No sense in building subs

The Australian has another installment of rent-seeking in favor of soaking the taxpayer for $36B in a dubious and high-risk sub program.

High-risk is OK if there is a dire reason for the effort, and, there is significant engineering management skill to pull us through. Unfortunately, with the state of the current DMO and friends, there is no such competency.

The very last bit of the opinion piece is an indicator of the motivation.

General Peter Cosgrove is chairman of the Defence SA Advisory Board.

And there you go. If The Australian isn’t busy ignoring its’ own journalism standards on the topic of Defence (see this advertisement by-any-other-name for the F-35 by one of their alleged “journalists”), it is providing a sounding board for rent-seekers. The whole ‘build-the-subs-at-home’ message is a plan using legalized (barely) money-laundering of Australian taxpayer dollars (of which in an entitlement society there are so damn few working taxpayers), to feather the rent-seeker’s nest.

Valid Defense as the goal? As a whole, this kind of goal does not exist for the Entrenched Defence Bureaucracy.

The rent-seekers tell us they will learn from previous Collins submarine project management mistakes. Let us look at those:

-Faulty noise signature assumptions. A loud sub is not good.
-Faulty propulsion system; fuel contamination via ballast; bad propellers.
-Bad assumptions with structural make-up and welding.
-Bizarre periscope mast assumptions in the design.
-Huge complexities in the combat system causing reduced combat capability.
-Bad management; lack of taking ownership of problems.
-Lousy manpower planning (all areas).

Leading to today:Poor availability and a large expense in sustainment (up to $1B per year) for not much capability.

But hey! This next time around let the same group-think mentality try and build twice as many subs.

The country is hundreds of billions in debt. It does not need this kind of ill-advised expense.