operational service until March 2004, a year after the last boat was commissioned. These delays forced the RAN to keep several Oberon-class submarines and the submarine base HMAS Platypus in service beyond their planned decommissioning dates. McIntosh-Prescott Report and Fast Track program Following his appointment as Minister for Defence following the 1998 federal election, John Moore decided that the only way to solve the various problems of the Collins class was for an independent report to be prepared on them. He appointed Malcolm McIntosh, chief executive of the CSIRO and an unofficial advisor to Moore, and John Prescott, a former BHP director, to investigate the project, uncover the problems with the submarines, and suggest ways of solving them. The Report to the Minister for Defence on the Collins class submarine and related matters (commonly referred to as the McIntosh-Prescott Report) was compiled in ten weeks, and released on 1 June 1999. This report concluded that the Collins class was incapable of performing at the required level for military operations. Although the report highlighted several elements of the submarine design that performed to or beyond expectations, and acknowledged that many of the publicised problems had been or were in the process of being fixed, it presented the propulsion system, combat system, and excessive noise as ongoing problems across the class. After identifying the combat system as the central problem, McIntosh and Prescott recommended that it be scrapped entirely and replaced with a system based on commercially available equipment and software. They also claimed that these problems were caused by poor design and manufacture; inappropriate design requirements; deficiencies in the structure of the contract, particularly with regards to modifying the contract to meet changing requirements; and problems between the various parties involved in the construction of the submarines, with a lack of overall direction and conflicts of interest causing avoidable hostility and uncooperativeness. Despite the report being promoted by the government as 'ground-breaking', many people involved with the Collins-class project later claimed that large sections of the report could have been copied from reports previously submitted by the RAN or ASC. The report, along with the planned December 2000 decommissioning of the final Oberon-class submarine, , prompted the establishment of an A$1 billion program to bring the fourth and fifth submarines ( and ) up to operational standards, then retrofit the modifications to the other boats. Referred to as the "fast track"