The Australian Government recently announced that France’s Direction des Constructions Navales Services (DCNS) had been selected to design and build Australia’s future submarine, known as the Shortfin Barracuda. Starting in 2016 when an initial design contract is signed, this will be the major developmental Defence project for Australia over the next ten years. This paper reviews the possible developmental approach options that come next for Australia’s future submarine project using the U.S. Defense acquisition life cycles, and finds a preferred approach to be the U.S. acquisition model of Engineering Manufacture Development (EMD), before any production contract. EMD does not align in all regards with Australia’s existing political, military, industrial, technological and economic design processes, which are identified and compared against existing aqcuisition models. The paper also reviews major lessons learned in Australian acquisitions regarding early preview test and evaluation (T&E), which has been the focus of serious reviews by the Senate, Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) and the Department of Defence (DoD) since 2012. Such review includes public testimony by Australia’s DoD in March 2016 to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Public Accounts and Audit, once again, regarding the absolute limits of paper-based down-selection from contender submissions even when the acquisitions are allegedly mature off-the-shelf acquisitions. The paper recommends that DCNS as the preferred contender work through a detailed series of preview evaluations before an EMD contract is signed. Lessons learned from the Collins Class Submarine and example preview T&E activities are provided to help justify this caution for Australia’s DoD. Such preview T&E would practically and independently confirm for both DCNS and Australia’s DoD exactly what are the major technical and operational risks driving modification of Australia’s submarine from its baseline French design – and do so before they both get locked into contract! The paper distils all these factors into eleven recommended T&E goals for the Shortfin Barracuda design, principally based around early commitment to an estimated five land-based test sites and two in-water test sites. Finally, the paper proposes more broadly that there be greater investment in the social spaces for critical thinking to guide the submarine design towards a continuous evolving design and build rather than blocks of design and build. Modelling of this approach out to 2050 shows an earlier initial capability might be achieved by as much as six to eight years and involve up to forty percent less submarine rework.
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