Thursday 16 September 2021

Australia finally plans for an effective sub fleet

In a shock outbreak of intelligent decision making, the Australia government today announced that they would scrap the trouble-plagued deal to build a fleet of vastly expensive, and probably ineffective, conventional submarines in Adelaide, and instead shift to building much more capable nuclear-powered subs in conjunction with the US and UK.

While this always seemed the obvious best solution for replacing our trouble-plagued fleet of Collins class conventional subs, I was shocked that such a rational decision has actually been made. Usually anything with the word 'nuclear' in it gets blocked in Australia (they even renamed Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging (NMR) as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to cater to radiation-phobes). Hopefully costs don't blow out too much by trying to build as much as possible in Adelaide (this usually turns out to  be a very expensive way to buy local jobs), but at least the end result should be an effective submarine fleet at a reasonable life-cycle cost per unit, compared to the conventional French-designed sub that had seen costs blow out from the initial estimates.

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