AUKUS Is Born, RAN To Procure Eight SSGNs

Following almost a year of extensive deliberations, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States on September 16, 2021 formally agreed to the creation of an enhanced trilateral security partnership, known as AUKUS, under which the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) will procure eight nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSGN), instead of 12 Shortfin Barracuda (Attack-class) conventionally-powered SSKs (at a cost of A$89 billion) from France’s Naval Group. Over the next 18 months, Australia, the UK and the US will intensely examine the full suite of requirements. Australia will establish a Nuclear-Powered Submarine Taskforce in the Department of Defence to lead this work.

It is highly likely that the RAN will select the UK’s Astute-class SSGN, whose prime contractor is BAE Systems. The UK’s Royal Navy has to date ordered seven such SSGNs, all built by BAE Systems Marine Barrow shipyard. The RAN’s SSGNs will be powered by Rolls-Royce PWR-2 pressurised water reactors (PWR) that use long-life cores, which means that refuelling will not be necessary for the service life of the SSGNs. The other main items of machinery on board will include two Alstom turbines and a single shaft with a Rolls-Royce pump-jet propulsor, comprising moving rotor-blades within a fixed duct. There will be two diesel alternators, one emergency drive motor and one auxiliary retractable propeller.

Northrop Grumman Sperry Marine will provide the digital, integrated controls and instrumentation system for steering, diving, depth control and platform management, Lockheed Martin Naval Electronics & Surveillance Systems–Undersea Systems (NE&SS-US) will likely be tasked to integrate all of the vessel’s systems—sensors, countermeasures technology, and navigation and weapon controls. All these will be based on open system architecture (OSA) with Q-70 colour common display consoles. The weapons fire-control control suite will likely be provided by Raytheon with a derivative of the CCS Mk.2 combat management system and the AN/BYG-1 combat control system. Two mast-mounted Raytheon submarine high-data rate (sub-HDR) multi-band satellite communications systems will enable simultaneous communication at a super-high frequency (SHF) and extremely high frequency (EHF). The sonar suite will be supplied by THALES of France.

But it will be only by the middle of the next decade that the RAN will become the world’s seventh navy to own and operate nuclear-powered submarines. At the same time, the RAN will be required to put in place an extensive array of shore-based industrial and training infrastructure for supporting the SSGN fleet operations, which will be the most challenging tasking since Australia has no prior experience in operating any kind of nuclear power generation facility and hence lacks the human resources that are proficient in both pressurised water reactor (PWR) physics and PWR engineering.

It may be recalled that back in 2009, Canberra’s Defence White Paper had revealed that a class of 12 submarines would be built to replace the RAN’s existing eight Collins-class SSKs. The selected design was to be built at the government-owned ASC Pty Ltd’s shipyard in Adelaide, South Australia. But, if a company other than ASC was selected to build the SSKs, it would be granted access to the shipyard. Plans at that time called for the first SSK to be completed before 2025. However, there were significant delays in implementing the project and by late 2014, the RAN’s NSQR had still not been defined. In February 2015 a competitive evaluation process commenced between competing Japanese, French, and German designs.

On November 30, 2015, Naval Group along with THALES delivered its proposal for the Shortfin Barracuda Block-1A design to the Commonwealth of Australia’s Department of Defence. This was preceded by a binding Government-to-Government Agreement between Australia’s DoD and France’s Direction Generale de L’Armament for aspects of the deliverables. On April 26, 2016 Canberra announced that the Shortfin Barracuda had emerged as the winner of the competitive bidding process. Each such SSK would have displaced 4,500 tonnes (surfaced), measured 97 metres in length, had an 8.8-metre beamwdth, used pump-jet propulsion, had a range of 18,000 nautical miles, a top speed in excess of 20 Knots, an endurance of 80 days, and a crew of 60.

Construction on the first SSK-in-class (HMAS Attack) was then projected to start in 2023 and its delivery was scheduled for the early 2030s. The next units were to follow at a rate of one every two years. It was only last March that negotiations between the DoD and Naval Group for the amendments to the Strategic Partnering Agreement were concluded. The amendments formally ensured that Naval Group’s was committed to spend at least 60% of the contract value (estimated at US$40 billion) in Australia over the life of the SSK construction programme. However, no firm contract had been inked till to date.

It is believed that the decision to proceed with the AUKUS alliance was taken last June at the G-7 Summit at Cornwall, the UK. This followed the realisation that the project costs had escalated (from US$40 billion to US$65 billion), and as per the revised delivery schedules, the first SSK was expected by 2035, with the last entering service by 2050. On top of all this, the pump-jet propulsion system, when powered by diesel engines, would have caused the Shortfin Barracuda Block-1A to have sub-optimal underwater endurance (requiring frequent surfacing for battery-charging), since the Barracuda’s design was optimised for running on nuclear power generation. Nor was the SSGN version of the Barracuda a viable option for the RAN, snce the SSGN has yet to enter service with France’s navy and is thus not considered a fully-proven design. On the other hand, the Astute-class SSGN is presently in series-production and its first-of-class vessel has been in service since May 2014. And since such SSGNs are powered by life-long PWRs that do not require any refuelling, procurement of second-hand SSGNs or SSNs from either the UK or the US becomes a no-brainer option.

In terms of the areas of operation, the RAN’s primary focus will be to monitor and stalk China’s PLAN naval deployments in the south Pacific, as well as in the southern Indian Ocean stretching from Timor Leste all the way westwards to Australia’s Christmas Island, located to the southeast of Indonesia’s island of Sumatra. It must be noted that Australia is a member of military alliances/arrangements like the ANZUS (that includes New Zealand and the US), ANZMIS (including New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore), FPDA (including the UK, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore) and the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence gathering/sharing alliance that also includes the US, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. It should therefore come as no surprise if a ‘Four Eyes’ intelligence gathering/sharing alliance emerges in future as a component of the QUAD for the Indo-Pacific region and its IOR sub-region, which could well start as a multi-domain naval intelligence-gathering-cum-sharing grid comprising a seabed-mounted underwater acoustic surveillance network, networked air operations involving P-8 LRMR/ASW platforms of Australia, India and the US, plus coordinated undersea patrols by the SSGNs and SSNs of the navies of Australia and India.