HMAS STIRLING, AUSTRALIA – The U.S. attack submarine pulled into the Australian Navy base on a cool winter day in winds gusting at nearly 35 miles per hour.
Will, a 26-year-old lieutenant in the Royal Australian Navy, was piloting the boat as it traversed the harbor to arrive at Australia’s western naval base HMAS Stirling.
It was a familiar channel for Will, who was a qualified submariner and navigation tech officer on Australia’s conventionally powered Collins-class boats before becoming one of the first RAN sailors to learn how to operate a nuclear reactor from the Americans.
“That was a special moment,” Will said from the bridge of USS Hawaii (SSN-776) on Friday.
“Obviously I’ve done this transit before in a Collins class, and then I went away for almost two years – did all the training,” he added. “And then to come back in on a nuclear-powered warship – it’s exciting. Career moment for me.”
Hawaii and its U.S. and Australian crew pulled into port on Thursday for a maintenance period with submarine tender USS Emory S. Land (AS-39), which was waiting on the other side of the pier. It’s the first time a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine will undergo an overhaul on foreign soil.
It’s also a chance for the U.S. Navy and the Royal Australian Navy to conduct a maintenance period together on a Virginia-class submarine and test the ongoing exchanges between the two navies that are a hallmark of the AUKUS partnership.
That pact – between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. – will help the RAN develop, build and maintain their own nuclear-powered submarine fleet and see the U.S. share its close-held nuclear propulsion technology for only the second time in history.
“We’ve been riding each other’s submarines and exchanging for decades, but it’s typically sonar, certain watch stations, and the officers for driving the submarine,” Rear Adm. Richard Seif, the commander of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific submarine force, told reporters on Friday. “Going forward, the Australians assigned to the submarines are fully qualified to operate the reactor plant, or drive the submarine, kind of everything in between.”
Over the next two to three weeks, RAN sailors assigned to Emory S. Land will perform most of the sustainment work on Hawaii under the supervision of the American sailors. That maintenance will include a routine swap of the boat’s mast, a simulation to take out a pump that would weigh about 1,500 kilograms, the replacement of a hydraulic valve and planning to handle nuclear material in the future, Seif said during a press conference at the RAN’s Fleet Support Unit at Stirling.
During a media tour, U.S. and Australian officials emphasized the decades-long relationship between the two navies, which have hosted each other’s sailors aboard submarines for decades.
“I’ve been crawling over Virginias since I was a commander, when I was posted in Washington, D.C,” Vice Adm. Mark Hammond, a career submariner and the chief of the RAN, told reporters.
Despite using different marine propulsion technologies, the Virginia-class boats and the RAN’s diesel-powered Collins-class submarines have a lot in common. They both have the same submarine combat system and field the Mark 48 torpedo.
“This is the missing piece of the puzzle,” Hammond said. “It’s the most advanced propulsion system and the safest naval nuclear propulsion system in the world.”
For the last year and a half, both RAN officers and enlisted sailors have been training at submarine schools in the United States, learning how to operate and maintain nuclear reactors.
Seif currently has three RAN officers on U.S. submarines in Pearl Harbor. About 100 RAN sailors – officers, nuclear-trained sailors and non-nuclear-trained sailors like sonar technicians – will come to the U.S. for training in the next six months, according to Rear Adm. Matt Buckley, the RAN’s head of nuclear submarine capability. For the first year, the RAN mostly sent officers to the U.S. who were already qualified on the Collins-class submarines, but, now, it’s sending sailors who are not submarine-qualified.
To prepare for the maintenance period at Stirling, about three dozen sailors from the RAN’s Fleet Support Unit joined the crew of Emory S. Land, starting in January, to learn from U.S. sailors how to maintain the Virginia-class and Los Angeles-class attack boats.
“They all work in our repair department,” said Capt. Brent Spillner, the commanding officer of Emory S. Land.
Two of those sailors – Able Seaman Marine Technician James Cooper and ABMT April Franklin – earned U.S. enlisted surface warfare specialist pins over the last seven months. U.S. enlisted sailors don’t typically go for this qualification until they’ve been in the Navy for about five to six years, and they have about one year to earn the pin, Spillner said.
Cooper and Franklin have already put in a special request with the RAN, asking if they can keep wearing the silver pins after they leave Emory S. Land.
“Their capabilities onboard have astounded me,” Franklin said of her time on the submarine tender. “They have essentially what we have at FSU, on a ship, and it moves.”
During their time aboard Emory S. Land, Franklin and Cooper experienced crossing the line – a naval tradition of hosting a ceremony when a ship crosses the Equator.
“I think we’re a bit .. boisterous,” Franklin said of her participation during the ceremony. “We came out with a lot of enthusiasm. It was good … the U.S. counterparts really enjoyed it, but I don’t think they were quite used to having such high energy.”
Teaching sailors like Franklin and Cooper how to fix the U.S. nuclear-powered attack boats will help the RAN develop a workforce that can maintain its own future SSN AUKUS boats that won’t come into the fleet until the 2040s. It will also foster expertise needed in the near term to maintain the U.S. and U.K. rotational submarine forces that will start basing out of Stirling in 2027.
In the medium term, the U.S. plans to sell Virginia-class boats to the Australians in the 2030s. Two of those boats will be Block IV Virginia-class submarines already in service with the U.S. Navy, while the third is expected to be a new Block VII boat. None of those boats feature the Virginia Payload Module. Under the current parameters of the AUKUS agreement, the Australians have the option to buy as many as five Virginia-class boats.
Will, the RAN lieutenant aboard Hawaii, could command one of those Virginia-class boats.
“That’s the goal,” he said.
Cmdr. Daniel Jones, the commanding officer of Hawaii, said that’s what he and Will discussed as they brought the boat through the choppy harbor and alongside in Stirling on Thursday.
“It’s like, don’t forget this when you’re the CO of your own Virginia,” Jones recounted.
