Quotulatiousness

October 29, 2023

Arguments for not buying military kit “off the shelf”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sir Humphrey provides some of the reasons why it’s not a simple economic case for a nation’s military procurement to buy “off the shelf” equipment even from a close ally:

Not all kit needs to be or can be domestically sourced. The British army uses Apache attack helicopters which are licensed from the original US manufacturer.
Westland Apache WAH-64D Longbow helicopter (UK Army registration ZJ206) displays at Kemble Air Day 2008, Kemble Airport, Gloucestershire, England in June 2008.
Public domain photograph by Adrian Pingstone.

The arguments for buying American are on the face of it reasonable. The US produces good quality equipment able to meet many UK defence needs. There is a strong supply chain in place, ensuring that there are plenty of spare parts in the system to draw on when needed, and at cheaper cost due to bulk buying. The equipment is usually designed to be interoperable with NATO partners, so it can be integrated to work alongside allies and with existing equipment. It can be delivered quickly, it works and lots of other people use it, so why shouldn’t the UK? There are in fact many good reasons why the UK should not exclusively buy American.

Earlier this month, we looked at the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) program and why the Canadian Armed Forces never seemed to get the same “bang for the buck” that our American or British allies seem to manage. Here, Sir Humphrey points out that even the British military has to make procurement decisions that weigh cost and convenience with some very significant national security concerns:

To start with, US kit is designed by US companies to meet US requirements, not British ones. This may sound obvious but there is a dangerous view some put forward that “off the shelf” means the UK could just buy something and use it. There is no such thing as “off the shelf” unless you want it as it comes in its US version, with no modifications, changes or installation of British equipment. The moment you do this, you’ve created a UK variant with its own bespoke requirements and supply needs, for which you are dependent on the US defence industry to support – and there is no guarantee that this can or will happen. From the outset you have lost operational sovereignty and control over your military equipment.

Buying from the US means the UK would need to request a Foreign Military Sale (FMS) case through the US government, seeking legislative approval to purchase the equipment. If, for example, the UK wanted to buy a new tank, it would be reliant on US government approval to do so, not just for the initial purchase, but for all spares buy thereafter. The way that FMS works is that it sets out approval not just for purchase, but sets a schedule for spare parts purchases, services, and upgrades, all of which are done at the time and schedule set by US government and industry, and not the British government. This means that the UK would lose control over when to purchase spares or upgrades and would be forced to buy to a foreign governments timetable. This is why FMS is so successful for the US – it offers cheap entry prices but makes a killing in the long-term spares and support market. To buy from the US means to accept that you are handing over control of your spares and logistics chain to a foreign power who determines the timing of when and what you buy. This is fine in small doses but if you buy exclusively from the US, suddenly means you’ve got no control over how you want to support your armed forces.

The next challenge is the integration work needed to make things work for the UK. One of the risks of buying a foreign design is that you lack operational sovereignty over the design and its internal contents. Equipment supplied by the US will often come with a variety of sealed, tamper proof boxes containing US government-controlled technology that cannot be accessed by the purchasing nation. As the operator, you do not have full control over your military equipment, you don’t know what is necessarily in the boxes, and you are reliant on the US to fix issues with them. By contrast any equipment designed and built in the UK means that the MOD has full control and sovereignty over it to open it up, modify, adapt or change it to meet British needs. To buy US means accepting we cannot change a design without a foreign nations’ approval, which in turn means exposing our own sensitive military technology and equipment to the US, to conduct trials to ensure it can work with the US provided equipment. This represents an astounding loss of sovereign control on advanced weapon systems and means potentially giving the US defence industry insight into UK capabilities that manufacturers may want to keep commercially sensitive.

October 18, 2023

Why the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) program will cost so much more than equivalent US or British ships

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

In The Line, Philippe Lagassé outlines the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) program — the next-generation front-line combat ships for the Royal Canadian Navy intended to replace the current Halifax-class frigates and the already retired Iroquois-class destroyers:

Building warships is an expensive business, especially if you’re getting back into it after a few decades. Take the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC). Fifteen CSCs will be built at Halifax’s Irving Shipbuilding to replace Canada’s current frigates and decommissioned destroyers. According to a 2022 study by the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), the CSC acquisition will cost $80.2 billion. Given that defence inflation is well above regular inflation, and that regular inflation is running hot, that number isn’t going to go down.

Canada’s CSC will be a variant of the Type 26 Global Combat Ship originally designed for the Royal Navy. The Canadian variant includes significant changes to the original Type 26 design, notably to the combat systems. With the estimated per unit cost of each ship topping $5.6 billion, the National Post‘s John Ivison warns that the CSC is out of control. Ivison notes that the United States Navy (USN) acquired its Constellation-class frigates for $1.66 billion. Why, he understandably asks, is Canada paying so much for the CSC, and to what end?

The Canadian government always views major military purchases for the Canadian Armed Forces primarily as regional economic development projects and always attempts to get all or at least a major part of the construction done in Canada. To most people this sounds sensible: big military equipment acquisitions mean a lot of money being spent, so why shouldn’t most of that money be spent inside Canada? The answer, in almost every case, is that it will be significantly more expensive because Canadian industry doesn’t regularly produce these ships/planes/helicopters/tanks, so a lot of money will need to be spent to construct the factories or shipyards, import the specialized equipment, hire and train the workforce, etc., and no rational private industry will spend that kind of money unless they’re guaranteed to be repaid (plus profit).

Ordinary items for the Canadian military like clothing, food, non-specialized vehicles (cars, trucks, etc.) may carry a small extra margin over run-of-the-mill stuff, but it will generally be competitive with imported equivalents. Highly specialized items generally won’t be competitively priced exactly because of those specialized qualities. The bigger and more unusual the item to be purchased, the less economic sense it makes to buy domestically.

There are also the conflicting desires of the elected government (who generally want to target the spending to electoral districts or regions that benefit “their” voters), the permanent bureaucracy (who want to ensure that programs last a long time to ensure jobs within the civil service), and the military procurement teams (who have a tendency to over-optimistically estimate up-front and long-term costs because they want to get the procurement process underway … it’s tougher to stop something already in-process than one that still needs formal approval).

Once there’s a budget and capabilities are identified, the requirements for individual projects are prepared. It’s here that the comparison with lower cost, off-the-shelf alternatives runs into difficultly. The USN has lots of different types of ships that do lots of specific things. The above-mentioned Constellation-class is one of many different types of warships that the USN will sail, each with specific mission sets and roles. The Canadian military has only been directed to acquire fifteen CSCs, but the government expects the CAF to do a variety of missions at sea — not as many as the USN, of course, but still a good number. Canada has other military ships, including the Arctic Offshore Patrol Vessels (AOPS) also being built by Irving, but the CSC will be Royal Canadian Navy (RCN)’s primary expeditionary platform. Canadian defence planners, therefore, need those 15 ships to be capable of undertaking various missions and roles. Compounding this challenge are technological changes and the ever-evolving threat. The requirements for the CSC need to be continuously updated, and in some cases expanded, to keep pace with these developments, too.

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

On purely economic grounds, it would often make sense to add Canada’s order on to existing US, British, or other allied military orders to benefit from the economies of scale … but pure economic benefits don’t rank highly on the overall scale of importance. There’s also the understandable desire of the government to buy fewer items with wider capabilities as the government’s requirements for the military change with time and circumstance.

Were Canadian defence planners too cavalier in their requirements and design modifications? Maybe. Looking at it from their perspective, though, we should appreciate that they thinking about capabilities for a ship that Canada will use until the 2100s.

Doubts about the CSC are going to keep multiplying. The per unit costs can only increase so much before people start seriously discussing reducing how many of them will be built. You can be sure that some within government are already asking “Why 15? Why not 12?” Serious concerns are also being raised about whether the defence budget can afford to maintain CSC and keep them technologically up to date after the fleet is introduced. Given the CAF’s personnel recruitment troubles, moreover, it’s unclear if the RCN will have enough sailors to operate the full fleet. The first CSC that hits the water, furthermore, will have all sorts of kinks and problems that will need to be sorted out. That’s standard for first ships off the line, but you can be sure that every failing will be met with handwringing and charges of incompetence.

To address these concerns, the government must let DND/CAF better explain what the CSC is designed to do and why it needs to do it. Simply telling Canadians that it’s the right ship isn’t enough when it’s easy to point to lower-cost alternatives. As well, the government needs to be far more transparent about estimates of costs and what’s driving them. Political and public support for the CSC shouldn’t be taken for granted, and growing concerns about the program can’t be simply brushed away.

July 18, 2023

Seaplanes? How 1940s. No, we’re seeking to “leverage emerging technologies” instead

Filed under: China, India, Japan, Military, Pacific, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

CDR Salamander wonders about a modern need for military sea rescue capability that the US Navy filled with flying boats and seaplanes during the Second World War, then supplemented with helicopters during Korea and Vietnam. For ocean search-and-rescue in a combat environment in the present or near future, what are the USN’s plans?

I will be the first person to admit that good, well-meaning, and informed people can disagree with seaplanes in general or the US-2 specifically, but they have to engage the conversation. Directly argue the requirement or offer realistic alternatives.

This does neither. If anything is demonstrates the narrowness of thought and fragility of substance used in opposition.

What an patronizingly toxic stew that answer is. I highly doubt Lung typed out that answer himself, so my commentary below is not directed at him personally, but … and it is what comes after the “but” that counts — but at the three-digit J or N code that extruded that from the random acquisitions professional statement subroutine from ChatGPT.

Let’s give that answer a full Fisking;

  • “The Indo-Pacific operational environment has evolved significantly since World War II”:

    • Let me check my WWII Pacific chart, my Vietnam War era globe, and GoogleEarth … and … no. The geography has not changed. The distances have not changed. The requirement of thousands of years to take and hold territory or eliminate your enemy from access to it has not changed. All the little islands, regardless of what Al Gore and John Kerry say, are still there. As we are seeing in the Russo-Ukrainian War, a million PPT slides saying so does not change the fundamentals of war.

    Sentence one is invalid.

  • “The employment of seaplanes today would not meet the operational demands and current threat scenario.”

    Is there an operational demand for us to rescue downed airmen and to be able to reach remote islands without airfields? Yes. Does your “current threat scenario” run from Northern Japan through to Darwin, Australia? Yes.

    Sentence two is invalid.

  • “However, we support the continuous development of new and innovative solutions that may provide solutions to logistical challenges.”

    • So, you define “new” as something that only exists on PPT slides? By “continuous development” you mean never matures as a design that goes into production. By “innovative” you mean high on technology risk. Undefined program risk. Unknown design risk. No known production line or remote estimate to IOC, much less FOC when we know that the next decade is the time of most danger of the next Great Pacific War.

    Sentence three is irresponsible and professionally embarrassing given the history of transformational wunderwaffe this century.

  • “As an example, DARPA’s Liberty Lifter X-Plane seeks to leverage emerging technologies that may demonstrate seaborn strategic and tactical lift capabilities.”

    • Well, goodness, we will have to micro-Fisk this gaslighting horror show of a sentence. To start with, they are talking about either this from General Atomics;

    … that could only be used on a very few select beaches under ideal weather in a completely permissive environment and could only be used for one specific mission and nowhere any possible hostile aircraft or ground forces. Also looks like we’d need a whole new engine and a small town’s worth of engine mechanics to maintain the maintenance schedule on those engines.

    Then we have this offspring of an accidental mating of the Spruce Goose with the Caspian Sea Monster idea from Aurora Flight Sciences;

    I give the odds of either one of those taking to the air prior to 2035, if ever, on par with a return of the submarine LST of Cold War fame (deck gun not included).

    Let’s get back to the wording of that dog’s breakfast of a final sentence. Feel slimy reading it? You should;

  • “seeks to leverage” — that is just a way of saying, “hope in magic beans.” Gobbledegook.
  • “emerging technologies” — oh, you mean something that hasn’t left the computer, white board, or PPT slide.
  • “that may demonstrate” — so, even if our magic beans managed to fuse unobtainium with Amrita, we’re not really sure if the strip mining of strange blue creatures’s holy sites and drilling holes in the soft pallet of whale-like thing will result in something of use.
  • “strategic and tactical lift capabilities” — I’m sorry, an eight or ten-engined aircraft that any goober with a 1960s-era iron-sighted RPG-7 could target at maximum range is going do anything “tactical” — especially at the expected price of those things and the resulting precious few that wind up displacing water. Oh, and you admit that it will only be used for cargo, so it can’t do the full range of possible missions the US-2 can … just cargo. On just a few beaches that are fully surveyed ahead of time. At the right tide. In the right weather. In a 100% safe and permissive environment.
  • The final sentence is a caricature.

Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) should feel at least mildly insulted by this reply. It was a serious question given a canned answer that, slightly modified, could have been provided at any time in the last quarter century by the lethargically complacent maintainers of the suboptimal habits of the mistakingly entitled acquisitions nomenklatura

May 26, 2023

CH-124 Sea King; Legendary ASW helicopter and example of a deeply flawed defense procurement process

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

Polyus
Published 21 May 2023

The 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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April 27, 2023

Spending more on defence requires more than just turning on the financial taps

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

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

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

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.

January 2, 2023

An in-depth look at the Type 26 frigate design

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Navy Lookout
Published 31 Dec 2022

The Type 26 frigates being built for the Royal Navy [and Royal Canadian and Royal Australian navies] are specialist submarine hunters but with a range of other capabilities. This video provides a primer on the overall warship design, its weapons, sensors and decoys.
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August 6, 2022

Canada’s New Warship

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Frontline Pros
Published 12 Feb 2022

The Type 26 Frigate will become the first dedicated warship Canada has built in decades. Soon the Royal Canadian Navy will take ownership of 15 of these vessels, making them the largest owner of the Type 26 in the world.
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July 10, 2022

Seven easy steps to fix military procurement

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander wrote these for the US military, so some of them are far out-of-scale for tiddlers like the Canadian Armed Forces, but the spirit is still valid and relevant:

1. No weapon system presently under production will be allowed to stop production until its replacement is under production itself.

2. Acknowledge we have lied to ourselves for decades actual magazine requirements in war (use “new” lessons from the Russo-Ukraine War for the tender to save face — whatever works) — and accelerate/restart production of everything from ASW weapons to strike weapons of all types.

3. Acknowledge that we do not have enough weapons — specifically anti-air and land attack — on our warships. Every war proves this and recent experience tells us this.

4. If I take away your access to satellite VOX & DATA and you cannot navigate and fight, you are not a wartime asset and your funding sent somewhere useful.

5. Accelerate capacity for repair away from fleet concentration areas, preferably afloat. Maximize production of sealift and begin the process to replace the C-5M.

6. If your combat unit does not have organic, robust unmanned ISR under the command of your unit’s commander, you are worthless in the war to come and you will have such a capability by FY25 or you will be disestablished.

7. Pass the Salamander Bill: no General of Flag Officer shall, for a period no less than 5-yrs from retirement date, receive compensation of any kind or anything of value from any publicly or privately held company that does business with the federal government, nor shall they serve in any non-paid positions with same.

Yes, #7 is important. If you have not realized why in 2022, you are part of the problem.

March 31, 2022

Canada’s F-35 procurement process — “Dysfunctional, but, like, a masterpiece of dysfunction.”

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney reveals the embarrassing secret of his life: he has “a favourite Canadian military procurement fiasco”. He’s quite right that there’s a distressingly wide variety of procurement cock-ups to choose from since the 1960s, but in his opinion the F-35 saga is the best:

“F-35 Lightning II completes Edwards testing” by MultiplyLeadership is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Having a favourite Canadian military procurement fiasco feels perverse, in a way. It’s like having a favourite gruesome sports injury. Procurement fiascos are bad. We want fewer of them. There’s nothing to be celebrated when yet another one barfs all over the national rug. And yet I find myself indulging a bizarre fondness for a mostly overlooked low point in our long, embarrassing journey to this week’s re-decision to buy a fleet of F-35 fighter jets for the Royal Canadian Air Force. As bad as the low point was — and it was really bad — it also so perfectly summed up our utterly manifest dysfunction that I’ve come to almost admire it. It’s awful, but it’s a pure form of awful. Dysfunctional, but, like, a masterpiece of dysfunction. You couldn’t ask for a better example of what’s wrong with us.

[…]

That wasn’t the original plan; the Liberals first proposed buying 18 new F-18 SuperHornets, the more advanced American successor to the original F-18. That idea fell through due to a trade spat between Canadian darling Bombardier and Boeing, the SuperHornet manufacturer. This was the point of no return: the Boeing dispute was another opportunity for the Liberals to sigh, pop a few Tums and then just do the right thing and proceed with the full replacement as quickly as possible.

They did not. And this, dear readers, is where this embarrassing chapter of our already pathetic history of military procurement reached maximum absurdity.

With our CF-18 fleet at a state of exhaustion, and Boeing in Trudeau’s dog house, instead of actually replacing our old, exhausted jets with new jets, we just gave the air force enough old, exhausted Australian jets so that the RCAF could cobble enough workable jets and spare parts together to allow the Liberals to further delay any decision on a real replacement program.

When you write a lot about military procurement, as I certainly have, you can’t help but grow a bit (!) jaded and cynical. Even by the standards of my appallingly lowered expectations, though, this was an outrageous decision. As I said above, it’s so bad, so cynical, so crassly political, that it has perversely become something I almost admire, in a twisted way. It’s an almost too-brutal-to-be-believed example of politicians dodging accountability and leadership like Keanu bobbing and weaving out of the path of CGI bullets. Every dollar and hour of time we put into scooping up Australia’s leftover jets — they were unneeded because Australia was competent enough to procure more advanced SuperHornets and, ahem, F-35s — was money and time spent not to improve the readiness and capabilities of the Canadian Armed Forces, but to permit the Liberals to avoid acknowledging they’d made a dumb campaign promise.

Stephen Harper failed the Canadian Armed Forces and Canada generally by not getting the ball rolling on a replacement during his majority term. This was a major failure by the Conservatives that they get all awkward and squirmy about when you bring up, but we should bring it up. The CPC botched this, badly, and should feel shame. Justin Trudeau then repeated that failure, and then took it up a level. In this race to the bottom, where no one looks good, Trudeau “wins” by simple virtue of snapping up used jets — the last of which only arrived last spring! — to buy his government time to do absolutely nothing.

March 30, 2022

The RCAF’s long, sad F-35 story

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

In The Line, Mitch Heimpel tries (without either laughing or crying) to tell the story of how the Canadian government finally got around to admitting they should have bought the F-35 fourteen years ago (when the RCAF told them it was the best fit for our national requirements):

If you’re looking for a simple meta-explanation for all of us, it would be this: Canadian politicians refuse to tell the public one simple truth — military procurement is expensive. There isn’t an inexpensive version of this. That doesn’t mean we should accept any and all costs just because it’s going to be expensive. It does mean that politicians have to stop trying to sell us on there being an inexpensive, or perfect, version of this. There is no MacGyver version of military procurement. No amount of rubber bands and paper clips replaces jet engines and submarines, no matter how many times we pretend it will. Indeed, the longer you delay, the more it’ll cost — the weapons generally get more expensive, and you end up spending more money to wring every last bit of use out of what equipment you already have, instead of replacing it in an efficient, orderly way.

So, let’s recap: We are, in fact, so bad at procurement that we ran a process for years, and then cancelled it. And then pledged not to buy the jets we’d originally pleged to buy. We then bought seven old Australian F-18s so we could keep our elderly and dwindling CF-18 fleet from experiencing a “capability gap” caused mostly by not just buying the F-35 in the first place. Then, almost 12 years after announcing we were going to buy the F-35, after all the drama above, we’ve announced we’ll buy the F-35, after all. Eighty eight of them, in fact. So there’s that, I guess.

In so many ways, the F-35 saga is another symbol of seven years of Trudeau governance. In 2015, the Liberals could not have been more clear in their campaign platform, which included a whole section titled “We will not buy the F-35 stealth bomber-fighter.”

What were Ministers Anand and Tassi out saying when the F-35 announcement was made this week? “Best plane” and “best price.” Which was true in 2008 when we were first told it was the only fighter that met our needs. It was still true when the Harper government blinked in 2012, and still true when Justin Trudeau was accusing the government of “whipping out” our CF-18s while on the opposition benches in 2014. Remained true in 2015 when the Liberals campaigned against it, too, and every year since.

We have no reason to believe that what is supposed to be a $19-billion announcement for 88 planes to begin delivery in 2025 will actually end up being any of those things. Don’t be surprised if we spend more money to get fewer jets at a later date. But we are now well past the point of being able to blame anyone other than ourselves for cost overruns or late deliveries. The Canadian government failed the Royal Canadian Air Force in this procurement. That is beyond dispute. These guys need the planes. They have for years.

Let’s hope we’ve at least been sufficiently embarrassed by this experience to be more serious when we have to talk about submarines, which is now, come to think of it.

But I doubt it.

March 15, 2022

For military procurement blunders, “no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada”

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

Germany has announced that they will be purchasing US F-35 stealth fighters as part of their re-armament program. My favourite headline on this was over at Blazing Cat Fur: “Germany To Buy 35 Lockheed F-35 Fighter Jets From U.S. Amid Ukraine Crisis … Canada Will Buy Cool ‘Fighter Jet Stickers’ With Eco-Friendly Adhesive”

On a more serious tone — but with sadly the same basic message — Mitch Heimpel looks at the multi-generational rolling catastrophe that is Canadian military procurement since the unification of the forces in 1968:

Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army since WW2. When I was in the reserves, we were told this was due for replacement in a few years. I was in the reserves from 1976-1980. It still hasn’t been replaced.

To say we have a checkered history with military procurement, fails to capture exactly how bad it is. Our political leadership has failed us continually over the course of half a century. No party has done it well. Some have done it better than others. But no one can claim any kind of bragging rights.

Fighter jet procurement in this country is so fraught it once caused the birth of a new political party. Trying to buy helicopters helped bring down a government. We only successfully bought those helicopters after they [the old helicopters] became a greater danger to the personnel manning them than they were to any potential adversary. We have been running a procurement for the next generation of fighter jets for an entire generation. Even Yes, Minister writers would have given up on something that absurd.

Our submarine fleet seems to be almost permanently in dry dock. Our most recent ship procurement resulted in the absolutely monstrous prosecution of one of the country’s most accomplished military leaders.

And we just issued a revised bid to finally replace our Second World War-era pistols … last week.

Just cataloguing that level of incompetence is exhausting. No leader or party looks good. The civil service, as the one constant through all these cartoonish blunders, surely has to wear some of this, too. The fact that we seem to repeat the same mistakes can, at least in part, be attributed to a significant institutional memory failure on the part of the people trusted with having the institutional memory.

Now, it is worth noting in fairness that no nation has an easy time with large scale military procurement. Ask the Americans about the development of the V-22 sometime. But, still, no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada.

I’m not a hardware expert. I can’t tell you which pistol we should buy. There’s also genuine policy questions here that need to be settled — I don’t know whether we should focus on the navy because we’re an Arctic nation, or the air force because it allows us to participate more readily in allied force projection exercises — like, say, no-fly zones? The necessary mix for Canada is no doubt some of both, and it’s fine to have disagreements between parties on what the right mix is.

But setting that aside, I want to talk about what it would take politically, to get us to start taking procurement seriously — just a few basic rules that any government would need to follow to procure anything that they chose was important for Canada to have.

May 15, 2021

Adventures in military procurement

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

Back in September, Matt Gurney wrote about the generations-long travesty that is the Canadian government’s procurement system for the Canadian Armed Forces. I missed it at the time, but — this is a shock, I know — it’s still fully accurate and up-to-date, because the government hasn’t done anything to address the blatant failings of the “system”:

Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army since WW2.

Some history first: during the Second World War, Canada manufactured hundreds of thousands of Browning “Hi-Power” 9mm pistols. The pistols were originally made by Belgian manufacturer FN, but Belgium, of course, was overrun by the Nazis early in the war. The schematics and part diagrams were evacuated before the Germans arrived and the pistol saw service in numerous allied militaries. The Canadian army ended up acquiring 60,000 of them, all built in 1944 and 1945. And here’s where things get bonkers: we’ve never replaced them. Some Canadian military units have used more modern pistols, acquired in smaller batches, but the standard sidearm of the Canadian Armed Forces, today, isn’t just the same kind of pistol we used in the Second World War. It’s literally the same pistols.

Reliability issues with the pistols are a chronic problem. I mean, they’re 75 years old, and they’ve been in use continuously. Our military weapons technicians do what they can, and they’ve been stripping some pistols for spare parts to put into other pistols for decades. But the Hi-Powers are in desperate need of a replacement. They’re a generation overdue for replacement. But in keeping with the finest traditions of Canadian military procurement, we can’t get it done. It’s beyond our ability.

We’ve tried, sort of. At the start of 2017, the military began work on a replacement program that would have procured up to 25,000 new 9mm semi-automatic pistols for the Canadian Armed Forces. The military gave itself 10 years to get this accomplished and budgeted $50 million. It’s hard to overstate how crazy that is. Pistols aren’t complicated. If you have a credit card and a firearms licence, you can walk into a store and buy one. A lot of what the military needs is super complex and custom-made. Pistols are easy. There are factories all over the world that are already producing proven, reliable, affordable designs. Buying new pistols has got to be about the simplest procurement any military is ever going to face. And we still thought we’d need 10 years to do it. A decade.

The amazing thing is, by total fluke, in 2016, the British also decided they needed new pistols. And they also decided they needed 25,000 of them. This is entirely coincidental, but it’s a fantastically convenient coincidence: it’s a rare apples-to-apples comparison of two national procurement systems. And how’d it go?

Well, the Brits selected a type of pistol, purchased 25,000 of them and issued them to their military units by 2018. They wrapped the whole thing up in two years. The total cost was $15,000,000.

In Canada, we set a 10-year goal for the same thing, budgeted more than three times as much … but never got it off the ground. No progress was made.

So now, the military is trying again.

When I was in the militia in the late 1970s, we trained with the Browning, although even then we were told it was slated to be replaced within a few years. After thirty-some years of heavy use, the guns were still going strong, but definitely showing significant signs of wear and were probably already at the point they should have been retired even then.

March 17, 2021

Rebuilding the Royal Canadian Navy

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

I somehow missed this article by Sir Humphrey when he posted it a few weeks back. He’s looking at the Australian and Canadian governments’ respective decisions to use the British Type 26 design to replace their current anti-submarine fleets and considering some of the economic and military concerns that led to the decision.

In both cases there have been media articles in the last week over the programmes and concerns. In Canada, the challenge has been that the cost has grown to a total of $77bn for 15 escorts. There has been cost growth from an originally scheduled $14bn many years ago, and the first of class will not now be delivered until 2031. This has led to suggestions in some media quarters that Canada could do things faster and more cheaply if it simply bought an off the shelf foreign design now and got on with things.

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (as all major weapon systems purchases tend to be).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

[…]

The issue now is that Canada will need to establish, almost from scratch, a frigate construction programme and workforce for a finite period of time without a clear plan of what follows on when the last hull is completed. At the same time it will need to run on ships that are becoming increasingly elderly – it is likely that most of the Halifax class will see more than 40 years of service, and some may approach their 50th birthdays before being replaced – something that will pose an increasing maintenance and resource challenge.

Could things be done more cheaply or quickly? Almost certainly yes, but only if you are willing to make massive compromises. It could be possible, for example, to look to licence build an existing design that is already in service. There are plenty of designs out there that could be licence built and brought into service in the next few years — probably at less cost than the T26 programme.

But while this may sound easy, its also a recipe for disaster. It’s easy to look at country X and say “they’re buying this ship for that much” and assume that Canada is getting a bad deal. But Country X is likely to have a very different set of requirements, and their design will reflect it.

For example, Canada needs a ship able to operate with NATO and 5 EYES as a fully integrated player – this adds cost to fit specific systems and equipment that is compatible. Canada will also want to fit bespoke systems to meet national needs – again this will require design changes, that come at a price. Bolting on all manner of different requirements that Canada needs to meet the unique operational circumstances adds price and complexity to the design.

While you probably could take an off the shelf design and build it now, it would be just that, an off the shelf design. It wouldn’t be optimised for local needs, and it wouldn’t have the right equipment, comms, meet local design standards, or be certified for use with national equipment.

You are then faced with two choices – either bring a cheap ship into service that is entirely unsuitable and not designed for your needs, but is a lot cheaper, or spend an enormous amount of money shifting the design to better reflect your needs. If you choose the latter, then suddenly you are adding cost and time in, and the 2031 date will slip even further.

If you choose the former, then you have to accept that the design is “as it comes” and will have minimal Canadian input – so limited industrial offsets, very little economic benefit, and the long-term support solutions will firmly be tied into the country of origin and not Canada. In other words, Canadian taxpayer dollars will be spent to support a foreign economy.

That last point is really the key. Canadian governments, in my lifetime at least, never look at the military requirement as the top priority and sometimes not even the second or third priority. The economic spin-offs, especially in those cases where the benefits can be allocated to marginal parliamentary constituencies, will be the top priority. As is always a talking point in the case of any major military hardware acquisition, this is going to be the “single largest expenditure in Canadian government history”. Just as the replacement of the RCAF’s aged CF-18 fighters will be the largest expenditure in its turn.

March 2, 2021

Warship purchasing is not for the faint-of-heart

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

Ted Campbell talks about the way the Royal Canadian Navy plans for warship purchases … and how the best-laid plans can be derailed by ignorant political advisors:

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (until the RCAF gets their replacement for the CF-18 Hornet).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

Once upon time,* about 25 to 30 years ago, in the mid 1990s, when I was the director of a small, very specialized team in National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ) in Ottawa, something like this happened: One of my colleague, who had a title like Director of Maritime Requirements or something similar said to one of his principle subordinates, “Look, now that the 280s (Canada had four Tribal Class destroyers with pennant numbers starting at 280, they were often just called ‘280s’) are finished their mid-life refit and now that the new frigates are entering service it is time to put a ‘placeholder’ in the DSP for their eventual replacements.” The DSP was (still is?) the Defence Services Programme, it is the internal document which sets out the long range spending plans (maybe hopes is a better word) for the Canadian Armed Forces.

Anyway, the Navy commander (the officer assigned to write the document, not the Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy who is nicknamed the Kraken (CRCN)) sat at his desk and consulted the most recently approved planning document which, as far as I can remember, called for a surface fleet of 25 combat vessels and four large support ships plus numerous minor war vessels (like minesweepers) and training vessels. The officer then prepared a memorandum for the joint planning staff which said that the Navy would need 25 new combat ships, to be procured between about 2015 and 2035, in five “batches” of five ships each** at a total cost of about $100 Billion, in 2025 dollars. He didn’t say much beyond that, actually, he was just intending to “reserve” some money a generation or so in the future. His memorandum sailed, smoothly, past his boss and the commodore but questions came from a very senior Air Force general: Where he asked, did the $100 Billion come from? That was an outrageous number, he said.

A meeting ensure where the Navy engineering people came and said, “$100 Billion is a very reasonable guesstimate. Our brand new frigate are costing $1 Billion each when they come down the slipway. They will each have cost the taxpayers two to three times that by the time we send them to be broken up thirty or forty years from now. Adding in the inevitable costs of new technology and inflation, which we know is higher for things like military ships and aircraft than it is for consumer goods, then a life-cycle cost of $4 Billion for each ship is very conservative. The admirals and generals huffed and puffed but they didn’t argue ~ they knew that the engineering branch insisted on using life cycle costing, even though no-one but them understood it, and they also knew that arguing with engineers is like mud-wrestling with pigs: everyone gets dirty but the pigs love it.

A decade later, when a new government was planning the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy, which was all about making the Canadian shipbuilding industry competitive and had very little to do with ships ~ except they would be the “product” for which the Government of Canada would pay top-dollar, the Navy was told it could have fewer ships, in two classes, and someone ~ NOT the military’s engineering branch ~ assigned a cost figure to the project which was, to be charitable, pulled out of some political/public relations staffer’s arse.

[…]

* The story is true, in general, but I was not directly involved in any of it. I learned about what happened from three main sources: 1. routine briefings that my bosses (directors-general and branch chiefs) gave, regularly, to we directors, dealing with what was going on in the HQ and in the big wide world; 2. periodic chats with my colleagues, after work on Friday afternoons, in the bar of the Officers’ Mess ~ many of us regarded 2. as a more reliable source of information than 1.; and 3. in the case of the story about the Navy engineers and the Air Force general, by a friend and colleague who was in the room.

** The idea, long before the National Shipbuilding Strategy, was to keep shipyards moderately busy on a continuous basis. The 25 ships would all be similar: the first “batch” of five would be identical, one to the other; the second “batch” would be very similar but with some improvements; the five ships of batch 3 would be similar to the ships from the second batch and those from batch 4 would be rather like their batch 3 sisters. Finally, the batch 5 ships would be product improved versions of batch 4 ~ they would still be “sisters” of the batch 1 ships, but not, in any way, twins. The idea was that about the time that the batch 5 ships were being delivered the first of the batch 1 ships would be getting ready for a mid-life refit (after 15 to 20 years of service) which would result in it being much more like the batch 5 ships … and so on.

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