Quotulatiousness

July 4, 2012

Canada’s new Cyclone helicopters — already 4 years late — may not arrive for another 5 years

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

Greg Weston reports for CBC News:

Canada’s long-promised fleet of new Sikorsky naval helicopters, already four years late and $300 million over budget, likely won’t be delivered and ready for combat for up to another five years, informed industry sources tell CBC News.

Last month, Connecticut-based Sikorsky missed its latest contract deadline to finish delivering 28 sleek, state-of-the-art Cyclone maritime helicopters to replace Canada’s aged fleet of increasingly unreliable Sea Kings, now nearing 50 years old.

In fact, delivery of the new choppers hasn’t even started.

[. . .]

As of last month, Sikorsky had only provided a couple of prototypes that have no military mission systems, and aren’t certified to fly over water or at night.

The two helicopters apparently spend most of their time on the tarmac at Shearwater Heliport at CFB Halifax as “training aids” for ground mechanics.

The machines are so incomplete the Canadian government refuses to accept them as an official delivery of anything in the contract.

What is it about helicopters in particular that makes it so difficult and so expensive for the Canadian government to acquire? Here’s the sad chronology:

  • In 1963, the CH-124 Sea King helicopter (a variant of the US Navy S-61 model) entered service with the Royal Canadian Navy.
  • In 1983, the Trudeau government started a process to replace the Sea Kings. That process never got far enough for a replacement helicopter to be ordered.
  • In 1985, the Mulroney government started a new process to find a replacement for the Sea Kings.
  • In 1992, the Mulroney government placed an order for 50 EH-101 Cormorant helicopters (for both naval and search-and-rescue operations).
  • In 1993, the Campbell government reduced the order from 50 to 43, theoretically saving $1.4B.
  • In 1993, the new Chrétien government cancelled the “Cadillac” helicopters as being far too expensive and started a new process to identify the right helicopters to buy. The government had to pay nearly $500 million in cancellation penalties.
  • In 1998, having split the plan into separate orders for naval and SAR helicopters, the government ended up buying 15 Cormorant SAR helicopters anyway — and the per-unit prices had risen in the intervening time.
  • In 2004, the Martin government placed an order with Sikorsky for 28 CH-148 Cyclone helicopters to be delivered starting in 2008 (after very carefully arranging the specifications to exclude the Cormorant from the competition).
  • Now, in 2012, we may still have another five years to wait for the delivery of the Cyclones.

Update: In the National Post, Kelly McParland tries to draw some useful conclusions from the longest-running Canadian comedy act:

If there is a solution to this farce it’s not easily identified. Canada desperately needs the helicopters and it is far too late to return once again to the drawing board. The blame is so widespread that politicians barely bother to bestir themselves to try: if Jean Chretien’s government hadn’t maliciously cancelled Brian Mulroney’s original 1992 purchase, a full decade might have been cut from the script, but there is no guarantee other mishaps wouldn’t have occurred. Ottawa’s only option now is to hound Connecticut-based Sikorsky relentlessly and mercilessly, recover every cent possible for its repeated failure to live up to its promises, and accept nothing less than full compliance with its contracted responsibilities.

The greater lesson lies in the nether world that surrounds military procurement. It’s a world where no promise can be accepted as reliable, no cost guarantee assumed to be binding, no contract treated as worth the paper it’s written on. The federal Conservatives should think long and hard on the Sea King saga as they push ever deeper into their own purchase of new fighter jets, whether the F-35 or otherwise. Prime Minister Stephen Harper would be well-advised to abandon his usual aggressive approach and tread warily. The uncertain costs, the shifting due dates, the obdurate insistence of the military mandarins on having their way, the determined stonewalling of the politicians : it has all the identifying markings of a Sea King re-make.

Update the second: On Facebook, Damian Brooks suggests that Kelly McParland is only able to see the humour because he hasn’t been close enough to the situation: “I’d be curious to know if McParland’s ever flown in one of our Sea Kings, with tranny fluid dripping down the fuselage, practicing autorotations ad nauseum (literally). I suspect not. If he had, I have a feeling he’d find the situation much more disgraceful and much less funny.” He also posted a link to this:

ACTA rejected decisively by European Parliament

Filed under: Europe, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Apparently even the insulated, protected European Parliament can be moved if enough people are actively against something — in this case it was the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Michael Geist explains:

When ACTA was formally signed by most participants in October 2011 in Tokyo, few would have anticipated that less than a year later, the treaty would face massive public protests and abandonment by leading countries. But with tens of thousands taking to the streets in Europe earlier this year, ACTA became the poster child for secretive, one-sided IP agreements that do not reflect the views and hopes of the broader public. This morning, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly against the agreement, effectively killing ACTA within the EU. The vote was 478 against, 39 in favour, with 165 abstentions. This is a remarkable development that was virtually unthinkable even a year ago. Much credit goes to the thousands of Europeans who spoke out against ACTA and to the Members of the European Parliament who withstood enormous political pressure to vote against the deal.

The European developments have had a ripple effect, with the recent Australian parliamentary committee recommendation to delay ACTA ratification and the mounting opposition around the world. ACTA is not yet dead — it may still eke out the necessary six ratifications in a year or two for it to take effect — but it is badly damaged and will seemingly never achieve the goals of its supporters as a model for other countries to adopt and to emerge as a new global standard for IP enforcement. That said, ACTA supporters will not take today’s decision as the final verdict. In the coming weeks and months, we can expect new efforts to revive the agreement within Europe and to find alternative means to implement its provisions. That suggests the fight will continue, but for today, it is worth celebrating how the seemingly impossible — stopping a one-sided, secretly negotiated global IP agreement — became possible.

This has been referred to as the biggest parliamentary defeat ever for a European Commission initiative. In theory, the ACTA treaty cannot be enacted into EU law without being approved by the European Parliament (although, as we’ve seen before, the EU is adept at getting around minor inconveniences like referenda and recalcitrant national governments).

British banks are “a cossetted, subsidised industry with captive consumers”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

If any industry has more than its fair share of “too big to fail” wards of the state, it’s the banking sector. Allister Heath in the Telegraph:

There is a horrendous problem, certainly, and urgent reform is required. But the ailment has been fundamentally misdiagnosed: banking has become a ward of the state, a cossetted, subsidised industry with captive consumers, and it is that which has crippled it. We have been there before, in other sectors, and the medicine is always the same. This may come as a shock, but we need more capitalism in banking, not less.

Banks need to be allowed to go bust, like every other private company. It was a disgrace that taxpayers were called upon to bail out some of the City’s grandest names. This must never happen again. The reason capitalism works so well, whenever it is tried properly, is that the principle at its heart — profit and loss — is the toughest of disciplines and the best of motivators. It is more ruthless than anything regulators, however clever, could ever dream up. It allows two conflicting emotions, greed and fear, to balance one another out. Shareholders, creditors and bosses want to make money — but they know that a step too far might entail ruin.

That, at least, is how it works for much of UK Plc — but no longer in banking, where profits have been privatised and losses nationalised. It is an obscene perversion of capitalism. Forget the nonsense about “light touch” regulation: the problem is that the fear of failure ceased to exist. Market discipline was replaced by extreme laxity.

There was no longer much need for prudence, proper capital buffers or strict internal controls: the taxpayer was ready to pick up the bill if anything went wrong, while incompetent regulators signed everything off. The Labour government which introduced this mad system wasn’t deliberately seeking to subsidise risk: it merely made a terrible mistake, though with the politically useful side effect of reducing the cost of credit and increasing its availability. The real blunder was that the Financial Services Authority had no plan to cope with a bank going bust. It simply assumed failure would never happen. After all, how could it? Gordon Brown had abolished booms and busts.

US military pay has more than kept up with civilian payscales

Filed under: Economics, Government, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:07

Mike Riggs has the details:

In other words, it’s not *just* teachers, cops, firefighters, and the bulk of civil federal employees who are riding high on the hog. Tom Philpott at Military.com reports:

    As private sector salaries flattened over the last decade, military pay climbed steadily, enough so that by 2009 pay and allowances for enlisted members exceeded the pay of 90 percent of private sector workers of similar age and education level.

    That’s one of the more significant findings of the 11th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation report released last week, given its potential to impact compensation decisions by the Department of Defense and Congress as they struggle to control military personnel costs.

Unlike previous generations, for whom military pay was almost a joke compared to civilian payroll, modern western military pay has been catching up to (or even exceeding) equivalent civilian jobs. When I joined the reserves in the mid-1970’s, the pay was actually quite good: better than minimum wage — the drawback was that the Canadian Forces’ budget was so tight that we were strictly limited to the number of paid training days. While that was a drawback for enlisted troops, it was worse for our senior NCOs and officers: they were working without pay for months at a time.

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