Royal Australian Navy : News, Updates & Discussions.
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can France take revenge against australia
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Submarine crisis: can France take revenge against Australia? - France News
Australia is out of submarines and France is rubbing its hands. A year ago, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the termination of the "contract of the century", signed with Naval Group. The proposal to deliver twelve French conventional submarines had been swept aside out of hand, in...
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NUCLEAR POWERED SUBMARINES – BRING BACK THE FRENCH
p-24
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letsgo,When the creation of AUKUS was announced a little more than a year ago on September 15, 2021, we were told the pathway to acquiring a nuclear propelled submarine would be conceptually straightforward. Most importantly, there was an early ‘in principle’ decision that this would not be a bespoke design but rather a simple choice between the US Virginia class or smaller Astute SSNs from the UK.
As numerous people have written, but which the Australian nuclear submarine task force has not acknowledged – at least not publicly – is that it is likely to be neither. The one that can definitively be ruled out is the Astute. As the British themselves have stated, after the delivery of the seventh and final vessel – at a date yet to be decided – that’s it. No more Astute class, particularly since their PWR2 reactor went out of production more than ten years ago partly because of safety concerns about the design.
The situation with the USN Virginia class production line is somewhat clearer, but that doesn’t necessarily help Australia. The program of record is for 66 of them to be constructed, but the actual number is likely to be less than that as the USN transitions to the as yet unnamed SSN(X) is in the 2030s. Because of the complexity of introducing a submarine into service, even if construction of the new class begins in 2035 it is unlikely to enter service before the early 2040s.
To date 22 Virginias, which need a crew of 132 officers and sailors, have been delivered by two shipyards – Electric Boat (EB) in Connecticut and Huntington Ingalls (HI) in Virginia. The first of class, USS Virginia, was built by lead yard EB and launched in August 2003. Since then, production been staggered with submarines delivered at a rate of one or two per year. The design has progressively updated and the current configuration is the Block V variant, the first of which is still under construction.
The US industrial system seems fully loaded and it is not at all clear how capacity could be found to build additional Virginia class submarines for Australia – let alone transfer the technology and provide the necessary supervision for constructing them at Osborn in Adelaide. For complex things such as submarines, long lead time items – for example the nuclear reactors – are often ordered a decade in advance.
It is worth remembering that the size of the US industrial base has shrunk since 1990 when it made up about 35% of the economy to now being around 11%. That might sound alarming, but it is part of what seems to be a natural progression from agriculture and raw materials through to industrialisation and then service-based advanced economies. Australia appears to have entirely skipped the industrialisation phase. Risk management can be fraught since during that long interval technology advances and no one wants to be taking delivery of a product that is already obsolescent – particularly one that is intended for front-line military. This means that the final product might be different from that which was originally ordered and managing to process is a demanding and rare skill that cannot be easily replicated. With that in mind, it has occasionally been suggested that a way forward would be for Australia to fund – in whole or part – the opening up of a third submarine production line somewhere in the US.
The latest reporting of this idea occurred in the Wall Street Journal on September 23 with a well sourced story from Michael R Gordon saying that the idea was under active consideration by the Biden administration. Officials have apparently cautioned that the way ahead is not straightforward because it would cost billions of extra dollars – and Australia would be expected to contribute.
A keen observer of the AUKUS process – and critic of it, largely on nuclear non-proliferation grounds - is Professor Alan Kuperman, from Austin, Texas. A regular visitor to Australia and subject matter expert on nuclear propulsion, we asked him for his reaction to the WSJ article:
“It means Australia’s taxpayers would pay tens of billions of Aussie bucks to expand US shipyards, with US workers, to build US subs, staffed largely by US sailors. I’m sure my fellow Americans will appreciate that foreign aid! “Richard Marles and Anthony Albanese might try to sell this to Aussie voters by promising that subsequent submarines would be Made in Australia, but after spending billions to expand US shipyards, that would have a probability verging on nil.
“Moreover, by purchasing the current class of US nuclear submarines, Australia would set a terrible precedent of importing weapons-grade uranium naval fuel, thereby establishing a precedent that Iran and other countries would cite to produce their own nuclear weapons-grade uranium for “naval fuel.”
“The final AUKUS plan is not due till March 2023, so there’s still time for Australian citizens to demand better of their government. One alternative would be French nuclear subs, which could be built jointly in Australia, are small enough that they could be staffed mainly by Australian sailors rather than foreigners and are fuelled by low-enriched uranium that is unsuitable for nuclear weapons – so that Australia could bolster rather than undermine the global non-proliferation regime.”
The issue that Professor Kuperman refers to is that the Virginia class use highly enriched weapons grade Uranium 235 as their power source, which is concentrated to about 95% of what goes in the submarine. This can be converted, with relative ease, into nuclear warheads. French naval reactors use commercial grade Uranium 238 which would have to be enriched to make weapons – a very complex, time consuming and costly process.
To purchase a Virginia class straight from the US production line – if such a thing were possible – would cost at least $5 billion, to which would need to be added all of the Australian support costs such as facilities, and training. The $5 billion does not include a number of items such as weapons, which are typically procured separately. Putting all of this together, estimates of the cost to Australia of acquiring eight of them are well in excess of $100 billion. This is more than twice the current annual Defence budget and 10 times the yearly spend buying new equipment. How Australia will be able to afford this is unclear – though perhaps thankfully serious levels of expenditure are still a decade away.
Despite this vast sum, there has been almost no public debate about the strategic justification for the decision to go down the nuclear propulsion path – just rhetoric that it is an absolutely vital capability for the RAN to acquire. In turn, this seems based on the premise – that no one has questioned – that Australia benefits from being able to conduct extended submarine operations close to the coast of China in the 2040s. Whether this is a better way of protecting Australia than other acquisitions that would be quicker and cheaper – such as acquiring B-21 bombers or accelerating the local production of long-range missiles – is unclear.
In the 2040s a crewed submarine will probably not want to go anywhere near the South China Sea because by then the seabed will be covered with a vast variety of sensors. The PLA(N) will have a fleet of large submarine-hunting surface and underwater uncrewed autonomous systems that already exist in prototype form. Even Australia is starting to move down the uncrewed path – see the interview with Anduril founder Palmer Luckey in this edition for a glimpse of what underwater warfare will look like. What an Australian nuclear-powered submarine will look like is anyone’s guess and presumably the nuclear task force will shed light on that when it reports – though how much of that will ever be made public is unknown. There has been talk of a hybrid future USN-RN-RAN design, but that sounds like a complete nightmare trying to harmonise budgets and requirements. Perhaps Australia will buy into the SSN(X) program, but with first deliveries starting 45 years from now. It is not clear what role the UK would play in such an arrangement, if any – something that would seem to be against the spirit of what AUKUS was meant to be about in the first place.
Another possibility would be to do as Professor Kuperman suggests and re-engage with France to acquire nuclear-powered Barracuda submarines.
Meanwhile, Australia will have to get by with conventional submarines for a while – and the RAN is resisting with all of its considerable obstructive might the need for an interim capability between the end of life of Collins and the eventual deliver of a nuclear-powered vessel. This seems to be nothing more than the worst sort of bureaucratic inertia: having transferred responsibility for Australia’s submarine future to AUKUS that seems to be the end of the matter. One of the ironies of the present situation is that almost all of Australia’s underwater warfare capability problems could be fixed by building a submarine resupply base on Christmas Island. This would allow conventional submarines with Air Independent Propulsion to carry out extended patrols in the South China Sea because it would drastically reduce transit times to operational areas. Christmas Island is 2,500km north of Freemantle and a submarine refuelled and resupplied there would get an additional 10 days on station, negating much of the justification for a nuclear submarine.
However, the RAN has a long and inexplicable history of resisting changes to basing arrangements. In the 1980s it fought tooth and nail resisting the move of half of the fleet to Western Australia; just as it dug in over earlier proposals to relocate to Jervis Bay. Much more recently, it has down-designed the joint US-PNG base on Manus Island so that rather than being a major asset for forward deployments the wharf has been reduced in size so that it can only handle a patrol boat.
It is a shame that AUKUS has been excluded from the Defence Strategic Review because it is very much in need of additional scrutiny. One has the sinking feeling – no pun intended – that an effective replacement for the Collins class will be decades away because of a lack of clarity and realism about what Australia needs and what we can afford. /KYM BERGMANN // CANBERRA
(thx to the original poster)
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yep!
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« Contrat du siècle » : Emmanuel Macron rouvre le dossier des sous-marins australiens
"Contract of the Century": Emmanuel Macron reopens the Australian submarine fileArriving in Bangkok for the Apec summit, the French president stressed that France's offer for conventional submarines remained "on the table". A statement made the day after a meeting, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
It is a little reminder to Canberra and a way of suggesting that the door is still open. The offer of French cooperation on submarines with Australia is "known, it remains on the table," said President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday from Bangkok - where the Apec summit is being held.
A statement made the day after a meeting, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. And which was an opportunity for him to recall one of the strong points of the French offer. It concerns conventionally powered submarines, a technology that could allow for faster delivery than the option of American or British nuclear-powered submarines.
A solution that would guarantee Australia's "freedom and sovereignty
The conclusion of the AUKUS alliance between Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom led Canberra to abruptly cancel in 2021 the 'contract of the century' for the acquisition of 12 French conventional submarines - which would have been built in Australia. Canberra then decided to buy American or British nuclear-powered submarines instead. This cast a pall over relations between France and Australia.
But the delivery of these submarines is likely to take some time as the Australians need to rapidly renew their capabilities in the face of China's growing influence in the region. This, even if the G20 was the occasion for the beginning of a warming between Beijing and Canberra.
"We will see how they adapt to the difficulties," said Emmanuel Macron, noting that "for the moment, they have not decided to change their strategy on the subject. This is despite the arrival in May of a new Prime Minister, Labour's Anthony Albanese, who has pledged to repair the damaged bilateral relationship between the two countries. "There is a fundamental choice as to whether or not they produce submarines at home or whether or not they decide to go nuclear," said Emmanuel Macron.
This was an opportunity for the Head of State to recall that France did not deliver nuclear-powered submarines abroad and that the offer therefore remained conventional. "We have never been on a strategy like this," he said. He added that the French solution offered Australia an alternative that guaranteed its "freedom and sovereignty", since the French submarines would have been built at home.
Relaunching French strategy in the region
The crisis with Australia has severely damaged the Indo-Pacific strategy of France, which has many territories and maritime spaces in the region and intends to have a place there. President Macron will therefore try to revive these strategic ambitions at the Apec summit in Bangkok, where he is the first European head of state to be invited.
"In this highly contested region, which is the scene of a confrontation between the world's two leading powers [...], our strategy is to defend freedom and sovereignty, balances that preserve maritime freedoms, balanced cultural exchanges, economic exchanges, and the development of technologies without a hegemonic model prevailing," Emmanuel Macron stressed.
So our offer remains unchanged: we do not offer nuclear propulsion technology, and production would be local, in Australia.
Advantages vs. "Aukus subs.": guarantees of Australian freedom and sovereignty, faster delivery, less aggressive stance towards China (and neighbours: Indonesia, etc.)
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Only 4 months to the announcement now. Then you can put this nonsense to bed. They will also say about another 28 F-35 and other stuff.
Is the Australian public still as anti-nuclear as I, as a French person, remember?
You mean nuking pacific atolls and blowing up Rainbow Warrior in NZ? I think that still has a ring to it. Nuke subs for some reason aren't a major issue. I guess because it's in the water and not a neighbour. We would still question nuke power stations and I can't see that happening in the near future.
I don't mind being accused of everything, but it's not my fault that Portuguese photographers can't swim!
Concerning the corals, the little mermaid and the little red and black and white fishes, yeah it's ugly. Poor beasts. But they were French, Monsieur. No kangaroos were mistreated in this case!
That's the price we pay for deterrence, freedom and independence.
How's Australia doing?
Coal is soooo "green". It's the future, for sure.
