Vanguard Magazine

C 71 www.vanguardcanada.com OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2024 29 Saab Expeditionary Submarine ish government adopted a fresh policy of strong domestic industrial defence capabil- ity, which was to make the building — and exporting — of the A26 an entirely Swed- ish initiative. After a tense confrontation with Thyssen Krupp, Saab ultimately ac- quired Kockums, where the two new sub- marines are now being assembled. For Nykvist, the shock of Russia's Crime- an adventure was redoubled when the country moved on Ukraine in 2022. He credited this continuing conflict for swell- ing popular support to make Sweden the 32nd member of the NATO alliance earlier this year. While this new status may not put the country on a war footing, it has further sharpened the call for situational awareness along the country's 2,100-kilometre coast- line, which features hundreds of thousands of islands. The stealth of submarines is es- sential to observe objectively, he argued, without influencing activities that may be taking place on the surface, or below. "What is important is presence," said Nykvist, "to be able to have the presence to see what's ongoing and see what is not a normal picture." That same credo could be applied to Canada's need for situational awareness, especially in a rapidly evolving Arctic. With a daunting three-ocean coastline total- ling more than 240,000 kilometres, and a warming climate opening up some of the most remote sections to international ship- ping traffic, the "normal picture" promises to be a moving target for decades to come. While nuclear powered vessels have estab- lished their ability to move freely and fully around this kind of extensive, complex envi- ronment, newer technology is pointing the way to more cost-effective options Canada could be bring into service more quickly. Saab presents the C71 as a lynchpin for bringing together those options, starting with AIP. While this technology is to allow the A26 to remain continuously submerged for up to 21 days, Hedin suggested the C71 could more than double that time. He noted the range could also be extended to 24,000 kilometres, a distance more aligned with the scale of Canadian missions. While those figures might be derived from design specifications of Blekinge- class vessels that have yet to hit the water, there are more definitive advantages to be considered. The required crew comple- ment of the A26 will be less than 30, and just a few more for the C71. That would be just over half of what it takes to run one of Canada's Victoria-class submarines, introducing a significant reduction in the significant degree of the performance typ- ically associated with nuclear submarines. Known as Air Independent Propulsion (AIP), it employs the Stirling engine, a closed-cycle heat engine invented some 200 years ago, which requires no external atmosphere to operate. As Hedin explained, AIP makes for a quieter submarine, since it does not re- quire the constant pumping of coolant through a reactor. This virtue was driven home during a set of international war games in 2005, when one of Saab's Got- land-class submarines famously "sank" the newly commissioned US carrier Ronald Reagan by snapping a photograph of the carrier without ever being detected. The accomplishment impressed the US Navy sufficiently to inspire a Memorandum of Understanding with Sweden to lease one of its submarines and its crew, which spent the next two years in California partici- pating in exercises to help the American forces determine how to deal with the potential threat from less friendly nations that might be developing their own AIP underwater fleets. While continuously developing the Stir- ling AIP technology, Saab, together with Swedish research institutes, are investing in new battery technology to improve op- erational performance even further. Rear Admiral Jens Nykvist, now Swe- den's Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, was among the submariners who took part in the work at San Diego's Naval Base Point Loma from 2005 to 2007. At that time, he recalls, his country was beginning a reduction in its international military profile and maritime industrial capacity, highlighted by the sale of the venerable Kockums shipyard in southern Sweden to German shipbuilding conglomerate Thyssen Krupp. Kockums' only customer was the Swedish military, which wanted to use the facility for its highly classified development of the A26, despite the Ger- man firm's reluctance to participate. The project floundered until Russia's 2014 in- vasion of Crimea, when a shaken Swed-

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