Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of key people
- List of acronyms
- Introduction
- Part 1 You Can't Build Submarines in Australia
- Part 2 The Honeymoon Years 1987–92
- Part 3 ‘A Strange Sense of Unease” 1993–98
- Part 4 Resolution
- 22 ‘Hardly a day went by without the project getting a hammering in the press’: the project in crisis 1997–98
- 23 ‘Bayoneting the wounded’: the McIntosh-Prescott report
- 24 ‘That villain Briggs’ and the submarine ‘get-well’ program
- 25 ‘Inside the American tent’: the saga of the replacement combat system
- 26 ‘We'll do it and get rid of the buggers’: Kockums, ASC and Electric Boat
- 27 ‘We would find that challenging’: comparison and retrospect
- Notes
- Index
25 - ‘Inside the American tent’: the saga of the replacement combat system
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of key people
- List of acronyms
- Introduction
- Part 1 You Can't Build Submarines in Australia
- Part 2 The Honeymoon Years 1987–92
- Part 3 ‘A Strange Sense of Unease” 1993–98
- Part 4 Resolution
- 22 ‘Hardly a day went by without the project getting a hammering in the press’: the project in crisis 1997–98
- 23 ‘Bayoneting the wounded’: the McIntosh-Prescott report
- 24 ‘That villain Briggs’ and the submarine ‘get-well’ program
- 25 ‘Inside the American tent’: the saga of the replacement combat system
- 26 ‘We'll do it and get rid of the buggers’: Kockums, ASC and Electric Boat
- 27 ‘We would find that challenging’: comparison and retrospect
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In early August 2000 Peter Briggs and Paul Greenfield gave a briefing on progress with the submarine ‘get-well’ program. Commenting on the combat system, Briggs said:
Last week Collins successfully launched the first Harpoon missile fired by a Collins class submarine. It constituted one of a series of tests to prove that the Harpoon missile has been integrated and can be initialised and fired by the combat system.
[Don't] draw any judgements that the combat system is suddenly passing its exams. It's not. The combat system must be replaced. The system is cumbersome and difficult to operate. It doesn't handle the data adequately and it's too slow. It's been overtaken by the computer revolution.
My recommendation remains: the cheapest, the fastest and the most effective way from where we are now is to replace it.
Peter Briggs asked how long it would take before a contract could be signed for the new system, saying he wanted it within a year. When he was told it would take at least four years to call for tenders, assess them, go through the committees and get the contract set up, Briggs said (as Paul Greenfield recalls), ‘Read my lips, we will have it within a year’. Greenfield was put in charge of the project to buy a replacement combat system and, following Briggs' advice to cut corners and ‘work with a room full of experts rather than a room full of paper’, the selection was made in 10 months.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Collins Class Submarine StorySteel, Spies and Spin, pp. 299 - 309Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008