defence
7 Mar 2008
The Super Seasprites Saga
The Super Seasprite at work
The cancellation the $1.3 billion Seasprite contract brings to an end one of the worst acquisitions in Australian military history, writes Ben Eltham
On Wednesday Defence Minster Joel Fitzgibbon cancelled the Royal Australian Navy's purchase of 11 Super Seasprite helicopters.The long overdue decision brings to an end one of the worst acquisitions in Australian military history. The Super Seasprites were ordered 11 years ago and have so far cost the Australian tax payer upwards of $1.3 billion. Despite being finally delivered last year, they are still grounded due to software and safety concerns, and have never reached operational capacity.
The saga of the Super Seasprites tells us much about why the forward projections for Australian defence acquisitions run past $60 billion, with no less than $23 billion worth of projects at "medium to high" risk of failure, according to Fitzgibbon.
First and foremost, the Seasprite is an old helicopter with a new brain. Brendan Nelson's quote about "squeezing a modern Holden into the frame of an EH" has been repeated at length by the news media, but if anything it underestimates the difficulty of the task that the Navy had demanded from the Seasprite's manufacturers, Kaman Aerospace International.
The original Seasprite helicopter was delivered in the 1950s for the US Navy, and operated off its frigates, cruisers and carriers chiefly in an anti-submarine warfare role. In the 1980s, the original design was refitted with new engines and renamed the Super Seasprite. It was not renowned for its reliability or performance. The Super Seasprite was a light helicopter able to operate in a combination of anti-submarine and anti-surface roles, although it has to be said its Penguin anti-ship missile lacks the range and lethality of state-of-the-art Soviet-designed anti-shipping missiles. Still, the Super Seasprite is an important "force multiplier" for the ships it operates off. Or, at least it would have been.
The Navy originally wanted the Super Seasprite because it needed a light helicopter capable of operating off the small mini-frigate (the "offshore patrol combatant") that Australia had hoped to develop with Malaysia in the early 1990s. The Malaysians eventually backed out of that deal, so the Navy decided to keep the Seasprite for the ANZAC frigates that Australia was building with New Zealand. But the ANZAC frigates are bigger ships and can carry the SH-60 / S-70 Sea Hawk helicopter that Australia eventually also purchased. The Sea Hawks are a newer, more durable design and are also capable of mounting the Penguin. In short, Australia never needed the Super Seasprites. We could have simply bought more Sea Hawks.
But, as US legislators have repeatedly found, defence acquisitions are notoriously difficult to kill off. The mind-boggling sums of money involved often lead defence planners and politicians into the "sunk cost fallacy" - in other words, they throw good money after bad.
So the Navy decided to persevere with the Seasprite project. But to make sure they were getting bang for their buck, Defence and the Navy placed some onerous conditions on Kaman Aerospace. Essentially, Kaman would be asked to deliver a brand new helicopter, with state-of-the-art avionics and software. These complex new machines-that-go-ping pushed up the cost of the 11 helicopters to something like $100 million a pop, and posed huge engineering challenges for Kaman. Of particular concern was integrating the Litton Integrated Systems Division Integrated Tactical Avionics System (ITAS) into the old airframe. This is why the Super Seasprite was still not operating off ANZAC frigates in early 2008 after being delivered to the Navy in 2003.
The Super Seasprite had some serious problems. In 2006 the choppers were grounded over safety concerns. According to this ABC report, they had trouble flying at night and over water. That's an issue in a naval helicopter.
What's left is an unholy mess. The Navy doesn't get its helicopters, and the taxpayer is $1.3 billion in the hole. Kaman will no doubt sue the Commonwealth over the cancellation, so you can add massive legal fees and a possible damages payout to the bill.
Who's to blame? Just about everybody, really. The Navy pushed for an ambitious and ultimately unrealistic project, essentially requesting a brand new helicopter when off-the-shelf models with similar capability were available. Defence completely mismanaged the contract with Kaman, allowing them to miss deadline after deadline with little or no sanction or risk management. And John Howard's government baulked at cancelling the project when faced with the obvious prospect of failure.
Joel Fitzgibbon deserves high praise indeed for finally having the guts to cancel a defence purchase. He's going to need plenty more courage in the months and years ahead. Australia is committed to some astonishingly risky defence acquisitions. There are several other upgrades trying to put new software into old platforms, which are also running behind. Most notable of these is the Guided Missile Frigate upgrade, but we're also refitting things like our old F/A Hornets and the M-113 armoured personnel carrier. Brendan Nelson also controversially committed to the purchase of F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets; this purchase itself is up for review. Then there's the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. These planes are brand new, not properly tested, overweight on their specifications and running late.
What about replacement submarines for the Collins-class boats due to be retired in the mid-2020s? These will need to be commissioned and begun in the next few years, and are expected to cost up to $25 billion. Fitzgibbon has also foreshadowed upgrading the Air Warfare Destroyers currently under construction to carry SM-3 missiles capable of ballistic missile defence, which could further complicate what is already a massively complicated project.
All in all, you wouldn't want to be Stephen Gumley right now. He's the CEO of the Defence Materiel Organisation, the Government agency responsible for managing these vastly complex acquisition projects. Good luck Stephen. You're going to need it.
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After reading this article, one which exposes the complete failure of the Howard Government in the area of Defence, I would like to ask the Rudd Government, via N.M., to visit all our neighbours urgently.
A request should be made to them to please put off any plans to attack Australia for at least twenty years. By then, perhaps, we may have some military equipment that actually works or has finally rolled of the production line.
While visiting our neighbours, perhaps tactful questions could be asked of them as to whether they have any old warships or helicopters or tanks lying about that they could give a quick upgrade to.
Who knows, they might have some Tiger Moths that might come in handy for Australia’s defence in the interim!
Is Biggles dead?
www.dangerouscreation.com
What about an outrageous suggestion why not develop some of our own unique equipment with a view to self defense rather than the US sheriff role we appear to be arming ourselves for. At the figures quoted it can’t be more expensive.
Violence begets violence.
Yeah, let us forget about being bloody Sheriff to an Insane Dictator, one G.W.Bush, who, with his crazy Zionist advisers (now mostly moved along), planned to rule the world with Bush, and only Bush (or perhaps Cheyney!) deciding on the Rules. Remember, he tells us, he is the ‘decider’. Hell!
Why are we preparing for World War 3, as a ‘stand and deliver’ type of War, anyway. It is much more likely to be revolts and insurrections, as places like the Sudan and Kosovo explode, with China and the USA supplying the arms and ammunitions, as proxy controllers. Maybe even Russia will be in there also, playing the ‘stirrer’ as Putin and Medvedev are doing now in Kosovo.
Nasty brush fires, not all out World War.
The USA may end up not even being a major player, as it sinks deeper into debt, with China, India and Japan holding the paper.
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. I wrote about just this some 40 years ago.
Dazza.
The federal government’s decision to abandon this failed contract will at least limit the further waste of limited defence funds on this helicopter project. It’s a sad but necessary decision, with significant impact on local technical people involved in this protracted tale.
By comparison, I was in New Zealand last month then one of their Sea Sprites was affected by a technical problem, which seemed to be isolated, fixed, and not affecting their other 4 aircraft of this type.
To quote from Wikipedia:
“New Zealand purchased 5 SH-2G [Sea Sprites] at the same time as Australia, but with different avionics, and the New Zealand aircraft were new-build airframes, not rebuilt American SH-2Fs. The SH-2G purchase was completed NZ$12 million under the $338 million budgeted (excluding GST). The first RNZAF SH-2G was delivered in mid-2001, the last was delivered February 2003.”
One persistent element in many of our failed and wasteful Australian defence orders, like this one, has been the urge to customize and improve on off-the-shelf designs which are themselves already proven, to give a result which is uneconomic and (in this case) unsafe for its crews.
There seems a good case for New Zealand to be asked to give mentoring guidance for their equivalent Australian defence bureaucrats, if we wish to avoid further fumbling waste and delay of this kind.
Where this idea came from of using secondhand armaments I do not know. Perhaps it came from someone whose family used to own a garage?
www.dangerouscreation.com
David Grayling, what we do have is a lot of obsolete armaments sitting around in the Arizona desert and other places…stuff the US forces will just not touch with the proverbial forty-foot pole, and Armaments pushers (manufacturers) desperate to get back the money spent on development and manufacture. Along comes the boot lickin’ Aussies, sucking up to Bush and Co., particularly Nelson, and they saw that, indeed, there is a sucker born every minute! Grab him and milk him dry! Which they did!
Great friend we have over there, hey!??????
American policy, never give a sucker an even break! And, there are no friends in (dirty) business!
Dazza.
The view that the Aeasprite failed because of the age of the airframe is a invalid. There are many aircraft such as the American b52, kc135, and especially the E-3 Hawkeye that are much older.
No, the reason the Seasprite failed was the attempt to make the co-pilots station Under Sea Warefare capable. This role is normally conducted by a third crew, in the Seasprite this was to be done by the flying crew.
Quote "The straightforward part of the job is in stripping the surplus Seasprites purchased by the Australians down to the airframe and refurbishing them to be almost new, or "zero hour" airframes. The challenge for the companies is in developing a completely new flight system for what will be, essentially, a new type of Seasprite helicopter."
The new system is was to be state-of-the-art. Replacing the mechanical gauges and other devices used for decades were to be four computer display screens and advanced electronics. Using these screens, and the powerful systems behind them, a two-person crew was to fly the helicopter, conduct search-and-rescue operations or fight in combat. "
This has never been done anywhere, and was intended to reduce the ongoing cost by only needed two crew to be trained, housed and managed.
Unfortunatley the technical complexity of combining two completly different physical regimes proved too hard in the end.
Requiescat in pace Seasprite!
Bruce Ferguson
Chairman
Helmsman Institute for Project Governance