Polyus
Published 21 May 2023The Sea King was a legendary aircraft in the history of the Royal Canadian Navy. It filled the role of hunter and killer in the Cold War against Soviet submarines. By the mid-90s the situation had changed and their retirement seemed eminent. How naive. The process of finding a replacement for this workhorse would be an election promise by government after government for over 30 years. Its replacement, the CH-148 Cyclone, became operational in 2018. This allowed the 55 year old workhorses to finally retire.
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May 26, 2023
CH-124 Sea King; Legendary ASW helicopter and example of a deeply flawed defense procurement process
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May 4, 2023
Despite all the evidence, Canada’s official motto doesn’t translate as “we broke it”
In The Line, Justin Ling adds more to the towering pile of evidence that “Canada is broken”:
If The Line has an editorial position, it is probably thus: Everything is broken.
This newsletter, of course, comes at the idea more earnestly than, say, the leader of the Conservative party. When my friend Matt Gurney advances that proposition, it is a lament. When Pierre Poilievre does: It’s wishful thinking.
While citizens of this country can’t always agree on what, exactly, is busted in our country, or why, or who is responsible — we can all agree, I hope, that things in this country could use a tune-up, at the very least. Canadians, after all, are imbued with a cloying optimism. An insufferable belief that things can be fixed. It’s a good thing.
Lucky for us, we have plenty of words written about how to fix much of what ails us. Because we, as a country, have a compulsive need to inquire about those problems. Our national pastime isn’t hockey, it’s the royal commission.
And we’ve got a government in office that loves to study the nature of the problem. There’s good work, these days, for the special rapporteurs and retired judges amongst us. And if you’re a Canadian that loves a good public consultation, you must be run ragged.
Yet we also have a government in office that has a pathological inability to take advice. And this problem may help explain why it feels like we’re sliding backwards.
[…]
When the government tapped an expert panel to study the use of solitary confinement in Canada’s prisons — literally torture — Correctional Services Canada blocked them from doing their job, and the public safety minister ignored their cries for help and then let their contracts lapse. Thanks to some scrutiny, the government renewed the study, then ignored it when the numbers showed they were still torturing people. Oops!
The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians — a body Trudeau created — warned in 2019 that Ottawa wasn’t taking foreign interference seriously, particularly when it came to China. “In short, government responses were piecemeal, responding to specific instances of foreign interference but leaving unaddressed the many other areas where Canadian institutions and fundamental rights and freedoms continue to be undermined by hostile states.” Prescient!
One of the most absurd examples is the sexual misconduct crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces. When Trudeau came into office in 2015, he had an external review on his desk from Marie Deschamps. One good external review deserves another, so the Liberals ordered one from Louise Arbour in 2022. What she found was harrowing: “We have been here before. Little seems to change.” Not only had the government failed to implement the Deschamps report, it was still failing to live up to the recommendations from the 1997 Somalia Inquiry. Fuck!
[…]
At the very centre of this tootsie-pop is, surprise, elitism. This Liberal government, armed with its paper-thin mandate, is convinced that they — and only they — are the verifiers of good ideas. And we should be grateful for whatever decision they deign to make.
If they farm out an idea to the public service, and the idea doesn’t come back in the form they envisioned, no matter: Send out the McKinsey signal. For just a few million dollars, their crack team of subject matter non-experts can prepare a PowerPoint presentation laying out the exact policy the political staff wanted in the first place.
The Liberals take a similar approach to consulting with the unwashed masses. When the government consulted the public on their plan to police “online harms,” they published a “what we heard” report that was broadly supportive of their plan.
Can we see the submissions? Journalists and academics asked. No. Came the reply.
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April 27, 2023
Spending more on defence requires more than just turning on the financial taps
In The Line, Philippe Lagassé explains why just pouring more money into the Department of National Defence won’t automatically improve our defence capabilities:
Canadian defence spending is back in the news, thanks to an open letter urging the government to spend two per cent of GDP on the military and a leaked document suggesting Canada won’t hit that NATO target. Like ending the monarchy, defence spending is one of those issues that gets lots of attention once or twice a year, only to fade away before any serious discussion takes place. It’s unlikely that this time will be any different.
[…]
Even if the government wanted to greatly increase defence spending, though, it would have trouble spending that money effectively in the short term. While more money is needed over the long term, the Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have to first build up their capacity to spend a much larger budget. As they do so, however, our historical tendency to reduce defence expenditures after pivotal moments should always be kept in mind.
The DND and CAF are already straining to implement the capital equipment and infrastructure programs that were announced in the 2017 defence policy, Strong, Secure, Engaged. This reflects the fact that department’s capacity to manage procurements has to be built back up after decades of anemic capital spending. There aren’t enough people to move the programs that are currently planned, let alone new ones that could be added. Additional money could be funneled to existing projects, but that wouldn’t be enough to cause an increase to two per cent of GDP in the coming years. The capabilities Canada is currently buying will probably be far more expensive to maintain in the future than the government realizes, which strongly suggests that we do need to gradually get to that number, but this reinforces the need for caution and for managing expectations. If ministers insist that new money be attached to still more new capabilities, DND/CAF will not only have trouble acquiring them, but will be unable to afford them.
One could argue that DND/CAF could get around its capacity challenges by simply buying more equipment “off the shelf”. Instead of getting more people to tackle complex procurements and infrastructure projects, the defence department should focus on simpler acquisitions that require less management. It is important to note, though, that “off the shelf” procurements aren’t an obvious solution either — DND and the CAF don’t specify requirements for the hell of it. Many project requirements reflect the need to integrate new capabilities into the existing force, which is no small feat when mixing new and old technologies and operating from installations across a massive country. Projects that gravitate toward “off the shelf” solutions, moreover, can be challenged by competitors who contend that they can develop a new capability that better meets Canada’s needs. Bombardier‘s response to the government’s plan to buy Boeing’s P-8 Poseidon aircraft to fulfil the Canadian Multi-mission Aircraft (CMMA) project is a recent example.
Canada also tends to favour platforms that can perform various missions, which further complicates “off the shelf” procurements, since the equipment sitting on the shelf may not do everything the CAF needs it to do. Unless we want the CAF to be less capable, the way to address this issue is to acquire more platforms that do specific things. The problem is that the CAF would need more people to acquire, operate, and maintain these additional fleets, still more money to sustain this extra equipment, and yet more infrastructure to store it. This approach promises to exacerbate the very problems it’s supposed to solve.
April 24, 2023
Canada won’t meet its defence spending targets, and Trudeau is totally fine saying this to our allies, if not to the public
Canadian defence freeloading has been a hallmark of Canadian government policy since 1968, and as The Line confirms in their weekend dispatch, it should be no surprise that Justin Trudeau is okay continuing his father’s basic policies:
A story we’ve been watching in recent weeks was the remarkable leak of sensitive U.S. national security documents onto the dark web, and from there, widely across social media. A young member of the Air National Guard has been arrested and now faces serious charges. News reports suggest that he had access to classified material at work and began sharing it privately with a small group of online friends, apparently simply to impress and inform them, with no broader political agenda. Some of those friends, in turn, appear to have leaked the documents further afield. It took months before anyone noticed, but once picked up by several individuals with large followings — including some who are none-too-friendly to the U.S. and Western alliance — the story exploded and the full scope of the leak was finally discovered.
This is, for the U.S., a huge embarrassment and a diplomatic nightmare. For us, it was simply a fascinating story. This week, though, we suddenly had the coveted Canadian Angle: the Washington Post claims to have reviewed one of the leaked documents, apparently prepared for the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, that assesses Canada’s military serious military deficiencies, and also reports that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has privately told fellow NATO leaders that Canada isn’t going to hit NATO’s two-per-cent-of-GDP spending target.
To wit:
“Widespread defense shortfalls hinder Canadian capabilities,” the document says, “while straining partner relationships and alliance contributions.”
The assessment, which bears the seal of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Germany is concerned about whether the Canadian Armed Forces can continue to aid Ukraine while meeting its NATO pledges. Turkey is “disappointed” by the Canadian military’s “refusal” to support the transport of humanitarian aid after February’s deadly earthquake there, the document says, and Haiti is “frustrated” by Ottawa’s reluctance to lead a multinational security mission to that crisis-racked nation.
Your Line editors just sort of sighed heavily and rubbed their temples when they read that. It was, to us, nothing we didn’t know already. It was actually almost some kind of a relief to know that the PM will at least say privately what he won’t admit publicly: we aren’t living up to our pledge, and don’t plan to.
The Post says that Trudeau told NATO that there won’t be much more military spending in this country until the political situation here changes. We aren’t sure if he meant the priorities of the voters or the composition of our parliament. It doesn’t matter — it’s true either way. We are disappointed, but again, in no way surprised, to see Trudeau seeing this as an issue that he’ll just accept as-is, as opposed to attempting the hard work of showing actual leadership. He’s always been more about the easy path of demonstrative gestures instead of working hard to achieve real change.
But hey. In this, he has a lot of company. The Tories under Harper were marginally better on defence, but not nearly good enough. We have little faith — next to none, really — that PM Poilievre would do any better on defence. What bums us out the most about this issue is that we recognize and even agree that the choice to neglect defence and shovel those dollars instead into other, more popular vote-buying files does indeed make political sense. It’s what the voters want. We wish it were otherwise. We’ve spent big chunks of our careers trying to change their minds. Our record to date is one of total, utter failure.
Still, never say die, right? So we’ll make this point: we understand and accept the criticism sometimes made by Canadian commentators, who argue that the two-per-cent-of-GDP target is arbitrary and somewhat meaningless. We don’t entirely agree — targets are useful, and two per cent seems reasonable. But we’d be open to an argument that Canada could still punch above its weight in the alliance, even while spending less, if we could deliver key capabilities.
But … we can’t. We probably could, once upon a time, but we can’t even do that now. The air force is a mess. The navy is a mess. The army is a disaster, and couldn’t even send Nova Scotia all the help it asked for after Hurricane Fiona. Sending a token plane or ship on a quick foreign jaunt is symbolism, not above-weight-punching. And the symbolism taps us out.
So we have to pick what we’re doing here, fellow Canucks. We can meet the two-per-cent target. We can find other ways to meaningfully contribute. Or we can do neither of those things, and admit it, but only in private. Right now, alas, we’ve chosen that third option. We see no sign that’ll be changing any time soon.
Pierre Trudeau discovered that Canadian voters are all too willing to accept “peace dividends” in the form of shorting defence spending to goose non-military spending, and few prime ministers since then have done much more than gesture vaguely at changing it. Worse, it’s also quite accepted practice for defence procurement to prioritize “regional economic benefits” over any actual military requirement, which often means Canada buys fewer items (ships, planes, helicopters, tanks, trucks, etc.) at significantly higher prices as long as there’s a shiny new plant in Quebec or New Brunswick that can be the backdrop for government ministers and party MPs to use as a backdrop during the next election campaign. Military capability barely scrapes into the bottom of the priority list on the few occasions that the government feels obligated to spend new money on the Canadian Armed Forces.
Worse, every penny of “new” spending on the military gets announced many times over before any actual cheques are issued, which helps to disguise the fact that it’s the same thing all over again — sometimes for periods stretching out into years. The Canadian military has a well-deserved reputation for keeping ancient equipment up and running for years (or decades) after all our peer nations have moved on to newer kit. It’s a tribute to the technical and maintenance skills of the units involved, but it probably absorbs far more resources to do it over replacing the stuff when it begins to wear out, and it reduces the number available to, and the combat effectiveness of, the front-line troops when they are needed.
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April 10, 2023
It’s totally normal for a country to send troops overseas and neglect paying to feed them, right?
This week’s Dispatch post from The Line includes some commentary on the story I linked to last week from the Ottawa Citizen, reporting that Canadian soldiers sent to Poland to train Ukrainian troops are being stiffed by the Department of National Defence on their food bills:
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery
Here’s a totally normal story from a well-functioning country that isn’t at all broken: it turns out that processing per diems for a hundred or so folks is now beyond the capability of the federal government.
This story came to us courtesy the Ottawa Citizen, where David Pugliese reported that the company sized unit of Canadian military personnel operating in Poland has seen months worth of expense filings go unpaid. In some situations, a military unit sent abroad would include its own logistical support team, including cooks. In other situations, a relatively small unit sent to a place with functioning civilian infrastructure is told to feed themselves and keep the receipts for reimbursement. For our troops in Poland, there to provide logistical and training support to Ukrainian forces since October, the government went the latter route.
And that’s fine. Really. Frankly, we’re sure the troops are happier eating out at local places and enjoying delicious Polish food — really, it’s amazing — than getting three servings of military slop a day. The problem, though, as these poor troops discovered, is that the military and national defence bureaucracy no longer has the ability to process the expense payments. So these balances are just sitting on their personal credit cards. For months.
[…]
The mission began in October.
It seems almost pointless to add much actual insight and analysis here. This kind of dysfunction speaks for itself. We’ll limit ourselves to two comments: operational deployments are incredible stressful on military personnel and their families on the homefront. That’s uncontroversial, and unavoidable. That’s why military service is recognized as a sacrifice even during peacetime deployments. The basic bargain we make with our servicemembers is while they are serving their country abroad, their country will take care of their families at home. Leaving these families with high-interest credit-card balances they can’t pay off because the Canadian government is too broken to reimburse soldiers for expenses they were told to incur is an on-the-nose failure of Canada to honour its debt to the the military parents, spouses and children who have been, in effect, ordered to advance the Canadian government money to subsidize military deployments.
The second comment we’ll make, is that this isn’t just further evidence in support of the Canada-is-broken thesis — it’s a very specific kind of break. We’ve all known that Canadian governments, at all levels, have struggled to turn new policies into new programs. That’s not new. But even granting that failure, we’ve generally been able to keep doing the things we already do. There seemed to be enough residual muscle memory in our governments. Can we do new things? No, not really. But we’ll keep doing the stuff we already do.
This military fiasco is alarming because it’s a sign that our state-capacity issues are now extending into areas that previously worked. Not only are we struggling to do new things, we’re forgetting how to do things we used to be able to do. This goes beyond what our typical gripes about state capacity. This is something else. This is state atrophy, or rot.
Now that the public is paying attention, we suspect we’ll see some reasonably rapid progress. The government will throw bureaucrats and maybe consultants at the problem until it goes away. This is how they have reacted to similar issues: we hurled ground staff at airport delays until they cleared, and bureaucrats at passport offices until the backlogs eased.
But we have to ask why we now require exceptional redeployments of staff to maintain typical levels of service. And we don’t like the answers we can come up with. Ottawa has added tens of thousands of civil servants, at an annual cost of tens of billions, in recent years. During that time Ottawa has also sharply ramped up spending on consultants; the annual cost now surpasses $20 billion.
And yet.
What the hell is going on?
I’ve been saying for literally years now, the more the government tries to do the less well it does everything, and this fiasco is a perfect example of that sclerosis spreading further.
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April 6, 2023
Tikka T3x Arctic / Canadian Rangers C19 Rifle, 7.62 / .308 Win
Bloke on the Range
Published 29 Mar 2019Bloke unboxes and takes a first look at the Tikka T3x Arctic rifle, adopted as the C19 rifle for the Canadian Rangers in 7.62 NATO / .308 Winchester. Is the hype real? Oh yes! Yes, it really is!
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April 5, 2023
The modern Canadian Army – go on deployment to Poland, train Ukraine troops … and have to buy your own rations
Is it hard to figure out why the Canadian Armed Forces are having recruiting shortfalls when they can’t even manage to feed the troops they send overseas to train Ukrainian soldiers?
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery – https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/operations/military-operations/current-operations/operation-unifier.html
The Canadian soldiers are in Poland to train Ukrainian military personnel but since Canada did not send military cooks on the mission, the troops were told to eat at local restaurants.
But there is a massive backlog with the Canadian Forces reimbursing the soldiers for those costs, sending some of them thousands of dollars into debt. Their families contacted this newspaper to complain about the situation they say is causing financial stress at home.
After this newspaper [the Ottawa Citizen] inquired about the situation, the Canadian Forces confirmed Monday that there are problems with payments of per diems and the reimbursement of other expenses. The Canadian Forces is now promising to speed up the process.
“We apologize to the members and their families for the distress this has caused, and thank them for their patience,” said Capt. Nicolas Plourde-Fleury, spokesman for Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC). “We want them to know we have implemented measures to better support them moving forward.”
Approximately 100 Canadian military personnel are currently serving in Poland as part of a contingent to train Ukraine troops. The first arrived in October 2022 but the mission added more personnel in February and March.
As part of Operation Unifier, the Canadian soldiers are providing training in basic and advanced engineering skills, the use of explosives for demolition work, demining and skills relating to the use and operation of the Leopard 2 tanks in combat.
The Canadian Forces usually has its own cooks to provide troops with food. But in this situation, the Canadians initially received their meals from the Polish military. Later, the Canadian soldiers were told to eat in local restaurants and they would be reimbursed by the Canadian Forces.
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February 13, 2023
It’s open season for balloons over North America
In The Line, yet another incursion into NORAD air space, and no, this isn’t a re-post from last week:
Holy jumpin’ Jeepers, folks, we’ve got more balloons!
On Friday, the Americans shot down another unidentified flying object — gulp — off the coast of Alaska. By Saturday, NORAD was reporting yet another one, this time over Canadian territory. NORAD jets scrambled, and an American F-22 destroyed the object over Yukon. Canadian military teams are now en route to recover the wreck and find out what the hell we are shooting at.
This was an exciting enough little pick-me-up on Saturday, but it wasn’t done. Later that night, another air defence emergency was declared over Montana, and American F-15 jets were scrambled out of Oregon to intercept an object that had been detected on radar. They were not able to find anything, and as of press time, NORAD has said only that they will continue to monitor the situation.
A few points we’d make about a truly bizarre series of stories.
The first is that there’s nothing wrong or particularly embarrassing about an American plane defending Canadian air space. NORAD is a joint bi-national command. Missions are tasked to the first available aircraft. That might sometimes mean a Canadian jet defending U.S. territory. It’s happened! On Saturday, the object was closer to American bases in Alaska than the nearest CF-18 base in Alberta. There probably is a conversation worth having about whether Canada should maintain a small alert force of jets further north, better able to respond in the future. That’s expensive and logistically complicated, but may still be worth considering. For now, the system functioned as intended. So we say, quite sincerely, thanks, America. We appreciate the help.
That being said, we do think this is a useful reminder that the long and repeated delays by Canada to both replace the aging CF-18 jets and modernize NORAD with new sensors and capabilities were reckless and dumb. It was obvious that the CF-18s needed replacing when Stephen Harper took office, but we only got that underway in recent months. NORAD, for its part, functions well as an institution but needs upgraded technology. That project also should have begun many years ago. In both cases, we delayed because we didn’t want to spend the money and because defence projects in this country are almost always politically fraught. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the weird series of aerial intruders is a useful reminder that neglecting your own defences is never a good idea. We are realists about Canada’s ability to field a massive military, but our geography, in so many ways a blessing, does impose a few costs back on us. It’s not easy to patrol and police such massive territories, especially with a relatively small and concentrated population. But we have to do it. It’s what being a country means. Too often, we haven’t. We hope that changes. With the NORAD modernization announced and the F-35s ordered, perhaps we’re finally making right some of these failures. We hope so. But we are jaded, friends. We admit that.
Our final point is an appeal to calm. We don’t really know what the hell is happening with all these aerial intruders either, but there could easily be a pretty mundane explanation. Radar sets have programmable software filters that are intended to avoid cluttering up the scopes with too much information. Without these filters, clouds, snow storms and birds can cause returns that may look like planes and missiles. One way of filtering out such clutter is by establishing a minimum speed for flagging an object. Balloons are likely normally below that minimum. Your Line editors suspect that part of what is happening right now is that we’ve adjusted those filters, and are suddenly seeing things that were already there all along.
Is that better, or worse? We don’t know. We can make that argument either way. In any case, that may be what’s happening.
Or hell, maybe it’s aliens, and Canada and the U.S. just declared war on a more sophisticated race that travelled across the vastness of the stars only to end their journey by being murdered by Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. We doubt it, to be honest. But it’s been a weird few years already, no?
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December 22, 2022
It may have taken most of the year, but Canada finally figured out its Ukraine position
In The Line, Andrew Potter theorizes that the Canadian government finally “got it right” on Ukraine, but only after having exhausted all the other possibilities:
Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery.
When Russia started massing troops on the border in Ukraine this time last year, Canada was one of the first Western countries to close its embassy in Kyiv, moving everyone to Lviv on February 12. Hours after Russia launched its illegal, insane, nihilistic, genocidal full invasion of Ukraine on February 24, all non-Ukrainian employees of our embassy scooted across the border into Poland.
For months after the invasion, that highly risk-averse attitude infected every aspect of Canada’s approach to helping Ukraine. Whether it was diplomacy (hesitant), military aid (slow and limited), financial support (inadequate) or straight-up moral fortitude (lacking), the Trudeau government made it clear that it would do the least amount necessary, while taking the most credit possible, in supporting Ukraine.
[…]
The weird thing about Canada’s foot-draggy-as-she-goes approach to helping Ukraine is how little sense it made politically, for both domestic and international audiences. Canada has one of the largest Ukrainian diaspora populations in the world. We were the first Western country to recognize Ukrainian independence in 1991. The deputy prime minister of Canada is half Ukrainian and has been a loud supporter of the country for years. Privately and publicly, our allies were pleading for us to do more.
Who knows what it was that finally shook some sense into the Trudeau government. Maybe it was Freeland, maybe it was a call from Uncle Joe Biden, maybe it was just a sense in the PMO that, having exhausted all other options, the only thing left to do was the right thing. Whatever it was, over the last three or four months, Canada is finally punching its weight on the global stage on the Ukraine file. In particular, we seem to have finally figured out that the best way to help is to provide the sorts of support that draws on our strengths.
So for example, while the handful of M777 howitzers we sent were certainly useful (and the ammunition we’re continuing to supply will be well spent) we’re never going to compete with the Americans or Brits when it comes to heavy arms supplies. That’s why, back in October, it was probably more helpful for us to send 400,000 pieces of winter gear and to provide a few million dollars worth of satellite communications to the Ukrainians through Telesat. And it was great to see Canada re-engage with its training commitments to the Ukrainian armed forces through the deployment of 40 combat engineers to train Ukrainian sappers in Poland, to complement our ongoing training of recruits in the U.K.
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December 17, 2022
Canada’s consciously anemic foreign and military policies
In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why Canada consistently fails to “punch above their weight” in foreign and military matters and that it’s not at all accidental:
Canadian politicians have an inputs problem. Maybe that’s actually the wrong way to describe it — the problem is with the outputs. But it’s the inputs they love talking about.
If that all sounds a little vague, maybe this sounds familiar: “Hey there, citizen. Alarmed about Troubling Issue X? Well, don’t worry. We’re pledging $300 million over the next six years to Troubling Issue X. Oh, and Annoying Irritant Y? We’re announcing a task force to report back on that.”
Does Troubling Issue X get solved? Does Annoying Irritant Y get less annoying and irritating? Eh. We probably don’t collect enough stats to even know. The purpose of the announcement isn’t to solve the problem. It’s to announce something and hope people stop paying attention.
Canadian politicians — especially the current federal government — are notorious for announcing the same “new thing” in as many ways and in as many different contexts as they can. They get several hundred dollars of positive press coverage for every actual dollar spent on whatever the announced spending is supposed to be devoted toward. If they can recycle announcements from months past into a new set of announcements, you’re pretty much guaranteed they’ll do it. Announcing spending is, one must assume, what gets people to cast their votes for the party announcing the spending.
A lot of what looks like policy failure in Canadian foreign and military affairs only looks like a failure when you forget that accomplishing something wasn’t the point. Being photographed and videotaped saying you’ll accomplish something was the point. And the announcement itself accomplishes that!
This was true even before the Trudeau government started handing out bushel baskets of money to various Canadian newspapers, TV networks, magazines, and other legacy media entities. What was once merely praise is now bought sychophancy from the (literally) paid media.
On the military side of things, the Canadian Armed Forces are an organization the government grudgingly funds, but only enough to look good for the self-same media:
It’s not that Canada accomplishes nothing on the world stage. We accomplish things. Sometimes we even play an outsized role — Canada did, for instance, perform well and above expectations in Kandahar. The odd exception aside, though, when it comes to foreign policy generally and especially with defence policy, successive Canadian governments have set a very clear target: we will do, technically, more than nothing. We won’t often do much more than that. But we’ll do enough to not get kicked out of the club of allied nations.
Why do we want to be in the club? Not because we feel any sense of duty or obligation to lead and take on any real burden. But because being in the club makes us safer, and it would, after all, be embarrassing to get kicked out.
It’s important to remember that Canada is, by any standard, a rich country. We could be an actual force for good and stability on the world stage if we wanted to. We could build a bigger fleet and patrol more places, more often — we’d be welcome! We could have a bigger army and lead more peacekeeping missions, or contribute more to NATO. A bigger air force, likewise, could contribute more to our allies, especially in Europe in these unsettled times. In a parallel universe where we did these things, we’d then be able to say with a straight face that the purpose of Canada’s navy was contributing to the safety and security of the seas, the purpose of our army was to assist allies and provide peacekeepers to help end international crises, and the purpose of our air force was to project power and bring support to threatened allies.
In the world we actually live in, though, the purpose of the navy is to technically have a navy that technically does things, the purpose of the army is to technically have an army that technically does things, and the purpose of the air force … you see where this is going, right?
Our navy does things! It shows up places, and patrols areas. But only as much as necessary to technically tick that box. The army is in much the same condition; with a growing number of domestic commitments sapping its strength and budget, even its ability to assist with disasters at home is largely maxed out, but we send a few hundred soldiers here and there, thereby allowing ourselves to proclaim that we’ve … sent soldiers somewhere. The air force, as was just reported this week, can’t even really do even that much this year. The exhausted force is skipping the very modest — a half-dozen fighter jets — annual mission to Europe. The air force is just too burnt out to sustain even that tiny mission.
This is a big and growing problem. Canada, again, is rich enough to make a difference in global security affairs, if we chose to make different choices with how we spend our money. We have made the opposite choice. We field just enough of a military to be able to make just enough difference to avoid being accused of being total deadbeats, and no more.
Can it fight? Eh, maybe a bit. Can it make a difference? Depends how you define “difference”, I guess. Does it make the world and our allies safer? In a way? Can it keep Canadians safe at home? Sort of.
This isn’t a failure of our policy. This is our policy. We show up with as little as possible for as brief a time as possible, but gosh, do we ever talk about the showing up.
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December 9, 2022
Canada’s “historic” shift toward the Indo-Pacific is … more marketing than strategy
In The Line, retired Canadian Lieutenant General Mike Day distills down all the airy phrases to see just what the Canadian government is actually going to do in the Indo-Pacific as opposed to merely talking about it:
“Red circle/oval roughly depicts the Indian Ocean region. Blue circle/oval covers the Pacific region. Green oval covers ASEAN. Yellow overlay covers the Indo Pacific.”
Map annotation by Eric Gaba via Wikimedia Commons.
A formal public-policy statement from the Government of Canada is a rare thing. It is even rarer when it is not just a speech but a published written document. The rarest of these is undoubtedly when such a document focuses on foreign policy. When Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly recently pitched her “once-in-a-generation shift” toward the Indo-Pacific, much was made of why Canada was doing it and what it would achieve. No fewer than four cabinet ministers took part in the announcement. Canada will, they announced, step up naval patrols of the region, continue to expand trade with China while also tightening our protections of intellectual property and ownership rules for strategic industries, and use “Team Canada” trade missions to boost commercial links with other growing regional economic powers, including India. We seek also to expand our intelligence and cybersecurity links with allies and partners in the region.
Now that the dust on the rhetoric has settled, closer examination reveals that this might simply be an exercise of branding separate activities into a marketing-friendly bundle, as opposed to a coherent plan focused on achieving specific outcomes.
In examining the document two approaches are equally useful in assessing value: whether the content has some substance and whether the policy framework is sufficiently robust to hang various activities and plans on its body.
Three hints are provided as to why the new plan might not be the cornerstone of Canada’s foreign policy that it portends to be. Firstly, operating in the “National Interest”, a phrase used six separate times over the 26 pages, is given neither form nor function and lacks any definition. It is reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat talking to Alice asking her “where do you want to get to”. When Alice replies that “I don’t much care …” the Cheshire Cat wisely suggests that “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.” With no definition of national interests pretty much anything can be hand waved as to being necessary and required, or not, for its achievement.
This leads in turn to the second hint that the plan might be more posturing than substance. Lacking the single aimpoint of operating in the national interest, the “objectives” supposedly fill that gap by providing a set of specific achievements which in combination would be a sufficiently clear aimpoint. But normally objectives can, and should, be thought of as something specific and measurable, allowing plans to be developed to achieve them. “Save 100 dollars this month” or perhaps, in more relevant terms, “Increase our trade in the Indo-Pacific region by 100 per cent over the five years of this policy enactment.” Plans can then be developed to achieve those objectives. But reviewing those objectives reveals that they are themselves actions, not end-states. It appears that the policy is based on “doing, not achieving”. I am reminded of my sons many years ago. When asked if their rooms were clean, they would reply, “I’m cleaning it.” The process was enduring but we most certainly disagreed on the value of the activity as opposed to achieving a measurable result. Under this construct the government can claim that as long as Canada is doing stuff the policy should be considered a success.
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October 29, 2022
The Canadian government, despite committing billions to replace old equipment, is still not serious about the Canadian Armed Forces
In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why — despite big-ticket items getting a few headlines — the Canadian Armed Forces need far more than what any government has been willing to provide since the start of the Cold War:
Objectively speaking, there has been progress. Canada has committed billions to replacing the CF-18 fighter jets with F-35s — 88 of them. (That’s still way too small an air fleet for a country our literal size — it’s not a lot of planes for such a big place, folks — but it’s something.) Billions more have been committed to modernizing NORAD’s early warning systems. And, miracle of miracles, we finally got around to replacing the goddamned Second World War-era pistols!
These are real, tangible things. These things matter. They will leave the Canadian Armed Forces better off, our soldiers better protected and our continent more secure. This is good news.
It’s also the bare minimum.
Even these big spending announcements, and even the itty bitty pistol one, don’t actually add capabilities to the Canadian military. They replace existing ones. They maintain our capabilities. Sure, we can quibble about “maintain” or “replace” — the F-35 will give Canada a stealth capacity it has never had before, and all that jazz. Fine. Fair. But it isn’t really adding to the overall list of missions we are capable of conducting. It’s fleshing out capabilities that, due to advanced age and wear-and-tear for our critical equipment, were starting to exist only on paper. The government deserves credit for this, but only a really small amount of credit. Getting the urgently necessary basics done, many years after they should have been handled, is good, but it’s not worth a pat on the back. It is the bare minimum the country deserved and that the military needed to function, so that’s how far I’ll go in my praise: congratulations, Liberals, on responding to a massive change in our geopolitical order by accomplishing the bare minimum that was already overdue.
If that sounds scathing, here’s the worst part: that’s me being sincere. Thanks for the bare minimum! I wasn’t sure we’d get even that
So yeah. Good, but … you see the problem here, no? In a new era of global instability and geopolitical turmoil, the Canadian response, thus far, has been to get caught up to where we should have been 10 years ago. At the latest. And it’s far from clear that, if not for Russia kicking off the largest conflict we’ve seen in Europe since 1945, we’d have even bothered to do these necessary, long-overdue things.
And this is all shaping up to be just the latest iteration of a little game both Liberals and Conservatives like to play with the Canadian Armed Forces (and, come to think of it, most policy files). They’ll point to specific investments or particular accomplishments when defending their record. And the investment and accomplishment may well be excellent indeed! But they won’t speak to the full, broader picture. And the full, broader picture of the Canadian Armed Forces is grim, and some new F-35s and 9mm pistols isn’t going to change that.
There was a little story last month you might have seen. After Hurricane Fiona wrecked big parts of several Atlantic provinces, the feds sent in the military. This is right and proper. The troops would have made a welcome sight in those communities, of course. What you might not have noticed, though, was that Nova Scotia had to go public with its desire for more troops. It asked for a thousand. It got 500. It kept asking for more. It got the 500. And most of those 500 were troops already stationed in Nova Scotia; only about 200 were actually sent in from elsewhere. The government never really commented on this, but it’s not hard to suss out the problem: the military couldn’t scrape together any more troops.
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October 25, 2022
Canadian Armed Forces recruiting crisis may be “more serious” than we’ve been told so far
Rachel Gilmore on the state of recruiting for the Canadian Armed Forces:
As the Canadian Armed Forces grapples with how to boost recruitment amid growing global dangers, a former chief of the defence staff is warning that the situation might be even worse than the top brass are letting on.
Current Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre has warned in recent weeks that, due to recruitment issues, Canada does not have the military “that we need” to tackle future threats — and that readiness within the CAF is “going down”.
“In reality, I believe the case is much more serious than what Wayne has articulated,” said retired Gen. Rick Hillier, speaking in an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson.
The Canadian Armed Forces is supposed to be adding about 5,000 troops to regular and reserve forces, to meet a growing list of demands, but are instead short more than 10,000 trained members – meaning about one in 10 positions are currently vacant.
However, Hillier says the number that he’s hearing suggest the military is down “far greater than 10 per cent”.
“Instead of being at 70,000 people, the Canadian Forces are operating probably somewhere at about 45,000 people — and out of that, there are a significant percentage of them who are not operationally deployable or capable,” Hillier said.
“So the capability of the Canadian Forces, what we rely upon to look after us in Canada and then to represent us and protect our interests around the world and to take our values with them, that part that can do that is minuscule right now, and we need to change it.”
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September 17, 2022
Maple Fury: Canada’s Mechanized Infantry Explained
Battle Order
Published 12 Nov 2020
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August 26, 2022
Bristol/Magellan CRV7 Ground Attack Rockets; Simply The Best
Polyus
Published 19 Aug 2022Sometimes a weapon is produced that no one can ignore. Something so much better than anything else on the market that it becomes the de facto standard. Winnipeg, Manitoba’s Bristol Aerospace created such a weapon in the early 1970s. It combined high speed and long range with a powerful knockout punch. It was the CRV7 rocket and it would eventually become ubiquitous among western aligned armed forces.
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