{"id":2279,"date":"2016-05-30T17:42:28","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T15:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meerverstehen.net\/?p=2279"},"modified":"2021-01-27T16:16:53","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T15:16:53","slug":"sound-of-silence-lookup-on-australian-u-boats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/sound-of-silence-nachschlag-zu-australischen-u-booten\/","title":{"rendered":"1TP5Understanding the sea: Sound of Silence - Australian submarines in review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>On Friday 13 May, five representatives from the Australian Ministry of Defence and 11 German representatives from TKMS, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Federal Foreign Office met in Kiel for a debriefing on the outcome of the Australian submarine deal.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At the debriefing, the Australian delegation wanted to explain the Australians' decision-making process to the representatives of the German bid. In April, it was announced that the French state-owned shipyard DCNS would be awarded the contract worth around 35 billion euros. The Japanese bid had already been eliminated at the beginning of the year. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The daily newspaper <em>The Australian<\/em> reports, citing sources, that the meeting was rather frosty and that the Australian delegation was not particularly convincing in its reasoning:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>The Germans were told that the \"critical issue'' was that their submarine was too noisy. Specifically they were told, with deliberate vagueness, that the boat would be too noisy at a particular frequency that was very important to the Royal Australian Navy - an apparent reference to the submarine's ability to collect close-to-shore intelligence without detection. The Germans countered by asking what the frequency was and why it was not emphasised in the bidding process. The Australians responded that this information was classified, but that they were not convinced TKMS understood the significance of this issue for Australia. They said the problems with stealth meant that the German proposal could never have delivered a regionally superior submarine for Australia. The Germans persisted, asking where the excess noise was coming from - internal machinery, the propellers, the hull? Again the Australian officials declined to comment.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The successful French bidder, DCNS, worked hard behind the scenes last year to cast doubt in the minds of Australian officials about the noise level of the TKMS submarine. DCNS modelled its estimate of the noise projection of the proposed German boat using the noise signature of its own, smaller, Scorpene-class submarine. It then compared this estimate with the noise signature for the quieter new French Barracuda submarines upon which the French-Australian submarine will be substantially based. The French also loudly touted their revolutionary pump jet propulsion system, which will replace propellers on the Australian boat, the Shortfin Barracuda. Paris claimed this would give its submarine a higher tactical silent speed than the German Type <strong>216<\/strong> submarine and Japan's evolved Soryu-class submarine, both of which would have propellers. Australian officials were said to have been highly impressed by the fact that when the Barracuda submarine accelerated, the French design was significantly quieter than either the German or the Japanese alternatives.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>They said they had reservations about the safety of the proposed lithium ion batteries that were to be installed on both the German and the Japanese submarines. Both those nations maintain that lithium ion batteries, which are four times more efficient than traditional lead acid batteries, are safe, despite small fires that have occurred in those batteries in hobby equipment, cars and airlines. In March, France publicly warned about the dangers lithium ion batteries might pose in a submarine. The Australian delegation made it clear in Kiel that it too had reservations.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>\u00a0The Australians also expressed scepticism about the ability of TKMS to upscale the size of both its Siemens motors and its submarine hulls to build a 4000-plus tonne submarine - almost double the size of previous submarines built by the company.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>\u00a0In addition, the Germans were told that their cost projections were overly optimistic, including their claim that there would be only a negligible premium for building all of the submarines in Australia. Germany's bid claimed that the price of building eight submarines (not including the combat system) would be just less than $12bn, while 12 submarines including the combat system would cost $20bn.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/meerverstehen.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/05\/the-sound-of-silence-the-australian-30may2016.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">The sound of silence - why Germany lost its subs bid, in: The Australian online, 30 May 2016 (PDF version, original article only available to subscribers).<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Let's hold on:<\/p>\n<p>The Australians had a specific technical requirement (noise reduction in a certain area) but did not want to specify this to the supplier. Australian concerns about TKMS's ability to utilise the existing designs of the 212\/214 <strong>Classes<\/strong> to the proposed 4,000 tonnes design type <strong>216<\/strong> The accusation that the Germans were not capable of scaling up to a high level could not be dispelled either. The criticism was not merely of a technical nature, as the Germans were not believed to have a <strong>Submarine<\/strong> for strategic tasks.<\/p>\n<p>France plays the lobby flute much more virtuously than Germany - nothing new, but always \"nice\" to observe. In addition to hiring the former Chief of Staff of the Australian Ministry of Defence, Sean Costello, as a strategic advisor and CEO of DCNS Australia, this also includes public criticism of nuclear technologies such as those used in German and Japanese nuclear power plants. <strong>Submarines<\/strong> lithium-ion batteries.<\/p>\n<p>The fact that the TKMS <strong>Submarine<\/strong> The argument that the boat type is fundamentally too loud is not convincing: On the one hand, because the boat type does not yet exist and therefore no values are available and the criticism was based on the existing 212\/214 types - although specific technical concerns could have been taken into account during production. On the other hand, because Singapore, a notoriously demanding user in the region, had already decided in favour of a variant (218SG) from TKMS in 2013.<\/p>\n<p>The Australian decision should be taken seriously in any case - it could and should be an occasion for a critical review on the German side. Is our underwater technology really as good as we think? Have others (e.g. the French pump jet propulsion system) overtaken us? And how does Berlin deal with French behaviour in the context of a possible consolidation of the European maritime industry?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Am Freitag den 13. Mai trafen sich f\u00fcnf Vertreter des australischen Verteidigungsministeriums sowie 11 deutsche Vertreter von TKMS, dem Verteidigungsministerium, dem Wirtschaftsministerium sowie dem Ausw\u00e4rtigen Amt zu einer Nachbesprechung betreffend den Ausgang des australischen U-Boot Deals in Kiel. Auf der Nachbesprechung wollte die australische Delegation den den Vertretern des deutschen Angebots die Entscheidungsfindung der Australier [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,33,40],"tags":[228,229,230,231,232],"class_list":["post-2279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technologie-blog","category-blog","category-streitkraefte-blog","tag-australien","tag-dcns","tag-deal","tag-tkms","tag-u-boote"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marineforum.online\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}