As of 2022, the Hunter-class frigate project was running four years behind schedule and the cost of the ships was $15 billion higher than originally expected. These issues led the acquisition to be added to the Defence 'projects of concern' list.
Australia's troubled future frigates could receive a dramatic boost to their firepower under proposed design changes unveiled by the British company in charge of the $45 billion program.
BAE Systems Australia has surprised commentators and critics with a newly upgraded model version of the Hunter Class frigate on display at the Indo Pacific 2023 International Maritime Exposition in Sydney.
The multi-billion-dollar Hunter Class Frigate Program (HCFP) has drawn significant criticism from industry commentators as BAE provides nine frigates optimised for anti-submarine warfare for the Royal Australian Navy. The growing uncertainty over the program has grown as the government considers the findings of a highly anticipated review into the navy's surface fleet.
These ships would replace the current Anzac Class frigates based on the UK’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship.
At an international maritime conference in Sydney, BAE Systems unveiled modifications which would add 64 MK41 vertical launch missile cells (VLS) - such as the Tomahawk (manufactured by Raytheon) - to the current 32 cell design of Australia's new anti-submarine warfare vessels. This involves replacing the standard mission bay and adding as many as eight more Naval Strike Missiles (NSMs); the ships fielding a total of 96 VLS and 16 NSMs. This is apparently without affecting the overall cost or delivery timetable.
However, the changes will come at the expense of some of the high-end anti-submarine warfare (ASW) equipment such as the towed array sonar, and the Hunter’s mission bay aft of the funnel.
But do we really want to forgo anti-submarine capabilities – the bread and butter of the current ANZAC frigate fleet, in favour of maritime and land attack capabilities?
The biggest loss in the new design is a massive multi-mission bay that sat atop the Hunter, enabling future navy planners to house various unmanned underwater, sea surface and aerial systems which could be launched and recovered when needed.
This was one of the beauties of the original design – giving the ship a rare flexibility likely to become invaluable as autonomous and unmanned systems become more critical in defence.
More missiles is all very well, but they suggest a completely different role to the ant-submarine one.
Late last month, the company called for confidence in the Hunter Class, rebuffing recent scrutiny in a public statement from BAE maritime managing director Craig Lockhart.
“This ‘go-to’ narrative far too often comes from those who haven’t visited the shipyard or have the context around the program,” he said.
“While public scrutiny is to be expected, and rightly so, on any program that comes at expense to the taxpayer, I find that Australia is unique in how it publicly debates its defence programs.
“These are dedicated people who are working tirelessly to provide a capability; specifically selected by the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), that will provide Australia with a world-leading, highly capable and versatile multi-mission warship.”
Lockhart said the first Hunter Guided Missile Frigate could be built as early as the fourth ship – the first vessel of Flight 2 - in the program if requested by Defence. If adopted, the proposal will arguably render the Navy’s three Hobart-class DDGs redundant.
BAE Systems said design work on the evolved ship began long before the surface fleet review and attendant public debate about Navy’s capability to put significant numbers of VLS cells to sea.
“A mix of the two types (ASW Frigate and Guided Missile Frigate) creates a pretty powerful Navy,” BAE Systems’ Managing Director Ben Hudson said.
Hudson said the margins in the Hunter design could accommodate a maximum of 128 VLS cells, but this would come at the cost of removing the forward the 5 inch Mk 45 gun, The 128 cells surpasses even the United States Navy’s (USN) Ticonderoga class Guided Missile Cruisers.
According to BAE the up-armed, Batch II Hunter, maintains 85% commonality with the existing ships that are under construction at Osborne, South Australia. The most significant difference is the removal of the Thales Sonar 2087 towed array and various other unspecified Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) systems.
It would also involve “minor” changes to the ship’s propulsion and power systems to accommodate for the increased top weight of the high-mounted VLS cells.
The proposed modifications would have a “minimal” impact on cost and a “negligible” impact on schedule so long as build of the modified design commenced with Batch II, rather than Batch I ships, Lockhart said.
BAE is also exploring alternative ways to up-arm the frigates through the use of containerised air-defence and surface-to-surface missiles.
Right now, however, a decision has not been made and BAE is simply “offering options” to its customer which is the Australian Department of Defence and RAN. The original Hunter class contract, signed in 2018, always included scope for redesigns between each batch of three ships.
“It’s an evolutionary approach to the evolution of the threat,” the company’s Head of Naval Shipbuilding Simon Lister added.
The Australian federal government previously signed the contract with ASC Shipbuilding (now known as BAE Systems Maritime Australia) in December 2018 to build the Hunter Class frigates under Project SEA 5000 Phase 1. British shipbuilder BAE Systems was chosen by the Turnbull government to construct the fleet of advanced anti-submarine warships but the massive endeavour has been beset by delays and complications.
BAE revealed it had been in discussions with the navy for 12 months about how it could update the Hunter class design with a "detune" of its anti-submarine warfare focus, in favour of a guided missile frigate variant.
"Whilst the contract said all nine ships were to be of the same variant, we never expected that to be the case because technology will advance quicker than our design process can keep track," Mr Lockhart said.
"Within this evolution of the Hunter design, by changing only three design zones and one construction module only, we can add another 64 cells to the current capability, taking the full ship cell capability, vertical launch, to 96 cells."
On 2 October 2023 the Albanese government was handed the long-awaited findings of a study into Australia's naval surface fleet, led by retired US admiral William H Hilarides, with a formal response expected early next year. Hilarides is a former submariner and commander of US Naval Sea Systems Command. The analysis will seek to ensure the current and future surface fleet is appropriately matched to the new submarines when they enter service from 2032, and are suitable in the expected short and medium-term operating environment.
On the opening day of the international Indo Pacific Conference in Sydney, Defence Minister Richard Marles declared the Service Fleet Review would involve some "hard decisions".
"Obviously we've inherited a whole range of programs — the Hunter program, the Offshore Patrol vessels and the like — we need to build into this what we have inherited and where we should now go," Mr Marles told an audience of visiting navy dignitaries.
"I have read the Service Fleet Review and I guess what I would say to people is it is a really impressive piece of work, it is a compelling thesis."
On Tuesday Australia's navy chief, Vice Admiral Mark Hammond, called on Australians to have "patience" as the country also worked on the massive effort to acquire nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS partnership.
The Hunter program is awaiting the outcome of the Surface Fleet Review, now not expected to be made public until the end of the first quarter 2024, but BAE Systems Australia has categorically refuted rumours that the Hunter build program would be moved to BAE Systems’ shipyard in Glasgow.
This analysis was an outcome of the defence strategic review, which recommended that the government direct ‘an independent analysis of Navy’s surface combatant fleet capability to ensure the fleet’s size, structure and composition complement the capabilities provided by the forthcoming conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarine’.
Is it more or less likely that the navy’s mission will switch to attack and aggression? Maybe Hunter could become a mix of the two vessel types?
No doubt the Service Fleet Review has considered all these matters.
But the outcome will very much make clear what kind of Royal Australian Navy Australia wants to field in future.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) published a report in October 2023 that said that Australia should cut back its $45bn Hunter-class frigate project or the navy will end up with too many ships focused on anti-submarine warfare. The report calls for a “bold” revamp of the navy’s surface fleet, including reducing the Hunter-class frigate order from nine ships to six.
Despite repeated warnings from the government about the worsening regional security outlook, the report argues the navy “lacks the resources to adequately protect Australia’s vast maritime interests”.
The report recommends an overall increase in the number of ships armed for combat, but says sticking with the production of nine Hunter-class frigates would result in an “unbalanced” fleet that is “biased” towards anti-submarine warfare.
The report’s author, Jennifer Parker, a senior adviser at the Australian National University’s National Security College, said the Hunter-class frigates were geared towards anti-submarine warfare and so had fewer “vertical launching system” missile cells.
The frigates would therefore have less capability to destroy a rival’s aircraft and other surface ships. These frigates are being built in Adelaide but the first is not expected to be ready until the early 2030s.
Parker recommended cutting the order by three ships and said the “remaining hulls would be replaced by a multipurpose frigate or destroyer capability with increased missile capability per tonne”.
In the new ASPI report, Parker said acquiring eight nuclear-powered submarines to replace Australia’s six conventional submarines was “important” but did not represent “a major structural change or significant expansion” of the navy.
“Submarines can have a disproportionate impact on an adversary’s attempts to achieve sea control,” Parker wrote.
“However, there are limitations. They can’t perform many important naval tasks and hence can’t replace an adequately sized fleet of major surface combatants.
Analysis of the growth and modernisation of navies in our region – including among our partners and allies – makes this abundantly clear.”
The report said the Royal Australian Navy relied on a backbone of 11 to 12 major surface combatants. At present, this consists of eight Anzac-class frigates and three Hobart-class destroyers – all of which have capabilities in anti-submarine warfare, anti-air warfare and anti-surface warfare.
Parker said 11 to 12 major surface combatants was “insufficient for Australia” and it should have 16 to 20 such ships.
She said a review of the navy’s structure should consider “bold changes, including reconsideration of a fleet auxiliary, a coastguard or forward basing of assets to support the workforce requirements of an expanded fleet”.
The report cites a warning from the former navy chief, David Shackleton, about a reduction in the RAN’s firepower. “In 1995, the Royal Australian Navy possessed 368 missile cells on its major surface combatants,” Shackleton wrote in February.
“By 2020, that had reduced to 208, a 43% reduction in firepower. It will take until 2045 for the Navy to get back up to its 1995 capacity. From 2050, it will plateau at 432, a net increase of 64 cells.”
Two years after the 2018 announcement of the BAE frigates, the cost of the program was revised up by $10 billion to $45 billion. Soon after, Defence acknowledged that the project was running 18 months to two years behind schedule, with the first ship expected to enter service in the early 2030s rather than the late 2020s. Design changes saw the weight of the ship blow out from 8800 tonnes to about 10,000 tonnes.
Beyond the navy’s leadership and BAE’s representatives, it is now hard to find fans of the Hunter-class frigate.
“I don’t know anyone who thinks the Type 26 [Hunter-class frigates] is the right ship for us to be buying,” says Hugh White, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Defence.
Another prominent defence analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity because of work they do for the federal government, lambasts the ships as floating “turkeys”.
“This is heading down the pathway to be the worst shipbuilding project in the RAN’s history,” the analyst says.
David Shackleton, who served as the chief of navy from 1999 to 2002, said in a major report for the ASPI last year that the Hunter-class program was so fundamentally flawed that it should be scrapped.
A scathing audit office report released in May found the final cost was likely to be “significantly higher” than $45 billion. It also revealed that the Defence Department initially concluded that the Italian and Spanish designs were better options for Australia than BAE’s Type 26 ship.
Among those highly critical of the Hunter-class frigates is Peter Dean, who served as a senior adviser to the Defence Strategic Review and its principal author.
“What we have here is an over-engineered, over-specialised, anti-submarine warfare frigate that is no longer meeting the needs of the strategic environment,” says Dean, foreign policy and defence director at the United States Studies Centre.
“The question now has to be: are we not better off walking away and looking at other options that we can explore?”
Around the world, even more profound questions are being asked about the viability of large surface ships in an era of precision missiles, drones and sophisticated surveillance systems.
Named after the Russian capital, the Moskva was the pride of President Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea Fleet. The 9000-tonne, 186-metre cruiser was seen as so significant, so formidable, that the Russian Orthodox Church handed over a Christian relic, believed to be a piece of the True Cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified, to grace the ship’s chapel. The Moskva played an important role in Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014, and was expected to do so again in the war in Ukraine.
Yet, last April Ukraine spectacularly shot down the Moskva using cheap, locally made Neptune cruise missiles launched from land near the port city of Odessa. It was the biggest ship to be sunk in combat since 1982 when the British navy famously downed the General Belgrano during the Falklands War.
Retired US Navy admiral James Stavridis applauded the sinking as “gut punch to the Russian military and the Kremlin”, but added that it offers “a stark reminder of the vulnerability of surface ships — including aircraft carriers, the heart of the US Navy — to relatively low-cost, numerous and technologically advanced cruise missiles”.
Stavridis said that, in the two decades since September 11, 2001 attacks, Western navies had “operated with impunity, projecting power ashore at will because Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians did not have Neptune-style cruise missiles”.
“That won’t be the case in great-power conflict,” he wrote in Bloomberg Opinion, alluding to a possible battle between the US and China, most likely in the Taiwan Strait.
Andrew Davies, a senior ASPI analyst and former Defence official, says surface ships have always had major vulnerabilities. They are large and slow, their defensive systems can’t be reloaded at sea and can only manoeuvre in two dimensions. Recent technological developments, he argues, have tipped the balance to render them virtually useless in war-fighting scenarios.
Firstly, there are the rapid advances in radar and sonar technology — including from space satellites — that make ships far easier to detect. “Once a ship sailed over the horizon, it used to be invisible,” he says. “Now they can be easily detected at long ranges.” At the same time, advances in precision-guided missiles are making them easier to sink. Adding to the threat matrix are attacks from drones and explosive uncrewed underwater vessels.
“My argument has been for a very long time that surface ships have no serious place in Australian military strategy in any conflict with a capable maritime power,” says Hugh White, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Defence..
“They’re so vulnerable, and there are so many other ways of doing everything that surface ships can do for you.”
Dean says: “There is a fundamental question about the long-term utility of very large surface vessels. It doesn’t mean that their time has necessarily come and gone, but the mass proliferation of cheap and ubiquitous cruise missiles make them much more vulnerable.”
However, even the biggest sceptics accept that a vast island nation like Australia must have surface ships of some kind. As well as war-fighting, such vessels serve an important role in providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to the wider region, as well as counter-piracy operations. The live question is, at cost of $5 billion each, whether the Hunter-class is the correct ship for Australia and whether nine are really necessary.
From the beginning, the biggest selling point of the Type 26 was its ability to hunt down and shoot enemy submarines.
Rather than an advantage, this is the hole in the heart of the program.
A wit once said, searching for a submarine with a surface ship is a bit like searching for a gas leak with a match,” he quips. “You’ll find the submarine, but only when the torpedo is in the water and heading towards you.”
You’re far better off searching for submarines with aircraft or other submarines.
Michael Shoebridge, a former senior Defence Department official, says Australia’s plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS pact has undermined the rationale for the Hunter-class program.
“The primary purpose of a Virginia-class attack submarine is to kill other submarines,” says Shoebridge. “That should free up the frigates to not be so focused on anti-submarine warfare.”
In the end the criticisms by the ASPI hawks and the design changes proposed by private company BAE (which will also enrich Raytheon) are all about increasing the amount of lethal weapons the Hunter-class frigates carry, demonstrating a clear move away from ostensibly being defensive and more towards aggression - the concept of “impactful projection” beyond our shores (a.k.a. long range strike options).
The Defence Department has conceded it had a "poorly executed" process for selecting a British company to build Australia's $45 billion future frigates, where "sufficient attention" was not given to risks associated with choosing an immature design. Department secretary Greg Moriarty has now outlined numerous shortcomings by defence during the competitive evaluation process between 2014 and 2018 where officials reported that "successive government ministers were closely involved as the process developed and iterative advice was provided".
"These senior defence officials considered across this period that there was sufficient advice provided to government to allow it to make a value for money assessment," Mr Moriarty stated in a submission to Parliament's Public Accounts and Audit Committee.
Mr Moriarty was appointed as defence secretary in 2017, taking over from veteran bureaucrat Dennis Richardson who has recently been appointed by Labor to "oversee the implementation of the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) recommendations".
The secretary also observed that his department "did not use all information available out of the tender process to undertake a comparative assessment in a manner consistent with defence procurement policy".
Parliament's joint public accounts and audit committee is scheduled to have another hearing on the matter next week.
"In failing to do this defence did not fulfil the requirements of the Commonwealth Procurement Rules in relation to achieving value for money," the Secretary writes in a submission dated November 10.
"The focus on achieving capability requirements displaced sufficient attention to the risks as well as the consideration of the tenders against other criteria which information was assessed and documented as part of the process."
Committee chair and Labor MP Julian Hill said he would seek critical missing documents from defence at a public hearing next week.
"It's possible that Sir Humphrey was engaged as a consultant to help draft this submission, yet nevertheless it contains a series of pretty startling admissions," he said.
"Defence confirms that no proper value for money assessment was undertaken to support the Liberal govt's decision to buy now $46bn of ships, and that successive ministers were curiously all over this.
"It's clear as day now that procurement rules were egregiously breached by the former government."
Australia's big-ticket national security items continue to be driven by looking beyond, not within, the Indo-Pacific. Without ensuring the engagement and alignment of our neighbours, that may well be a fatal mistake.
But if it involves the purchase of more weapons, you can almost hear the military industrial complex salivating at the prospect.
Got to keep those US billionaires receiving Australian taxpayers' money.
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