And just when I thought our Defence Materiel Organisation couldn’t do anything more stupid than build landing ships that were too big to go into the mother ships that couldn’t take them anywhere anyway because the mother ships were rusting out and on the way to the scrapyard, the DMO has shown that there is no limit to its brilliance.
Tres bomb: navy’s new toy needs translator
Dan Oakes
August 26, 2011
Help needed … the Australian navy has called out for translators.
WHEN you buy flat-pack furniture, you can be sure the instructions will include English. But when you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on torpedoes for your navy, apparently that is not the case.
The highly classified technical documents for the European-built weapon are in Italian and French, so the defence procurement agency, Defence Materiel Organisation, has tendered for people to translate them.
The translators will be flown to Canberra and accommodated while they plough through the documentation at DMO offices. It is the latest in a series of stumbling blocks for the anti-submarine MU90 torpedo, which will be installed on two classes of warship.
The handling of the project, which has already taken 13 years and will cost $655 million, has been savaged by the government auditor.
‘‘As a result of acquiring a torpedo manufactured in Europe, most of the original data (required to accept the MU90 into [Australian Defence Force] service) is written in French and Italian,’’ the tender document says.
''The French and Italian militaries are preparing significant amounts of classified technical data, up to a secret level, for delivery to Australia under a trilateral agreement to meet these requirements.
‘‘There is an immediate need to translate portions of these documents … with a continuing need to translate documents (or part thereof) through to full certification of the system, including operational test and evaluation and transition activities.’’
In May, the Australian National Audit Office said the project would not deliver what was originally specified, was running behind schedule and was sloppily administered.
The auditor also found that the DMO had approved the torpedo in the mistaken belief it was a proven weapon, already in use by other navies - rather than a developmental torpedo. It took the DMO five years to discover this.
‘‘At the time, Defence advised the government that it had misunderstood the French and Italian acceptance processes and, contrary to previous advice, the torpedo had not been accepted by these services and remained subject to trials,’’ the auditor said.
But when Defence realised the torpedo would be more costly to integrate and would not deliver the desired capability, it pressed ahead anyway.
Defence has said it will pay no more than $110,100 for the translation but will cover the cost of flights and accommodation.
