Navy frigates in a $30bn race to the future
Denmark is offering its 6650-tonne Iver Huitfeldt frigates, modified with the antisubmarine warfare focus Australia wants.
Denmark’s biggest selling point is that the Iver Huitfeldt boats are significantly cheaper to build.
Denmark is offering its 6650-tonne Iver Huitfeldt frigates, modified with the antisubmarine warfare focus Australia wants.
Denmark’s biggest selling point is that the Iver Huitfeldt boats are significantly cheaper to build.
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Per Hesselberg leans forward in his chair, a portrait of his queen *behind him, and explains why Denmark should design our new fleet of warships. “We are the country of Lego,’” the Danish navy captain says with a smile.
“And our frigates are like Lego frigates … they are built from blocks and are flexible, multi-role ships, so that you can pluck and play with and create exactly the warship you want.”
Outside Hesselberg’s office, winter rain sweeps across the *Korsor Naval Base in a remote pocket of *Denmark, almost obliterating the giant grey frigate moored in the distance.
If Denmark has its way, that frigate will form the rump of Australia’s future navy.
It’s the least they could do, the Danes joke, for Australia giving them their beloved Tasmanian-born princess Mary.
To do this, Denmark will need to fend off at least five other larger nations circling like vultures to grab the second largest Defence contract in Australia’s history, the $30 billion project to build nine new frigates.
Since the defence white paper was released last month, the headlines have been all about the $50bn future submarines — while the *Future Frigate project largely sails under the radar.
But in many ways the stakes *involved in building the fleet of navy frigates to replace the eight Anzac-class frigates are just as high as for the submarines — and certainly more immediate.
Unlike the future submarines, which will not be built until the early 2030s, the government promises it will begin cutting steel on the new frigates in Adelaide in 2020 — almost tomorrow in shipbuilding terms.
What’s more, the success or failure of this project will determine the future of the nation’s struggling shipbuilding industry and thousands of jobs.
For the first time, it will herald the start of a continuous shipbuilding project, ensuring a rolling-*production line of frigates into the future.
The glittering prize of the *Future Frigate contract has *captured attention at the highest levels in Paris, Madrid, Rome, London and Copenhagen as each capital steps up its lobbying campaign to seduce Australia’s Defence officials.
Yet already the project is *tainted by controversy and shrouded in secrecy. Defence will barely speak about it — it took four days for The Australian to *elicit fundamental answers about the *project.
Defence refuses to say which countries are bidding or even what size warships the navy wants. The Australian understands there are five defence giants and one minnow in the race. These *include the industrial powerhouses of *Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
Then there is Denmark, the enfant terrible of the competition and a country with a proud sea*faring tradition. “Why not Denmark,” Hesselberg asks as we lunch in the naval base’s Viking room under a painting of a Viking boat in stormy seas.
“We have come up with a *frigate where you get value for money and which can match anything with the capability of its weapons, its stealth, acoustics, sensors and its endurance. You can sail from Denmark here to Indonesia on one tank of fuel. That is very unusual.”
As with almost every aspect of Australia’s troubled naval shipbuilding industry, the project to *replace the navy’s Anzac frigates from the mid-2020s, known inside Defence as SEA 5000, is buffeted by politics and controversy.
In 2014, the government was unnerved by the huge blowouts in cost and schedule for the building of the three air warfare destroyers in Melbourne and *Adelaide. (The three AWDs and nine new frigates will form the firepower of the future surface fleet.)
So it commissioned a study to see if it could create some economy of scale by using the same hull of the AWD, designed by Spanish shipbuilder Navantia, as the base for the Future Frigate.
Other *competitors for the frigate contract cried foul, saying that this gave Navantia an unfair *advantage. Navantia claims this study showed that its AWD hull could be adapted to meet the *requirements of the Future Frigate program, but Defence refuses to *divulge the results of the study, which concluded in September, saying only, “No decision has been made on whether this particular option will progress.”
Also, early last year, there was an internal row within Defence over the frigates.
The navy presented Defence Secretary Dennis Richardson with a plan that called for its new frigates to be super warships, at twice the size and with twice the firepower of the Anzac-class boats.
Richardson threw the proposal back at the navy, asking it to refine its wishlist to a more affordable ship.
Even so, the final negotiated outcome for the Future Frigate is understood to be a substantially larger warship, in the range of 6000 tonnes to 7000 tonnes, compared with the 3800-tonne Anzac boats.
The Future Frigates will have more firepower than any previous Royal Australian Navy *warship — a capability the navy believes is essential when China is investing billions on *developing a navy that can project power far from its shores.
By *having a strong antisubmarine focus, the frigates will be able to complement and support the navy’s 12 new submarines.
In August, the Future Frigate program was again turned upside down when Tony Abbott became panicked by poor opinion polls in the shipbuilding state of South Australia. The then prime minister rewrote the shipbuilding schedule to try to save jobs and win votes by bringing forward the construction schedule for the new frigates by two years, from 2022 to 2020.
Experts say that by fast-tracking such a complex project for political purposes the government has increased the risk and dangers associated with the future frigate program.
The government said the move would save more than 500 jobs by reducing the gap *between the end of the AWD project and the start of the frigate construction, which will be a rolling build.
But, shipbuilding expert Mark Thomson of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute says: “The frigate project is at least as risky, if not more risky, than the AWD project.” He says the expectation that the frigates will need to be modified to fit US combat and weapons systems and the CEAFAR radar used on the Anzacs was already risky enough without bringing the schedule forward.
“We are going to cut steel on the frigates earlier than we would have, not because there is anything wrong with the Anzacs,” Thomson tells The Australian.
“I don’t think it is a dark secret that this is all about addressing South Australia’s expectations about being provided a more or less continuous line of work to keep things going.”
The Abbott decision to bring forward the project means that Defence has had to rush its processes. In October, a few months after Abbott’s announcement, *Defence began its so-called competitive evaluation process — a global search for the right frigate for *Australia.
The secretive Rand Corporation was engaged to help evaluate suitable designs from around the world, and through this process a long list of potential bidders was drawn up. This also has annoyed some of the larger bidders for the project. They say Rand Corp had asked them for details of highly sensitive stealth features of their boats — details some were reluctant to provide.
“The Rand Corp was engaged to assist with the gathering and analysis of information to support the analysis of alternatives,” a *Defence spokesman says.
“The first step is identification of the mature ship design options available in the market, and then narrowing of the field of designs for further development. A number of designers/builders are involved in this process but their names cannot yet be made public.”
The defence white paper provided little detail on the *frigate *project beyond saying that Australia will build nine new frigates in Adelaide configured *especially for antisubmarine warfare operations.
Australia has been weak on *antisubmarine warfare capabilities for many years, when the number of submarines, especially Chinese submarines, in the Indo-Pacific is fast rising.
The government says that later this year it will narrow the field of contenders for the Future Frigates — most likely to a shortlist of three — before deciding the winner in 2018, barely two years before construction is scheduled to begin.
Britain is offering Australia its yet-to-be-built Type 26 frigate; Germany wants to sell an anti-submarine warfare variant of the MEKO 400 family of frigates; Spain is offering a frigate based on its F-105 AWD hull; and France and Italy are offering their own variants of the FREMM European multi-role frigate.
Denmark is offering its highly capable 6650-tonne Iver Huitfeldt frigates, three of which are in service with the Danish Navy.
The ship’s designer, Odense Maritime Technology, is proposing to modify the design to give it the antisubmarine warfare focus that Australia wants, by expanding its helicopter hangar to hold two ASW choppers and installing a towed array sonar to hunt subs.
Denmark’s biggest selling point is that the Iver Huitfeldt boats are significantly cheaper to build — and to maintain — than comparative frigates.
This is largely because Denmark, home to the world’s largest commercial shipbuilding company, Maersk Group, uses its own commercial shipbuilding practices and parts for its frigates, driving down the cost of production.
The Danish Navy also managed the project as the prime *contractor, rather than another defence company, which keep costs lower.
These factors, coupled with highly efficient shipyards, meant Denmark built its frigates for $US340 million each, less than half the projected costs of the other SEA 5000 competitors.
The ship also includes a modular design allowing for the wholesale replacement of units such as guns, computers and other equipment, reducing maintenance costs.
These cost factors alone will ensure the Danish bid is closely scrutinised by Australian Defence officials, who have visited Denmark four times in the past 18 months, with another visit due next month.
“We think the frigate platform Denmark has developed fits pretty well with the requirements that Australia has for frigates and we believe we can transfer that production capability to Australia,” says OMT chief executive Kare Christianson, who oversees Denmark’s frigate bid from an old whitewashed thatched cottage north of Copenhagen.
Denmark’s Chief of Navy, Rear-Admiral Frank Trojahn, tells The Australian that he hopes Australia closely examines the Danish *option.
“I know we do have a good product, it has shown its worth in exercises, in live operations, and the Americans trust it 100 per cent; so from my point of view that is a stamp of guarantee,” he says.
John White, who oversaw the successful construction of the Anzac frigates in the 1990s, says the Future Frigate project must be carefully managed to avoid the mistakes of the past.
“The success of the Anzac frigates project was based on using a privatised shipyard organisation in Australia to team with an overseas design-and-build partner that had proven, successful experience in designing similar vessels,” White says.
White is an optimist. He believes that, despite the problems of the past, Australia’s naval shipbuilding industry has a bright future. The frigate project will be its first big test.
“It will provide a sovereign Australian naval industry to meet our *future strategic requirements.”
