth of f*ck ups in defence acquisitions because of the insistance of the ADF to Australianise everything and the insistance by the Government to involve local industry. Just because we may have f*cked up the Seasprites and Wedgetail more than we f*cked up the Collins Class doesn't make it an acceptable f*ck up.
 
This paragraph gets me:

"Most of this was delivered under Sea 1114 for around $5 billion, which, allowing for inflation, was actually slightly less than the contracted price of $3.9 billion. However, the project had encountered many difficulties, that were to be rectified under new project numbers, and an additional $1.2 billion was spent overcoming these. Yet of this additional expenditure most was for capability upgrades&S94; only around $143 million was spent to rectify the specific faults (excepting the replacement of the now terminal combat system). On that ground the Collins is a singular success because, despite its portrayal in the media as a financial disaster, it arose out of a period of enormous acquisition cost overruns to finish two decades later with the original price still relevant to project management objectives."
 
How does he figure that $1.2 billion with "only" $143 millon on specific faults and the rest to provide capability upgrades less than a decade after the thing was introduced is an acceptable outcome? Why did the thing need a capability upgrade so soon? Why doesn't he mention the cost of replacing the combat system, which only finds its way into some brackets, which I believe was about $1 billion? Saying that those amounts of taxpayers dollars being wasted constitutes a singular success is a joke!
 
What we should have done instead of going on this very expensive frolic which risked out national security was to have the Germans build 6 to 8 Type 209-1500's for us, like they have for many other small to medium size navies. The type has the same range as the Collins Class but 1/3 less weapons, which doesn't matter because no modern sub has ever used 22 torpedos on a cruise anyway. They use less crew members so we would have greater availability and we would have probably been able to afford the fleet, a submarine maintenance facility, training in Germany for the  maintainers, a tender and then probably would have had some change to spare. I hope that somebody grows a brain and buys off the shelf in this manner with our next subs, though I'm not holding out my hopes for it.  
 
 
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Volkodav       11/6/2009 9:17:17 PM
 
Was Wooner involved with the project? I can't finding anything on the web other than references to the book he co-authored and his appointment at ANU.
 
No which is why he was he was commisioned to reseach and write the book, think of him as an impartial biographer who has been given access to people and documents covering all aspects of the subject so he can produce an accurate and even handed account of what happened and why.
 
Anyway, I'm not that impressed with this paper. He spins the stats on the Collins Class project to highlight it in the best possible light. For instance, the claim that the subs were "only" on average delivered 26 months late neglects the point that the first boat didn't have a fully operational combat system until 2004, more than 10 years after the Collins was launched.
 
Its only "spin" if you have already decided to the contrary and refuse to accept other accounts.

No submarine to date, conventional or nuclear, has a combat system as capable as that "intended" for the Collins.  The RAN were kidding themselves asking for it and the government screwed up in paying Rockwell for it even though they failed to deliver.  Rockwell of course screwed up by promising they could do when when in actual fact they didn't realy know where to start.  Interestingly there were several (less expensive) systems available that offered superior performance to both the Rockwell / Boeing original and the Raytheon RCS that could have been inserted during the build, i.e. on the last 3 or 4 boats during construction.  There were plenty of warnings that the combat system was in trouble, even before boat one was assembled, but the key players chose to ignore them and persist with Rockwell.
 
EB has a the 1:3:8 Law, i.e. what takes 1 hour in a module, will take 3 hours in an assembled hull and 8 hours in the water.  By not putting the Rockwell system out of our misery after boat one, when it was already clear it was NEVER going to work, the cost of rectification was blown out by a factor of 8 for the later boats.  This was government and RAN decission not ASC.
 
The constant references to how other projects that have done worse doesn't impress me either. We've had two decades worth of f*ck ups in defence acquisitions because of the insistance of the ADF to Australianise everything and the insistance by the Government to involve local industry. Just because we may have f*cked up the Seasprites and Wedgetail more than we f*cked up the Collins Class doesn't make it an acceptable f*ck up.
 
Well Greece has refused delivery of their german built Type 212 on quality and performance grounds.  Canada is having diabolicals with their Upholders with only one in service some of the time, there is even a suggestion from some of their personnel, who have experience with the Collins class, that they regret that they didn't buy some when they had the chance.
 
This paragraph gets me:

"Most of this was delivered under Sea 1114 for around $5 billion, which, allowing for inflation, was actually slightly less than the contracted price of $3.9 billion. However, the project had encountered many difficulties, that were to be rectified under new project numbers, and an additional $1.2 billion was spent overcoming these. Yet of this additional expenditure most was for capability upgrades&S94; only around $143 million was spent to rectify the specific faults (excepting the replacement of the now terminal combat system). On that ground the Collins is a singular success because, despite its portrayal in the media as a financial disaster, it arose out of a period of enormous acquisition cost overruns to finish two decades later with the original price still relevant to project management objectives."
 
How does he figure that $1.2 billion with "only" $143 millon on specific faults and the rest to provide capability upgrades less than a decade after the thing was introduced is an acceptable outcome? Why did the thing need a capability upgrade so soon? Why doesn't he mention the cost of replacing the combat system, which only finds its way into some brackets, which I believe was about $1 billion? Saying that those amounts of taxpayers dollars being wasted constitutes a singular success is a joke!
 
The highlighted section sa
 
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Volkodav    Interesting reading   11/6/2009 9:32:48 PM

 
 

?From Collins to Force 2030: The Challenge of the Future Submarine?

 

SPEECH TO THE SYDNEY INSTITUTE

 

Wednesday 4 November 2009

 

CHECK-AGAINST-DELIVERY

 

 

Director of the Institute, Mr Gerard Henderson, Ladies and Gentlemen.

 

I would like to talk to you tonight on the topic of ?From Collins to Force 2030 ? the Challenge of the Future Submarine? in order to highlight the importance of this project and deal with some of my roles and responsibilities as the Minister for Defence Personnel, Materiel and Science. 

 
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Aussiegunneragain       11/6/2009 9:53:43 PM
No which is why he was he was commisioned to reseach and write the book, think of him as an impartial biographer who has been given access to people and documents covering all aspects of the subject so he can produce an accurate and even handed account of what happened and why.

Who commissioned him? 

Its only "spin" if you have already decided to the contrary and refuse to accept other accounts.

No, it is spin because he picks and chooses the facts he wants to present to show the project in the best possible light and glosses over the stuff ups. 

EB has a the 1:3:8 Law, i.e. what takes 1 hour in a module, will take 3 hours in an assembled hull and 8 hours in the water.  By not putting the Rockwell system out of our misery after boat one, when it was already clear it was NEVER going to work, the cost of rectification was blown out by a factor of 8 for the later boats.  This was government and RAN decision not ASC.
 
I agree that the project specification was the fault of Beazley and the RAN and don't hold ASC to account for that, I just hold them to account for the various engineering failures within their remit that the type has experienced.

Well Greece has refused delivery of their german built Type 212 on quality and performance grounds.  Canada is having diabolicals with their Upholders with only one in service some of the time, there is even a suggestion from some of their personnel, who have experience with the Collins class, that they regret that they didn't buy some when they had the chance.
 
Buying from a foriegn company with a proven track record doesn't guarrantee that the project will be conducted perfectly, but it improves the odds over starting from scratch here. That is what risk management is about. The 212 is a reletively new design and one would expect a few teething troubles, but it remains to be seen whether there are anywhere near the sorts of problems that the Collins Class has had. I'd also have to know a bit more about the Greek problem, i.e. whether they had any specific specifications that added additional risks. The Upholders were a screw up but I'd argue that the Brits have less recent experience than the Germans in building DE subs, so we probably wouldn't buy from them anyway.

The highlighted section says it all.  Besides the class is approaching the middle of their life now and a major upgrade would have been expected anyway, which is why I am amazed so much time and money was wasted on Rockwells disaster when other cheaper option would have provided better performance and could have been incorporated during build.  The ANZAC's are even newer than the Collins, are far less sophisticated and are already begining their mid life updates.  Hulls last far longer than ships systems which is why they have regular upgrades and improvements. 

I don't thinWoolner was talking about mid-life upgrades. He was talking about correcting problems that happenned to improve capability as well. In any case the HMAS ANZAC was launched in 1994, a year after the HMAS Collins. If the ANZAC's are beginning their MLU's now they are doing a lot better than the Colins class which needed "capability enhancements" from the late 90's.
 
The Japanese take it even further with their submarines only having a life of type of 16 years.  They build one new boat a year and maintain a fleet of 16 effectively replacing their subs at what we would call the mid life point with a totally new hull to house the updated systems.  It is not actually that much more expensive to do it this way and provides a much more modern and sustainable fleet.  Greg Combet has mentioned the possibility of our twelve new boats being built in batches to create a more sustainable capability.
 
I don't think that is a bad idea at all.

Disagree, the Type 209-1500 is actually inferior to the Collins in that it can not conduct many of the real world missions the Collins, and the Oberon before it, have been carrying out since the late 90's.  Start adding the new roles the Collins is being updated to carryout, i.e. special fo

 
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gf0012-aust       11/6/2009 11:28:05 PM

Well Greece has refused delivery of their german built Type 212 on quality and performance grounds.  Canada is having diabolicals with their Upholders with only one in service some of the time, there is even a suggestion from some of their personnel, who have experience with the Collins class, that they regret that they didn't buy some when they had the chance.

geez, we dodged a bullet by not getting the Upholders as a second squadron.  I was at the DefProc when Adm Barrie gave the speech to all and sundry as to why we wouldn't - everything that was identified as a problem with them came true.  We analysed the Upholders closely - somewhere along the line the canucks had a brain fart and didn't do their homework.  I used to have that session on tape - it was about 2 hrs and detailed all the probs - they pulled no punches and there were RN and CN snrs present.

we'd be a golden mile worse off if we'd bought them as interims and a 2nd string act - replaing Collins with the Ups would have been a bigger nightmare.  Nice concept, but again (as with Collins/Gotland) you can't upscale/descale platforms and expect the numbers to extrapolate.  it doesn't work like that.

Disagree, the Type 209-1500 is actually inferior to the Collins in that it can not conduct many of the real world missions the Collins, and the Oberon before it, have been carrying out since the late 90's.  Start adding the new roles the Collins is being updated to carryout, i.e. special forces insertion (plus others I am not at liberty to discuss), the type 209 is simply too small and constrained to receive similat upgrades.  Discount the number of torpedoes and think in terms of space and weight, what can be carried inplace of some or all of the torpedoes......

 absolutely, the 209's aren't within a bulls roar of what we can do with collins.  bear in mind that the "janes" type data is just about meaningless and doesn't reflect anything close to the real world specs on performance.

At the end of the day what we have in service now is superior to any current serving, or in production, non nuclear sub in the world.  They are not as good as they could/should have been, they are starting to suffer reliability and obsolescents issues with old equipment and they are expensive to upgrade and maintain with the decission to layup one of the subs due to crewing issues now causing availability issues for the class. 

up until BYG, ADCAP/CBASS there was only one other large conventional that could challenge.  they're still a superior asset to even the scorpenes (at the systems and combat level).  considering that we were the first to actually get anechoic tiles to sit properly etc. and the fact that we can pull signatures which only the US can reach (with gear that costs 15 times more) - then they're a very underestimated asset

It can be argued that proper risk management could have seen the combat system changed for the last three or four boats during build and that the build could have been extended to eight hulls built in two batches of four over a longer period of time with the second four incorporating all the lessons tearned on the first four.  This would have avoided the majority of the availability issues we are encountering today as well as the need for urgent rectifications being rushed to incorporate changing requirements.

if someone had properly evaluated the integration issues in the first place then most of the hurt would have gone south.

 
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Aussiegunneragain       11/6/2009 11:39:27 PM

 absolutely, the 209's aren't within a bulls roar of what we can do with collins.  bear in mind that the "janes" type data is just about meaningless and doesn't reflect anything close to the real world specs on performance.


They aren't within a bulls roar when the Collins Class have worked as advertised which cuts out the entire first decade of their service after the Collins was commissioned. We could have had 209's in operation doing an acceptable job over that entire time, with a follow on sub like the 212's or 214's for better performance coming into service during this decade. That of course would never have occurred to the mighty ADF, who will inevitably poo poo the idea of accepting a platform that does 80% of what they want but which works if there is an opportunity to buy a customised one that has all the bells and whistles but which is a decade late at vast expense. We do "punch above our weight" and all that you know. http://www.strategypage.com/CuteSoft_Client/CuteEditor/Images/emcrook.gif" align="absMiddle" border="0" alt="" />
 
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hairy man       11/6/2009 11:40:03 PM
two batches of three may have even been better value than the way we chose.
 
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gf0012-aust       11/7/2009 1:07:50 AM





 absolutely, the 209's aren't within a bulls roar of what we can do with collins.  bear in mind that the "janes" type data is just about meaningless and doesn't reflect anything close to the real world specs on performance.







They aren't within a bulls roar when the Collins Class have worked as advertised which cuts out the entire first decade of their service after the Collins was commissioned. We could have had 209's in operation doing an acceptable job over that entire time, with a follow on sub like the 212's or 214's for better performance coming into service during this decade. 
they were a cold war construct, for the types of missions that we were doing - and what we viewed as a future, smaller subs were not attractive for the mission set.  the canadians had a similar view.  as good as the 21nn's were/are, I still don't regard them as being suitable for our work.  as it was, collins was a mule for the swedes to develop gotland - and thats one of the things that irritates me more than anything at the engineering level.  they were designed around a doctrine set of reaching out, going far and snooping long and doing it on nuke duty cycles.  none of the smaller subs were remotely close.  we either changed the doctrine set or went with large blue water subs.  doctrine was heavily influenced by Govt - and was supported by both sides even though Moores motivation for fixing them was initially politically motivated
That of course would never have occurred to the mighty ADF, who will inevitably poo poo the idea of accepting a platform that does 80% of what they want but which works if there is an opportunity to buy a customised one that has all the bells and whistles but which is a decade late at vast expense. We do "punch above our weight" and all that you know. http://www.strategypage.com/Images/emcrook.gif" align="absMiddle" border="0" alt="" />

you'd be surprised at how many military procurement decisions are done by govt.  there are 3-6 different reviewing groups at each sign off - Govt is the only one that can veto at any stage - and they have and done on kit that the public never gets to "discuss" - let alone major capital ones like this.

one of the stuff ups we have with the C17's is directly related to the Govt making decisions without absorbing consideration of the speed of purchase.  ditto with abrams, ditto with elements of shornet, ditto with some of the ewarfare decisions.

in procurement, every step is lockstepped by multiple stakeholders - no one can move forward on a whim except the govt if they elect to exercise veto privileges.

like Volk, I can give horror stories of what the prev and the current govt have done and which has been gilded.  blaming the  military for the development process is not always approp.

however, universally everyone is glad combet is in the job, it would be good to see him eventually get the prime job as faulkner 'aint in there for the long haul
 
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