I have no problem with using tax-payer dollars to support ship-yards. Just make it an honest investment and direct it out of Industry or Infrastructure. Don't take it out of the Defence budget. They have got little enough to play with.
Likewise I am not thrilled with the way the new life-cycle costs are being used to "bulk-up" contracts. The Liberals love to bundle a bunch of projects together and add them up over a long period of time so that they create the impression that they are doing something while standing in place. Better yet if they can add in third-party money, like provincial, municipal and private funds and take credit for them all as a federal investment.
Case in point, the new SH-92s. 5 Billion dollar contract. Wow - they're spending. Gee-Whiz Pauly's spending more than even Brian Mulroney was proposing. Pauly definitely isn't from Shawinigan. He's a BIG friend of the CF. And spending all that money in the US - won't that make George happy.
Counter-spin.
5 Billion = 1.8 + 3.2 Billion
1.8 Billion for 28 choppers at roughly 64 million a copy. 3.2 Billion for 20 years of maintenance and training support including facilities.
Now while I support life-cycle costing and through-life support I am concerned that the spinning will be used by the Government to show how much they are doing and justifying how little more they can do.
On the other hand they could make the point that they are only setting aside 5 Billion out of 20 years x 13 Billion (assuming no increases) or 5/260 or less than 2% of projected spending.
I guess I will have to wait and see but between past history, burying the defence review as an internal exercise and the delay in getting a defence and foreign policy review out (both were supposed to be released this fall for discussion) I am exceedingly cynical.
Just for laughs I took the Cyclone Programme Expenditure costs and used the same ratio of Capital to Operating costs and applied them to the JSS project.
Capital costs are 1.8/5 or 36% of the total project costs. With the 2.1 Billion dollar JSS project that results in a total capital cost of 756 Million dollars for three vessels or about 252 Million dollars apiece.
Actually that is probably a pretty fair and reasonable price. The question is who is going to get the 20 year maintenance contract and who is going to be given the new improved dry-dock necessary to handle a larger hull.
Having said that - if the capital cost is in the 250 Million range (maybe even 150 Million for a similar hull but without the RAS capability and more Transport space) maybe it wouldn't boost the cost of the project so much to add another couple of hulls for Jungle and me. Especially if they were only used occasionally for deployments and training and were manned by a skeleton crew (50 or so) or reservists.
I can't see that it would add that much to the support costs if they were not going to accumulate the number of sea-days that their sisters operating in the AOR-RAS roles would.
Gawd - if somebody would just let me be King of the World for a day................ :-\
;D :'(
