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Australia to Get Nuclear Submarines


Adam_S

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On 9/30/2022 at 10:24 AM, Argus said:

mate, I'm dealing with tech focused '30 somethings' and down, who mostly vote Green. We are talking people who are happy to throw around Nazi and Fascist as labels but wouldn't know Mussolini from Franco from Salazar.  Calling Napoleon a proto-fascist passes without comment or objection in those circles - and yes that's including a Catalan anarchist bio-tech developer  :D

You poor bastard.

Sorry, what I meant to say was: The Power Of Ten Compels You, The Power Of Ten Compels You, etc.

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Strange definition - trying to be a bit too clever, I think. Fascism that does not include government direction of production priorities seems like a serious omission, and including "mass-based parties", which applies to all political parties in a democracy, cannot reasonably be considered a marker of a particular political flavour.

Not sure that it's reasonable to call the US government a communist one on the basis that it was in favour of decolonisation, despite tanknet's usual confusion between FDR's policies and communism.

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2 minutes ago, DB said:

Strange definition - trying to be a bit too clever, I think. Fascism that does not include government direction of production priorities seems like a serious omission, and including "mass-based parties", which applies to all political parties in a democracy, cannot reasonably be considered a marker of a particular political flavour.

Exactly, but go tell that to an Antifa that knows that someone wearing a red MAGA hat is a Nazi.

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5 hours ago, Argus said:

I would have said some degree of collectivism was an essential ingredient for an 'Nazi' but modern propagandists seem to disagree with me :D

Yes, but it was a weird collectivism. Government-friendly corporations used to receive free of charge the assets of government-unfriendly businesses.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 10/3/2022 at 6:07 PM, sunday said:

Yes, but it was a weird collectivism. Government-friendly corporations used to receive free of charge the assets of government-unfriendly businesses.

But is that  actually inherent in Fascism as a steady state, or more a factor of getting started and established? I mean presumably, once all the government-unfriendly businesses had gone they couldn't keep doing that. 

 

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Not to get back on topic or anything,  but I learned a few things about our Submarine history the other week.
1/ apparently this is not the first time the RAN have been in line for nukes. When we bought the O-Boats, the plan was for 4 as that was the minimum number to provide fleet ASW training and a submarine crew pool large enough to support 2x SSN's 'of the Dreadnought type' so presumably Valliant's. The program was killed on purely financial grounds (Vietnam I'm guessing) and another 2x Oberon's ordered instead.     

2/ The real problem with the French SSK program - it wasn't really the French or how the thing was being managed or such. Rather it came down to the latest generation of remote sensing camera's IR resolution. I'm told that SSK's are fine in busy waters where there's a lot of other traffic to hide amongst. however out in the open ocean, there's enough contrast for the satellites to track individual diesel exhaust plumes (presuming the engines are large enough). So a hotspot out in the oggin without an AIS squawk or radar return pretty much screams 'SSK hiding here.' So not terrible news for 90% of the worlds SSK operators who run their subs as coastal boats or as prestige assets. But the RAN's peculiarity is running SSK's as long range deep water boats. So the Attack Class had become operationally obsolete before they reached the production gate. 
Which sort of explains why they seemed so happy to exchange a bird in the hand for a pile of fuzzy handwavium with AUKUS and a decade's delay. It looks like the choice wasn't really between the French subs and 'something better,' rather between nothing at all and something nuclear powered in the future.  

Edited by Argus
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35 minutes ago, Argus said:

But is that  actually inherent in Fascism as a steady state, or more a factor of getting started and established? I mean presumably, once all the government-unfriendly businesses had gone they couldn't keep doing that. 

 

I give you the one Third Way on Economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism

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12 hours ago, Argus said:

Not to get back on topic or anything,  but I learned a few things about our Submarine history the other week.
1/ apparently this is not the first time the RAN have been in line for nukes. When we bought the O-Boats, the plan was for 4 as that was the minimum number to provide fleet ASW training and a submarine crew pool large enough to support 2x SSN's 'of the Dreadnought type' so presumably Valliant's. The program was killed on purely financial grounds (Vietnam I'm guessing) and another 2x Oberon's ordered instead.   
 

2/ The real problem with the French SSK program - it wasn't really the French or how the thing was being managed or such. Rather it came down to the latest generation of remote sensing camera's IR resolution. I'm told that SSK's are fine in busy waters where there's a lot of other traffic to hide amongst. however out in the open ocean, there's enough contrast for the satellites to track individual diesel exhaust plumes (presuming the engines are large enough). So a hotspot out in the oggin without an AIS squawk or radar return pretty much screams 'SSK hiding here.' So not terrible news for 90% of the worlds SSK operators who run their subs as coastal boats or as prestige assets. But the RAN's peculiarity is running SSK's as long range deep water boats. So the Attack Class had become operationally obsolete before they reached the production gate. 
Which sort of explains why they seemed so happy to exchange a bird in the hand for a pile of fuzzy handwavium with AUKUS and a decade's delay. It looks like the choice wasn't really between the French subs and 'something better,' rather between nothing at all and something nuclear powered in the future.  

Thats very interesting, ive never heard anything about that in any of the British accounts of the build up of our SSN fleet. I do wonder why they didnt lean to America, seeing as the RAN was increasingly buying American in that period.

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15 hours ago, Argus said:


2/ The real problem with the French SSK program - it wasn't really the French or how the thing was being managed or such. Rather it came down to the latest generation of remote sensing camera's IR resolution. I'm told that SSK's are fine in busy waters where there's a lot of other traffic to hide amongst. however out in the open ocean, there's enough contrast for the satellites to track individual diesel exhaust plumes (presuming the engines are large enough). So a hotspot out in the oggin without an AIS squawk or radar return pretty much screams 'SSK hiding here.' So not terrible news for 90% of the worlds SSK operators who run their subs as coastal boats or as prestige assets. But the RAN's peculiarity is running SSK's as long range deep water boats. So the Attack Class had become operationally obsolete before they reached the production gate. 
Which sort of explains why they seemed so happy to exchange a bird in the hand for a pile of fuzzy handwavium with AUKUS and a decade's delay. It looks like the choice wasn't really between the French subs and 'something better,' rather between nothing at all and something nuclear powered in the future.  

Do you have a source for that? I know the USN's P-8s and possibly the MQ-4Cs have a "hydrocarbon sensor". It isn't clear what form this takes, how it works, or how effective it is but it isn't a physical sniffer like the days of old - it is something spectral (and thus likely relatively high altitude and stand off-ish). I've never heard such a capability attributed to satellites.

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It's still just weird to me what the Aussies are expecting to do with nuc boats that would justify the cost. Nuc boats can't really do power projection (which the Aussies don't care much about anyway), and the only conventional war possibility Australia has is vs. China, in which case Australia's job, given geography and the size of its population, should be to make itself an extremely well-defended base for activities by its allies. 

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Its not sniffing the diesel, the issue is  detecting and tracking the exhaust plumes heat in IR. So it needs an engine over a certain size to produce enough heat and that heat source has to be out on its own at sea to provide a high contrast background. And the capability is more or less commercial rather than military, its the evolution of multi-spectral cameras for remote sensing.  So it doesn't really bother coastal SSK operators who have enough IR sources scattered around their AO to blur the picture, but deep sea operations become a lot less viable. 

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1 hour ago, Angrybk said:

It's still just weird to me what the Aussies are expecting to do with nuc boats that would justify the cost. Nuc boats can't really do power projection (which the Aussies don't care much about anyway), and the only conventional war possibility Australia has is vs. China, in which case Australia's job, given geography and the size of its population, should be to make itself an extremely well-defended base for activities by its allies. 

I don't think it really matters who the current threat is with a long term capability like this. However, whomever it happens to be they need to come by sea if they want to pick a fight with Australia. Submarines are the best stand alone sea denial platforms going and SSN's are the best type of submarine for sea denial over the operational profile the RAN has to work with. SSN's are also a key element of any operational group we might form with allies, were SSK's are less useful in this role.
Further I'd disagree that SSN's can't do power projection. They may not be so versatile as other expressions of naval power, but having a nooklear fricking submarine turning up is sending a very powerful message with an easily adjustable volume knob. From a port visit with a band playing to "give me one ping Vassily"  little messages to naval forces at sea. 

So in my view it is a capability well worth having and buys a lot of utility.

 

Shane

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12 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Thats very interesting, ive never heard anything about that in any of the British accounts of the build up of our SSN fleet. I do wonder why they didnt lean to America, seeing as the RAN was increasingly buying American in that period.

Yeah but it was American systems we were interested in not American boats, and we were buying the Oberon's in the same deal.  The RAN were still building RN designs into the 70's and if you look into the design histories of a lot of RN types built across that period (50-60-70's) there'll be a foot note under any proposed sketch with US systems as having some Australian interest. We liked the County's but not Seaslug for example. We've only ever bought two US classes new, and more or less because we couldn't get the systems we wanted any other way (Charles F Adams, and Oliver Haz Perry). 

All that said, it was all news to me too and I though I was pretty well read on both Aust and UK sides of the issue. :D

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5 hours ago, Argus said:

Further I'd disagree that SSN's can't do power projection. They may not be so versatile as other expressions of naval power, but having a nooklear fricking submarine turning up is sending a very powerful message with an easily adjustable volume knob.

The role of Conqueror in the Falklands war is probably the most illustrative example, starting with its public departure from the UK all the way to the sinking of the Belgrano, at which point not a single Argentinian vessel left any of the naval ports of the mainland (except, possibly ARA San Luis - because it was a submarine, too).

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Veinticinco de Mayo came out before they knew it was there however. They were actually trying to form a pincer attack on the task force, with Belgrano and Veinticinco de Mayo forming the tips of the two different claws. A British Submarine was tracking her but, frustrating, after Belgrano was sunk, she scuttled home in the shallows where she couldnt follow.

That illustrates the problem with submarines. If you know they are there, they are potentially vulnerable. If you dont know they are there, they can be lethal. But it also means they are not succeeding in their role in power projection. Sure, you can say a submarine is in the general area, but you could be lying and your enemy might not believe you. Its not like a warship, which you can see. If you see an SSN, its probably vulnerable.

Submarines are basically great sea denial platforms. They can stop the enemy performing most roles they want to perform at sea. But they are not great at conducting maritime operations in their own right. Which is why most nations that have them, still prefer to have surface ships to conduct that role.

I still think Australia would do well to have maybe for SSN's, and maybe a small carrier battle group for backup. Forward deploying SSN's might deny the ability to conduct missions at sea, but its not going to do much to allow coaltion operations in the area to reverse them.

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13 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

the problem with submarines. If you know they are there, they are potentially vulnerable. If you dont know they are there, they can be lethal. But it also means they are not succeeding in their role in power projection.

Why?

That Conqueror left, with nuclear armament, already caused concern in Buenos Aires, if I remember correctly what was reported about the exchanges between the Argies and the US State department.

Once that it was clear from the Belgrano sinking that the sub WAS in the area, Argentine cleared the waters of the exclusion zone. The deterrence/sea denial worked perfectly. I know of no major effort that was made to actually hunt the boat. That is of course no guarantee that it would never happen in a future conflict, but you need a clear clue as to where the submarine was at a certain datum in order to launch a coordinated hunt, and for that you have to have suitable forces in the vicinity.

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I dont believe Conqueror ever had nuclear weapons. In fact all the RN had in SSN weapons at the time was the glorious old Mk8 straight runner from from the 1920's, and the Tigerfish Mk24 ASW torpedo. The latter was homing, but had all kinds of shortcomings, not least a relatively small top speed, whcih is why they conducted the attack with Mk8's. They didnt get SubHarpoon till 1984. We never employed Subroc, and I dont believe we ever had USN nuclear Torpedos. So why they would think it was nuclear armed is beyond me.

There may have been concern about a British SSBN maybe possibly being in the south atlantic. But that is not clear, and is based upon testimony from Mitterands Hairdresser if I recall correctly, claiming that madman Thatcher had sent a ballistic missile submarine into the South Atlantic. I think It can probably be disregarded.  Ive a nagging feeling, I would have to check, that the British Government announced there was an SSN in the south atlantic even before the Task Force got there. And clearly that did not stop Veinticinco de Mayo or the Belgrano sailing.

Basically you might only make a potential enemy believe there are submarines present if you USE a submarine. And if you are in a period of protracted crisis, you cant clearly go around plinking your opponents ships to demonstrate your capacity.

If the idea is to demonstrate Australian power in the South China sea, the first problem they have is, if they are being used correctly, the Chinese will never know they are actually there. Militarily its the most useful of platforms, yes. Politically, unless your oponent is aware of how good you are and what you are doing (which is fairly dangerous when you think about it), they can be a bit of a dud,as we found in the Falklands. The ideal case would have been to have made the Argentinians go back to the barn without a shot being fired. And of course, that didnt happen, because they coudlnt know we were there.

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For the foreseeable future Australia's probable job won't be deterring the invasion of Australia, but acting in concert with the United States and other allies in East Asia. If the Chinese are not deterred by US Navy with all kinds of ships in... quite substantial numbers, they won't be deterred by a relative handful of RAN ships either. 

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Well yes,  obviously in conjunction with allies. And whilst clearly its welcome that Australia takes that role seriously, as an independent power,as far as demonstrating a willingness to intervene it might be that whilst an SSN is militarily most useful, politically its far less so. Because the PRC can happily convince themselves that if they dont detect it, its probably not there, just as the Argentinians once did. If a platforms entire object is not to be detected, then how can it fulfill the apparent political role of demonstrating Australian willingness to intervene? The first time they realise they were wrong is when they put a fish into a Chicom can.

Im not deprecating the choice Australia has made, in fact I think its probably the best they could make. Im just saying there is a clear conflict between military utility and political utility. Which of course isnt unknown in military weapons in other areas, nuclear or chemical weapons for example.

 

 

Edited by Stuart Galbraith
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