I will say though. Your comment points to a distinct problem that I've seen at work. Lots of old guys and gals (like yourself) aren't cut out to expand the CAF.
This.
And coming from an old guy like I am.
Militaries in general, and Canada's in particular, take great comfort in the bureaucratic process where risk is spread around and failure hidden from the overseers in government. We have a military leadership - and have had such a leadership for decades - that does not see beyond today's issues. Canada's force structures, procurement programs, and general way it does business is almost exclusively focused on what needs to be done in peacetime with the manpower allocated. It expends much treasure in running a bureaucracy that oversees administrative functions and yet does nothing to expand, or even plan to expand, the hard defence outputs needed by the country. It tweaks them from time to time but never grows them.
Very little energy or resources are dedicated to planning how to create that "great host," as General Belzile called it. And let's be clear, before I get hauled up for thinking historically, I don't see Belzile's call being one to recreate Canada's WW2 forces. I see it simply as a call to plan and to take the necessary steps to shape the Canadian military/industrial system to be able to expand rapidly beyond its current regular force construct.
I know that I'm sitting on the outside looking back in, but there is very little about the army's current modernization "experiment" which strikes me as one aimed at addressing the fundamental issues plaguing it. It's yet again another timid deck chair shuffle that creates a bit better position for some but a worse position for others without any demonstrable increase in fighting power. I see the air force and navy a bit more forward leaning.
This is a point in time of great opportunity. The challenges facing the country and the government's willingness to react haven't been this great for over a half a century. Canada's military leaders need to boldly step up with a vision that truly aims to reshape the Canadian military/industrial complex.
"Jobs in Canada" makes a sale easier. I doubt it makes it easy enough to sell a path to 5%. Also, we're likely to have another fiscal-impacting crisis before that much time elapses.
"Jobs in Canada," especially high-paying industrial work, will definitely make it easier. There are already many job funding schemes the Feds operate. Redirecting that money to growing defence industries could be a zero-sum process. I can't see why a "fiscal-impacting crisis" should interfere with what is a % of GDP goal rather than hard and fixed dollars. The key is that the defence dollars do not simply fall into a bottom-less pit, but actually show demonstrable gains in defence capability. That's my big beef of the last decade. Defence spending has been climbing but there is little to show for it.
Maybe if Canadian companies can figure out how to build the world's best-for-cost trucks, or armoured vehicles, or guns, or aircraft, or small ships, etc. in some niches we'll get some exporting companies that can sustain themselves instead of production runs that start and end and disperse everything learned into nothingness.
I agree with the need to have sustainable equipment production that carries on for many decades rather than in short and brief orgies. "Boom then bust" doesn't work, and yet we do it over and over again. It's not the companies that need to figure it out; its for the military and the procurement system to work the projects from cyclical to continuous. I sometimes wonder if that would be easier if much of the core R&D and manufacturing capabilities were rolled into a, or several, Dominion Arsenals crown corporation(s) rather than left entirely to public companies. The guy that welds the armour on a tank doesn't care where his paycheck comes from.
