Quotulatiousness

September 22, 2024

Canada’s latest moral preening on the international stage includes a partial arms embargo against … the USA?

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Conrad Black points out that the Canadian government’s tedious and never-ending virtue signalling has reached a new and barely believable low:

It is the usual pious and cowardly humbug that causes Ottawa to announce it is suspending the sales of some non-lethal military equipment to Israel because it has the effrontery to opine that the Israeli Defense forces are insufficiently protective of the lives of civilian Palestinians in Gaza. But it is breathtaking that Canada should include in this practically irrelevant step an embargo on some equipment to the United States that it suspects the Americans might pass on to Israel. This initiative is a trifecta of fatuous error. First, it is clear from thoroughly available evidence that Israel has achieved an unprecedentedly low ratio of civilian to authentic military casualties for modern urban counter-guerrilla warfare. This is especially difficult as the enemy in this case, Hamas, proudly states that civilian casualties are useful to its propaganda campaign (which has brainwashed our foreign policy-makers), and which habitually embeds its terrorist cadres in and near schools, hospitals, and places of worship to incite as much collateral damage on its own population as possible.

Second, it departs completely from any real concept of the nature of war. The invasion of Israel on October 7 and the slaughter of more than a thousand Israeli, mostly civilians, was intended and received as an act of war. Wars are not fought by dropping pamphlets or posturing with trivial gestures. As General Douglas MacArthur famously said during the Korean War, “In war there is no substitute for victory”. This is particularly the case in the current war in Gaza as Hamas has made it clear that it will never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. As long as that condition prevails, there can be no peace and Israel’s pledge to exterminate Hamas as a terrorist force enables it accurately to be described in the Wilsonian phrase: “a war to end war”. Canada’s government is engaged in a contemptible assertion of moral relativism between the heroic and democratic state of the long wronged Jewish people and a ragtag of vicious terrorists happy to be the cannon fodder of the principal terrorism-promoting state in the world — the primitive racist totalitarian theocracy of Iran.

Finally in the trifecta, in the bankruptcy of their imagination, our foreign policy makers have taken up the trite evasion of the outgoing Biden administration, that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, but we reserve the right to coach it on how to do that and this effectively limits self-defence to the expulsion of invaders but muffled and insulated retaliation against the invaders after they have been evicted from Israel. This is a formula for perpetual conflict and is a moral and military under-reaction to the enormity of Hamas’ provocation. What our government imagines it is accomplishing with this pallid, torpid, and ludicrous gesture surely escapes the imagination of all interested parties.

It must slightly bemuse the United States government that it is boycotted by Canada, which has benefited from an American guarantee of our security since President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking at Queen’s University in Kingston in 1938, said that the United States would not “stand idly by” if Canada were invaded by any power from another continent.

September 4, 2024

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy indulges himself with a Trudeau-esque bit of geopolitical posturing

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Military, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill outlines the British government’s odd choice of timing to announce suspension of (some) arms shipments to Israel:

Bereft of vision, the modern politician is obsessed with “optics”. Which makes foreign secretary David Lammy’s announcement this week that the UK will be suspending some arms exports to Israel all the more surreal. The optics of withholding weapons from the Jewish State the day after we discovered that its enemy is so ruthless it will happily murder young Jews in cold blood are atrocious. Did not one functionary in the Foreign Office think to raise his or her hand and say: “Sir, should we at least wait until the bodies of those six Israeli hostages are cold before we shame and punish the nation they came from?”

This goes way beyond optics, of course. It is more than a failure of spin. It is a failure – a colossal, unforgivable one – of morality. As the bodies of the six slain Jews found in one of Hamas’s hellish lairs in Rafah were being transported back to a grief-stricken Israel, our government took action not against the Islamist extremists who carried out this unutterable atrocity, but against the nation that suffered it. Mere hours after the discovery of an act of fascistic savagery, our government handed a propaganda victory to the fascists by dragging Israel’s name through the mud. What were they thinking? Shameful doesn’t cover it.

Mr Lammy has said around 10 per cent of arms sales to Israel will be suspended. Thirty out of 350 arms-exports licences will be cancelled, primarily affecting parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones. The reason for this smug, haughty smackdown of the Jewish State? Because there’s a “clear risk”, said Lammy, that such equipment will be used to “commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law”. Big talk from a politician who noisily supported the West’s imperial bombardment of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the widescale torture and rape of prisoners.

Many are damning Lammy’s partial embargo as gesture politics. “What is the point?”, headlines wonder. Denying Israel a few parts for planes won’t make much difference, some moan. For the frothing Israelophobes of the iffy left, nothing less than a complete arms embargo will do. They want not one gun to go to crazy Israel. If only there was a word to describe people who agitate morning, noon and night for the disarming of a Jewish nation that recently suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust.

The obsession with the partial nature of Lammy’s reprimanding of Israel misses the point. What the Foreign Office has just done is huge – and profoundly troubling. Sure, it won’t make much of a dent in Israel’s ability to fight Hamas, but it will cast aspersions on Israel’s fight against Hamas. It won’t militarily weaken Israel’s war on the pogromists that slaughtered more than a thousand of its people on 7 October, but it might morally weaken that war with its sly implication that there’s a criminal element to this crusade against Hamas’s army of anti-Semites. The partial arms embargo is indicative of something far more unsettling: a solidarity embargo as Britain slowly but surely turns its back on the Jewish nation.

August 19, 2024

The US Navy’s mis-managed decline continues

Filed under: Business, Government, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo from his weekend wrap-up of various news articles that caught his eye:

Artist’s rendering of the US Navy’s FFG(X) Constellation-class guided missile frigate. Initial contract awarded 30 April, 2020, but delivery of the first ship is not expected until 2029 due to design changes and other issues.
US Navy image via Wikimedia Commons.

One data point that works in favour of American Declinism is the US Navy’s inability to not just keep up with the Chinese in terms of the production of ships, but to also maintain its own production output. Many lightly-armed littoral combat ships have been retired, for example, with nothing to replace them.

These production setbacks have been pointed out to me, with one mutual on Twitter/X reiterating the point so that I get it (I do!). This is an actual problem that requires solving, and fast. It is partially to blame for the Americans effectively ceding the Red Sea to the Houthis (for now).

AP has done a partial deep-dive (horrible language here, I apologize) on this issue:

    The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.

    Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”

    Marinette Marine is under contract to build six guided-missile frigates — the Navy’s newest surface warships — with options to build four more. But it only has enough workers to produce one frigate a year, according to Labs.

A lot of the guys who know how to do this work are retiring or have already retired. Sound familiar?

    One of the industry’s chief problems is the struggle to hire and retain laborers for the challenging work of building new ships as graying veterans retire, taking decades of experience with them.

    Shipyards across the country have created training academies and partnered with technical colleges to provide workers with the skills they need to construct high-tech warships. Submarine builders and the Navy formed an alliance to promote manufacturing careers, and shipyards are offering perks to retain workers once they’re hired.

    Andreini trained for his job at Marinette through a program at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. Prior to that, he spent several years as a production line welder, making components for garbage trucks. He said some of his buddies are held back by the stigma that shipbuilding is a “crappy work environment, and it’s unsafe.”

The problem:

    Much of the blame for U.S. shipbuilding’s current woes lies with the Navy, which frequently changes requirements, requests upgrades and tweaks designs after shipbuilders have begun construction.

    That’s seen in cost overruns, technological challenges and delays in the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford; the spiking of a gun system for a stealth destroyer program after its rocket-assisted projectiles became too costly; and the early retirement of some of the Navy’s lightly armored littoral combat ships, which were prone to breaking down.

    The Navy vowed to learn from those past lessons with the new frigates they are building at Marinette Marine. The frigates are prized because they’re less costly to produce than larger destroyers but have similar weapon systems.

Now check this out:

    The Navy chose a ship design already in use by navies in France and Italy instead of starting from scratch. The idea was that 15% of the vessel would be updated to meet U.S. Navy specifications, while 85% would remain unchanged, reducing costs and speeding construction.

    Instead, the opposite happened: The Navy redesigned 85% of the ship, resulting in cost increases and construction delays, said Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute. Construction of the first-in-class Constellation warship, which began in August 2022, is now three years behind schedule, with delivery pushed back to 2029.

    The final design still isn’t completed.

Shifting threats:

    Throughout its history, the Navy has had to adapt to varying perils, whether it be the Cold War of past decades or current threats including war in the Middle East, growing competition from Chinese and Russian navies, piracy off the coast of Somalia and persistent attacks on commercial ships by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

    And that’s not all. The consolidation of shipyards and funding uncertainties have disrupted the cadence of ship construction and stymied long-term investments and planning, says Matthew Paxton of the Shipbuilders Council of America, a national trade association.

    “We’ve been dealing with inconsistent shipbuilding plans for years,” Paxton said. “When we finally start ramping up, the Navy is shocked that we lost members of our workforce.”

How is the US Navy supposed to protect Taiwan from a potential Chinese invasion?

August 10, 2024

“Heavy casualties” in a modern western army might count as “a skirmish” in earlier conflicts

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I sent a link to Severian a few weeks ago, thinking it might be an interesting topic for his audience and he posted a response as part of Friday’s mailbag post. First, my explanation to him about why I thought the link was interesting:

I know that Edward Luttwak is what the Brits call “a Marmite figure” … people love or hate him and not much in between. I’ve read several of his books and found he had interesting things to say about the Roman and Byzantine armies in their respective eras but I haven’t found his modern analysis to be anywhere near as interesting. This time, however, he might well have found that acorn … is the dramatic casualty-aversion of western nations going to be a key element of future, shall we say “adventurism”?

Clearly, [Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu] can still get their legions moving when they feel they need to, but could [insert current US President here] get the 101st Airborne into a high-casualty environment (let’s not pretend that Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer could or would, and Macron’s posturing is nearly as bad as Baby Trudeau’s total lack of seriousness)?

Anyway, here’s the Marmite Man’s latest – https://unherd.com/2024/06/who-will-win-a-post-heroic-war

Sev responded:

US Army soldiers assigned to 2-7 Cavalry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team (BCT),3rd battalion 1st Division, rush a wounded Soldier from Apache Troop to a waiting USMC CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter during operation in Fallujah, Iraq, during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.
Photo by SFC Johan Charles Van Boers via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve often said that, from what I can tell — and bearing in mind my entire military experience consists of a .500 record at Risk! — AINO‘s entire force philosophy amounts to “zero casualties, ever”.

Note that this was true even in the 20th century, when America was still America. “Stupendous casualties” by American standards would hardly rate “a spot of bother” by Soviet. Wiki lists the bloodiest American battle as Eisenborn Ridge (part of the Bulge), with approximately five thousand fatalities.

A Soviet commander who didn’t come home with at least five thousand KIA could probably expect to be court-martialed for cowardice.

That same Wiki article separates “battles” from “campaigns” for some reason. There’s an entire “methodology” section I’m not going to wade into, but even looking at “campaigns”, the bloodiest (by their definitions) is Normandy — 29,204 KIA. That’s an entire campaign, which might rate “a hard week’s fighting” by Soviet, German, or Japanese standards.

Please understand, Americans’ unwillingness to take casualties was greatly to their credit. You want to know about “meat assaults”, ask the Germans, Russians, or Japanese (or the British or French in WWI). George Patton might not have been the best American commander, but he was the most American commander — the whole point of battle is to make the other stupid bastard die for his country. I am 100% in favor of minimal losses, for everyone, everywhere.

But “minimal” does not mean “none”. People die in wars. People die training for wars. People die in the vicinity of the training for war, because it’s inherently risky. It doesn’t make one some kind of monster to call these “acceptable” losses; it makes one a realist. One could just as easily say — and with the same justification — that a certain number of car crash fatalities, or iatrogenic deaths, etc. are acceptable losses, because there’s no way to have “interstate commerce” and “modern medicine”, respectively, without them.

The Fistagon seemingly denies this. Forget human losses for a moment, and consider mere equipment. You read up on, say, Air Force fighter planes, and you’re forced to conclude that their operations assume that all planes will be fully operational at all times. Again, saying nothing of the pilots, just the airframes. The Navy seems to assume that all ships everywhere will not only be serviceable, but actually in service, at all times. Just recently, they shot off all their ammo at Houthi and the Blowfish … and seemingly had no idea what to do, because as Milestone D walked us through it, it’s impossible to rearm while underway.

Think about that for a second. How the fuck is that supposed to work in a real war? Can we just put the war on pause for a few months, so all our ships can head back to port to reload?

In fact, I’d go so far as to speculate that that’s the origin of the phrase “meat assault”. What The Media are calling a “meat assault” is simply what was known to a sane age as “an assault”. No qualifiers. You know, your basic attack — go take that hill, and if you take the hill, and if enough of the attacking force survives to hold it, that’s a win. People who absolutely should know better, though, don’t see it that way.

Since we’re here … I remember having conversations with some folks in College Town re: the Battle of Fallujah, while it was happening (technically the Second Battle of Fallujah). Now, obviously quite a few of my interlocutors were ideologically committed to the position that this was senseless butchery. And in the fullness of time, I too have come around to the position that the entire Operation Endless Occupation was senseless butchery. But leaving all that aside, the point I was trying to make was a simple one: Total US casualties were 95 killed, 560 wounded.

Every one of them a senseless crime, I now believe, but considering Fallujah strictly as a military operation, that’s amazing. House-to-house fighting in a heavily urban area, against a fanatically committed opponent who was willing, indeed eager, to use every dirty trick in the book … and US forces took 655 total casualties. That’s about as well as it can possibly be done. The Red Army probably lost 655 men on the train ride getting to Stalingrad. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that 655 is the daily casualty figure across the entire front in Ukraine … hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are lots of individual sectors in Ukraine taking those kinds of daily losses. 655 is pretty damn good …

… but I was called every dirty name they could think of for suggesting it. I was called dirty names by people who called themselves conservatives, who were such ostentatious “patriots” that they’d embarrass Toby Keith.

Fallujah was fought in 2004, a time that seems like the Blessed Land of Sanity compared to now. AINO simply won’t take casualties. The Pentagram won’t — lose a tank, and you lose your job. (In battle, obviously. If you abandon it to the Taliban, no problem. And of course if you lose an entire war, it’s medals and promotions for everyone). And because the high command won’t, the field commanders won’t either. And because they won’t … well, “desertion” is an ugly word, but let’s just say Tim Walz won’t be the only guy who suddenly needs to be elsewhere right before it’s time to ship out. And as for the guys actually shanghaied into whatever foreign fuckup … well, “mutiny” is an even uglier word, but does anyone want to bet against it?

August 1, 2024

The Rarest 1911: North American Arms Co

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 22, 2024

In the summer of 1918, the US government wanted to increase production of M1911 pistols, but all current manufacturers were working at capacity. So they looked to issue new contracts, and someone realized that the Ross rifle factory was a potential option. Now, the Ross Rifle Company was bankrupt by this time, and its factory lay essentially abandoned. So in June of 1918, two Canadian lawyers by the names of James Denison and Edmond Ryckman incorporated the North American Arms Company Ltd in Quebec, signed a contract to manufacture 500,000 1911 pistols for the US, and then leased the Ross factory for a term of 18 months. Whether they would have been successful in producing pistols at scale is unknown, because their contract was cancelled on December 4, 1918 before any deliveries were made. With the end of the war, arms requirements plummeted, and pretty much all ongoing weapons contracts were cancelled, not just this one. However, parts for 100 pistols had been produced, and these were assembled and sold commercially after the contract was cancelled.
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July 23, 2024

Trudeau announced new submarines for the RCN … don’t assume he’s really serious

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Hub, J.L. Grantastein explains why Trudeau’s hasty commitment under pressure from our exasperated NATO allies is not likely to be met, and almost certainly not to be met fully:

HMCS Chicoutimi escorts Peoples Liberation Army (Navy) ships visiting Victoria on behalf of the Chinese military, 13 December 2016.
Photo: Cpl Carbe Orellana, MARPAC Imaging Services, ET2016-0468-03 ©2016 DND-MDN CANADA

Canada has no capacity to construct submarines, and the country’s shipyards are struggling to build destroyers, icebreakers, and supply ships. This means that submarines will need to be purchased from European or Asian shipyards with experience in building them. (There will be a certain irony if the RCN, having fought against U-boats in two world wars, ends up with German submarines.)

As of Trudeau’s announcement, let us be clear, no submarine design has been selected, and naval officers are said only to have been engaged in seeking the best models for the RCN. Given Canada’s broken defence procurement system, this is unlikely to be a quick process. The RCN may soon know what it wants but the bean counters will rule as they always do, and orders most likely will not be placed for at least three to five years.

Few expect that the Liberals will be in power in 2027, and if the Conservatives do form the government, it is worth noting that Pierre Poilievre has refused to commit to a date for Canada to meet its 2 percent pledge. New subs may not be an idea the Tories will accept.

If an old or new government does decide to continue with a submarine program, it is certain that a new conventional sub will cost at least $1 billion, many millions more to make it strong enough to operate for long periods in the Arctic, and millions more for its torpedoes, missiles, other weapons, radars, and electronic systems. The costs involved all but guarantee that 12 submarines are a pipedream — the RCN will be lucky to get four to six. Trudeau did not offer a timetable in his remarks, but it is highly unlikely that even a single submarine would be ready to go to sea before the early 2030s and the last by the 2040s.

Then there is the problem of manning a fleet of underwater vessels. The RCN has four Victoria-class boats now. These subs, purchased used from the Royal Navy, have not worked well, are constantly undergoing expensive repairs, and scarcely leave the dock. In other words, the crews have relatively little sea-going experience, the RCN is short of sailors already, and experienced mechanics and skilled technicians are in even shorter supply. Each sub will need more than sixty officers and sailors, and there must be at least three times that number on leave, on courses, or in training to support each crew.

There is little point in acquiring new submarines if there are no crews to sail in them, and with the fifteen new destroyers planned and just beginning construction, the senior service’s personnel needs must be a top priority. That need will not be met until the Canadian Armed Forces’ problems with recruitment are fixed, and that problem has bedevilled the military for decades. (I served on a Department of National Defence Special Committee in 1995 that advanced recommendations to improve recruiting, but nothing changed. Nothing has improved in the three decades since.)

Note that referring to the navy as “the senior service” is only appropriate when talking about Britain’s Royal Navy. The Royal Canadian Navy was established in 1910, long after the Canadian Army came into existence. I’m sure members of the RCN won’t mind if you make that mistake, however.

May 15, 2024

Canada’s Minister of National Defence says new submarines are “inevitable”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Bill Blair regrets earlier comments that some read as weakening the government’s already feeble commitment to re-equipping the Royal Canadian Navy’s submarine branch:

HMCS Victoria, one of the four submarines currently in service with the Royal Canadian Navy. She was originally commisioned into the Royal navy as HMS Unseen in 1991 and re-commissioned as HMCS Victoria in 2000.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Bill Blair, the federal defence minister, made a rare admission of Liberal fallibility in Washington on Monday when he said he regrets using the word “explore” when talking about renewing Canada’s submarine fleet.

Ottawa’s recent defence policy update said the government will “explore options for renewing and expanding the submarine fleet”, a form of words that was criticized for lacking urgency.

“It’s certainly not my intention to be wishy-washy. What I’ve tried to articulate very, very clearly and strongly in the document is, we know we have to replace our submarine fleet, and we’re going to do that,” Blair said.

Replacing the four Victoria-class subs is necessary, he said. “It is, I might suggest, inevitable.”

That is absolutely the case, if Canada is committed to maintaining its submarine capability. The Victoria-class subs date back to the late 1980s and are due to be taken out of service at the end of the 2030s.

Submarines are seen as a crucial defence against incursion by hostile powers, as the polar ice melts and opens up northern waterways. The Northwest Passage is forecast to be the most efficient shipping route between Asia and Europe by 2050.

But Blair admits “there is a lot of work to do”, not least convincing his cabinet colleagues of the “business case for the capability”.

“One of the greatest challenges of being a defence minister is to secure funding and the second one is actually spending it”, he said on Monday.

He gave a sense of the struggles around the cabinet table last month in a speech in Ottawa, where he admitted: “I had to sort of keep on pushing my issue forward about the importance and the need to invest in defence”. He made it sound as if he was a lone voice in the wilderness.

[…]

Retired captain Norman Jolin recently wrote an analysis for the Naval Association of Canada that noted if Canada wants to maintain submarine capability, it needs to place a contract with a proven builder by 2027 at the latest. He said the lack of domestic submarine-building capacity means there is neither the time nor resources to even think about a made-in-Canada solution.

The typical procurement process takes 18 years to get from cabinet approval to delivery, which would mean if an order was placed tomorrow, we wouldn’t get new subs until 2042.

Based on that timeline, “it is clear that the decision to replace the submarines is considerably overdue,” Jolin wrote.

There’s little chance that this will move closer to completion during the remaining life of the current government, with an election due before the end of 2025, and Blair is already on the record emphasizing how little the Liberals would relish spending any money on military equipment even in good economic times. Oddly, the fact that there are no domestic shipyards currently capable of building submarines may be a positive — building the RCN’s ships in Canadian yards always means that each ship costs much more than if the hull is built in a foreign shipyard. Canada doesn’t have the facilities and trained workforce to build naval vessels, so every time a new class of ships is needed, the cost of building/refurbishing the shipyards and hiring and training-from-scratch a new workforce balloons the total cost of the program.

May 4, 2024

Bill Blair – “I couldn’t make a defence policy argument to meet that spreadsheet target of two per cent”

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t find it at all surprising that Canada’s current Minister of National Defence hasn’t been able to persuade Justin Trudeau and the rest of cabinet that we should live up to our treaty commitments to our NATO allies. I do find it surprising that he’s allowed to say anything on the topic that implies criticism of Justin’s tame ministers:

This week, Defence Minister Bill Blair made a rare admission for a federal cabinet minister: He said he keeps trying to get the rest of cabinet to fund the Canadian military to NATO standards, but nobody’s biting.

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s important, but it was really hard (to) convince people that that was a worthy goal,” Blair said in a Wednesday address to the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a foreign affairs think tank.

Blair was speaking specifically about boosting Canadian defence spending to the NATO standard of two per cent of GDP, which he referred to as a “magical threshold”.

“Nobody knows what that means, they didn’t know how much that is and they didn’t know what we were going to spend money on, so I couldn’t make a defence policy argument to meet that spreadsheet target of two per cent,” he said.

Only a few years ago, it was pretty typical for NATO members to fall well short of the two-per-cent threshold. In 2018, for instance, Canada spending 1.23 per cent of GDP on defence put it roughly on par with Germany, The Netherlands and Portugal, among others.

But Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked a massive defence-spending boost among the alliance. Germany, most notably, greenlit a massive rearmament plan with the specific goal of hitting the NATO threshold.

According to a 2023 report by the NATO Secretary General, Canada is the only member of the alliance to fail on both spending metrics tracked by the organization: The two-per-cent threshold, and the requirement that at least one-fifth of the defence budget be spent on equipment.

This is a perennial sticking point in Canada’s NATO membership. In February, both NATO Sec.-Gen. Jens Stoltenberg and U.S. ambassador to Canada David Cohen publicly chastised Canada for failing to deliver on its military commitments. Years earlier, U.S. president Donald Trump said Canada was “slightly delinquent” when it came to its NATO funding.

April 23, 2024

KICKING IT TO THE MOON? Canada’s Military Procurement: A history of broken promises

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Esprit de Corps Canadian Military Magazine
Published Apr 22, 2024

The Liberal government have finally released their long awaited Defence Policy Update which promises billions of dollars in increased spending for the CAF. Critics wonder if such promises are worth the paper they are printed on. History says that when it comes to military budgets, promises are made to be broken. Good Grief.
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April 21, 2024

Canada’s latest unlikely-to-meet-expectations defence update

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Michael Den Tandt considers the Trudeau government’s most recent update to Canada’s defence plans (where the cynic might be tempted to read “plans” as “vague gestures toward treaty obligations with no real intent to do more”):

… Among the more intriguing findings is that no likely economic path has China overtaking the United States in terms of global influence, between now and 2040. And all likely paths project a sharp decline in global population growth over the same period, including in China.

This is worrying, because declining population growth is a precursor to declining economic power, which in turn means declining military might, and also a tendency to lash out. As the American political scientist Michael Beckley has noted, there is a lengthy historical pattern of rising powers becoming expansionist when their initial economic boom slows. In a prolonged multipolar interregnum between the U.S.-led order that followed the Second World War, and whatever comes next, threats will continue to multiply. A capable military is essential to national survival.

Which brings us back to the federal defence update, and its raft of new spending, with $8.1 billion in additional funding by 2029-30, by which time Canada’s military spending will reach just under 1.8 per cent of GDP, with steady increases adding up to $72.3-billion by 2043-44. Commitments include ramping up recruitment, revamping procurement, new subs for the Arctic, tactical helicopters, new vehicles and long-range missiles, drones, a new Canadian Cyber Command, and more. There is a laudable commitment to developing reserves of ammunition.

The commitment — as was a prior promise, from 2022, to spend $38 billion on NORAD modernization over 20 years — is all to the good.

But the elephant in the room, when it comes to federal defence commitments, is that we’ve seen these before, from both major governing parties, with disappointing results. The purchase of new fighters for the Royal Canadian Air Force was first announced in July of 2010. The rebuild of the Royal Canadian Navy’s surface combatants, replacements for the 1980s-era frigates, was first announced in the fall of 2011. We don’t yet have either new fighter jets or new surface combatants. And the vast majority of funding outlined in the updated policy statement will be up to future governments. Net incremental new spending in 2024-25 is just $612 million.

There was a historical moment, not long ago, when Canadian military preparedness advanced at a wartime pace — when Canadian soldiers were fighting and dying in Afghanistan. From 2005 through 2010, the governments of Canada, initially Liberal, then Conservative, set about getting our soldiers the kit and equipment they needed. In short order the CAF acquired Chinook helicopters, Boeing C-17s and Hercules C-130 transports, and more. It is possible.

The great risk in building up Canada’s defences at a leisurely, peacetime rate, is that the days of leisurely, peacetime stability are over. The update can be counted as progress. But it needs a major infusion of urgency.

April 18, 2024

On The Line with General Wayne Eyre, commander of the Canadian Armed Forces

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Line
Published Apr 16, 2024

General Wayne Eyre served for decades in the Canadian Army, including as its commander, before being promoted to Chief of the Defence Staff in 2021. During his time as Canada’s top soldier, he has overseen not only a series of challenges inside the Canadian military, but also a rapid deterioration in the geopolitical environment. The world is a more dangerous place, and Gen. Eyre has been unusually outspoken in noting that Canada needs to do more to be ready for what’s coming.

In this conversation with The Line‘s Matt Gurney, the general provides his take on the state of the world today, shares his thoughts on the recently announced Defence Policy Update, and talks about why he is encouraged by some of what he is already seeing change with Canada’s military readiness.

On The Line is The Line‘s newest podcast, featuring longer interviews by either Jen or Matt with someone who is currently in the news or able to speak to something topical (or, sometimes, simply fun and interesting). We are still getting it up to speed, but Line listeners and viewers can expect an episode weekly by next month, at the latest.

To never miss an episode of either On The Line or The Line Podcast, sign up today to follow us on YouTube, on the streaming app of your choice and, of course, at ReadtheLine.ca, home of The Line. Like and subscribe!

Please note: This interview was recorded on Friday, before the Iranian attack on Israel.

March 28, 2024

Justin Trudeau never misses an opportunity to make a performative announcement, even if it harms Canadian interests

Filed under: Cancon, Middle East, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an announcement last week that the Canadian government was cutting off military exports to Israel … except that Canada buys more military equipment from Israel than vice-versa:

Israeli Spike LR2 antitank missile launchers, similar to the ones delivered to the Canadian Army detachment in Latvia in February.
Wikimedia Commons.

When the Trudeau government publicly cut off military exports to Israel last week, the immediate reaction of the Israeli media was to point out that Canada’s military was far more dependent on Israeli tech than was ever the case in reverse.

“For some reason, (Foreign Minister Melanie Joly) forgot that in the last decade, the Canadian Defense Ministry purchased Israeli weapon systems worth more than a billion dollars,” read an analysis by the Jerusalem Post, which noted that Israeli military technology is “protecting Canadian pilots, fighters, and naval combatants around the world.”

According to Canada’s own records, meanwhile, the Israel Defense Forces were only ever purchasing a fraction of that amount from Canadian military manufacturers.

In 2022 — the last year for which data is publicly available — Canada exported $21,329,783.93 in “military goods” to Israel.

This didn’t even place Israel among the top 10 buyers of Canadian military goods for that year. Saudi Arabia, notably, ranked as 2022’s biggest non-U.S. buyer of Canadian military goods at $1.15 billion — more than 50 times the Israeli figure.

What’s more — despite Joly adopting activist claims that Canada was selling “arms” to Israel — the Canadian exports were almost entirely non-lethal.

“Global Affairs Canada can confirm that Canada has not received any requests, and therefore not issued any permits, for full weapon systems for major conventional arms or light weapons to Israel for over 30 years,” Global Affairs said in a February statement to the Qatari-owned news outlet Al Jazeera.

The department added, “the permits which have been granted since October 7, 2023, are for the export of non-lethal equipment.”

Even Project Ploughshares — an Ontario non-profit that has been among the loudest advocates for Canada to shut off Israeli exports — acknowledged in a December report that recent Canadian exports mostly consisted of parts for the F-35 fighter jet.

“According to industry representatives and Canadian officials, all F-35s produced include Canadian-made parts and components,” wrote the group.

March 12, 2024

The recently admitted “death spiral” for the Canadian Armed Forces is nothing new

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

“Shady Maples” outlines just a few of the historical procurement fuckups Canada’s armed forces have had to work through, showing that the recent admission that the armed forces are in a “death spiral” by MND Bill Blair is almost “situation normal” for the troops:

The Canadian Armed Forces are fucked. By this term of art, I mean that the CAF:

  1. are in dire circumstances; and
  2. are being used for such aggressive political gratification that it’s practically perverse.

You don’t have to take my word for it. The Minister of National Defence made the following remarks last week:

    because, the bottom line is the Canadian Armed Forces must grow. We’re short a lot of people. Almost 16,000 in our regular forces and reserves.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he added:

    more than half of our trucks, more than half of our ships and more than half of our planes are not available for service because they are in need of parts and repair. We’re going to have to do better.

Translation: we are fucked.

The MND’s remarks come eleven months after the CDAI published an open letter on the state of national security and defence:

    Years of restraint, cost cutting, downsizing and deferred investments, have meant that Canada’s defence capabilities have atrophied. Our military capabilities are outdated and woefully inadequate to protect our landmass and maritime approaches. We have also fallen short in meaningful contributions to burden sharing for the collective defence and security of our allies and partners.

Translation: we have been fucked for awhile.

More recently, the Vice Admiral Tophsee made waves on the RCN’s official YouTube channel by stating the obvious:

    Colleagues and Shipmates, the RCN is facing some very serious challenges right now that could mean we fail to meet our Force Posture and Readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond. La situation est grave mais nos problèmes ne sont pas uniques et je sais que l’aviation et l’armée sont confrontées a des défis similaires. [The situation is serious, but our problems are not unique, and I know that the Air Force and the Army are facing similar problems.]

Translation: we will be fucked for the foreseeable future.

He then shows that this sort of thing has been part-and-parcel of Canada’s delusionary approach to national defence since the year before Confederation. Canada’s WW1 army was sent off with fantastically bad equipment — from rifles to web gear, from automobiles to artillery ammunition — all scandals of the day that no lessons were learned from.

Soldiers and officers at the tactical level will readily tell you that these headlines are only surprising because senior leaders are finally saying the quiet part out loud: the CAF is undermanned, under-equipped, under-trained, and unprepared. We know this because we live it every day: situation normal, all fucked up. But you don’t need a source or a leak to learn about our deplorable state of readiness. Here is a link to DND’s 2023 audit and evaluation reports. They paint a bleak picture: we have insufficient equipment and what we have keeps breaking. We have insufficient personnel to match with commitments, and we are struggling to recruit, train, and retain more. Go have a look at the reports, they lay it all out.

February 22, 2024

Trump’s crude, threatening rhetoric on NATO’s cheapskates is … right

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé joins all right-thinking people in condemning Donald Trump’s campaign trail threats to not defend NATO’s freeloaders if they’re attacked by, say, Vladimir Putin:

Donald Trump recently called into question the core principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As a collective defence alliance, NATO operates on the principle that an attack against one member is an attack against all. This principle is enshrined in Article 5 of the NATO agreement. Although Article 5 allows each ally to respond as they see fit, there’s an understanding that allies have an obligation to defend each other.

On the campaign trail, Trump declared that, if elected, he wouldn’t defend NATO allies if they’ve failed to spend two per cent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence. Not only that, he said he’d encourage Russia to attack these allies. As Trump reiterated last week: “Look, if they’re not going to pay, we’re not going to protect, okay?” These comments raised serious concerns within NATO. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General, warned that Trump is striking at the underlying logic of the alliance. The Secretary General stressed that “We should not undermine the credibility of NATO’s deterrent”.

What should we make of Trump’s threat? On the one hand, it’s clearly dangerous and evidence that a second Trump presidency could shake the foundations of the alliance. We should rightly be worried and condemn such reckless rhetoric. On the other hand, this is classic Trump. His approach to international politics can best be understood as “mobster diplomacy”. He demands personal loyalty as the head of the “family” of Western liberal democracies. When it comes to trade deals, he echoes Don Corleone in making offers that partners can’t refuse. As for alliances, he sees them as a protection racket. When it comes to NATO allies, his message is simple and direct: “Nice country you have there … pity if something happened to it”.

Allied leaders and academics can protest that the two per cent target isn’t a payment to the United States; it’s a measure of the relative amount allies spend on their own militaries, not a fee they owe Washington. While true, it’s a waste of breath to point this out. Trump and his supporters don’t care. They see most allies as freeloaders who’ve been coasting on American military power for too long. And you know what? They’re not wrong. That’s the rub for those who are understandably horrified by Trump’s comments. Far too many NATO allies, including Canada, have been content let the United States carry a heavy defence spending burden, while we focus on other priorities. That’s what Trump is ultimately getting at here, however menacingly.

Canada has been particularly unwilling to pay its agreed share, actually cutting the military budget late last year while many of our European allies were increasing theirs. We’re habitually the ones who slip out of the room when it’s our turn to buy a round, militarily speaking.

December 26, 2023

Canada is the unchallenged international champion of “the gesture” and “the pose”, yet always manages to be out of the room when the bill needs to be paid

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sorry for being several days behind on this, but Matt Gurney‘s message — while necessary and timely — does not have a “best-before” or an expiration date … it’s going to be valid for a long time to come:

On the military front, Canada has actually made some meaningful investments since that speech was given. We have announced deals for new transport and refuelling jets — desperately needed and long overdue. We more recently announced a plan to sole-source new surveillance planes, also desperately needed and long overdue. We also, just this week, announced that we are procuring a fleet of large, long-ranged, armed surveillance drones, to patrol our remote air and sea frontiers, after a mere two decades of mulling it over.

There ends the good news, sadly. Most of these procurements are many years away from actually being in service. And even once we have them, as good as the new equipment will be, the biggest problem for the military today is a crippling personnel shortage. The military is, to be blunt, a disaster. Far worse than is generally known. I’ve been covering military and defence issues for longer than I care to recount, and I can tell you plainly, dear readers, that the level of panicked leaking and lamenting coming out of the Canadian Armed Forces is like nothing I’ve ever seen. We don’t have the troops, sailors and aircrew to meet even basic obligations. Training is falling behind. The in-service availability of equipment and vehicles is appallingly low for lack of trained maintenance personnel and money for spare parts and equipment.

This is showing up in operations. The army doesn’t have enough soldiers to meet every commitment. The air force has cut back on operations. The navy’s top admiral is openly speaking, in public, about the crisis in his service.

We at The Line often talk about the Canadian love of talking about inputs instead of outputs. It’s easier to say “Our government has committed X dollars over Y years to address Societal Problem Z” than it is to actually ever have to answer to the public about why Z is somehow still getting worse. New procurements are an input; the desired output is a functional Canadian Armed Forces, capable of meeting its domestic obligations, honouring our treaty commitments and also being prepared for any unexpected contingencies. We do not have that military today. We cannot have that military for years. It would take massive investments and sustained effort to begin fixing this problem.

That is not happening. Hell, we took Anita Anand, one of Justin Trudeau’s better ministers and replaced her with Blair, a man for whom that has never been said. I can tell you with certainty that our allies, and our senior military commanders, had no trouble reading between those lines. Trudeau thought the military mattered, briefly, but then he stopped thinking that, and here we are.

So, 14 months out from Freeland’s speech and on the military front, well … Merry Christmas, or something?

But wait! There’s more!

Freeland’s speech also talked about other ways Canada could support its allies, and democracies in general. Some of it was vague and aspirational — hard to measure or follow-up on. But she was specific about two things: providing our threatened allies and the democracies broadly with a stable, democratic and reliable source of critical strategic resources. Energy, for example. And minerals.

Fourteen months later, how are we doing on those fronts?

I’m not an expert in either area, but I know experts in both. Andrew Leach is an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta (I literally copied that bio right off his webpage there). He is also, simply put, one of the smartest guys on the energy file in this country. I called him this week and found him grading papers, which is probably why he was so willing to talk with me. I explained to him what I was doing with the Brookings speech, and asked him if there was anything he could point to over the last 14 months as signs that we’d gotten serious and were doing as Freeland had said we would and must.

Nope!

“By any metric, it’s worse today,” Leach said. Two months ago, he noted, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trudeau government’s energy policies. “Now, there are no clear processes to get approvals for anything,” he added, except, somewhat ironically, pipelines, whose approvals process wasn’t included in the court ruling. I asked him if this was something the Trudeau government had done to itself, or if it was a victim of happenstance, and he said that some of the legislation they were dealing with dated back to the Harper era — before their time — but that in general, the Trudeau government hadn’t handled this well. “They messed up. They assumed they had powers they didn’t have, and didn’t make the arguments for those powers. They didn’t think about the framing. They had to earn that. They didn’t.”

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