Will "Another RAN submarine fails to return from war patrol" be a future news headline?
The Federal Government should have given me $214M for a Collins submarine replacement plan. They would have received a more credible result.
See the previous post below for some reference. It shows the Friday news cycle release of what the Abbott government wants to do so-as to have a hope of being a two-term government...er... I mean... his team's plan to replace the Collins submarine. The release is riddled with nonsense.
One of the critical pieces of nonsense in that statement is demanding that no matter what submarine the Entrenched Defence Bureaucracy picks to replace the Collins, it must have an American combat system.
This is a giant risk because the combat system the U.S. perfers for their subs hasn't been working all that well for years. See this U.S. Department of Defense test report (Acoustic Rapid Commercial Off‐the‐Shelf (COTS) Insertion (A-RCI) and AN / BYG‐1 Combat Control System) of its health (PDF). It doesn't pick out or process target information very well at all.
"For ASW, A-RCI passive sonar capability is effective against older classes of submarines in some environments but is not effective in all environments or against modern threats.
The A-RCI and the AN/BYG-1 systems are not effective in supporting operator situational awareness and contact management in areas of high-contact density.
The AN/BYG-1 system did not meet the Navy’s requirements for target localization; however, the targeting solutions were often sufficient for a trained crew to provide the torpedo an opportunity to detect the target. Nevertheless, AN/BYG-1 remains not effective in ASW scenarios."
Picking a combat system for the faulty SEA 1000 Collins sub replacement has been a significant topic of discussion for years.
How the government gets around this major stumbling block is yet to be seen. The self-before-service attitude of the Entrenched Defence Bureaucracy also prefers keeping the Americans feeding on your tax dollars, even if we buy unworkable garbage.
I have been very critical of the Collins submarine up to this point. But it looks like the only credible replacement for it, is another Collins with all the stuff hopefully working based on lessons learned.
Or...change the faulty SEA1000 requirement to a more realistic effort.
Until then, a U.S. combat system is at best "sub-optimal".
And may get our new, partially blind submarines and crews, killed.
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Other reading:
-Rex Patrick, "A Coherent Combat System Solution, Please", Asia Pacific Defence Reporter, July-AuG 2013, pg36 (In regard to the Collins submarine replacement program requirement known as SEA1000.)
-Rex Patrick, "Combat Systems Selection for SEA 1000", Asia Pacific Defence Reporter, October 2011, pg38 (Again, in regard to the Collins submarine replacement program requirement known as SEA1000. Like above, a good read. It implies the logic that if Australia gets "X" foreign submarine, that it should get the combat system that comes with it. The author recommends: "Those that think that the use of a combat system with a US pedigree is an important consideration for our future submarines might be better trying to weigh the submarine selection process in favour of the Spanish S-80.". Note that today, the S-80 submarine combat system is also unproven. As an aside, the S-80 has its own problems. One being a design goof that predicted the sub could submerge but then would be unlikely to surface again.)
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