The Royal Canadian Navy’s (RCN) Victoria-class submarines spent as much as 60% of their life tied up alongside. Ottawa is now in the final days of weighing a costly procurement decision, with South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean and Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) competing for the contract. However, unless the RCN fixes the institutional issues behind that record, the 12 new boats could spend much of their time non-operational as well.
Both the Korean KSS-III and German Type 212CD are excellent replacements, making the choice between them difficult. But the deeper problems have little to do with which type of submarine the navy will operate. Capability generation is an institutional challenge, not a strategic one. The material considerations dominating the current media coverage are merely contextual to that institutional problem.
The Choice: KSS-III or Type 212CD?
In many ways, the contest is Korea’s to lose. Looking at the hard material factors surrounding both boats and their bids, Korea has invested significantly more effort in wooing Canada, and its boat has a number of features that may make it the more attractive option.
In terms of the boat itself, the Hanwha Ocean’s KSS-III is a bigger sub. This will have an impact on both endurance and habitability. A bigger boat will allow larger internal tanks so more fuel and wastewater can be stored. While fuel is self-explanatory in terms of endurance, bigger bilge tanks will permit longer patrols in waters above the Arctic Circle, where there are very stringent environmental regulations on pumping grey and black water into the ocean.
Beyond the impressive diamond shaped anti-sonar hull, the Type 212CD made by Germany’s TKMS has a number of “soft strengths” that are not easily captured by a strict material analysis. While a smaller boat, it will be far more “NATO-compliant” given its design has been shaped by both the German and Norwegian navies. Factors such as how the command-and-control systems are designed, the layout of the operations room, and the weapon systems that it comes with means it will already be fully integrated into how NATO navies work. English language proficiency, both within the German navy and across the industries supporting the 212CD, will be key, whereas South Korea’s comparatively low levels of English proficiency may pose challenges for naval training and industrial cooperation.
Lastly, the decades that TKMS has been supporting a global list of customers with their submarines means the logistics and sustainment of these boats is well established, a feature worth 50% on the scorecard for making the decision.
Institutional Problems That Require Solutions
The Hanwha Ocean-TKMS contest has been covered almost entirely through the material lens. But the deeper problem the RCN must solve lies not with the submarine itself, but ashore.
The low readiness rate of the Victoria-class was a function of the lack of available spares, and the small scale of the enterprise managing the four boats. This was a fully interactive set of features that generated negative feedback loops, making the problems progressively more difficult with each iteration. A lack of spares increased the time spent in maintenance, which reduced sea time, which reduced the number of personnel being generated, which further reduced the ability to operate and manage the boats.
The small submarine community was the first part of the RCN to experience the personnel “death spiral” that VAdm. Topshee has since described as navy-wide. The RCN now wants to quadruple its submariner ranks within a decade. However, it will have to begin this growth with the existing Victoria-class during a period in which the already problematic readiness rate will become increasingly challenging to maintain or improve.
But the personnel problem is larger than simply one of producing sailors. The RCN will also have to significantly increase the number of engineers and project managers overseeing the submarine project desks and life cycle management of the systems onboard the boat. The Maritime Equipment Programme Management division of ADM Mat in the Department of National Defence (DND) is a comparatively tiny affair compared to Australian, British, or American equivalents. This has limited the ability to address maintenance and modernization issues throughout the Victoria’s life cycle.
Furthermore, submarines rely on a cadre of highly specialised dock workers and industrial trades in both the navy’s Fleet Maintenance Facilities (FMF) on each coast, as well as in the industrial base supporting them. The skills needed to work on submarines are rare and often of equal importance to other critical infrastructure like oil and gas pipelines. Additionally, ensuring that both the FMFs and industry have sufficient numbers of workers in these areas will be a challenge involving universities and colleges.
As much as the RCN has fought to acquire and maintain underwater warfare capabilities, the submarine community has always been a bit of an organisational annex within it. The RCN has been a “navy that owns submarines”, not a “submarine navy”, in the way the Royal Australian Navy or the US Navy are. In each of those services, submarines form a direct part of national strategies rather than simply representing professionally desirable assets. As useful as a submarine can be in general, at the strategic level they have always represented a solution in search of a problem for Canada.
Many have argued that we need submarines to effectively monitor the Arctic, but the difficulties operating in that environment are principally time and space issues given the distances from either of Canada’s naval bases. Even with 12 boats, we may not have enough of them to maintain continuous patrols in areas that may be relatively uninteresting tactically speaking – there are relatively few strategic advantages for an enemy with a submarine in Canada’s Arctic waters.
Finally, the addition of twelve boats to the RCN will likely reshape the entire identity of it in ways that cannot be immediately appreciated. With 12 boats, the RCN will operate almost as many submarines as destroyers. Surface ships will always produce more sailors overall, but submariners will make up a far larger share of the navy’s personnel than they do today. The RCN’s institutional knowledge of these mysterious weapons will grow accordingly, as will the inevitable budgetary trade-offs between the surface and submarine fleets created by their very expensive maintenance costs.
Do Twelve Boats Solve the “Problem”?
Thus, the biggest question facing the RCN at the moment is not “which boat” but rather “do 12 boats solve the submarine problem”. Without serious attention to the problems ashore, that potential failure becomes a real possibility.
What the Victoria-class illustrates is just how complex submarine technology is: bad luck – a fire, a war, a grounding, a poorly timed political decision – will have dramatic effects on operational readiness. The RCN must organise itself to be resilient to such “normal accidents” to improve recovery times.
The Victorias spent much of their service life alongside, not at sea. Given that the new boats will be part of a much larger number of submarines, all serving in at least one other navy, many of the issues the RCN has had to manage alone in the last twenty years will be avoidable. However, the complexity of the new boats will also be an order of magnitude greater than even the Victorias were.
Without resilient institutional systems within the RCN back-stopped by a clear national strategy girding their employment, there is a non-zero risk that even these may turn out to be white elephants.
Dr. Paul T. Mitchell is a professor of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto where he served as its first Director of Academics. Dr Mitchell was awarded the Literary Award by the United States Naval Institute and the Surface Naval Association for his paper on Network-Centric Warfare and Small Navies in 2003. In 2021, he was awarded the Canadian Forces Medallion for Distinguished Service for his contributions to Professional Military Education.
The views expressed in this op-ed are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the Institute or its staff.
