British Army Documentaries
Published 4 Nov 2021The fifth in the series, this episode features stories about the Grenadier Guards, the favourite tipple of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, and how the King’s Own Scottish Borderers made porridge palatable.
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March 15, 2022
In The Highest Tradition — Episode 5
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For military procurement blunders, “no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada”
Germany has announced that they will be purchasing US F-35 stealth fighters as part of their re-armament program. My favourite headline on this was over at Blazing Cat Fur: “Germany To Buy 35 Lockheed F-35 Fighter Jets From U.S. Amid Ukraine Crisis … Canada Will Buy Cool ‘Fighter Jet Stickers’ With Eco-Friendly Adhesive”
On a more serious tone — but with sadly the same basic message — Mitch Heimpel looks at the multi-generational rolling catastrophe that is Canadian military procurement since the unification of the forces in 1968:
Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army since WW2. When I was in the reserves, we were told this was due for replacement in a few years. I was in the reserves from 1976-1980. It still hasn’t been replaced.
To say we have a checkered history with military procurement, fails to capture exactly how bad it is. Our political leadership has failed us continually over the course of half a century. No party has done it well. Some have done it better than others. But no one can claim any kind of bragging rights.
Fighter jet procurement in this country is so fraught it once caused the birth of a new political party. Trying to buy helicopters helped bring down a government. We only successfully bought those helicopters after they [the old helicopters] became a greater danger to the personnel manning them than they were to any potential adversary. We have been running a procurement for the next generation of fighter jets for an entire generation. Even Yes, Minister writers would have given up on something that absurd.
Our submarine fleet seems to be almost permanently in dry dock. Our most recent ship procurement resulted in the absolutely monstrous prosecution of one of the country’s most accomplished military leaders.
And we just issued a revised bid to finally replace our Second World War-era pistols … last week.
Just cataloguing that level of incompetence is exhausting. No leader or party looks good. The civil service, as the one constant through all these cartoonish blunders, surely has to wear some of this, too. The fact that we seem to repeat the same mistakes can, at least in part, be attributed to a significant institutional memory failure on the part of the people trusted with having the institutional memory.
Now, it is worth noting in fairness that no nation has an easy time with large scale military procurement. Ask the Americans about the development of the V-22 sometime. But, still, no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada.
I’m not a hardware expert. I can’t tell you which pistol we should buy. There’s also genuine policy questions here that need to be settled — I don’t know whether we should focus on the navy because we’re an Arctic nation, or the air force because it allows us to participate more readily in allied force projection exercises — like, say, no-fly zones? The necessary mix for Canada is no doubt some of both, and it’s fine to have disagreements between parties on what the right mix is.
But setting that aside, I want to talk about what it would take politically, to get us to start taking procurement seriously — just a few basic rules that any government would need to follow to procure anything that they chose was important for Canada to have.
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FN FNC: The Belgian 5.56mm NATO Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Nov 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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The FNC (Fabrique Nationale Carabine) was FN’s followup to the unsuccessful CAL rifle. Chambered for the newly-adopted 5.56mm NATO cartridge, the FNC uses a long stroke gas piston system very reminiscent of the AK, combined with a stamped upper and milled aluminum lower. After about 5 years of development, the FNC was put on the market in 1980, and was quickly purchased by Indonesia, along with a license for domestic production as the Pindad SS-1. It would also be adopted by Sweden as the AK-5 (minus the 3-round burst functionality) and Belgium. About 6,000 semiautomatic sporting models were imported into the US. A number of those, including this one, were legally registered as transferrable machine guns before 1986.
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QotD: Pecan pie
The pecan pie is the highest expression of the pie-making art, and it is uncomfortable when well-meaning people tout silly and pale reflections of pie as somehow superior.
I won’t even discuss the lowly pumpkin pie, which reminds me of nothing more than the goo that seeps out of a broken sewage pipe or the remains of the vegetable bin after a 10-day blackout.
You apple pie people may have a point, but really, the best part of any apple pie is the crust, so just climb down off that high horse!
Blueberry you say? Yes, I will grant the glory of a well-made blueberry pie, but on the second day it is a soggy mess, while my pecan pie is a wonderful accompaniment to a great cup of coffee. And bacon. But that doesn’t even have to be said.
Key lime and Boston cream and … um … other pies are certainly good eating, but for sheer pie power and authority there is nothing quite like American pecan pie served after a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner.
[Here’s my go-to recipe … probably from Cooks Illustrated, but I don’t remember]
CBD, “Food Thread: Family, Friends And Pecan Pie … But Mostly Pecan Pie … And Family And Friends!”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2021-11-21.
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