Collins Class submarines a triumph

People in the street and some sections of the media dismiss the navy's Adelaide-built Collins Class submarines as monumental duds.

In stark contrast, most insiders we interviewed, as the authors of the history of the project, consider them a naval engineering triumph and a monument of Australian nation-building.

From its inception in 1978 the project was seldom far from controversy and it was mercilessly attacked by the media and the Howard government for a myriad of technical failings – real, exaggerated and imagined.

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