Canada’s selection of TKMS and its Type 212CD as preferred supplier answers which submarine the Royal Canadian Navy will sail. The harder question is whether the country has the people to build, maintain and sustain a fleet of up to 12 boats.

Engineering firm BMT argues that work has to start now, in university classrooms and trade schools as much as in shipyards.

Vanguard spoke with BMT’s Ken Cox, director, submarine programs, and Emily Spurling, regional business director, North America, at the Deep Blue conference. They discussed the company’s new submarine training, the industrial capacity Canada will need, and what often gets overlooked in the submarine conversation.

What does Canada need to get right today to build the submarine capability it will need for tomorrow?

Cox: We’re lucky with the selection of TKMS as the preferred bidder. The capability we’re going to get from that alone is built into the product, so Canada’s along the right path there. So really, the capability I think we need to look at here in Canada is the workforce.

There is already a workforce in industry sustaining submarines, so we don’t have to create something from scratch. But we have to make sure that [those] coming into the pipeline at least get an introduction to what’s different about it.

Think about an engineering graduate coming out of a university program. They get a taste of aerospace, a taste of maritime, a taste of structural and buildings. They don’t really hear anything about submarines, and that’s unfortunate, because submarines carry a unique aspect of engineering in design and performance that just can’t be ignored.

Normally, our engineers don’t get to learn about that. Either they join the Navy and end up in submarines, or they join a company that’s currently sustaining submarines and get introduced to it there.

So getting programs into the universities, into the trade schools, and then into industry generally, that’ll provide some training to let people understand the difference. How is the approach different on a submarine than on a normal surface ship? That will be of huge value, so we start building that workforce.

How is it different?

Cox: It’s three-dimensional. Just from a pure structural standpoint: when you talk about a pressurized vessel, everyone thinks of an air tank, so the pressure is on the inside. The design, the engineering, the science all goes into keeping that pressure inside.

Well, it’s inverse on the submarine, and the approach is different. The logic is different. So just that pure thinking itself, you need to come into it in a different way.

In the aircraft industry, someone who’s going to be a tradesperson understands why they have to do the assurance, why they have to prove the right part went in the right place and was tested. We don’t teach that in the maritime industry because on ships it’s not as valuable, but on submarines it’s essential. Not to the level of aircraft, but there are certain systems on the submarine which are essential to recovery.

They have the same critical requirements, so teaching aspects of that becomes very important. The tradesperson needs to understand why I have to collect the evidence, why I have to have the exact part number and the test number, calibrated equipment to prove that I installed it. The probability of failure has to be lowered as much as possible, because the severity of failure is catastrophic.

BMT says this new submarine training is “for engineers, by engineers.” What does that mean in practice, and why is that important for Canada?

Spurling: As Canada grows that ecosystem, and we’ve heard that talked about today, we’ll have to mature that. We’re going to need a much stronger supply chain than we’ve perhaps got now.

When we talk about Canada’s future submarine capability, what do you think is sometimes overlooked in the conversation?

Cox: The sheer size. Through our last two classes of submarines, we’ve been operating three, four platforms. For the Oberons, we were able to sustain them within the maintenance facilities.

With the Victoria class, Canada took the leap to go to an in-service support contract, with the vision that if this is more complex, we’re going to need more industrial input to maintain them. We kind of need to take that and multiply it.

The keynote speaker brought up a point earlier during the conference that the Navy does have a bit of a luxury, because the crew size is going much smaller for a newer platform, so they get a little bit of gravy. The industry doesn’t really get that.

The amount of people it takes to go into a submarine and work, do the production, do the testing and what we call the commissioning, that doesn’t shrink. If anything, we need to multiply severely to get in there.

Canada’s got a huge opportunity here, because we’re building two facilities in this country to maintain this type of submarine. That means any other country that joins in on the 212 program might not be looking to invest the same as us. So Canada might actually have opportunities to bring other countries’ platforms of the same type into our facilities as well.

So building that capability, making it sovereign and being able to deliver to the platform is going to be very critical.

Why is it important to invest in people and engineering knowledge alongside investment in the platforms themselves?

Cox: You could be looking at making this a career. This is not a one-time job.

Someone finishing trade school, someone coming into this industry from university or other parts of the industry, you can build a career doing this work and being involved in something very strategic and essential for Canada.