A short book published today by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute charts, in unprecedented and revelatory detail, the troubled relationships between key players on the Collins-class submarine sustainment and the program’s rehabilitation in the wake of the celebrated Coles Review.
The book by defence expert and former head of ASPI’s defence and strategy program Andrew Davies, titled ‘Nobody wins unless everybody wins’, is based on interviews with central players and decision-makers. It describes the organisational dysfunction between the then Defence Materiel Organisation, the Royal Australian Navy and ASC (formerly the Australian Submarine Corporation), and its ultimate repair.
The progress, widely attributed to the major review by a team led by British submarine expert John Coles that started under then Defence Minister Stephen Smith, carries lessons that the book makes clear need to be remembered as Australia takes on the much more complex task of moving into the AUKUS submarine period.
“It’s unfortunately possible for a mixture of complacency and the loss of corporate knowledge over time to set in, and for very hard-won lessons to be gradually forgotten,” Davies writes.
The reforms that followed Coles, implemented by then Chief of Navy Ray Griggs, took Australia’s fleet from having at times no boats available for deployment, to having three or four boats, the maximum that can be achieved given two are always expected to be in deep maintenance.
The book contains honest and insightful reflections from Smith, Vice Admiral (retd.) Griggs, former DMO heads Stephen Gumley and Warren King, ASC chief executive Stuart Wiley, DMO’s then submarine lead Chris Deeble, senior Department of Finance official Stacie Hall and others.
The book makes clear that the delays in solving Collins sustainment had crucial knock-on effects in identifying and progressing with options for a successor fleet.
Smith recalls reflecting that “there’s no way in the world we can start a future submarine program process with the National Security Committee, or the Expenditure Review Committee, or my colleagues, unless and until we’ve actually made some progress on problems and have outcomes of Collins being in the water”.
Deeble describes the relationship difficulties as follows: “When I first hit the program in 2010, it was fractured relationships, extremely poor, not just with ASC, but with the supply chain supporting it, and also with all of the key players within Defence … one of the most fractured relationships was the relationship between Defence and Finance. And Finance, being the shareholder, clearly just thought Defence didn’t know what they were doing and ASC wasn’t the problem.”
Griggs reflects on the enormous strategic importance of Australia’s being able to demonstrate, via a powerful image, having three boats in the water.
“I was surprised by how quickly things turned around, and how relatively quickly we achieved benchmark. I think most people, if they’re honest, would have to say that they were surprised that we not only got there so quickly, but have managed to sustain it—it’s now 10 years since the review,” he says.
Davies writes that the review team put together by Coles, a British naval architect and engineer, was formidable – a small group of career professionals with hard-won specialist knowledge in submarine sustainment.
It didn’t take Coles and his team long to work out that the Collins class submarines were fundamentally sound but that the system put in place to support them wasn’t fit for purpose. The team also found that everyone wanted to fix the problem – the problem being that nobody agreed on what the causes of the problem was.
Davies writes in his conclusion: “The Roman historian and politician Tacitus wrote that ‘Victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone’, so John Coles knew what he was doing when he insisted that nobody would win unless everyone won. In that, he succeeded admirably—one of the striking aspects of researching this volume was the enthusiasm that all of the participants had for discussing the process.”
