Government hints at boosting Canada’s military spending

I have long said that you could fund the CAF to 4 percent of GDP, but we would still lag behind in NATO and be much the same where we are.

It's never the money, it's politics. It's procedures. It's the pork-barreling in our defence spending that makes us a paper tiger in NATO.

My only hope in all of this for the CAF and the GoC, whatever the political stripe that may be, is that it will rouse them out of the "Peace Dividend" slumber. The world has been unstable since 1945. We have used geography, proximity, and association as a Defence Policy ever since. ICBMs don't care how close to the U.S. or how far from Russia/China we are.

Don't give us a dime more, but let us spend money on defence like it matters. The fact we follow the same rules for purchasing a fighter aircraft as we do for buying office furniture for a Service Canada office is disgraceful. Don't treat defense procurement as a stimulus package for Canadian Industry. There I said it.

We spend so much money, time, and effort trying to get that money to stay in Canada; be it by awarding contracts to companies with no capability to produce items without first "retooling" and"developing the production lines", or by hamstringing perfectly competent and competitive bidders by forcing the project to be made in St. Margaret de Poutain de Champignon, QC because the ruling government either lost the seat in the election, or won it with promises.

We spend so much money and staff hours jumping through TBS regulations that are great for other departments, but are terrible for defence procurement. Some items you have to sole source, because there are technologies and capabilities no one else makes. By doing the bid process, you get companies clamoring for a project they can't deliver on, but because they tick the bright boxes on the score sheet....

I truly and honestly belief we need to split from PSPC and legislate that its not beholden to TBS, only to the PBO/PCO. The guiding principles of this new Defence Procurement department should be "Off the shelf, from somewhere else" if there isn't an industry in Canada.

BOOTFORGEN has demonstrated how well we do when we are able to actually get what we need, instead of lining the pockets of a Canadian company that got lucky.

That, but with tanks, fighters, ships, weapons systems....

 

[FSTO]

That is a little rich, coming from a USN Admiral. The USN actively blocked us in the 1980s from getting US reactor technology when we wanted nuclear submarines the ….

Certainly is. But times they are a changin!

 

[Kirkhill]

That is a little rich, coming from a USN Admiral. The USN actively blocked us in the 1980s from getting US reactor technology when we wanted nuclear submarines the ….

Certainly is. But times they are a changin!

I've said before that providing for the CAF is a bit like fishing for big fish on a low test line. If you fight too hard the line breaks and the fish escapes. You just have to wait for the opportunity and take up any slack that the fish offers you. Right now we are being offered some slack. We should be reeling for all we are worth.

 

[Eye In The Sky]

In theory it would take over all support and control of deployed missions. In practice its only interested in Army things and passes back all responsibility for mission sustainment to the RCN, while adding further layers bureaucracy.

I cant speak to the RCAF.

I wish they would leave us alone. Less stuff to unfuck if they did…

 

[Eye In The Sky]

No real role for CJOC with RCAF deployments, unless you count the JFACC, which is just 1 Cdn Air Div wearing two hats (much like MARLANT wears the MCC hat).

Yet they get their fingers into things and make simple things hard.

 

[Kirkhill]

After suffering enough CJOC-induced stupidity the last decade my first thought was…

I still maintain CJOC is an example of bloat and not required. But I'm just a simple Storesman.

In theory no, but I think in practice yes.

CJOC should have cut out a number of other entities when it was created, but I haven’t seen any relay PY savings from it.
But I've not been doggedly following the CAF structure for the past 20 years.

Things that got lost in the Hillier years?

1 Canadian Div as an Army expeditionary force.
Canada.Com as a joint domestic planning and operations construct
Any concept of the Canadian Armed Forces as a Joint Force that could operate together in one theatre with one objective.

The RCN operates as an subset of the USN, to an even greater extent than the RN. It goes where the USN goes.
The RCAF operates as a subset of the USAF, or to be more precise, a subset of NORAD. It doesn't go anywhere since its primary task is the defence of the Canadian sector of North America, a job it does every day. Every now and then it despatches a small detachment on temporary overseas duty.
The Canadian Army .....

Without getting into ranks and service affiliation I do think that the CAF needs separate, functioning, operational and joint coordination centres for domestic force employment and for expeditionary force employment.

I also think the Canadian Army needs a separate "Coordination Centre" to manage its Separate Brigades. Some people might be inclined to think of such a Co-Ordination Centre, responsible for 3 Brigades and appropriate Combat Support and Combat Service Support as a Division.

Beyond that the question remains how big a force is Canada going to deploy? From that how big are the necessary C4ISR, CS and CSS elements that are to be engage and what portion of them are going to be forward and what portion of them are going to be actively engaged while remaining in Canada passing goods and info forwards?

Double hatting, like multi-tasking and just in time delivery are peacetime constructs beloved of consultants. None of them survive contact with reality let alone the enemy.

.....

The fundamental weakness at the heart of the CAF is the lack of clarity on the purpose, roles and tasks of the Canadian Army.

 

[Eye In The Sky]

The RCAF operates as a subset of the USAF, or to be more precise, a subset of NORAD. It doesn't go anywhere since its primary task is the defence of the Canadian sector of North America, a job it does every day. Every now and then it despatches a small detachment on temporary overseas duty.

My first flying tour was 6 years long; I spent more than 3.5 of those years outside North America and did 10 “named op” deployments and about that many exercises, on top of all the stuff we did over/around North America.

Other fleets are just as or possibly more busy and away from their postal code lots.

From my window, I’m not sure the para above is accurate for the tactical fleets.

 

[Kirkhill]

My first flying tour was 6 years long; I spent more than 3.5 of those years outside North America and did 10 “named op” deployments and about that many exercises, on top of all the stuff we did over/around North America.

Other fleets are just as or possibly more busy and away from their postal code lots.

From my window, I’m not sure the para above is accurate for the tactical fleets.

I am not saying that the RCAF doesn't deploy. I am saying that the centre of mass is firmly fixed in North America. In some ancient aphorism terms it keeps one foot firmly planted and never seems to over-reach itself.

Personally I think the RCAF gets the balance right. If there are any quiet professionals in the CAF it is you lot.

That is the reason why I would build my Defence of Canada force around the RCAF and NORAD and have the Army and Navy play second fiddles domestically.

 

[Eye In The Sky]

I think I see the context you meant initially.

 

[Kirkhill]

Well that didn't last long...

I have long suspected a Trudeau affinity for things germanic.

Germany under fire for dropping Nato spending pledge

Berlin abandons legally binding commitment to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence in last-minute reversal

www.telegraph.co.uk

Germany under fire for dropping Nato spending pledge​

Berlin abandons legally binding commitment to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence in last-minute reversal

ByJörg Luyken18 August 2023 • 4:23pm

The defence ministry is run by the Green party in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition government CREDIT: Ronald Wittek/Shutterstock
Germany’s government has been criticised for an “absurd” plan to present interest payments as defence expenses after stepping back from pledges to hit Nato spending targets.
Berlin abandoned a legally binding commitment to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence in a last-minute reversal on Wednesday, a government official told Reuters.
An objection to the clause, which had been part of a new budget financing law, was reportedly raised by the foreign ministry. The ministry is run by the Green party in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition government.
The developments came as Germany’s Bild newspaper reported that the country’s defence ministry had been instructed to include debt-servicing payments as military spending for next year to make up for the fact that Berlin would otherwise fall far short of the Nato target.

€14 billion short​

Defence spending for 2024 is projected to come in €14 billion short of target. However, the defence ministry is planning to cover for around €9 billion of that deficit by adding debt servicing to its official expenditure.
“The idea of categorising interest payments as defence expenses is outright absurd. While soldiers can protect our nation, interest rates certainly cannot,” said Info Gädechens, an MP for the opposition centre-Right CDU party.
A spokesperson for the defence ministry told The Telegraph the move was in line with Nato standards.
“In addition to the entire defence budget… defence expenditure according to Nato criteria can sometimes also include expenditure on other individual plans,” such as spending by foreign and finance ministries, the spokesperson said.
Berlin will also include €4 billion of military assistance provided to Ukraine in its defence spending figures.
The defence ministry said that “expenditures for the capacity building of partner states in the areas of security, defence, and stabilisation” can legitimately be included in the overall spending figure handed to Nato.

Failed to hit goal​

Germany has repeatedly failed to hit Nato’s defence spending goal in recent years, aggravating other allies, most notably the United States.
Donald Trump, the former US president, regularly berated Berlin over its defence commitments while in office.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, Mr Scholz pledged to heavily reinvest in Germany’s military.
Speaking to the German parliament three days after the war began, he promised to hit the Nato spending target “year after year”, a pledge he repeated at the alliance’s summit in Vilnius last month.
Caught flat-footed by the invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s top generals admitted last February that the country’s army was “naked” in the face of any potential invasion.
Since then, Berlin has made a stuttering attempt to buy in modern equipment, most recently spending £2.75 billion on Israel’s Arrow-3 missile-defence system.

 

[Kirkhill]

Keep Trudeau and you get Germany, China, the WEF and Net Zero.

 

[Kirkhill]

Good read/watch material on how the war in the information space is conducted

I got stuck on this video and in particular on the reference to this 2015 poll by Gallup asking the simple question "Would you fight for your country?"

WIN/Gallup International’s Global Survey Shows Three in Five Willing to Fight for Their Country

A global survey from WIN/Gallup International, the world’s leading association in market research and polling shows that 61% of those polled across 64 countries would be willing to fight for their country, while 27% would not. However, there are significant differences by region. Willingness to...

www.gallup-international.bg

Here's the European map of those results.

Percentage of Europeans Who Are Willing To Fight A War For Their...

Map created by reddit user Spartharios The map above shows the percentage of residents in various European countries who are willing to fight and go to war for their country. Full results below: From high to low, these are the percentages by country: 74% - Finland. 73% - Turkey. 62% - Ukraine...

brilliantmaps.com

Canadians join most of Western Europe, including the Brits and the French, as well as the Aussies, in the 25 to 30% range. That largely explains why politicians don't vote for Defence.

From a Geopolitics standpoint it is interesting to note that Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands are grouped together at the low end of the spectrum. That is one of the reasons that I suspect the Netherlands involvement with the Joint Expeditionary Force is more of a political gambit than an actual military commitment and is tied exclusively to the association of the Netherlands Marine Corps and the Royal Marines. A reminder that JEF is the organization exploited by Boris Johnson to coalesce support for Ukraine and through which he offered UK's nuclear umbrella to the Swedes and the Finns while NATO debated what to do. It includes, as well as the UK (27%) and the Netherlands (15%), Iceland (26%), Norway (??), Denmark (37%), Sweden (55%), Finland (74%), Estonia (??), Latvia (41%) and Lithuania (??). It is also tied by treaty to Poland (47%) and Ukraine (62%).

The US comes in at 44% not too dissimilar to Denmark but a lot less "patriotic" than Sweden and Finland - neutral warriors.
Ireland and Switzerland at 38 and 39% are both more patriotically warlike than Canadians.

This, of course, is all based on a 2015 poll. After the Euromaidan in Ukraine in 2013 but before the recent pleasantries. Russia had already invaded Chechnya and Georgia and the Swedes were already starting to take notice and update their intelligence assessments.

It would be interesting to see what the current numbers are but I suspect that the Canadian numbers wouldn't be radically different. Some Canadians are intensely engaged and following events closely but judging from anecdotal evidence of conversations and scanning headlines it seems to me that most Canadians are just hoping that this won't interfere with the Stanley Cup.

 

[FJAG]

Germany, Italy and Japan aren't hard to understand. That's what happens when you beat militarism out of and pacifism into someone with a stick after WW2. It's become hard wired into their culture.

Even the remaining 20 to 30% bunch in the western world are understandable as a residual of the Vietnam anti-war rhetoric that swept through in the Sixties and Seventies. Canada stood smugly apart from what was going on south of us for those decades. It changed our Fifties attitude to defence dramatically and permanently. We still falsely believe we have a peacekeeping culture and not a warfighting culture based on our own internal propaganda.

 

[Brad Sallows]

"Would you fight for your country" is pretty close to "Is your country worth fighting for".

One obvious and elegantly simple explanation is that the kind of people who would answer a call to arms are not interested in propping up the people who are constantly picking cultural fights, except in an obviously existential and just cause like a defensive war against Nazi Germany.

 

[FormerHorseGuard]

Canadian governments are masters of playing darts, they throw darts at the board and if the dart sticks they decide that is the project they are going to work on.

But every government project takes longer than the government is in power for and the new government throws a new dart at the board and the old dart falls to the floor.

Navy rebuild, takes more than 1 government term to build a ship, so they know they are not going be there to cut the ribbon, or break the bottle on the bow of the ship as it hits the water. So they never really get around to deciding on what they are going to do.

Airforce, they buy jet once every other generation, helicopters they last even longer. Unless it is a jet the VIP and government is going to fly on, we will wait it out till nothing is left and then add a mid life rebuild and update to get thru another term in office.

Army, need a handgun, ( that is too dangerous and a political hot potato, civilians cannot be trusted to own one so we cannot be seen buying them for a group of young kids ( remember jr officers get handguns ) who might need them when they go into war zones to further Canadian goodwill and political ambitions.


So if the Canadian Government wants to look good and look as if they increasing military spending they buy the kit that has no lead time required, no danger to the idea of Canada being a peaceful country to the world. Make sure the kit will not offend anyone, but have peacekeeping role and look good in media reports.

Such as trucks that cannot go to war ( but do not forget they said that the small green helicopters, the cougars, the grizzlies, the iltis this list could be endless ) when push came to shove the training equipment goes to war. Those trucks that were for internal country use will go to war and come back broken if they ship them back.

Send planes to a war zone but do not equip the aircraft with the right weapons after the Allies have the air superiority sew up, no air to ground weapons ( GW1 )

In my opinion, they will spend money for the CAF in the following places

1) new uniforms in a more friendly looking patterns to keep in line with the new personal grooming rules
2) new safety gear to make the troops stand out better when at home
3) more green friendly vehicles ( remember the propane issues of the 80s? they are coming back but this time it will be green power issues or lack of power issues)
4) make do with less fire power because that is for other countries to use, and not for use by Canadians
5) make a show of force but never make the show force go beyond a month of combat because we will be out of supplies
6) spend more money hiring ( i mean promoting more) generals to command units that do not have the troops to even a company or over sized platoon in the field.
7) forget aircraft, forget ships, forget tanks unless they are green, and have a smaller than humming bird sized carbon foot print

 

[Kirkhill]

In my opinion, they will spend money for the CAF in the following places

1) new uniforms in a more friendly looking patterns to keep in line with the new personal grooming rules
2) new safety gear to make the troops stand out better when at home

Got 1 and 2 sorted

 

[Czech_pivo]

Got 1 and 2 sorted

View attachment 79533

Sometimes the more and more everyone talks about current state and potential future state, the less I’m inclined to remain in Canada when I retire. I’d rather enjoy my remaining time on the planet living in a place more inline with my overall beliefs.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Mexico gives a lot of bang for buck, and contrary to what some believe is not everywhere a third world hole full of gangsters.

 

[ueo]

I've said before that providing for the CAF is a bit like fishing for big fish on a low test line. If you fight too hard the line breaks and the fish escapes. You just have to wait for the opportunity and take up any slack that the fish offers you. Right now we are being offered some slack. We should be reeling for all we are worth.

Just plain reelin'

 

[Quirky]

Sometimes the more and more everyone talks about current state and potential future state, the less I’m inclined to remain in Canada when I retire. I’d rather enjoy my remaining time on the planet living in a place more inline with my overall beliefs.

If you haven't made plans to get your assets out of Canada, then you aren't being responsible to your family.

 

[WestIsle]

September 6, 2023 – Defence Stories

Many of you will have heard by now about efforts underway by the Government of Canada to bring the growth of government spending back to a pre-pandemic path. This was announced in Budget 2023 [Chapter 6: Effective Government and a Fair Tax System | Budget 2023], and is an important – and necessary – initiative, to ensure that Canadians’ tax dollars are being used efficiently.

As one of the largest federal departments, National Defence has an important role to play in effective and efficient government operations. Early efforts are now underway across the Defence Team to address our part in this initiative by developing spending reduction options. Assistant Deputy Minister (Finance) is leading this exercise in consultation with Level 1 organizations.

Reductions related to operating expenditures will be phased in over three years and are not expected to result in job losses outside of normal attrition, or reallocation, ensuring that our people’s work is focused on high-priority initiatives. Similarly, reductions identified related to professional services and travel will have no impact on employment levels. The extent of impact is yet to be confirmed.

This exercise is distinct from the Defence Policy Update process announced in Budget 2022 [Chapter 5: Canada’s Leadership in the World | Budget 2022], which is still underway.

Expenditure reviews are an essential part of responsible management, and we all have a role to play in finding ways to deliver the best results for Canadians. This will entail hard decisions. However, this is not about doing more with less or arbitrary cost-cutting. It is about ensuring the defence budget is directed toward top defence and government priorities; and in an increasingly dangerous world, ensuring this will not negatively impact the ability of the CAF to perform its functions — keeping Canadians safe and contributing to international security.

For this, we are counting on your support as we move forward this fall with priorities for review.

We are committed to communicating clearly and regularly on the progress and scope of this important work.

Bill Matthews Deputy Minister

General Wayne Eyre Chief of the Defence Staff