Department of Veterans' Affairs
Transcript
Enlistment
I pretty much only had a school life before the ADF. I joined from Townsville, in 1990, having spent most of my schooling there in Brisbane, and then joined the Navy straight off the bat from school, literally left school in early December and joined the Navy on the third of January 1990.
So I was seven or just turned 17, I guess, and joined as an apprentice first attach to HMAS Nirimba the apprentice training establishment in Western Sydney and went through the full training in Nirimba as an aircraft maintainer called a weapons electrical at WEL.
And then went to HMAS Albatross post that to finish off my apprenticeship which I did, I guess, in a 12-month timeframe rather than two years and then changed over to officer immediately following that, in 1993.
Entry into submarines
I changed over to officer as a midshipman on the 16th of February 1993 and did the training at HMAS Creswell. Having completed that I was accepted as an officer to be a pilot, then I proceeded on to pilot training with air force and navy, sort of pilot candidates in 1994 and spent the majority of the course at RAAF Pearce in Western Australia and failed the course sometime in the last two months of that particular course.
Big problem, of course, because that's what you changed over to do. So that's a bit of a hit as to what is next. And I went down to HMAS Stirling, and then for a couple of weeks, and then came to Canberra as a midshipman just to I guess, identify what opportunities were available and what I might want to do and fell upon being a seaman officer first, to drive the ship or now known as a maritime warfare officer because I didn't want to sort of sit in the back of the aircraft and be a navigator, I actually wanted to drive the ship. So did that, I went through Seaman Officer Application Course as it was called at the time.
In 1995 and 1996 and then having completed that training at HMAS Watson in Sydney, went off to a ship called HMAS Protector, which was a trials vessel we used in South Australia for submarine trials. And I had, at the time, been contacted by a friend I went to school with who had joined the Navy after me, but we ended up being at HMAS Creswell together, ironically living in rooms next to each other, who said, "Hey, maybe you want to try submarines, it's pretty interesting".
And this was on the last sort of number of Oberon class submarines. So that got me interested and I found myself on the last Oberon training course in 1997 and then posted to HMAS Onslowin late 1997 and completed my first posting there. So that was my kind of entry into the Submarine Force early. Through that I went to HMAS Otama, the final Oberon class and saw that through to the decommissioning, conducted Collins training, and then found myself in the Collins pipeline sort of post that.
An opportunity to lead
It was quite gut wrenching because you've actually, I wanted to join as a pilot initially but didn't pass the maths tests for pilot. So when it's an apprentice actually just to join the military. So yeah, it's a bit of a hit to your personal ego. But, you know, it was a course at which I was sort of only just making the grade the whole way along, basically.
So I guess, you know, in retrospect as a mature reflection of what it was, it probably would have been quite difficult to sort of go through that pipeline, you know, on an ongoing basis unless something dramatically changed. However, I guess what I said a few moments ago, I'll expand upon that a bit more. So what did I want out of pilot training?
It was early command opportunities, get to do something independent, and then do something that was good fun and pretty cool. So if I move that forward to submarines, what did I actually get out of that? I got to do something that had early command opportunities because at that time, submarine CEOs were lieutenant commanders, something independent, because submarines are all about independent operations and got to do something pretty cool. But the benefit, sort of, I guess, there is also about people.
So you have a crew on a submarine now of 60, at the time, 82. So you get all the benefits and personal interactions of actually managing and leading a whole bunch of people. So you got all that I wanted, you know, and more. And, you know, I felt that I actually thrived in that particular submarine environment having been in it a couple of years because that was where the real challenge is, managing people.
Training
I was, during my course, I was a midshipman for only the very first part of it. So by the time I got to ships I was a sub-lieutenant. But I went to Protectorand got my ticket, my bridge watchkeeping certificate on HMAS Protector which was kind of a handy thing because it was a shorter ticket than going to a frigate but it also was the avenue by which I could get myself on the last Oberon submarine course which I felt was important rather than going on a Collins course so you could actually understand what the previous submarines were and what they did, because it was a very manual environment on an Oberon class submarine as opposed to Collins which actually had a bunch of sort of push button valves, same process, ultimately, but, you know, I guess I felt that I wanted to do the original class of submarine that I was on, then Collins afterwards.
The barbecue question
To put it succinctly, I turned up on race day and started the course, basically. So from a professional basis, you are actually conducting the same kind of thing, you're using mariner skills to look out and assess your environment to navigate the ship or submarine safely. Of course, the submarine works in three dimensions, ultimately. But yeah, there were a range of psych sort of testing that you did, but not particularly in any greater fashion that I felt that I would have done as a joiner or on pilots course.
But a mate of mine, a guy I joined the navy with called Kirk who was also an apprentice with me and has remained friends to this day, I remember him calling me up at the time and said, "Hey, man, what are you doing? Like you like being outdoors so much? How you going to survive in a submarine?" And I said, "Yeah, I think I'll be right".
You know, it's just something you turn your mind to do and it's like being in an aircraft or being in a room. And I didn't say before, but I guess it's worthwhile saying that one of the barbecue questions is "Oh, is it claustrophobic?" to which I answer, it has never bothered me to be in it.
So I have heard other stories of people saying that they got sort of asked about the thought of claustrophobia or how they actually went through some of the selection process. But I can say that didn't happen to me. And ultimately, it's like any workplace, you get used to what workplace you're in.
Disconnection from the outside world
One of the big differences is that you are totally disconnected from the outside world when deployed, there's no outgoing communications, like you might have with a ship. There's no incoming communications that you might have with email now and previously messages, except for a very short, transmitted messages, call a family gram from families, effectively, once a week.
So you do have to be somewhat more resilient and I found later as a leader, as a commander, or manager and leader, some of the problems that you have on ships, didn't actually exist on submarines. So you didn't get an email, from somebody's partner to them, say, "Hey, look", here's some home problems. "Guess what? I've left you". These are all things that were kept, you know, for when they came alongside.
And in a submarine, you have no choice but to get on with people because there's nowhere to go, there's nowhere to hide, there are no compartments you can go and sit in on your own, though there is one which we'll talk about in a moment, there is no windows you can look out if you feel bad, so you've kind of got to crack on with it. And the way we operate in our submarines now is on a six hours on six hours off basis. So you either work or you sleep.
Delivering bad news
As the CO, you have the only place on the submarine that somebody could escape to and be silent. So some of the real leadership difficulties is telling people that they've lost a child or a parent which is a very delicate thing you must do because the person is not getting off the submarine at least not immediately, and potentially not at all and I've had to do both of those things in my time in submarines.
So you sort of choose an opportune time and you let the watch leader the person in charge know, I got to talk to, you know, person X at the time so get him to come and see me. You'd always do that at the start of their watch, basically. So you would literally come in and have them sit down and, you don't go to the COs cabin for no particular reason, so you'd prepare yourself, glass of water, box tissues, and you just, you know, have to deliver the message basically and it's best delivered, in my view.
In a straight manner, "I've got bad news, I gotta tell you. This happened". And, of course, there's the initial grief to get through, you talk to the person and my approach was always to say and I'd say that most of my CO compatriots would say, that you would then just leave them there, say, "Hey, look, I'm leaving now, when you're ready to come out, you know, come out." But then they would get that watch off and actually be back on watch 12 hours later, you know, from their normal procedure.
So it's quite a difficult environment from that respect because you can't let him make a phone call, at times, and then you got to try and organize how you might get them back or if they're getting back at times at all. And for some people, it was totally out of the blue and that was obviously the hardest to do but when you told them that, you know, particularly parents had passed away that may not have been a surprise in some cases.
So yeah, there's some of the challenges that you don't necessarily get on a surface ship or any other type of ADF service actually, that you've always got contact as some kind of communication device or a welfare sort of device you can call back on.
Medical evacuations
Not to be glib about it, but twisted testicles are actually quite a serious medical emergency that happen with young men. There is a problem with people with, effectively, an impacted hair at the base of their spine is a big one, or indeed, just an infection on your skin, so if someone pops a pimple and they've not cleaned it, you can actually get a very significant infection start very quickly.
And we've had some more major injuries and you do have to make a decision on how you're getting that person off at the time and what your operational circumstances are, one, if it's an exercise it's no problem, you surface and go back to port and you get them off. If you are departing, let's say from Australia to Hawaii, It's a 21-day transit from Sydney to Hawaii and if you're halfway then you've got to call, as the CO, got a call back to submarine operations here and try and organize people to get off. Interesting point because that's been done before.
I myself amputated the end of my finger on the submarine in a door hatch. A door, shut on it and crushed the end of my finger off. As the captain, we've just left Australia, so we actually had to get me back under heavy sedation and morphine to a port which we had left about a day before and then get the CO off.
So then what happens? You know, you've got to get a new captain because unlike a surface ship, you can't actually sail without the command qualified captain, surface ship can sail with an ex-o submarine can't. So then we had to fly a new guy up and, you know, he had to take the submarine away.
Diesel electric submarines
It's all underwater now, basically, deep or at periscope depth, basically, because it's a diesel electric submarine. It is like, effectively a hybrid car, you've got to recharge the battery to then discharge the battery. And you would spend, you know, a period of time at periscope depth charging a battery often at night.
And then a period during the course of the day, you know, executing it so, of course, at periscope depth at transit speeds the periscope gets rattled around a fair bit because of the water flow over it which has a big impact on bearings and the periscope itself over long transit so you would like where possible to transit at periscope at a lower speed. Oberon's going back to them was not, because an Oberon actually went from point A to point B on the surface and then we'll dive at point Beta to what it needed to do and then surface later.
I mean, Collins was Australia's first true submarine and they operate dived all the time. So they will literally leave Perth, dive just off Rottnest Island if you go into Sydney, resurface just outside Sydney and we go everywhere in that manner unless it's too shallow to be dived.
Collins class: A true submarine
The ocean is broken down into various layers and i general, there's basically a warmer layer at the surface, where it's the same temperature basically called an isothermal layer, then it will generally break to a negative temperature grade, so decrease in temperature. And then at some later stage, that'll sort of slowly increase in temperature as well.
And by using various layers of the ocean, you can detect in layer or out of layer passive transmissions or active transmissions and, of course, it's better to transit, probably not, of course, but it's better to transit deep because the way the propeller operates, if you operate the propeller above certain revolutions, or put it on too fast to surface, you'll get what's called cavitation on the blade tips, which is an immediate identifier of a submarine if you're deep and it's inefficient for the propeller to do so.
So you would go deep and actually transit deep and often you can do that in hot water because it's cooler down below you actually cooled the submarine down by, in an Oberon you would open the main ballast tank vent valves and water would actually flow through those tanks and, important to note I guess to my earlier point, that an Oberon was a cylinder, a steel cylinder that had tanks on the outside of it basically which allowed you to dive and surface the ballast tanks, there are also some oil and fuel tanks there as well but a Collins is a steel cylinder that has all the ballast tanks internal to it.
So you've got, you know, effectively, you know, a couple of inches to sort of, inch and, I think, three quarters steel as the outside of the hull with anechoic tiling around it, which is what makes it that pure submarine verse, effectively a submersible or a part time submersible.
A clandestine asset
In the current environment, the electromagnetic environment as in that is what is above the waterline and can be detected by overhead sensors, radars, other non-traditional sensors is probably the most dangerous environment. Acoustically from the surface of the ocean to the floor of the ocean, there are so many factors that actually go into being detected or not, and how you can evade that, that it is still very difficult to detect, you know, a submarine underwater.
So I guess the submarine is the is one of the true or the only true, I guess, clandestine assets that the ADF has or any nation has because they can operate forward in denied environments to surveil or conduct intelligence surveillance, reconnaissance, or conduct kinetic activity, if required, with the ability to either deny that had occurred from a particular country because you don't know where the threat comes from or, indeed, to do something and come back and actually never be detected. So it is a true, what we would call now phase zero preparation, sort of device for the majority of its time, but it can deliver kinetic effects in wartime as well, quite effectively.
Submarine training
I had spent exclusively, from joining submarines, time on submarines and not back to surface ship,. so I had joined Onslow as a sub-lieutenant and went through Onslow and Otama as a sub-lieutenant and I was on board, HMAS Collins. I'm sorry, HMS Waller first, sorry, for a number of postings, then HMAS. Collins as the executive officer So actually, I'll go back there. I was on HMAS Waller.
First for two postings is the sonar officer and as the Ops-O. I then went to HMAS Dechaineux as the Ops-O and the navigator, so that sort of took up all my lieutenant postings. A short period of shore in submarine operations was in there as well, which was in Sydney. Then I was on HMAS Collins as the Ex-O through 2005 2006. I spent some time in 2007 on an exchange with Holland for five months, and came back and was on board, HMAS Rankin effectively as the Ex-O again, and then conducted Perisher or the Netherlands submarine command course in 2008.
And Perisher is, I guess, the pinnacle sort of requirement for a submariner and it's kind of unique in the ADF, in that it's a back loaded course, by which I mean, you know, most people will do their professional training as a, you know, as an army person, infantry, armour, in the army, or seaman, officer from the Navy, and the principal warfare officers course, there's no course for an Ex-O and surface ships, but there is for submarines and then you proceed through that without any further training. But submarines have this, I guess, this final course to determine if you can be a CO and the basic requirements are to train your submarine in time of peace or war and keep submarines safe at all times And those two tenets have existed since the commencement of Perisher.
Early in the 1900s, I think it was 1918 was the first course as a result of high losses of submarines in World War One for the Brits, and they decided they need to actually do a course to assess commanding officers to meet those aims. And effectively it is both those things and of course, in decision making under extreme pressure when there's no best solution, so we continue that to this day.
And as of today, in real time, we're conducting the first Australian submarine command course, having left the Dutch only sort of two years ago, and that was a decision to repatriate the command course to Australia, was so we could actually take some sovereign control of the training of our commanding officers, knowing that we will have an increasing burden upon us to train commanding officers as we move to what was 12, for the attack submarine and now, you know, some of the order of eight potential nuclear submarines in the future.
Silent running
Any diesel electric submarine is comprised of a number of components. In the drive train, there is a diesel engine, like a prime mover in a large truck, or a locomotive, which then goes on to an electrical generator to provide power. The power does two things, it provides what's called hotel load, to run all the components, internal lights and fixtures and fittings and charge the batteries and the batteries are a lead acid battery, like your normal car, however, they're very big.
And for Collins, there's four separate battery sections, each of which has just got 99 cells, but the voltage in those is quite low, unlike a car which is about 12 to 13.6 or 14.2 volts. The nominal voltage of a Collins cell is only sort of in the order of 1.5 to sort of two point something volts. So the connection between those batteries is to the main motor as well.
And the main motor is an electric motor just like what's in a slot car to make that as easy as possible to direct current and for Collins it's two motors on the same shaft and the combination of how you electrically connect those batteries and those motors together, either in series or parallel, gives you different abilities to create more revolutions and more speed out of the submarine in the back and the shaft of the submarine comes out the back of those two electric motors. So when you're running on batteries, it is nearly silent. Even if you stand right next to the shaft you can hear almost nothing.
Crew changeovers and training
So generally, you would find that about 33% of the crew change every year. And so then as you get to the end of the second year, the majority of the crew has actually changed out on a particular time. And, of course, you're part of that process as well. I guess, as you're going along the flowing river that's your posting throughout time, you don't sort of think about that too much until you become the commanding officer at which stage, you've actually got to train all these new people over the two to three years you might be in command.
Of course, you can take two approaches to that, you can try and cherry pick the best people or you can take what you get and train them. Now internally to just the normal workup and training cycle that happens in ships and submarines, is if you change out a certain part of a command team or a certain amount of people, that sparks what's called a workup or effectively a training and assessment period. And then internally to that, you as the commanding officer, you have to do your own training to make sure you're proficient to operate that submarine.
And I guess I rationalized in my head that on a submarine or as a commanding officer you got three things, you got people, you got a platform and a program. So all the rest was up to you basically, to make them an efficient team, you know, for peacetime and potentially wartime operations and to make sure everyone is trained, and at least their job and hopefully, you know, some of the other jobs on the submarine.
Director of submarine operations
I took up the role of the director of submarine operations in late 2014, having finished my command of the Dechaineux and certainly it was a job that I had wanted to do. Having completed Perisher in 2008, I spent three years in Canberra because of a, effectively a break in the ability to take over one of the submarines as CO and also to determine what the environment in Canberra was like, because, of course, submarines are all based in Western Australia, dislocated from, I guess, what we would call the strategic centre.
However, acknowledging that command was not the last step in what I wanted out of a military career, I wanted to actually see what the strategic centre was like and if I liked it, and if we liked it as a family to make a decision on what would actually happen next post command because, you know, a lot of people or a number of people will finish command and say, "That's kind of it for me, I want to do something else".
But I had my sights set on, I guess on further opportunities, you know, in command and leadership within the ADF. So having spent those three years here in Canberra, time well spent in the lead up to command and actually reinforced the view that I wanted to come back and do jobs in Canberra again which the peak submarine job from an operational perspective is the director of submarine operations or in older days, it was called FSOO - Fleet Southern Operations Officer and the change to Canberra sort of became the director.
So that role is responsible for all the operational side of submarines at sea. And if I, if I broke those in two parts, there's two kind of key contributors to the seagoing role of submarines and one is the com sub, the commander of submarine forces, which is the short that the waterside captain in charge of all the ratings train sustain aspects of submarines and then the director of submarine operations, which is responsible for all the planning and execution of activities at sea, including operations.
And I did that over a four-year period between late 2014 until late 2018. And I it was, you know, probably, you know, one of the most rewarding jobs for me that I'd done and I would include sort of command in that as well because you had an ability to shape with your counterpart as com sub and also a submarine six or captain's role in the submarine capability branch, how things were being used.
And it was also at the time at which we dramatically increased our sea time and our availability for submarines post what was called the Coles review. So we went from doing, you know, isolated sort of deployed operations for a period instead of 20, up to 2014, to actually more and more overseas operations and more and more exercise activity, to which the point where it's sort of a peak of activity, you know, that sort of continues to this day. So it was both a challenging, exciting time to employ the submarines year on year in an increasingly available way.
Middle East deployment
I was embedded in the US Fifth Fleet, and I was dual hatted as the maritime task group commander in the Middle East and I was the director of operations for the combined maritime forces, which is a 33-nation coalition responsible for maritime security in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Bab-el-Mandeb, and Arabian Sea. And it's under the auspices of the US Fifth Fleet but it's a larger coalition, broken into a number of smaller task forces, which were CDF 150, which was effectively Arabian Sea drug activities, Task Force 151, which was a bit further afield, and Task Force 152, which was sort of inside the Arabian Sea.
So that came about, quite unexpectedly, actually, I had thought I was going to a different role and was asked, offered the opportunity, I suppose to go to the Middle East as a 12-month sort of operational posting that are deployed sort of away from family to do that activity and that was not something that was on my radar ever to go to the Middle East. Mostly it had been surface people who had been posted there and people who had experience on ships, although there had been one submariner in the role before.
So it was a great opportunity to do something different and, in particular, in a different maritime environment with a different fleet that I hadn't worked with before. So it was also a pretty interesting time, right? So the Navy was drawing down, the ADF, we're drawing down on our commitment in the Middle East and secondary to that, in the start of that period was when Iranians or a state-based actor started commencing attacks on surface shipping.
So there were a number of surface ships that were attacked, and partially blown up by mines in the period. So from a security environment perspective, it was a pretty interesting, exciting time to be there as well.
An amazing cultural indoctrination
The interesting component as CMF, or the combined maritime forces, you were, I guess, within Fifth Fleet but also a kind of a separate part to it and as an Australian Navy member, as a member of the Five Eyes, we also had a secondary role with the US Fifth Fleet, I guess on that I'll come back to in a moment, but many of the people I worked with in CMF, there was not the 33 nations represented at the time but we, for example, had Omanis, Saudis, Pakistan, Norway, Norway, Denmark, Singapore, Canada, the UAE, and I guess, the French, and Brits all in a very small office.
So actually, it was an amazing cultural indoctrination into everyone's sort of lifestyle in particular, it was based in Bahrain, in particular, you know, being placed in an Arab country that I had never had any experience with, there was an amazing introduction to Islamic culture, Arabic culture, food, and an entire lifestyle.
So it was a deployed opportunity that was quite amazing for me personally, and quite a growth experience in relation to the, I guess, your circle of people that you know, and circle of people that you have to sort of maybe modify your behaviour as a leader and commander to actually understand their point of view.
And to that end, you know, many meetings in Arabic cultures, everybody gets the opportunity to speak and you will do a normal meeting but then go around and make sure everybody has their say, at the end of it, which is a great, a great way to be right, because a lot of people who may be quiet in a meeting, you know, may speak up having been given the opportunity.
Drug trafficking
The Navy has been involved in operations or had had been involved in maritime operations in the Middle East, since the very early 90s with only very short periods of gaps between ships most of that time, but I guess the contributing factor that CTF 150 looked at was that the transit of drugs and or other illegal materials such as, could be charcoal for example, which is well transited, hashish or increasingly, sort of towards the period that I was there was other more chemical drugs, heroin, sort of methamphetamines but all those things can support the growth of terrorism as well or to underpin the financing for terrorism.
So the idea was that if you disrupt and destroy those drugs you're actually taking away a method of funding for terrorism. And to that end, you know, that the Navy ships that we would send mostly an FFG, a frigate or FFH, like an Anzac class would interdict ships or dows running, generally, from the Iranian coast, down to Africa and they would either have nothing on board or they would have, you know, a couple of tons of drugs on board.
And there would be a number of indicators and warnings the ships would look for, you know, transit pattern, what they're doing, the type of ship, and they would then identify the vessel and board it in a number of ways, that might need to be a flag verification boarding. So what country does that ship belong to and show us your papers and if they show could they belonged to a flag, you would then need to go through a certain process. But if it was found to be stateless, you could then do effectively a boarding and a search of that boat.
That was done under the auspices of the CMF activity. But if you find drugs, you have to then use some of your national laws to both seize and then dispose of those drugs. At the time I was there, there was, I think, either close to a record done by HMAS Ballarat, the ship that was there for about six months of that time, either destroyed or disposed of materials in the ocean. So you know, some hundreds of millions of dollars of money that did not get to terrorism.
