Black is white and up is down. There’s a reason Australians are losing trust in their government and in public officials, and it’s been on display in the unhappy land of submarines and our Defence department.
In just a few weeks, we’ve had two major U-turns on what our country is doing with submarines. One on the subs our Navy actually has – the 6 Collins class subs – and one on AUKUS, where old subs turn out to be much better than new ones.
Each time, the ministers and officials involved – including our nation’s most senior military officers – have insisted either that nothing has really changed, or that the new plans are even better than what they told us was perfect before. Years of hearing one thing from them seems to be something we should forget or not mention as we sign on to their new narrative of perfection and progress.
This kind of verbal gymnastics makes it hard to trust what they tell us.
And it matters because there is one thing that has stayed constant through all this – apparently submarines are the critical thing that Australia’s military needs to protect us all in our dangerous world. So, getting this area of defence right and ensuring the public – and taxpayers – have confidence they’ve got this right should be at the top of their to do list.
U-turn Number One: the Collins life extension that now isn’t
U-turn number one came with the Collins class life of type extension (the “LOTE”). The Collins subs are getting on in years. They were meant to last about 30 years, with the first one getting retired in 2026, and the other 5 going off to submarine heaven every two years after that until the last one left in 2036. But because replacement subs have been delayed – and now the AUKUS subs won’t start to arrive until 2032 at best – the Navy wanted to keep using the Collins for longer. In fact, much longer.
So, Defence planners came up with the “Collins LOTE” program. A $6 billion project to upgrade the ageing diesel electric subs so they could stay reliable and capable against the regional threats out to 2048. Each boat would get upgrades to allow it to be kept in service for 10 years more after a 2 year LOTE upgrade.
And Defence worked on this plan for 10 years. Unfortunately, the plan was deeply flawed from the start and slowly collapsed. It was going to put new types of main motor, diesel generators, propulsion and power systems into the subs. But the new main motors and diesel generators would have meant shuffling everything else around in the submarine to fit them in, and the resulting submarines would have had to spend even more time on the surface “snorting” to get rid of toxic gases and recharge their batteries than they do now.
That would have made them less capable and more vulnerable – a bizarre outcome for an upgrade, because a big reason we’ve been told our Navy needs nuclear-powered subs is that diesel electric ones are way too vulnerable when they are surfaced and snorting…..
The problem, beyond the fact that Australia’s only actual submarines right now will no longer get the upgrade we were told was essential to keep them reliable and capable into the late 2040s, is that ministers and officials kept insisting everything was fine with the LOTE program even years after they knew this just wasn’t so.
The ANAO Audit report into the Collins LOTE program gives all the details, but it makes it clear that senior officials – like the Secretary and the Chief of Navy – knew from at least 2020 that the LOTE as planned wasn’t possible and would make the subs more vulnerable.
But we kept hearing things like this from Chief of Navy Hammond even as late as October 2025. When asked “Is it on track? There are disturbing reports that there’s now this new LOTE lite. Is it LOTE lite?”, Admiral Hammond said: “There has been no change to the program of record for the Collins life-of-type-extension program.”
And when asked further: “There have been repeated concerns that there are engineering challenges which haven’t been resolved for LOTE and that it’s still in design scoping phase. Is that still the case? Is it still in a design and scoping phase?”, Admiral Hammond said: “There has been progress since the last estimates hearing.”
He knew then that the design work to put the big new systems into Collins had failed and that the big changes that were to keep the Collins reliable and available for ten more years were in deep trouble. But his words even when answering direct questions that went straight to the problems he was well briefed on conveyed false confidence and progress without even an ounce of the trouble that he knew lurked behind the curtain. Everything was fine.
A few months later, though, just in time to get ahead of the scathing ANAO audit report showing everything was far from fine and had been far from fine for years, and just before work had to start on the first sub that was meant to get all the big new systems, HMAS Farncomb, Richard Marles gave a long speech that told us there was a new plan. Defence wasn’t doing the stuff in the $6 billion LOTE program after all. He didn’t come clean on the fact that the plan to put new main motors, diesel generators propulsion and power systems into the boats had failed and was being abandoned. Instead, he told us that he’d “put the extension of the life of the Collins class submarines back on track”. And we would “see a pivot in our approach that reduces risk”. It would “prioritise sustainment and accelerate upgrades for the fleet’s youngest submarines”.
Reading the Audit report days later, it became clear what the Minister meant and what neither he nor the Chief of Navy or Department Secretary had told the public or the Parliament for years. The original LOTE program had failed. And he didn’t mention that, because the idea of putting new motors and diesels in had failed, if the Navy does keep the Collins subs into the 2040s, they’ll be doing so with an original main propulsion system and diesel generators that are at “high” risk of failure.
Mr Marles did what we’re all now far too used to seeing with our political leadership: he pretended that there really hadn’t been much of a problem before, except for the inept stuff done by politicians from the opposition parties before he took the helm. And things with the Collins were now all good, because of the fine tuning he had done.
So, in the land of Collins subs, we’re all supposed to just forget how essential it was to do all the things that had been planned for ten years but can’t now be done. And we’re meant to accept that not doing them gives us the same result: these old subs stay reliable, safe and super capable against regional adversaries until sometime in the 2040s. That is almost certainly not true and not going to happen, as anyone paying even vague attention to the issues knows.
That doesn’t build trust in our Government or the officials in charge of our military or Defence department.
U-turn Number 2: old subs are better than new ones
And now there’s U-turn number two. This time it’s about the plan to get American Virginia class subs before the yet to be designed SSN-AUKUS the UK is in charge of starts to get assembled in Adelaide and turn up sometime from 2042 onward.
The AUKUS “Optimal Pathway” announced with great fanfare by the leaders of the US, UK and Australia back in March 2023 involved Australia’s first three (and maybe two more) AUKUS subs being US Virgina class boats. The first two were going to be used ones already in-service with the US Navy and the third one was going to be a new one from the US production lines.
As the head of the Australian Submarine Agency Admiral Mead put it when giving evidence in Parliament back in May 2023: “The plan is that two Virginias would be transferred to us and then we would buy one off the production line. That’s the composition of the three Virginias.” We’ve been told this many times over the years since.
The US Congress knew this was the plan too, with its research service stating bluntly: “ The United States is to sell Australia three Virginia-class submarines, with the potential to sell up to two more if needed. The first two boats, which are to be sold in FY2032 and FY2035, would be existing boats with 18 to 27 years each of remaining expected service life. The third boat, which is to be sold in FY2038, would be a new boat taken directly from the U.S. production line, and thus have a full 33-year expected service life.”
That was all pretty clear.
But last weekend, this all changed. Richard Marles came back from meeting US Pentagon chief Hegseth to tell us that it was great news that all three of these Virginia subs that Australia is meant to get in the 2030s will be used ones.
He told us this was great news for many reasons. We were ‘chasing simplicity”. They would save money compared with buying new subs. They would be easier to operate and maintain because they’d all be the same variant. The decision meant that Australia wouldn’t have to face one of his fears: that the Navy would be operating four different types of submarine at the same time in the 2040s…. The incredible benefits just kept rolling.
There wasn’t any balancing here of any obvious downsides, like the fact that used subs have less life left in them and so must be replaced by new subs earlier. Or the tricky point that the new versions of the Virgina class subs are considerably more powerful than the ones we’ll now be getting – they’ll have 40 launch cells for missiles compared with the existing version’s 12 cells, for example, making them a much more lethal weapon.
Of course we shouldn’t want the most powerful version of the Virginia class subs – why on earth should we spend $368 billion on AUKUS and insist on getting the most powerful Virginia sub when we could get a less capable, older one?
And there was no squaring of the circle with all the claims about AUKUS that we’ve heard for years now. A big part of AUKUS is the fact that under the same old “Optimal Pathway” that now seems to have been sub-optimal, Australia will be maintaining all the different versions of American Virginia subs, and British subs, that rotate through our base at HMAS Stirling. That rotational force of allies’ submarines using the base is a key part of the AUKUS agreement. And our Navy sailors who are being trained onboard all the different variants of Virginias are learning about these variants as they do so because they are being “100% completely integrated” into US crews. That apparently showed how integrated the whole AUKUS enterprise was and how it was going to produce efficiencies and savings from integration and commonality between the US, UK and Australia.
Put simply, the Australian submarine base at Stirling and the deeper maintenance facility at Henderson are supposed to be able to maintain all the different US, UK and Australian nuclear subs operating out of there, and that was apparently part of the commonality, efficiency and integration benefits out of the whole plan. That means it shouldn’t matter what flag is on what boat, and it shouldn’t matter which variant of a Virginia sub is being supported. Until it does as a means of justifying a change.
Now, all those benefits seem to have evaporated because having our three used Virginias be all the same variant is ‘chasing simplicity’ to simplify training, maintenance and operating costs and give us efficiencies across this tiny Aussie “fleet”. This now seems to be a standalone fleet instead just part of the larger AUKUS enterprise – which of course is nonsense.
Having this basic logic shift isn’t enough though in this new, even more perfect version of AUKUS that we now are celebrating.
We’re now being told that it was always Australia’s preference to get three used subs, meaning we’d somehow settled for second best with the old oddly named “optimal” plan. For some reason, we weren’t getting what we really wanted from the US until now. Boy is it good news to have wrestled this result out of the Americans by convincing them to keep the new subs for themselves and give us another one of their old ones. Phew! What luck!!
Those silly Americans have fallen for our fiendishly clever negotiation ploys and now they’re stuck with getting new subs while we buy their old ones and give them extra billions to build their new ones.
Minister Pat Conroy came up with new, extra reasons that us getting all old subs was great news. His version is that this is a sign US submarine maintenance is improving, so the US Navy is now “comfortable’ releasing in-service subs!! And, even better, new subs can be pesky things with teething trouble and other stuff, so it’s best to get used ones.
Then the new Secretary of the Defence department, Megan Quinn, took ownership of the new, improved, AUKUS plan and sold us all on its benefits when she told us that the AUKUS Optimal Pathway wasn’t actually any particular path, or even any single path at all. In contradiction to previous plans and evidence, she revealed that there may have been “two constrained optimal pathways” no one had mentioned before. Critics seemed not to understand that this was the acme of fine public policy making. She insisted that “Australia’s position is that we would have always had a preference for three in service” (maybe we’d just been too shy to pursue it before now??).
The uglier truth here is likely to be much simpler. The US is retiring its 4 cruise missile carrying Ohio class submarines. Each of these can launch 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, so their retirement is leaving a yawning hole in US launch capacity. The new Block V Virginia sub we are no longer getting will have 40 missile cells, not the 12 that the earlier version has. So, there is no way the US is handing over even one of these far more lethal, powerful new model Virginias to Australia. Another used older one is the only thing on offer.
We are the price taker with AUKUS and we’ll get what we are given and be grateful. After we find out what this is, we just need to find reasons for the result to be exactly what we wanted all along, as we see ministers and officials doing here.
The result of the U-turns: 20 years of AUKUS will deliver three second hand subs
Far from being fantastic, the net result of the Collins and AUKUS U-turns looks sobering.
Collins subs look unlikely to make it into the 2040s. Ageing boats with high-risk propulsion systems operating in a region where militaries like China’s are operating growing fleets of increasingly capable nuclear subs along with capable, new anti-submarine systems and lethal uncrewed underwater drones looks very unlikely. So, the Collins will probably be retired early instead of serving bravely into the late 2040s. They’ll almost certainly be gone by 2040.
By 2041 – twenty years on from AUKUS being announced to the world, Australia will have three used American Navy Virginia class subs. And nothing else.
And the UK-designed SSN-AUKUS subs look almost certain to be delayed, if they turn up at all. So, the idea that our Navy will be operating its first SSN AUKUS sub anytime around 2042 looks like a worse bet than buying the latest cat hand puppet-inspired crypto meme.
Mr Marles fear of operating four different sub types simultaneously in the 2040s can be laid to rest. He should have a new fear: we’ll have just three subs of one type and they’ll all be second hand.
Can you imagine if back in September 2021, former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison had announced AUKUS would give Australia this result?
Back then we were held out the promise of a glittering new high technology boost to the whole Australian economy with spin offs for everyone and new subs popping out of Adelaide like iphones from a Foxconn factory.
Now, we see we’ll be looking at something else.
Imagine if back then Mr Morrison had told a breathless Australian people that with his new “AUKUS” submarine plan, after two decades of work and expense – eyewatering expense given we’ll have spent between $70 and $90 billion on AUKUS in just the next ten years – we’d have a Navy with three used US submarines. That’s it.
He may have not got that sign up to the whole AUKUS enterprise from then opposition leader Anthony Albanese in the few hours he gave him to think things through.
And we may not be in the muddle we’re in now, having to take whatever our American friends are willing to give us while building them a base and maintenance facility for their subs on our West coast.
Mind you, it’s not all doom and gloom. In 2041, there’ll also be a very happy American Treasury boosted with multi-$billion cash injections from us Aussies, topped up by no doubt top dollar payments for each of the three second hand subs. And the UK Government’s budget books will have an AUKUS bloom on them that will be very welcome in difficult times.
The trust deficit grows
The big problem here for Australia’s submarine capability is that we’re in a mess and it’s a mess that keeps changing as obvious tension and challenges play out in the real world.
But we have ministers and officials who seem unable to admit challenges and changes and instead insist on telling us that everything is on track and everything isn’t just fine, it’s better than ever it was before – even though the previous version of reality was apparently perfect, fine and on track too……
With the Collins life extension failure and U-turn and now this AUKUS sub U-turn, we don’t need to wonder why Australians are losing trust in their political leaders and public officials. And while the Government and Defence stay on this path of denial, repackaging and celebration, the level of support for AUKUS will keep falling and the doubts will grow.
Honesty, frankness and openness is the antidote to this spiral. That isn’t just necessary for taxpayers and voters: it’s essential for the young Australians who we expect to serve on our submarines.