Cold War Command: The Dramatic Story of a Nuclear Submariner

18 Back to the Shipyards

On 2 August 1990 the Iraqi army invaded the kingdom of Kuwait. In response, an international coalition led by the United States of America began building up forces in the Middle East, prior to liberating the emirate from the Iraqi occupation. Conley, checking into Strathclyde University Business School in September, was aware that as a captain on sabbatical leave between appointments, he would probably be assigned to augment the Naval Staff in Whitehall. In the absence of any indication that the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, would comply with the United Nations Security Council’s resolution demanding the withdrawal of his forces, it thus came as no surprise when Conley receive a telephone call instructing him to join the Naval Staff for watch-keeping duties in January 1991. Having successfully completed his first term examinations, he withdrew from his MBA studies, which he completed in due course by distance learning.

In London, Conley joined a small group of naval officers, known as the Naval Advisory Group, whose task was to disseminate incoming campaign and logistics information and subsequently provide briefs to senior officers and ministers upon recommended actions or decisions to be made. An area of the MoD main building had been set up as an operations and intelligence centre from which the specific commitment of troops, ships and aircraft was determined in what was known as Operation Granby. The centre also managed logistical support and, when necessary, urgent equipment procurement. The main operational control of the British element of the coalition was undertaken at the RAF Headquarters, High Wycombe, just outside London. In the theatre of operations British ground and air forces came under the tactical control of the charismatic and ebullient American coalition commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf.

The MoD experience, both its organisation and its culture, was very new to Conley as, indeed, was the extensive intelligence and information network which supported the ultimate decision-makers. This included information gleaned from CNN and other television broadcasts. Indeed, in many cases television reporters at the scene of an action or event provided the most accurate and timely source of intelligence. Nevertheless, he was shocked by the amount of political micro-management that influenced the decisions under which the campaign was managed.

Early in his watch-keeping duties he received a request from the British air commander in theatre, asking that two additional Wessex commando helicopters be deployed to enable the eight of these aircraft already near the battlefront to be rotated out of the front line and fitted with additional protection devices. It astonished him that this very obviously pragmatic requirement, involving a modest expenditure, required the development of a written brief for the personal approval of the Secretary of State for Defence, Mr (later Lord) Tom King. Although this was rapidly effected, from his experience of dealing with this relatively minor issue Conley sensed that mistrust existed between the politicians and the military, the former being alert to the latter achieving inessential equipment improvements under the pretext of ‘urgent operational requirements’. This would bypass the normal procurement process, characterised as it was — and is — by slow and prolonged scrutiny and cumbersome contracting procedures.

The air campaign of Operation Desert Storm began on 17 January. On 7 February, Conley’s day of duty was spiced up when a series of loud explosions were heard coming from nearby. A rumour rapidly spread that the MoD main building was under attack by Iraqi special forces, but the alarm subsided when word was passed that the detonations were that of a mortar bomb fired by the Irish Republican Army from the back of a van in Whitehall. The mortar was aimed at No. 10 Downing Street where a War Cabinet meeting was in progress and although there had been some damage, no one had been seriously injured.

The coalition forces entered Kuwait on 24 February, rapidly rolling up the Iraqi army, which retreated across its own border in complete disarray. In four days the war was effectively over, though besides the withdrawal of coalition troops there remained the daunting tasks of clearing minefields and extinguishing blazing oil wells deliberately sabotaged by the retreating Iraqis. Despite these residual tasks, to minimise cost Britain rapidly withdrew its forces.

Observing the Royal Navy’s part in the conflict from a distance, Conley had noticed that the warships operating in the north Persian Gulf near the Iraqi littoral, where there was a threat from both Iraqi naval forces and mines, were either American or British. Vessels of other navies were generally deployed well to the south, out of harm’s way. However, the first force to land in Kuwait from the sea was a French mine-clearance contingent and while the French tricolour was very evident, there was no sign of a British white ensign as Royal Navy mine clearance was being conducted well offshore; indeed, there was little visible presence of the British in Kuwait at all, the situation the British ambassador to Kuwait encountered soon after being reinstated.

The crisis organisation at the Ministry of Defence wound down during March, and the 31st, which happened to be Easter Sunday, was the final day of the Ministry’s Granby organisation and Conley’s last day of duty. Anticipating a quiet, anticlimactic day, his reading of the Sunday newspapers was interrupted by the receipt of an urgent telegram from the ambassador pleading that a battalion-sized British battle group of infantry be deployed to Kuwait forthwith. The diplomat was very concerned that with no ‘boots on the ground’, lucrative post-war reconstruction contracts were bound to go to America and France, both of which still had substantial ground forces in place. The ambassador also pointed out that since Prime Minister John Major was intending to make a statement in the House of Commons that there would be no new deployment of British forces to the Gulf, there was a real urgency in this situation.

With the help of his two assistant watchkeepers, a wing commander and a lieutenant colonel, Conley contacted the key members of the MoD hierarchy, most of whom had just enjoyed a substantial Easter Sunday lunch by the time he managed to speak to them. Armed with their verbal support, he succeeded in rapidly putting together a brief to the prime minister’s office, strongly recommending the immediate deployment of a battle group to Kuwait. Two days later it was of some satisfaction to Conley that he heard on the radio the prime minister announcing that a battle group of infantry would immediately deploy to Kuwait. Never again would he experience such sensible, rapid and emphatic MoD decision-making.

During his brief spell of duty in the MoD, Conley had learned a little bit about the military/political interface and had observed how, in an emergency, major decisions could be made quickly. Nevertheless, he was about to join an organisation which was on the whole risk-averse and where the approval and decision-making process could be very ponderous.

Having moved his family to a new home in Wiltshire, in April 1991 Conley reported to the Commodore Naval Ship Acceptance (CNSA) organisation in Foxhill, Bath. This small section, part of the Ministry’s Procurement Executive (PE), consisted of about a dozen officers with their supporting staff. As its name suggested, it was headed by a commodore who was responsible for formally accepting ships and submarines from their builders on the completion of construction and successful sea trials. The section was also charged with advising when new weapon systems had met their MoD specification — defined as the ‘agreed characteristics’ — and that they were fully ready for operational service. This seemingly straightforward process was, to Conley’s chagrin, full of pitfalls. These often arose from flaccid and imprecise specifications, the bane of any procurement programme, or worse, there could be a significant mismatch between the Ministry-endorsed detailed specification and the actual content of the contract placed by the PE. When this occurred there were inevitable disputes, and no available money to remedy voids or deficiencies.

Conley found the Foxhill site depressing. It consisted of a sprawling complex of single-storey brick buildings which had been built in 1944 as a temporary hospital to receive the anticipated high level of casualties from the D-Day landings. In the event, it was never used for this purpose and instead became home to the rump of the Royal Navy’s division of the PE. This, in turn, came under the eye of the Controller of the Navy, an admiral who served on the Navy Board. With the Procurement Executive responsible for the design and procurement of ships and submarines, along with their weapon and command systems, a separate entity, known as Chief of Fleet Support, ran ship and submarine maintenance and stores support and it was also quartered in Bath.

Not only did Conley find the environment at Foxhill dejecting, but he found its culture weird and very difficult to assimilate. He was one of only a handful of seamen officers in a very large organisation dominated by the Civil Service and the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, the MoD’s naval architects and ship equipment designers. Despite a cadre of weapon and marine engineer officers in senior posts, and whilst there were several naval constructors with whom the new captain worked well, Conley perceived a strong vein of arrogance running through the establishment, manifested by a degree of disdain for the Royal Navy’s seamen officers. If he thought that his extensive operational experience and knowledge of sonar — including state-of-the-art American systems — would be of value, Conley was to be disappointed. Instead, he discovered an organisation which was more focused upon processes as opposed to outcomes. Moreover, and significantly, in view of the challenges confronting the modern Royal Navy, many of his weapon engineer officer peers in the organisation lacked operational experience. Typically, they had undertaken only two sea appointments, yet they would be key in providing their particular projects with front-end user input. It was evident to Conley that the United States Navy’s ‘line officer’ system, where the majority of mainstream officers had both warfare specialisation and engineering experience had real advantages within the procurement ambit, and that absence of any comparable system at Bath was damaging to the procurement process of the Royal Navy.

It was clear to Conley that within the overall procurement organisation there were groups of individuals pulling in different directions, be it politicians perversely directing contracts to underperforming firms in areas where they had historic political support or obligations, or civil servants charged with slowing down the whole process to meet annual budget targets. These problems were compounded by many important individuals, particularly Service personnel, normally being in post for only two or three years, an unacceptably short period of time when compared to the length of modern procurement cycles. With a lack of ‘process ownership’ and responsibility, this practice had a debilitating effect upon both continuity and accountability. To this woeful situation was added the MoD’s inclination to demand unnecessary sophistication and/or capability in new projects that, within the set-price contract, was unattainable by British industry. Finally, in many areas the prevailing project management competence was very weak. In sum, it was little wonder to Conley that whilst it had had its highly commendable successes, the PE had an ongoing history of complex projects running into severe problems of overspend, underperformance and overrunning.

Conley had plenty to do when he joined CNSA. The Cold War might have been over, but the final submarine of the Trafalgar class, HMS Triumph, was nearing completion at VSEL Barrow, while the first of the huge Trident-class SSBNs, HMS Vanguard, was progressing well in the same shipyard. Meanwhile, on the Mersey, the final three diesel boats of the Upholder class were completing at Cammell Laird shipyard at Birkenhead.

On the downside, the highly capable third-generation SSN — the SSN 20 project — intended to replace the Valiant class, had been recently cancelled as unaffordable. In its place there were plans for a second batch of Trafalgar-class submarines, due to enter service in 2003, fitted with the PWR2 reactor, the larger and more powerful steam-raising plant of the Trident class.

Inevitably, this cancellation would induce a ‘design and build gap’ and it saddened Conley to see some very capable submarine designers and engineers leave Foxhill for early retirement. By the time the new SSN — designed by GEC-Marconi and known as the Astute class — was ordered, VSEL, the sole submarine builder, now owned by GEC-Marconi, had also lost a lot of its own internal expertise in submarine construction. The Astutes, which in the event had many of the planned improved features of the ill-fated SSN 20, had a long and difficult gestation. Almost 50 per cent bigger than the Trafalgars, the first-of-class HMS Astute did not enter service until 2010, by which time she was years behind schedule and her hull cost had nearly doubled in real terms from the original £600m to £1,000m plus.

During the course of his appointment, Conley’s responsibilities were extended to assisting his commodore in the acceptance of surface ships from the shipbuilders, most notably from the firms of Swan Hunter (Tyneside), Vosper Thornycroft (Southampton) and Yarrow (Glasgow). On the submarine weapons systems side of his remit, there were many projects long overdue for final acceptance, including the Spearfish torpedo, which a small section of his officers based in an outpost of the Procurement Executive at Portland were addressing.

The submarine acceptance procedure involved Conley and his team conducting a series of material inspections. The first of these confirmed that a submarine was safe to proceed to sea on contractor’s sea trials, with the final inspection occurring when the building process was proved and the submarine was completed, just prior to commissioning. A key element of the procedures involved identifying and listing all extant defects and agreeing the rectification costs with the shipbuilder. Handover of the vessel and authorisation of the final staged contract payment occurred only after the successful completion of the post-commissioning sea trials.

As part of the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, all four of the Upholder class were planned to be sold, but it was intended that the three boats still under construction be completed and demonstrated as being fully operational before being put up for purchase. Designed to replace the Oberon class, the Upholders had the specific wartime role of conducting a six-week patrol in the Iceland — Faeroes gap. Designed by VSEL, they were the first British single-screw diesel submarines of streamlined, teardrop ‘albacore’ form. With a much smaller crew than the Oberon class, many of the systems fitted to the Upholder were highly automated and this was to cause a number of problems.

It soon became evident that the class had several serious technical deficiencies, the first of these manifesting itself in Upholder herself during her sea trials in 1989 when she suffered a complete loss of power and propulsion. This, it was discovered, had been caused by a design defect which was only fixed after several months. Other problems which soon became evident included a paltry range of about 4,000 miles, serious safety concerns with the torpedo tube operating system — described as being like a computer driven by hydraulics — and the snort exhaust system, which leaked badly after use.

Arriving at the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead for the first time, Conley was briefed by Gordon Howell, its managing director. Howell was an extremely experienced and astute ship and submarine constructor who had started his career as an apprentice with Vickers at Barrow. Returned to private ownership in 1986 and renamed Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Ltd (VSEL), the company had acquired the Cammell Laird yard as part of the deal. It was a sprawling 150-acre site on the west bank of the Mersey, a run-down complex of old buildings and sheds which, like many British shipyards at that time, was quite unsuitable for modern and efficient shipbuilding, though it did possess a covered construction hall. At the time Conley arrived, Unseen lay in the fitting-out basin with her sisters, Ursula and Unicorn, yet to emerge from the vast cavern of the hall.

Howell explained that, because there were no further orders in the offing, the workforce of about a thousand faced redundancy on completion of the present contract. Although he was trying his best to find a buyer for the yard, he was hamstrung because the yard did not qualify for either British or European Union intervention funding support for merchant shipbuilding. In the meantime, he was downsizing the estate, selling off pieces of land and other facilities where he could. He assured Conley that, notwithstanding this sad situation, he and his workforce were determined to complete the three boats to the very highest of standards. For his part Conley soon came to have the highest regard for Howell, with whom he got on well; together they formed a strong professional partnership.

Within a few weeks Conley and his team found themselves aboard Unseen in the early phases of her conducting contractor’s sea trials in the Clyde Estuary. Climbing onto the bridge he noticed her slow speed as she headed on the surface to her diving areas; about 10.5 knots was her maximum on the surface, although she was capable of 18 knots dived. There was a following wind and the bridge was shrouded in the exhaust gases from the two diesels. Apart from its toxicity, the acrid fumes reduced the ability of the bridge team to keep an efficient lookout. For some reason the designers had not built in a bulkhead under the casing to prevent the exhaust causing this serious problem. Conley was very much bemused by this extraordinary deficiency — the bridge diesel-exhaust problem must have been learned years ago — but thought it would not be costly to remedy.

Having dived in the North Channel between Scotland and Ireland, the priority for Conley and his team was to witness the leaking snort exhaust hull-valve problem through a series of snorting runs of different durations and engine loads. It was evident that as the one-foot diameter hull valve heated up after a period of continuous use, it distorted in shape. Consequently, when the snorting evolution was ended and, as part of the routine, the engines crash-stopped, the valve did not seat properly for some time, thus allowing several tons of seawater to pour into the engine room as it cooled down. This, of course, had serious safety implications. However, Conley reluctantly acquiesced that there was to be no quick fix before acceptance of the boats, other than ensuring the crew had a drill and equipment in place to immediately pump out the engine room bilges on completing snorting. He could have done with the presence of the Upholder project director, a senior civil servant, during some of the sea trials, but the latter suffered from claustrophobia and never went to sea on any of his submarines — a ripe comment on the PE’s placement policy and a reflection upon the little importance it placed upon its project directors actually getting to sea on their charges. Fortunately, the stalwart Gordon Howell was always present during the key sea trials phases and readily appreciated Conley’s concerns.

This was but one serious design shortcoming amongst others, the most notable being a small but plausible risk of the torpedo tube flood valves opening to the sea when the tubes’ rear doors were open. This type of problem was the cause of the catastrophic flooding resulting in the loss of the submarine Thetis in Liverpool Bay in 1939. Again, owing to the complexity of the torpedo tube control system, the only immediate solution was to introduce strict operating procedures to avoid serious flooding. Indeed, as the submarines were due to be disposed of and as the costs for the four boats had escalated to £1,350m at 2013 prices, there was no real impetus to fix the problems, other than the torpedo tube defect which had the most serious implications.

Despite these dispiriting observations, Conley observed that the Upholder class did have some commendable features. They handled well underwater, had a very quiet acoustic signature and they had an excellent fire control and sonar suite. Indeed, in the realms of war-fighting capability, they were a real improvement upon the Oberons. Unfortunately, these advances, which might be expected of evolving submarine design backed by the Royal Navy’s experience of submarine operation, were offset by other constraints such as poor equipment accessibility and confined accommodation spaces which seemed to have put the clock back a generation. Moreover, with only two modestly powered diesels, they lacked power generation capability and Conley was driven to conclude the design as ‘very disappointing’, and that there was much evidence that the Procurement Executive had not adequately scrutinised the VSEL contract specification. Somewhat counter-intuitively, he pragmatically appreciated that the acceptance process would largely be confined to ensuring the shipbuilder had built the submarines to the contract criteria.

In April 1992 Conley was at the Cammell Laird yard for the launch of the last of Upholders, HMS Unicorn. On a sunny spring morning, to the loud cheers of the remaining few hundred shipyard workers and their families, the submarine slid gracefully into the Mersey following a moment’s anxious pause after the traditional bottle of champagne had struck the hull. The occasion marked the final launch of a vessel — any vessel — from the yard of Cammell Laird, ending a history stretching back 165 years. It was also probably the last dynamic launch down a slipway of a submarine from a British shipyard. Future submarine ‘launches’ would be achieved by gently lowering the vessel into the water using a huge lifting assembly known as a synchronised ship lift.

In the interim, Unseen and Ursula had been accepted into service after final trials in the Clyde. The acceptance formalities with the shipbuilder were completed onboard each of the boats in a very subdued atmosphere. Conley and his team were only too aware that many of the shipyard managers and workers aboard for the trials would be made redundant when they returned to Birkenhead.

In June 1993 Unicorn was commissioned in a very empty shipyard. It was Gordon Howell’s swansong in shipbuilding, as he would not be returning to Barrow. At the commissioning lunch in the boardroom, surrounded by the paintings and the other memorabilia of what had been a great shipbuilding company, each of the guests was presented with a small crystal bowl. It was engraved with the words Semper Commemoranda Unice Optima — ‘Always remember they were the best’.

The Upholders were all paid off by 1994 and in due course were sold to the Royal Canadian Navy. They have since proved very expensive and difficult to maintain and operate, even making the headlines. When, in October 2004, the Chicoutimi (ex-Upholder) was crossing the North Atlantic, she took a considerable quantity of water down the conning tower whilst on the surface in rough weather. This caused a serious fire in which one man was killed. The cause of the fire was eventually discovered to be the fitting of the wrong type of watertight bulkhead electrical cable sealing arrangements: when saltwater came into contact with the seals they combusted.

Aside from the Upholders, for Conley and his team there was much more important business to deal with. HMS Vanguard, the first of the new Trident submarines, was approaching commissioning and there were many problems to address. In the event, perhaps the biggest challenge he and his team would confront would be getting the Trident submarine project and the Ministry of Defence to accept there were any problems in the first place.

As a junior captain, he soon recognised that CNSA had limited leverage in getting the MoD to accept there were problems and to allocate resources to fix them. Perversely, his organisation was part of the Procurement Executive, yet was responsible for approval of the organisation’s output in terms of delivering ships and submarines and their equipment to the standards and criteria set by the Naval Staff in the MoD. This was made more difficult by the frequent weakness of the MoD’s vague or opaque detailing in their specified requirements. These could read like a wishlist, rather than hard and fast criteria, allowing fudging by either the PE or contractors.

Although throughout this appointment Conley was to be supported by an enthusiastic and very energetic boss, Commodore Stephen Taylor, he was not a submariner and in effect CNSA proved to have limited influence upon the Trident project. The latter was headed up by a senior naval constructor, who in turn reported to the Chief of the Strategic Systems Executive (CSSE), Rear Admiral Ian Pirnie. Admiral Pirnie had a daunting remit as he was responsible for all aspects of the Trident project, including the procurement of the missile systems and the construction of the requisite shore facilities.

Soon after taking up his post, Conley and his team visited VSEL and toured the Devonshire Dock Hall where there were three Trident SSBNs in various stages of construction, Vanguard, Victorious and Vigilant. Boarding Vanguard, Conley was immediately disappointed by her layout. Designed by the Ministry of Defence itself, the highly significant decision had been made to reduce the hull length by wrapping the forward and after ballast tanks around the pressure hull, reducing the hull diameters at either end. This was instead of adopting the precedent of the United States Navy’s Trident SSBN in which uniform pressure-hull diameter was maintained throughout its length, with the ballast tanks attached at either end, thus creating much more internal space. There had been reasons for constraining overall hull length in context of the costs and the feasibility of the modifications required to the Barrow dock system to handle the Trident boats; there would also be an additional expenditure of building bigger shore facilities to accommodate longer hulls, but this appeared to be a case of cutting the head off the horse to fit it into the stable. The resulting non-uniform hull diameter, in addition to constraining layout design and adding complexities to the construction, ineluctably produced cramped propulsion spaces with very difficult machinery access. Indeed, Conley assessed the engine room as even more congested than Valiant’s, all of which, when combined with the complexities and space constraints of the other machinery spaces, would increase the cost of through-life upkeep and increase crew stress when maintaining and repairing engineering plant.

However, there was nothing Conley and his team could do about the SSBNs’ layout other than press hard for improvements to the crew mess deck areas, which had been completed as dining halls, as opposed to the submarine practice of doubling as recreational spaces. In fact, there was no provision of any recreational space where individual members of the ship’s company could relax in peace and quiet away from their crowded mess decks, particularly when meals were in progress or movies were being shown. This facility had been called for in the Naval Staff requirement but had been missed in the design. The project management conceded this deficiency and agreed accordingly to adapt redundant space in the missile compartment; they also consented to the mess decks being improved. These were small triumphs for Conley and his team, but they would make a lot of difference to crew comfort during long patrols.

It was in the area of the sonar fit where Conley had most contention with the Trident project. It was evident to him that several key aspects of the submarine’s sonar suite had been under-specified, resulting in a number of operational deficiencies which would either be costly or difficult to rectify. He firmly believed that the sonar system — which was unique to the Trident class — was not fit for purpose; in Conley’s judgement, it would be unable to provide comprehensive protection against third-generation Russian submarines, the quiet and capable Victor IIIs and Akulas, which would be the SSBNs’ main threat. Incomprehensibly — and almost egregiously, one might think — no expert operator input had been sought during the design stage of the sonar system. Furthermore, it was evident to Conley that weak and inexperienced project management was handling this vitally important part of the submarines’ defences.

These views put Conley on a collision course with the hierarchy of the Trident project who saw him as awkward, unduly demanding and — from their perspective — of questionable judgement. However, none of them had knowledge or experience of operating submarine sonar in the contemporary threat environment. Conley afterwards recalled, ‘It was like a Formula One racing driver trying to explain his car deficiencies to a bunch of people who have never been in a car in their life.’ Perhaps seduced by the infallibility of the group, several members of the project team complained to Commodore Taylor that Conley was being unreasonable. With little or no support from either the Naval Staff or the specialists on the staff of Flag Office Submarines, Conley’s voice was, for an inordinately long time, a lonely one.

In the autumn of 1992 Conley embarked on Vanguard for contractor’s sea trials. He was immediately struck by the novelty of the submarine control room being situated two decks below the conning tower, as opposed to being directly below it. With the primary means of visual surveillance through remote periscope camera images which were then displayed on the submarine’s state-of-the-art command system in the control room, this did not matter. Indeed, it was very conducive to an efficient and effective control-room layout. The 14,000-ton SSBN was much bigger than the SSNs to which Conley was accustomed, where most command positions, including the bridge, were a few feet away from each other. Accordingly, he assessed that operating on the surface would be more complex and difficult to manage. In short, he did not envy the challenges the commanding officers would confront when the boat was on the surface in dense shipping or poor visibility conditions.

A year later, during post-commissioning trials Conley authorised the acceptance of HM Submarine Vanguard into service on behalf of the project and the final stage payment of £80m to VSEL was endorsed (she had cost about £850m to build). Overall, the first-of-class trials were successful and in late 1994 Vanguard deployed on patrol for the first time. She had been delivered to time and cost, albeit the latter being helped by a favourable US dollar/sterling exchange rate. Conley had to concede that it was a remarkable achievement which — despite all his misgivings — reflected well upon the Ministry of Defence and British industry.

Predictably, however, soon after the submarine started sea trials, many of the sonar problems of which Conley had warned made themselves manifest. The Trident project senior management at last woke up to Conley’s anxieties and began to investigate these emerging deficiencies, most of which would take both time and significant resources to fix. Although totally vindicated, Conley deeply regretted that, owing to lack of expert operator input at the outset of the design process and inept project management, the British taxpayer would be confronted with a substantial bill to fix the problems. But he was also aware that few in Foxhill were commercially minded, beyond meeting their own budget targets, and this too was part of the problem.

In 2011 the decision was made to extend the life of the four Trident boats from their designed twenty-five years to the thirty-year mark. As Conley had predicted, because of the poor equipment access and confined machinery spaces, the class has proved very expensive to operate. Furthermore, serious and underlying engineering problems, exacerbated by the accessibility constraints, have resulted in periods of very limited operational availability, putting the burden of extended patrol lengths on the sometimes single available SSBN in order to maintain continuous national deterrence. In 2007 the procurement and support organisations merged to form the Defence Equipment and Support Organisation (DESO), a major aim being to ensure that when warships and equipment are procured, there is equal consideration given to both initial production and through-life support costs. This reorganisation was, of course, very much overdue.

Conley’s surface ship acceptance responsibilities proved much less challenging and contentious. His first ward was the 500-ton Sandown-class minehunter HMS Bridport, a real contrast to the complexity and scale of Vanguard. The class was being built in the small Vosper Thornycroft yard on the River Itchen in Southampton, an excellent, modern facility which specialised in constructing smaller warships. Highly manoeuvrable, fibreglass in construction and of a very low magnetic signature, Bridport and her sister vessels had the potential to be excellent minehunters but initially their variable depth mine-detection sonar had significant technical problems. These defects were preventing two of this class — completed by Vosper Thornycroft under the aegis of the BAE Systems Al Yamani contract — being accepted from the shipbuilder by Saudi Arabia. They had been alongside in the shipyard for a prolonged period, all ready to go except for the sonar deficiencies. Although in due course, when its technical glitches were sorted out, the minehunting sonar proved a world-beater, the acceptance delay did not augur well for further Saudi Arabian warship orders.

Vosper closed their Southampton shipyard in 2004, transferring their shipbuilding facilities to Portsmouth and, in the process, losing some of their highly skilled technicians. The site has since been developed into a housing and retail complex and, at the time of writing, the Portsmouth shipbuilding yard is scheduled for closure.

In addition to the Bridport, Conley was involved in the acceptance of two new, multi-role 30,000-ton Royal Fleet Auxiliaries (RFAs), Fort Victoria and Fort George. The former had been built at Harland & Wolff in Belfast but, owing to a number of factors, the yard had not had the manpower to complete it and this was initially undertaken by Cammell Laird before being passed on to Portsmouth Naval Dockyard. Meanwhile, Swan Hunter on the Tyne was struggling to complete Fort George and make a profit, owing to the contractual obligation for the yard to fund several significant structural modifications. Conley observed that the yard was under-capitalised. Furthermore, the amount of remedial work being undertaken in compartments of the ships under construction already deemed completed was at an unacceptably high level. This all compounded the shipyard’s woes as, at the same time, the production costs of the three Type 23 frigates also under construction in the yard escalated, putting a further squeeze upon Swan Hunter’s solvency. Indeed, sufficient anxiety was caused to move the MoD to make contingency plans; if necessary, the three frigates would be shifted elsewhere for completion if the yard went into receivership, which did indeed occur in 1993. In the event, these plans were not executed, but all was tragically symptomatic of British shipbuilding sliding into terminal decline.

The day of the final inspection of Fort George was a particularly poignant occasion for Conley and the CNSA team. The shipbuilders had done their best to present the ship, with its myriad of compartments, to the highest of standards, and even the directors and senior managers had rolled up their sleeves and helped with the final clean and finish. Overnight, a large team of cleaning ladies had worked hard to present every compartment, large or small, in a pristine condition. When the CNSA inspection team arrived early the following morning, these ladies were cheerfully checking off, clearly very proud of another fine Tyneside ship.

The inspection itself went very well and when it was complete in the early evening all who had partaken in it were invited to enjoy a can of beer in the ship’s wardroom. Sitting there contentedly at the conclusion of the task, Conley could not but help noticing the insecure and concerned demeanour of many of the shipyard people, who were only too well aware of the contrast between his own secure future and their very precarious one.

Things were much brighter at Yarrow Shipbuilders on the Clyde. This shipyard, owned by GEC-Marconi, was in better shape under the redoubtable chairmanship of Clydeside shipbuilder, Sir Robert Easton. The latter’s son, Murray, was his managing director, and the yard was doing well in its construction of a number of Type 23 frigates. It had much better undercover fabrication facilities than Swan Hunter and was also set to benefit from greater numbers of future frigate orders owing to the financial difficulties of the Tyneside company.

However, visiting the yard for the first time on a very wet and windy January day, Conley watched the struggles of a group of painters trying to apply a special non-slip coating to the flight deck of HMS Monmouth lying in the exposed fitting-out basin. Whilst the deck was protected to some extent by polythene screening, the conditions were quite unsuitable to apply any paint, let alone a specialist coating such as was required, and he doubted how durable it would be. Ideally, such external painting of the ship should have been carried out undercover, as it would have been in most yards in the world. Conley also noted the depressing fact that many fittings and prefabricated parts of the ship were being sourced from overseas: the anchor made in Spain, the upper deck guardrails in Sweden were but two examples. British shipbuilding had declined to such an extent that many of the British firms which had once made ancillary equipment had long since gone, and matters were now beyond redemption.

At sea on contractor’s sea trials, Conley was highly impressed by the Type 23’s handling and its very responsive combined gas turbine and diesel-electric power train. With a quiet acoustic signature and a low radar silhouette, these vessels, which would build up to a class of sixteen, had been designed specifically to conduct anti-submarine towed array operations in the Norwegian Sea. Six Fort-class RFAs, armed with Sea Wolf antiaircraft missile systems, were planned to provide them with logistic support but, in the event, in the post-Cold War era only the two mentioned above were built, the Fort George and Fort Victoria. Although there were facilities for Sea Wolf in both ships, the missile system was never installed.

The main initial shortcoming of the Type 23 frigate class was that the early vessels were not fitted with a command system. This was needed to make the ship effective in combat. Furthermore, the Merlin helicopter they were planned to carry was experiencing technical delays. As for the sonar carried in the new frigates, Conley was convinced that there was an intrinsic signal-processing problem with their hull-mounted sonar set, as its submarine detection capability compared unfavourably with other similar systems. He reported his concerns accordingly but, not for the first time, experienced a very lethargic response from the responsible project team.

It seemed incomprehensible to him, a submariner steeped in the cut and thrust of Cold War operations, that the surface element of the Royal Navy appeared to have lost all pride in its ships and people being leaders in anti-submarine warfare — the fundamental skill that had saved the country in the Battle of the Atlantic.

To this profound anxiety he could add a further defect: the frigate’s single 4.5in Mark 8 fully automatic gun tended to jam after a few rounds had been fired. To his despair, it seemed to Conley that Royal Navy gunnery had hardly advanced since his Cambrian days.

Conley left the Procurement Executive in the summer of 1994. He was not sorry to depart. Although he had very much enjoyed working with the shipbuilders, there had been too many frustrations and a sense of personal impotence. His sparring with the Trident project had achieved successes, but in pressing the case for improving the SSBN’s sonar system, he felt he had ploughed a very lonely furrow. What he could not comprehend was that many of his colleagues on the Procurement Executive’s staff with whom he had engaged had had brilliant intellects, and were dedicated and committed to the Royal Navy. Why, therefore, was the organisation so dysfunctional?

To him, it could be all summed up by his experience soon after joining, when he made a courtesy call upon the senior civil servant at Foxhill, the Chief of the Underwater Systems Executive, who was responsible for the procurement of submarines and all underwater equipment and weapons. During the meeting Conley had raised the issue of the very poor results of a recent series of Spearfish trial firings. The mandarin had responded that he did not know about the Spearfish problems and furthermore he went on to express little, if any, interest in them.

Such a dismissive response should, he mused later, have sounded a warning call. What was clear to Conley after his experiences of the procurement process was that, despite periodic intensive reviews and reorganisations, it remained very inefficient and in many cases badly managed. It was thus both expensive to the taxpayer and in general unsuited to providing those going into harm’s way with the best equipment affordable within the defence budget set by the government of the day. Conley afterwards reflected ruefully that during his time in the PE there was no one within the Royal Navy’s hierarchy energetically and aggressively pursuing the necessary reforms, and all future significant change was to be driven by external initiatives.