Strength in depth?

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Nuclear

David Clark

Defense Global Market Lead, Bristol, United Kingdom contact form+44 1454 66 2498

Gareth Jenkins

Client Director - Aerospace & Defence, Plymouth, UK contact form

This article was written by Alan Dron and first published in ADS Advance. You can view the original article here.

The UK still does some things that are genuinely world-class. One is producing astonishingly elusive submarines.

In the 1990s, a senior US anti-submarine warfare expert told USN sonar operators: “If you know a sub’s out there but you can’t hear it, it’s either a diesel-electric boat… or a British nuke.”

Combined with the notoriously rigorous ‘Perisher’ course for putative RN submarine commanders, together with high-quality crews, this has traditionally made UK submarines extraordinarily competent vessels.

Like many of the UK’s military assets, they were allowed to wither as successive UK governments plundered the defence budget for the ‘peace dividend’ over 25 years.

The SDR proposes to restore some bulk to the attack boat fleet with a major order for the AUKUS-class vessels that will be built for the UK and Australia. Worryingly, the SDR used the traditional government weasel phrase ‘up to 12’ in talking about the RN’s future fleet. Assuming that figure holds, however, is the UK even capable of building them within a reasonable timescale?

To deliver on this submarine construction commitment, government and the supply chain will have to ramp up the infrastructure that underpins submarine production, operations and maintenance. In the view of specialists from ADS member AtkinsRéalis, this will require industry reform, innovative project delivery, digital tools and collaboration.

UK-Canadian AtkinsRéalis has long-term experience in submarine infrastructure. In January, it was appointed by Rolls-Royce Submarines to help nearly double the size of its Raynesway site in Derby to meet significant growth in demand from the RN and AUKUS. The company has also been a long-term supporter of Babcock International at Devonport Royal Dockyard, Plymouth, to deliver major upgrades for effective submarine maintenance.

“Up to 12 was the key,” said Gareth Jenkins, AtkinsRéalis’s client director, and a former Royal Navy commanding officer.

Typically, a navy requires three warships to have one on operations. One will be readying for the next patrol, while the third will be in refit.

The RN’s seven Astute class submarines – when eventually all in service in 2029 – means that “from seven, you can have two point something, but you can't have half a submarine, so it's two. So, 12 would give the navy in theory four at readiness, which would be great.

“This government will soon announce the exact number and that's important, because industry needs to know how to scale and organise itself around the demand.” However, “I think it's also going to be challenging, because crewing 12 submarines will require a lot more people.

“I think the first AUKUS SSN is due to be delivered in 2037 to the Royal Navy. That's 12 years from now. That means the captain of that submarine has probably just finished his or her basic training at Dartmouth.

“It's challenging in terms of finding the people. There just aren't enough. There are a lot of employment opportunities these days, so for STEM-skilled people in particular, it's a challenge.”

David Clark, AtkinsRéalis’s global defence and aerospace lead, said a further challenge will be ensuring that the supporting infrastructure is in place to produce 12 SSNs at a decent pace.

Building something as complex as a nuclear submarine requires long supply chains “and you can imagine that the investment required actually needs to flow quite far down those supply chains. So, you know the decisions are critical if you are to have the things built. That could be factories or whatever, in time to have the production ramped up at the right time.

“I think the other point I'd make is about all the things that are required to support those submarines [once in service].”

Much may depend on the government’s new defence industrial strategy, which was due to be announced as Advance went to press.

Perhaps most critically, expansion is already planned at the UK’s sole submarine production facility, BAE Systems’ yard at Barrow-in-Furness, together with Rolls-Royce’s site at Raynesway. AtkinsRéalis supports design for both.

Expanding activities at Barrow, Raynesway and elsewhere will mean expanding the workforce, which will eventually mean the government potentially having to find funding for more schools, hospitals and transport networks.

Industry needs to play its part in defence reform, Clark said. “There's a lot of focus on the commercial area, [such as] speed to contract and all those kinds of things.

“One of our interests is very much in the space of reforming some of those acquisition governance processes themselves. There's a lot of talk about how we might use different, more modern techniques in different parts.”

Among these, a model-based systems engineering approach is critical. This was borne out by a recent meta-study by Sandia Laboratories. “The one thing they said was if you don't apply it end-to-end, you miss all those opportunities for spotting where things might go wrong,” said Clark. “It's not just equipment, it's infrastructure, it's training systems, it's the full spectrum.”

Creation of a National Armaments Director is a step in the right direction, as is extending the period for which a project’s senior responsible officer (SRO) is in post.

More generally, said Clark, plans to buy more off-the-shelf materials and the need to spend money more rapidly to get systems to frontline units would be welcomed by many SMEs, which potentially would not have to jump as many procurement hurdles.

Today, he said, “only the very biggest organisations with the biggest bank balances can afford to bid in those kinds of processes. They're very lengthy [and] very expensive.

“One of the things that we see about infrastructure is that it can sometimes be a bit of an afterthought. Particularly around the submarine space, it's seen as something additional rather than a critical part of delivering capability “So, [look at] things like the safety case. That’s a combination of the equipment and the infrastructure. It's particularly important in the submarine world, because you've got a nuclear reactor set inside your submarine. The infrastructure is hugely important in the overall safety case and as things change there has to be a much more dynamic link.”

The point was taken up by Jenkins, and the plan to increase the SSN fleet from seven to 12.

“That’s effectively a doubling in size of the attack submarine fleet, which means twice the number of jetties at Faslane naval base, twice the number of workshops to facilitate the maintenance, twice the number of docks to do dry dockings, same for accommodation blocks.

“There will be twice as many sailors, and even down to the tactical things like the sick base, [that’s] arguably going to need to be twice the size. Faslane has something called Clyde 2070, which, as the name suggests, is a very long-term strategic infrastructure programme to address these issues, such that when these submarines arrive, the infrastructure will be in place to support them.”

Naval shipbuilding in the UK is starting to gear up, with the Dreadnought ballistic missile submarines being built between the last Astutes and the first AUKUS class, plus the fleet solid support ship in Belfast, Type 26 destroyers in Glasgow and Type 31 frigates in Rosyth.

“So that's BAE, Babcock, Rolls-Royce, MOD, all trying to recruit thousands of people with STEM skills competing against things like Sizewell C, HS2, other big infrastructure, other mega projects in the UK. And that's before you look abroad: the things like Neom in Saudi Arabia or AUKUS in Australia that might attract younger engineering graduates.”

Clark added: “It now feels to me like we can't simply increase the workforce and work in the same way to deliver these outputs. We've got to work differently.

“When we talk about taking time out of these procurement, acquisition and engineering programmes, we need to also talk about reducing the amount of human capital that's required.

“The obvious answer is to make better use of digital and AI technologies. But unless we better structure the data that runs across these procurements and acquisition programmes, there’s no way that we can apply that data.

“So, these things are all interlinked – the size of the ambition, size of the workforce, the procurement, acquisition, the investment in digital technology – all have to happen if this ambition is going to be realised.”

This article was originally published in ADS Advance.

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