In the interim, lack of competent software support had caused a great deal of extra effort and frustration on the part of the targeting team and, of course, did nothing for their confidence in the MoD organisation. Neither of these two factors, of course, was measured or reported, and no one was held accountable for the very poor contracting decision. The whole set-up was truly that of a Madhouse.
Epilogue
THE SUMMER OF 1996 found Conley back at HMS Dolphin in Fort Blockhouse as captain of the shore base, his appointment at the Ministry of Defence thankfully behind him. However, it was a very different Dolphin from the one he had joined twenty-nine years earlier as a trainee sub lieutenant, and now was an empty place echoing with past glories. The submarines had gone, the berths were empty and the workshops lay silent; his posting would be a short one, preparing the establishment for handover to the Royal Defence Medical College and other tri-Service medical training organisations.
For the time being, however, his staff was accommodated within the old submarine headquarters and he was ensconced in what once had been Flag Officer Submarine’s office. The last link the establishment had with submarines, the Submarine School, also lay within his bailiwick, but plans were already well advanced to relocate it to the training establishment HMS Raleigh in Torpoint across the River Tamar from HM Dockyard Devonport.
Conley was also responsible for heading up the Fleet Warfare Development Group (FWDG) which was a recent amalgam of the surface fleet, air and submarine tactical development organisations. The Submarine Tactics and Weapons Group (STWG) had been divided, the weapons element remaining in Faslane. This distressed Conley, as he viewed one of STWG’s great strengths to have been the co-location of the separate disciplines of tactical and weapons’ development. He found the FWDG to be an organisation which lacked a sense of direction and focus, with many of its staff neither possessing the requisite analytical competences nor being adequately motivated in what they did. It too was also on the move, to be co-located with the Maritime Warfare Centre in the training establishment HMS Dryad situated just outside Portsmouth. Time was therefore against him achieving any significant changes to the quality of either its output or effectiveness.
In early September 1997 Captain Dan Conley, the last captain of HMS Dolphin, and his wife were given a very convivial farewell lunch by the wardroom officers. On leaving the building they both took up positions astride a large model of a nuclear submarine on a trailer roped to a contingent of officers. To a loud cheer from the assembled gathering, they were pulled out of the parade square; it was not quite a going into retirement, but to Conley the occasion effectively and poignantly marked the end of his career in submarines.
Despite the decline he found all around him, he had taken part in the Submarine Flotilla’s greatest ever peacetime expansion and had witnessed a period of unprecedented technical change and challenge. He had served in the highly successful Swiftsure-class SSN and had been at the cutting edge of the Royal Navy’s undersea confrontation with the Russian submarine force. He had also been involved in the introduction into service of the less successful Upholder and Vanguard classes amid the shrinking of Britain’s industrial and shipbuilding capacity, factors adversely affecting the country’s ability to maintain a home-built nuclear submarine force.
There had been the very rapid downsizing of the Flotilla in the 1990s, spurred on by the end of the Cold War and the marked diminishment of the Russian submarine threat. Accordingly, he concluded that he had enjoyed almost certainly the best and most professionally satisfying of times for a peacetime submariner. Furthermore, he had immensely enjoyed working with highly professional and committed officers and ratings.
Conley had one more job in the Royal Navy, as a director of the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) in Taunton, a quasi-commercial agency which remains the world’s leading producer of nautical charts. The United Kingdom’s maritime triad of the Royal Navy, Merchant Navy and the fishing fleet might all have drastically diminished in size and capability, but the UKHO still provides the charts of many other countries’ navigational waters, and is renowned for the quality and accuracy of its Admiralty chart series and other supporting products.
However, like all organisations, the UKHO faced change, and in particular the conversion of thousands of paper charts to a digital format. Included in his responsibilities, Conley was in charge of the electronic navigational chart (ENC) development and production project. Early on he had to take the unpopular and unprecedented initiative of outsourcing elements of the paper chart conversion to an Indian company. This was for reasons of both cost and skilled manpower availability, demonstrating that even the very successful UKHO could not escape financial and efficiency pressures.
At the same time, he and his team had robustly pressed the Ministry of Defence to make a modest outlay for the provision of digital charting systems to all ships in the Fleet. A basic system cost as little as £10,000 and with highly accurate navigational positional input from the American global positioning system (GPS) and the availability of an automatic alarm facility providing warning should a hazard be approached, digital charts significantly enhance navigational safety. But this was not agreed by a key civil servant in the Ministry decision-making chain, who rejected such a proposition with a counter assertion that: ‘There is no evidence to support the case that digital charts enhance navigational safety’. Consequently, the few million pounds of expenditure required to fit all ships of the Fleet with this equipment was turned down on both the occasions that Conley made a submission to the Ministry, notwithstanding that the First Sea Lord at the time, Admiral Sir Nigel Essenhigh — himself a former Hydrographer of the Navy — was an ardent advocate of digital charts.
Captain Dan Conley left the Hydrographic Office and the Royal Navy in October 2000. Less than two years later, the destroyer HMS Nottingham grounded on rocks off Lord Howe Island to the east of Australia. The ship was only saved by exceptional damage control efforts and the cost of the repairs was over £40m. The cause of the grounding was sloppy navigation, but it would not have occurred if a digital charting system had been available. Eight years later, in 2010, the brand new £1bn submarine HMS Astute went aground off the Isle of Skye during contractor’s sea trials and incurred over £2m of damage. The cause of this extremely embarrassing accident, where the submarine was televised well and truly stranded, was a poor navigational and pilotage organisation. Incredibly, Astute did not have an electronic chart facility, which again would highly likely have prevented the grounding. To Conley, by then deep into retirement, both incidents reflected just one more procurement debacle, evidence of a system which was well and truly broken.
He had not quite hung up his seaboots, as on leaving the Royal Navy he was back to his fishing roots, joining the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen as its chief executive. Fishing remained the nation’s most dangerous industry, its 13,000 seafarers suffering on average sixty fatalities or serious injuries each year during Conley’s eleven years with the charity from 2001 to 2012. Moreover, vessel losses in the 6,000-strong fleet averaged two a month, largely due to flooding or groundings; there was, therefore, much work for the society to do in supporting the bereaved and injured, while proactively contributing to a range of safety measures.