Mr Pyne and the boss of DCNS, Herve Guillou, visit the
shipyards in Cherbourg. Is l'affaire Adelaide a repeat of DCNS's l'affaire Karachi
-Australian taxpayers have not been told why French subs will cost 5 times more
Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian this morning:
Australia’s defence outlook is changing rapidly and new Defence Minister Linda Reynolds faces a daunting task.
She is being bombarded with material from defence officials defending what are increasingly obvious past mistakes or strategies in danger of becoming obsolete.
The submarine contract and the joint strike fighter (JSF) are at the top of the list with yet another defence expert warning over the weekend that technology change is endangering the $90 billion French submarine gamble.
The ABC reports that former government defence adviser Derek Woolner and fellow researcher David Glynne Jones say that Australia’s objective to produce a “regionally superior” submarine is “now under challenge” and by the time the new submarine hits the water around 2034 “it’s going to be obsolete”.
Woolner says our submarine is to be built with a heavy metal main battery, as part of a process already initiated under a contract signed by France’s Naval Group company and MTU Friedrichshafen for diesel generator sets.
Hydraulics expert Aidan Morrison’s detailed research paper last year showed that the while the pump-jet system works well with nuclear submarines, at the slow pace required for diesel electric it fails.
After a long delay, defence countered by claiming that pump-jets could be efficient across the entire speed range. Morrison responded: “It is a bizarre, irrational claim with no basis whatsoever in physics. It is frankly bewildering that such a claim could be made, given how easily its falsehood can be established by even moderate research, or simple logic.”
To pretend that the Australian DCNS contracts are nothing like the other DCNS contracts is to indulge in that naive Australian habit of pretending that this country alone is pure and incorruptible.
The reports below show that even documents in the public domain show that belief to be fantasy.
If the Department Of Defence wants to justify its DCNS-Barracuda decision, it can start by providing full public disclosure of all the related offset contracts, providing details of when, who and how much.
END
See first
And then:
And for the EY connection
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