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....

 

[ueo]

Businesses wouldn't give people Lada funding then demand Lambourghini performance (without quickly failing as a business).



When you have $300M+ of work for a refit of known work, and get a lot less then that, you can't expect no operational impact. That's per ship btw (which is insane, but happens when you consistently underfund dockings for 30 years).

For context, they are doing about 4-5 times as much known work compared to the 280s at end of life at 40ish years at the 25-30 year mark, and get much more arising work, on a strictly hourly work LOE basis (which is about the best apples to apples comparison you can make).

The GoC wants us to do all these deployments, then give us the money (and time) to build up to that. Or don't massively ratchet up RCN ops tempo (when it was already unsustainable). Can't do both.

Suck/Blow principle- often forgotten or never learned by highers

 

[MilEME09]

Except the RCN cannot and knows they cannot employ a dozen FFH in the lead up to CSC. A rational organization would move to 8-9 platforms and divest the rest, saving hundreds of millions along the way.

According to the CDS we can't even continue to maintain the 3 ships on the pacific we have. Media should be making a bigger deal of that, we can't up OP tempo, turn Latvia into a brigade, and cut budget without effecting everything

 

[Kirkhill]

According to the CDS we can't even continue to maintain the 3 ships on the pacific we have. Media should be making a bigger deal of that, we can't up OP tempo, turn Latvia into a brigade, and cut budget without effecting everything

 

[Furniture]

Except the RCN cannot and knows they cannot employ a dozen FFH in the lead up to CSC. A rational organization would move to 8-9 platforms and divest the rest, saving hundreds of millions along the way.

If you don't plan for the ships now, when the time comes that you need them, you won't have them. We should have learned that lesson in WWI and WWII, but Canada is a slow learner.

 

[Quirky]

According to the CDS we can't even continue to maintain the 3 ships on the pacific we have. Media should be making a bigger deal of that, we can't up OP tempo, turn Latvia into a brigade, and cut budget without effecting everything

 

[dimsum]

According to the CDS we can't even continue to maintain the 3 ships on the pacific we have. Media should be making a bigger deal of that, we can't up OP tempo, turn Latvia into a brigade, and cut budget without effecting everything

So, Privateering and Letters of Marque then?

 

[daftandbarmy]

So, Privateering and Letters of Marque then?

 

[dapaterson]

If you don't plan for the ships now, when the time comes that you need them, you won't have them. We should have learned that lesson in WWI and WWII, but Canada is a slow learner.

I am not saying to shrink the CSC buy; I am saying that the RCN will not be in a position to crew and operate sufficient FFH to need a dozen hulls between now and when CSC #1 hits the water.

 

[Furniture]

I am not saying to shrink the CSC buy; I am saying that the RCN will not be in a position to crew and operate sufficient FFH to need a dozen hulls between now and when CSC #1 hits the water.

Understood.

Divesting a few of the most worn out CPFs makes too much sense.

 

[Kirkhill]

I am not saying to shrink the CSC buy; I am saying that the RCN will not be in a position to crew and operate sufficient FFH to need a dozen hulls between now and when CSC #1 hits the water.

Understood.

Divesting a few of the most worn out CPFs makes too much sense.

And won't the RCN have 15 years or more to rebuild its man-power? It is going to take that long to get all the CSCs into the fleet.

 

[daftandbarmy]

And won't the RCN have 15 years or more to rebuild its person man-power? It is going to take that long to get all the CSCs into the fleet.

Dude, srsly?

 

[Navy_Pete]

And won't the RCN have 15 years or more to rebuild its man-power? It is going to take that long to get all the CSCs into the fleet.

Given that we continue to lose people faster then we can recruit them, and then can't train/retain enough, and have been trending that way for 20 years, is that reasonable?

We also need to totally overhaul our combat operator/CSE tech trades to operate AEGIS, and we haven't started that yet either. It has taken 4 years now to figure out that we need HTs back and still in the task analysis phase of things. We'll have lost effectively a generation of HTs before any forecasted training starts there, and that's from something where we should just be dusting off some QSPs.

Training and personnel things take a really long time, especially when you prioritize it after most other things. You can't 'reconstitute' when you are overextending the RCN resources to just keep up with ops, and this with some creative accounting like sending MCDVs on a NATO commitment, sending east coast ships to the Pacific deployments, and looking at AOPs for a mediterranean tour.

 

[QV]

View attachment 81306

This meme is not accurate. Canada has slid backwards, not stayed the same.

 

[Navy_Pete]

I am not saying to shrink the CSC buy; I am saying that the RCN will not be in a position to crew and operate sufficient FFH to need a dozen hulls between now and when CSC #1 hits the water.

Fortunately that decision will be taken out of RCN hands when ships start to self-retire in the next 5-10 years or so. I don't think a lot of them will make it to the first CSC being delivered, let alone last until the 15th.

 

[dapaterson]

Fortunately that decision will be taken out of RCN hands when ships start to self-retire in the next 5-10 years or so. I don't think a lot of them will make it to the first CSC being delivered, let alone last until the 15th.

One-time one-way unforecast FFH to SSK conversion.

 

[Navy_Pete]

One-time one-way unforecast FFH to SSK conversion.

lol, without the 'K' part of the SSK I guess.

 

[dapaterson]

lol, without the 'K' part of the SSK I guess.

Nowhere do the references state that the "K" can't be self-directed

 

[FJAG]

If you don't plan for the ships now, when the time comes that you need them, you won't have them. We should have learned that lesson in WWI and WWII, but Canada is a slow learner.

"You go to war with the army you have ..."

The big difference is that in WW2 one could crank out a ship pretty quickly compared to today. On the other hand WW2 was over in a short six years. The Cold War is now in its 8th decade and heating up again.

It's the lulls in between - those periods when everyone calls for a peace dividend - that throws everything out of whack.

That and having playboy leaders and their imbecile advisors who haven't a clue as to how the world really functions and only concern themselves with the next election and not what's best for the country's security and prosperity.

 

[Navy_Pete]

"You go to war with the army you have ..."

The big difference is that in WW2 one could crank out a ship pretty quickly compared to today. On the other hand WW2 was over in a short six years. The Cold War is now in its 8th decade and heating up again.

It's the lulls in between - those periods when everyone calls for a peace dividend - that throws everything out of whack.

That and having playboy leaders and their imbecile advisors who haven't a clue as to how the world really functions and only concern themselves with the next election and not what's best for the country's security and prosperity.

The leap in technology is a huge difference here; our entire WW2 fleet could be wiped out by our current fleet, even in it's fairly sad state, and they wouldn't even see it coming for the most part. I think an army equivalent would be training a spear phalanx and marching them against a machine gun nest.

But the more complicated technology needs a lot more integration and set to work to build, and training to operate/maintain, so the lead time is longer.

Probably generally true for all the technological advances; sure the capability leaps are huge, but means you need to plan way ahead, and assuming we could do what we did in WW2 without considering the completely different context is probably a bad idea.

 

[Kirkhill]

"You go to war with the army you have ..."

The big difference is that in WW2 one could crank out a ship pretty quickly compared to today. On the other hand WW2 was over in a short six years. The Cold War is now in its 8th decade and heating up again.

It's the lulls in between - those periods when everyone calls for a peace dividend - that throws everything out of whack.

That and having playboy leaders and their imbecile advisors who haven't a clue as to how the world really functions and only concern themselves with the next election and not what's best for the country's security and prosperity.

IMO, the big difference between war and peace is that the peace time plans almost invariably fail to survive contact with the enemy. The forces a revised course of action and ultimately the new course of action is predicated on killing as many of the enemy as quickly as possible with the materials to hand.

World War II was won in large part by commercial whalers and concrete liberty ships. Pre-war designs were still on the slips on Sept 3 or were available in small numbers.... and were very expensive.

The Air Force went through something similar with the plywood wonder, the Mosquito. The Army lucked out with the Sten when the Thompson was too expensive and difficult to make.

....

The Ukrainians have been devising work-arounds at a high rate of knots seeking to kill as many Russians as possible. They have begged and borrowed as much as they can and have started to build new factories for conventional munitions and vehicles. But at they same time they, and the people that share their geo-political situation, like the Poles, the Turks, the Balts and, to an extent the Swedish led Scandinavians, have been aggressively pursuing "the other thing".

So far they have progressed from making cases of molotov cocktails to stymying the Russian advance, reversing about half of the incursion, chasing the Russian fleet out of Crimea and surviving for the best part of two years.

...

Whatever happens the solution is more likely to look like a whaler or a Mosquito than a cruiser or a Bolton Paul Defiant.