Quotulatiousness

January 26, 2026

The 2026 US National Defence Strategy

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

Noah looks at the recently released American National Defence Strategy and identifies areas of interest (or concern) for Canada (edited for typos):

The 2026 National Defense Strategy is out, and with it we get a few references to Canada. While our mention is little, and when there is it is fairly mundane, there is a message. You either step up or get stepped over. [NR: This has always been true, but administrations in the past have been more coy about it than President Trump … who is the opposite of coy. On the other hand, the Canadian government has been quite blatant about giving mere lip service to shared US-Canadian defence interests and slacking off completely on any serious work to keep the Canadian Armed Forces in a state to be able to do what the government pretends to want.]

This policy was shadowdropped in the middle of the night, so I decided to quickly rush to get just about anything out about it. This isn’t a full analysis, but more a quick rundown with some personal thoughts for those who want the quick go of whats happening.

To start, here are the direct mentions of Canada:

    We will engage in good faith with our neighbors, from Canada to our partners in Central and South America, but we will ensure that they respect and do their part to defend our shared interests. And where they do not, we will stand ready to take focused decisive action that concretely advances U.S. interests.

The policy continues:

    Canada also has a vital role to play in helping defend North America against other threats, including by strengthening defenses against a missile, and undersea threats. In addition, U.S. partners throughout the Western Hemisphere can do far more to help combat illegal migration as well as to degrade narco-terrorists and prevent U.S. adversaries from controlling or otherwise exercising undue influence over key terrain, especially Greenland, the Gulf of America, and the Panama Canal.

The strategy itself is fairly domestic in focus, with repeated mention of the Western Hemisphere and borders as the key areas for which the United States should focus. It takes a backseat approach to the Indo-Pacific, favoring a collaborative approach to Chinese containment that focuses on “peace through strength”, instead of what the NDS refers to as “confrontation”.

In this regard, it is funny that despite criticisms today from President Trump regarding Canada’s trade deal with China, as well as criticism over an apparent lack of Canadian support for Golden Dome, the NDS further states that “President Trump seeks a stable peace, fair trade, and respectful relations with China.” [NR: I think Noah is being a bit naive here … Trump wants to deal with China as a normal trading partner, but China’s actions in so many ways show that China doesn’t want to reciprocate.]

The strategy further states that “Our goal in doing so is not to dominate China; nor is it to strangle or humiliate them. Rather, our goal is simple: To prevent anyone, including China, from being able to dominate us or our allies.”

On today’s Golden Dome comments, I wanna take note that Canada has been discussing participation fairly openly and trying to figure out in what ways we can align even without full participation. There is no indication the current government is against Golden Dome.

The RCAF has its own IAMD study underway in Canadian Shield. It is already fairly well aligned to what the Americans are doing. People will focus on space-based interceptors and such, but Golden Dome is far more extensive than that. There’s much we align on without joining.

Canada is also undertaking its own extensive modernization of both NORAD and space-related assets, both of which will significantly contribute to Continental Defence in a variety of different ways. That includes OTHR and F-35, yes, but is so much more extensive.

From autonomous vehicles in the Arctic to ground- and space-based optical capabilities, AEW&C aircraft, new satellite constellations for both communication and surveillance, domestic launch investments, and even establishing a VLF communication capability.

There is so much going on that can and will contribute to collective Continental Defence. Much more than I believe anyone truly knows about, even myself. We need to highlight and promote these investments if we want mentalities to change and people to recognize the effort.

January 13, 2026

Navies in the news

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Konrad talks about the latest “OMG we’re all going to die!” pants-wetting over scary new hypersonic missiles as a threat to the navies of the west, especially the US Navy’s big carriers:

    R.C. Maxwell @RCMaxw3ll
    EXCLUSIVE: After Russia used hypersonics in western Ukraine, @RedState talked with senior executives from American startup @CastelionCorp, which is on the brink of finishing a comparable missile system that surpasses the capabilities of Russia & China.

This is insane and it’s great news for the U.S. Navy.

All the worst people keep telling me Trump-class battleships are “obsolete” because of hypersonic missiles.

Then this drops:

“Blackbeard, engineered from a clean-sheet design by former SpaceX alumni, will not only match but decisively outpace foreign systems … rapid iteration and scalable production. We’re not just going to provide a comparable missile. We’re going to provide better missiles.”

A tiny startup just told Russia and China’s entire missile-industrial complex: we can beat you.

That’s the tell.

If hypersonics were the unstoppable carrier-killers people claim, you wouldn’t see startups leapfrogging them in a garage with venture capital. You’d see locked-in monopolies and terrified Western navies.

Here’s what the hype crowd misses:

1) Future battleships won’t be naked.
They will carry layered anti-hypersonic defenses, directed-energy weapons, decoys, and interceptors specifically designed to kill these things.

2) Hitting a moving ship at hypersonic speed is brutally hard.

No nation has publicly demonstrated a successful hypersonic strike on a maneuvering warship. China hit a fake carrier sitting still in the desert. That proves almost nothing.

Think about the physics.

Flying a kamikaze plane into a carrier was hard but pilots had eyes, brains, and real-time judgment.

Now imagine doing that blind, with sensors the size of a soda can, while the target is jamming, maneuvering, spoofing, and throwing decoys.

Now imagine the Honey I Shrunk the Kids laser made you the size of an ant and you are told to steer a bullet into a weaving jet ski.

Russia can hit slow oil tankers. If they could reliably hit moving ships bringing supplies into Ukraine, they already would have.

3) Hypersonics are scarce and insanely expensive.

Even if it took 100 missiles to score a hit on a battleship, that’s 100 missiles that aren’t hitting ports, refineries, factories, air bases, and ammo depots.

Most of those targets don’t shoot back. None of them weave like a battleship.

Battleships change the economics of war.

They force the enemy to burn their most precious weapons just to try to hurt one ship.

That’s not vulnerability.
That’s deterrence.

Stop black-pilling naval power. The physics, the economics, and now the tech sector are all pointing in the same direction.

Also on naval matters, Matt Gurney at The Line talks about his unfamiliar feelings of hope that the Canadian government’s promised spending boost for the Royal Canadian Navy will not only happen, but that the RCN may generate significantly improved capabilities as a result:

Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship HMCS Harry DeWolf shortly after launch in 2018. The ship was commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy in June, 2021.

A day or two ago, I found myself thinking about the state of the Royal Canadian Navy. Because, I mean, hey — who doesn’t?

Anyone who has paid much attention to my work will be aware that I’m not exactly bullish on our country’s ability to get much done — especially on the file of military procurement. Yet, a day or two ago, I found myself thinking about the state of the Royal Canadian Navy and feeling something almost like … hope? Is this what hope feels like?

There is a lot going on in Canadian naval news, and that fits a broader pattern. There’s a lot going on on the seas globally, and, somewhat to my surprise, Canada seems to be doing a pretty good job — could be better, but could be worse — adapting to the new reality.

[…]

So let’s talk about seapower. The U.S. has it — not as much as it wants, but it’s got it. It wants more. Even if that ends up taking some pretty weird forms. And others are racing to catch up.

Including, intriguingly, Canada.

Last week, Canadian shipyard Seaspan announced that it had signed agreements with both Finland and American shipyards to licence its design for Multi-Purpose Icebreakers to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Arctic Security Cutter Program. And while the “Elbows Up” crowd may look askance at the prevalence of the word “American” in that sentence, this is damned interesting — not only are we continuing to show interest in the Arctic, but we’re also trying to sustain real shipbuilding in this country. The situation in the White House is so bizarre these days that it’s hard to take any announcement like this to the bank, but it was notable. If nothing else, it would be nice to see more efforts like this — whether the plans work will, alas, largely be out of our hands.

In addition to that, a few more stories came to mind. The first was this announcement from a few months ago: the Irving Shipyards have begun work on the final Arctic Offshore Patrol Ship of the Harry DeWolf class. Irving is also getting started on the next generation of Canada’s main warships, the River-class destroyers. Canada is actively seeking a replacement, in far greater numbers, of its current fleet of problematic submarines. And there’s also growing talk about a new smaller, mid-range class of Canadian warship, dubbed, for now, the Continental Defence Corvette. (Which I guess rolls off the tongue better than the See, Trump, We’re Spending On the Military Now Program.)

It’s easy to be a cynic on Canadian defence procurement — I am cynical about Canadian defence procurement. But then I looked at the ships being seized by U.S. forces. At Russia cutting cables, China ringing Taiwan with missiles and the U.S. throwing fleets around like Theodore Roosevelt has something to prove. And I look at a plan to not only replace Canada’s (too small) fleet of warships, but to considerably grow it … and it’s hard not to see the bigger picture.

Reverting to a pre-1945 geopolitical reality isn’t going to be an exercise in vibes. It’s going to be an exercise in power — or at least attempts to wield power. Air forces matter, cyber matters, drones matter and Lord knows armies matter. But they matter locally. True global power, or at least the ability to give a global power some pause before they decide to whisk your el jefe off to a Manhattan courtroom in a tracksuit, requires the ability to control your coasts and all the ocean approaches to them.

June 4, 2025

“Asshole Britain”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Greg Quinn indulges in a bit of struggle sessioning about his earlier disagreements with the editors of The Line about Britain and Canada (protip: don’t search for images to go along with that particular headline, especially if you have “safe search” filters turned off):

Yeah, let’s go with an inoffensive photo of His Royal Majesty and his Canadian First Minister chatting in the Senate chamber, rather than anything remotely to do with the headline of this post.
Photo by Paul Wells from his Substack

On February 12th of this year, I wrote in The Line about how my country, the United Kingdom, had “ghosted” Canada by refusing to come out strongly in reaction to U.S. President Donald Trump’s egregious attacks on the country and his calls for it to become the 51st state. In writing that piece, I didn’t beat around the bush — I called the U.K.’s actions what they were at the time: cowardice and sycophancy.

Since February, there have been a few (many?!) developments in Canada’s — and the world’s — relationship with President Trump.

Not least among these are Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson’s depiction (or technically, implication) of the U.K. as “Asshole Britain”. As other regular Line readers will know, “Asshole Canada” or “Maximum Canada” is an idea the editors floated here some months ago, where they asserted that Canada should abandon its typical desire to be seen as a global do-gooder and simply assert its national interests, vigorously and unapologetically, and if other countries, even allies, object, well, to hell with them. Editor Gurney, in a recent podcast, cited the just-concluded visit of His Majesty the King to Canada to deliver the Throne Speech — the first time a monarch has done so since 1977 — as an example of that. Prime Minister Mark Carney issued the invite to the King despite obvious discomfort with the idea among senior officials in my government.

Carney didn’t care. The King is the sovereign of Canada, too, and Carney didn’t let British discomfort deter him.

I have to say that HM the King’s speech was a blinder and (in its own royal diplomatic way) left no doubt as to where His Majesty’s sympathies lie and how he supports Canada’s sovereignty and independence. Whether you are a royalist or a republican, the fact that HM the King made the trip and read the speech should be welcomed. And I entirely agree with the editors here — Canadians should and must ignore the comments from the U.K. Who cares? HM the King was acting in his capacity as Canada‘s monarch — the views of anyone in the U.K. (government or otherwise) are irrelevant.

I wish I could condemn Jen and Matt for their (again, implied) characterization of the U.K. — Britain has needed no urging to unapologetically assert its own interests in this revived era of Trump. But I can’t. They are absolutely correct. And every day that passes, I’m sorry to say that the U.K. becomes more and more “Asshole Britain” when it comes to its relationship with Canada and the U.S.

The reasons remain much the same as I identified before: cowardice and sycophancy. To that, I’d now like to add venality. We think we have a special relationship with the U.S., as demonstrated by our recent trade agreement — except the impact of that agreement is open to some question. We seem to be afraid of saying anything that might upset President Trump, in case he reacts. Although we fail to understand that upsetting the President does not follow a rational process. He could (and does) get upset and react extremely easily at the simplest and most unexpected of things.

The President continues to make unacceptable claims against Canada, including reiterating his call for it to become the 51st state shortly after the King’s visit concluded. His latest iteration of this includes claims that Canada could save U.S.$61 billion it “should” be charged for the so-called Golden Dome (what is it with adjectives and this President?) if it joins the U.S. This, of course, fails to grasp the simple strategic fact that if you want a defence shield like this over North America, then you’re going to have to use sensors and other infrastructure on Canadian soil. Is he expecting to be provided that land for free?

By continuing to refuse to stand up to President Trump and clearly express our support for Canada, we are submitting to his attempts to divide and rule those of us who remain like-minded. At its worst, we are now venal — selling out to the president.

Instead, we should be standing true to our roots — as defenders of the free market and democracy. We should be leading the way, and we should be building an alliance of those who continue to share our values.

That is what we should be doing. That we aren’t is nothing short of a disgrace.

Update: Fixed broken link to Greg Quinn’s article. Doh!

April 22, 2025

Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults

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

James Pew reviews Douglas Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization (I was first made aware of the book by the sudden uptick in antisemitic posts on social media that directly attacked Murray and his work).

The opening words of On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray contains a disturbing fact about the situation Israel, and the entire Western world, were thrust into immediately following the barbaric terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023:

    Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.

Indeed. Out of all the conflicts occurring all over the world, many of which are more devastating by orders of magnitude and in terms of the scale of humanitarian catastrophe than the IDF’s Gaza campaign, why would Westerners care so much about it? Why do Canadians and Americans take to the streets and occupy college campuses over it? These and many other vital questions are asked by Douglas Murray in On Democracies and Death Cults.

So why should this particular October 7th event, and the IDF’s subsequent military response, which is taking place halfway around the world, be the one that reveals “exactly where everyone is standing”? Murray knows the answer, as do his readers and most clear thinking people who do not harbour secret loathing’s for the Jewish people. The reason is clear and plain as day: the Jews are defending themselves and their homeland from a terroristic death cult bent on their destruction, but for some reason hoards of people from all political stripes from virtually all corners of the world, believe this to be a wholly unacceptable thing for the Jews to do.

The shame I felt for Canada, or more correctly, for things that had been allowed to take place in Canada following the October 7th massacre in Israel, was immediately apparent in the introduction when Murray wrote:

    In Canada alone, after October 7, synagogues were firebombed and shot at, Jewish schools were shot at, Jewish shops were fire-bombed, and Jewish-owned bookshops were vandalized.

Future generations will need to contend with the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the worst crisis to strike the Jewish people since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism erupted throughout the West. An inexplicable “shapeshifting” hatred that “locks Jews in an unresolvable set of challenges.” Murray writes:

    Jews were once hated because of their religion. Then sometime after the Enlightenment it became hard to hate people because of their religion. At that point the Jews were hated because of their race. Then, after the twentieth century it became unacceptable to hate people because of their race. So, in the twenty-first century, when civilized people cannot hate the Jews for their religion or their race, Jews can be hated for having a state–and for defending it.

Murray’s head is constantly in two places: 1) Israel, including the war zone in Gaza 2) The West. The question of why Israel seems always to be the object of relentless and obsessive international scrutiny, is top of Murrays mind. But as well, the infiltration of radical Islamic ideologies into the Western institutional edifice is not lost on him. Indeed, this knowledge leads him to such observations as the following:

    While there were certainly plenty of non-Muslim politicians in the West who decided to attack Israel from the moment the conflict started, it should also be noted that elected Muslim politicians across the West seemed to have a special beef with the Israelis and supported the Palestinian side …

Canada has no shortage of the exact political personage Murray is referring to. The signs of Islamic infiltration and subversion into Canadian society are everywhere. The recent adoption by the Toronto District School Board of policies concerning Anti-Palestinian Racism, is but one example of the phenomenon.

Early in the book Murray mentions the Iron Dome – the Israeli missile defense system. One thing I never considered was the economics involved with the constant rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza. Whereas the cost of a rocket shot from Gaza is estimated at around $300 US, the cost of one of the defense missiles deployed to eliminate Hamas’ rockets is around $100,000 US, and sometimes two defense missiles are required to shoot down one $300 dollar terrorist rocket. The vast amount of economic resources eaten up by the asymmetrical terrorist warfare waged by Hamas is astounding, when one considers the years over which these rocket assaults have taken place.

October 16, 2024

QotD: Technical differences between ground-attack and air-defence missiles

Filed under: Military, Quotations, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Russians claim the missile that struck the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kiev yesterday was an American-made air defense missile. It wasn’t; video footage clearly shows that it was a Russian KH-101.

To help everybody not get fooled again, I’m going to explain some basic differences between ground-attack and air-defense missiles, and why nobody should have been fooled by this propaganda for a second.

The top-line thing here is that ground attack missiles can be large and have heavy warheads, while air defense missiles have to be smaller and have lighter warheads.

Air defense missiles have to intercept a target traveling at high speed. They have to be as fast and agile as possible in order to do that; every gram of weight is a penalty. That means you’re going to make the warhead no heavier than you have to in order to kill a plane. And it doesn’t take much kaboom to kill a plane.

Even if we didn’t have footage of the missile and wreckage to examine, it would be obvious that the damage to that hospital wasn’t done by an air defense missile because there’s too much of it. You can’t get that much blast shock out of the smallish warheads they put in those things.

The weight penalty for a big warhead is much less in something like a KH-101. It’s not designed to be agile, it’s designed to get from point A to point B on a least-time course and then blow up real good.

You can use an air defense missile for ground attack with some hacking of the guidance software, but you can’t use a ground-attack missile for air defense; the physics are against you.

The problem with using an AD missile for ground attack is it it won’t give you much of a kaboom when it gets there. They’re just not very effective.

Nevertheless, the Russians have actually been doing this in Ukraine, throwing S-300s and S-400s at ground targets. Only because they were short on ground attack missiles to start with, and their capacity to manufacture them is limited by Western sanctions on the electronics they need.

So the next time the Russians try to deflect blame for one of their missile strikes on civilian cities by claiming the explosion was from a failed Ukrainian intercept, treat the assertion with the contempt it deserves. If whatever went boom actually was an air defense missile, it was almost certainly a repurposed Russian one.

Eric S. Raymond, X(the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, 2024-07-11.

December 1, 2022

Crisis? Which crisis?

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Military, Politics, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney makes the case that was NATO (and western governments in general) needs is something called “deliverology”:

I couldn’t have asked for a more topical example of exactly what I’m talking about here: the lull between realization and reaction. There were no problems with “expectations” at the top of the federal government in February [during the Freedom Convoy 2022 protests]. Everyone in a position of authority was seized with the urgency of the situation and the need for rapid action. There wasn’t any denial, doubt or incomprehension, which are the usual enemies when I write about our expectations being a problem. 

February was an example of a different issue: realizing there was a crisis but not really knowing what to do about it, or whose job it was to do it, and wasting a lot of precious time trying to figure it all out. When days and even hours count, governments can’t spend weeks or months figuring out what to do. But that’s what happened during the convoys, and during COVID, and other incidents I could rattle off. Does anyone think it won’t happen again next time, whatever that threat may be?

And some version of that concern came up over and over in Halifax [at the Halifax International Security Forum]. And not just among Canadians. The world is changing very quickly and even when we recognize a problem, we aren’t moving fast enough to keep up. So on top of our expectations, we’ve got another challenge: response times. They’re just too damned long.

I hope the readers will forgive me for being a little vague in this next section; some of the conversations I’m thinking of here were in off-the-record sessions. Rather than trying to splice together any specific quote or anecdote, I’ll just wrap it all up under the theme of “There are things we should be doing now that we weren’t, and things we should have been doing a long time ago that we only started on way too late.”

An obvious example? The rush to get Europe off of Russian fossil fuels and on to either locally generated renewables or energy imports from allies and friendly nations. (If only there was a “business case” for Canada doing more. Sigh.) Another fascinating example that came up was air defences. Two decades of post-Cold-War-style thinking among the allies has led to widespread neglect among the NATO countries of air-defence weapons. Why bother? The Taliban didn’t have an air force, right? 

Most countries have fighter jets and inventories of air-to-air missiles suitable for their planes. However, across the alliance, there are very few ground-based air-defence systems suited to shooting down not just attacking aircraft, but incoming cruise missiles and drones. 

Drones pose a particular challenge. They fly slow and low and are highly manoeuvrable, plus they are so cheap that they can be a true asymmetrical weapon: you’ll go broke real quick firing million-dollar missiles at a drone that costs your enemy $50,000 or so. And your enemy may send a few hundred at once in a swarm that simply overwhelms your defences. It’s not that drones are unbeatable. The opposite is true: drones are easily destroyed, if you have the right defences available. 

We don’t, though. Oops.

The NATO powers actually had a preview of this element of the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia during the 2020 conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where drones were used to devastating effect. Every military affairs watcher I know sat up a bit straighter after watching what the Azeris did to Armenia, with shocking speed. Swarms of drones first killed Armenia’s air defences and then went to work on Armenian ground forces. The U.S. and NATO allies have been studying that conflict, and considering how to adapt our own strategies, for both offence and defence. But right now, nine months into the Ukraine war and two years after the conflict in the Caucasus, there still aren’t enough NATO systems available even for our own needs, let alone to share with Ukraine. Russia keeps hammering away at critical Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and the Ukrainians keep begging for help, but we have nothing to send. To be clear, a few systems have been sent to Ukraine, which include not just the weapons but the radars and computers necessary to detect and engage targets. But they can only be delivered as fast as they can be built. There is no real production pipeline here, and certainly no pre-stocked inventories in NATO armouries. 

October 19, 2022

South Atlantic D-Day: Battle of San Carlos – Falklands War

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historigraph
Published 15 Oct 2022

On May 21st 1982, the United Kingdom landed thousands of troops at San Carlos Water in the Falkland Islands, to begin their recapture from Argentina. But only hours after arriving, British forces were under intense attack, as the Argentine air force attempted to push the troops clambering ashore back into the sea. This was the Battle of San Carlos.

0:00 – Intro
0:37 – Britain’s Invasion Plans
2:59 – Bespoke Post
4:16 – The Argentine Onslaught
8:46 – Attack on Coventry and Conveyer
(more…)

February 27, 2022

Canada couldn’t intervene in a modern war even if we wanted to

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney considers the state of the Canadian Armed Forces, which have been systematically starved of resources since, oh, 1968 (we started cashing in the “peace dividend” long before there was one):

Canadian Army LAV III convoy near Khadan, Afghanistan – 2010-01-25
Photo by Staff Sgt. Christine Jones via Wikimedia Commons

We assumed that we’d never need the heavy, nasty stuff — history had ended. We cut our budgets and our force levels again and again, until many of our critical capabilities really exist on paper only. Canada’s fighter jet fleet of alarmingly elderly CF-18s is large enough to technically meet the requirements of keeping a few jets on alert for NORAD missions, intercepting the odd plane near our airspace, and showing the flag on NATO missions. We can even hurl some bombs on enemy groups that are annoying us, as we did with the Islamic State, because, well, they can’t shoot back. Our navy is much the same: we have a fleet large and capable enough to more-or-less patrol parts of our own coast and contribute to the odd international patrol mission abroad, because doing so buys us some diplomatic credibility — it is table stakes for being a sorta-paid-up member of the Western alliance. Our army has enough men and equipment to help out with domestic missions at home or to contribute in small missions to broader coalition efforts, though it’s a struggle to do both at the same time. That’s basically all we assumed we’d need, and we “rationalized” our budget and capabilities accordingly.

Again, yes, this made sense for a time. But it was obvious a decade or so ago — around when Obama was mocking Romney — that China was a power on the rise. Russia invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014. That was another wakeup call we ignored. For the last decade, certainly for the last five years, we’ve indulged in a kind of make-believe defence policy planning, where we were enthralled to an increasingly obsolete and dangerous post-Cold War mindset that was as narrow and misguided as the “Cold War thinking” the soft-power advocates of the post-1991 era disdained among the old guard.

We defence hawk weirdos who sweated blood with each abandoned capability were right, though. History wasn’t over. We hadn’t seen the end of great power war, or at least the real danger of it. The world is a dangerous place. This might be a surprise in the corridors of power in Ottawa, but it’s not like they weren’t warned. I’ve got 15 years of National Post bylines to prove it.

We are missing critical capabilities that our troops would need — need — in order to not get wiped out in a conflict with a relatively modern opponent. The Canadian Army has very good armoured vehicles for infantry. That’s good! Our LAVs are genuinely excellent. But we don’t have self-propelled artillery. We have only a few dozen tanks, and very little anti-tank missile capability (anti-tank missiles can be fired by infantry on foot or from vehicles; we don’t have a ton of missiles to go around in any case). Recruitment has lagged, and we are notoriously slow at actually processing an applicant into service. Perhaps most alarmingly in the current context, the Canadian military has basically zero air defence capability. If under air attack by helicopters, attack aircraft or, increasingly, drones, our guys could fire wildly into the air and hope to get lucky. That’s about it.

It’s a classic Canadian procurement story, of course, and perfectly emblematic of the bigger problem. We used to have mobile air defence. We didn’t have a ton, but we had 36 M113 armoured vehicles — an older vehicle, but a proven workhorse — that came armed with eight missiles that could be used against attacking air threats or tanks (given our paltry anti-tank capability, that’s two birds with one stone!). We procured the “ADATS” vehicles right at the end of the Cold War, never ended up needing them on any of our missions during the 1990s and early 2000s, and scrapped them without replacement in 2012, because Stephen Harper had a budget to balance and didn’t want to spend a bunch of bucks either modernizing the system or buying something new. We realized by 2019 that that was a bad idea, and began a procurement process to replace them, and the earliest we could expect delivery is … the end of this decade.

So for now, we try to buddy up with allies that have anti-air defences, or expect our troops in the field to put their faith in the Lord and mediocre Russian targeting systems. But even if we rush a procurement of some air-defence systems, that would just plug one gap among many. Why the hell haven’t we picked a fighter jet by now? Oh, yeah: Because no leader wants to spend the money and assumed we’d never need them, anyway. Oops! Why haven’t we gotten the new navy ships under construction, or begun work on the next-generation submarines? Huh, that’s weird — it’s the same reason: we’re cheap and assumed we wouldn’t need them, so flaking out wasn’t risky. Why aren’t we pushing ahead with NORAD radar modernization? Why was buying trucks such an ordeal? Why are we still incapable of buying a new 9mm pistol? Same, same and same.

For the politicians, military spending is a boring and distracting waste of money they’d rather spend on something they think voters would like. This is a mindset that is deeply set in among Canadian politicians, and it applies basically evenly across Liberals and Conservatives alike (the others are even worse). There has been a massive failure of imagination across not just our political class, but our society more generally. We have dropped the ball, and are now at the mercy of events.

November 26, 2021

The modern carrier debate

Filed under: China, History, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I recently started reading A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, a fascinating historical blog run by Dr. Bret Devereaux. You can expect to see plenty of QotD entries from his blog in future months, as I’ve been delighted to find that he not only has deep knowledge of several historical areas I find interesting, but that he also writes well and clearly. This post from last year is a bit outside his normal bailliwick, being modern and somewhat speculative rather than dealing with the ancient world, classic-era Greece, Republican and Imperial Rome, or the Middle Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean basin:

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) underway in the Persian Gulf, 3 December 2005.
U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Matthew Bash via Wikimedia Commons.

Let’s talk about aircraft carriers for a moment […] There is currently a long-raging debate about the future of the aircraft carrier as a platform, particularly for the US Navy (by far the largest operator of aircraft carriers in the world), to the point that I suspect most national security publications could open companion websites exclusively for the endless whinging on aircraft carriers and their supposed obsolescence or non-obsolescence. And yet, new aircraft carriers continue to be built.

As an aside, this is one of those debates that has been going on so long and so continuously that it becomes misleading for regular people. Most writing on the topic, since the battle lines in the debate are so well-drawn, consists of all-or-nothing arguments made in the strongest terms in part because everyone assumes that everyone else has already read the other side; there’s no point in excessively caveating your War on the Rocks aircraft carrier article, because anyone who reads WotR has read twenty already and so knows all of those caveats already. Except, of course, the new reader does not and is going to read that article and assume it represents the current state of the debate and wonder why, if the evidence is so strong, the debate is not resolved. This isn’t exclusive to aircraft carriers, mind you – the various hoplite debates (date of origin, othismos, uniformity of the phalanx) have reached this point as well; a reader of any number of “heterodox” works on the topic (a position most closely associated with Hans van Wees) could well be excused for assuming they were the last word, when it still seems to me that they represent a significant but probably still minority position in the field (though perhaps quite close to parity now). This is a common phenomenon for longstanding specialist debates and thus something to be wary of when moving into a new field; when in doubt, buy a specialist a drink and ask about the “state of the debate” (not “who is right” but “who argues what”; be aware that it is generally the heterodox position in these debates that is loudest, even as the minority).

Very briefly, the argument about carriers revolves around their cost, vulnerability and utility. Carrier skeptics point out that carriers are massive, expensive platforms that are increasingly vulnerable to anti-ship missiles and that the steadily growing range of those missiles would force carriers to operate further and further from their objectives, potentially forcing them to choose between exposing themselves or being pushed out of the battlespace altogether (this, as an aside, is what is meant by A2/AD – “Anti-Access/Area-Denial” – weapons). The fear advanced is of swarms of hypersonic long-range anti-ship missiles defeating or overwhelming the point-defense capability of a carrier strike group and striking or even sinking the prize asset aircraft carrier – an asset too expensive to lose.

Carrier advocates will then point out all of the missions for which carriers are still necessary: power projection, ground action support, sea control, humanitarian operations and so on. They argue that no platform other than an aircraft carrier appears able to do these missions, that these missions remain essential and that smaller aircraft carriers appear to be substantially less effective at these missions, which limits the value of dispersing assets among a greater number of less expensive platforms. They also dispute the degree to which current or future weapon-systems endanger the carrier platform.

I am not here to resolve the carrier debate, of course. The people writing these articles know a lot more about modern naval strategy and carrier operations than I do.

Instead I bring up the carrier debate to note one facet of it […]: the carrier debate operates under conditions of fearsome technological uncertainty. This is one of those things that – as I mentioned above – can be missed by just reading a little of the debate. Almost none of the weapon systems involved here have seen extensive combat usage in a ship-to-ship or land-to-ship context. Naval thinkers are trying to puzzle out what will happen when carriers with untested stealth technology, defended by untested anti-missile defenses are engaged by untested high-speed anti-ship missiles which are guided by untested satellite systems which are under attack by untested anti-satellite systems in a conflict where even the humans in at least one of these fighting forces are also untested in combat (I should note I mean “untested” here not in the sense that these systems haven’t been through test runs, but in the sense that they haven’t ever been used in anger in this kind of near-peer conflict environment; they have all been shown to work under test conditions). Oh, and the interlinked computer systems that all of these components require will likely be under unprecedented levels of cyber-attack.

No one is actually certain how these technologies will interact under battlefield conditions. No one can be really sure if these technologies will even work as advertised under battlefield conditions; ask the designers of the M16 – works in a lab and works in the field are not always the same thing. You can see this in a lot of the bet-hedging that’s currently happening: the People’s Republic of China has famously bet big on A2/AD and prohibiting (American) carriers from operating near China, but now has also initiated an ambitious aircraft carrier building program, apparently investing in the technology they spent so much time and energy rendering – if one believes the carrier skeptics – “obsolete”. Meanwhile, the United States Navy – the largest operator of aircraft carriers in the world – is pushing development on multiple anti-ship missiles of the very sort that supposedly render the Navy’s own fleet “obsolete”, while also moving forward building the newest model of super-carrier. If either side was confident in the obsolescence (or non-obsolescence) of the aircraft carrier in the face of A2/AD weapons, they’d focus on one or the other; the bet hedging is a product of uncertainty – or perhaps more correctly a product of the calculation that uncertainty and less-than-perfect performance will create a space for both sets of weapon-systems to coexist in the battlespace as neither quite lives up to its best billing.

(I should note that for this brief summary, I am treating everyone’s development and ship procurement systems as rational and strategic. Which, to be clear, they are not – personalities, institutional culture and objectives, politics all play a huge role. But for now this is a useful simplifying assumption – for the most part, the people procuring these weapons do imagine that they are still useful.)

In many ways, the current aircraft carrier debate resembles a fast moving version of the naval developments of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Naval designers of the period were faced with fearsome unknowns – would battleships function alone or in groups? Would they be screened against fast moving torpedo boats or forced to defend themselves? How lethal might a torpedo attack be and how could it be defended against? Would they be exposed to short-range direct heavy gunfire or long-range plunging gunfire (which radically changes how you arm and armor these ships)? With technologies evolving in parallel in the absence of battlefield tests, these remained unknowns. The eventual “correct solution” emerged in 1903 with the suggestion of the all-big-gun battleship, but the first of these (HMS Dreadnought), while begun in 1904 was finished only after the Battle of Tsushima (May 27-8, 1905) had provided apparently startling clarity on the question.

January 30, 2020

Upgrading NORAD’s capabilities with AN/SPY-7(V)1 radar (aka “Aegis Ashore”)

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

Ted Campbell on the need to upgrade NORAD radar installations as part of a general refurbishment of the alliance’s capabilities:

Lockheed Martin’s Solid State Radar has been designated as AN/SPY-7(V)1 by the US government.
Image from Lockheed Martin/PRNewsfoto.

One of the elements which might be considered in modernizing and enhancing the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) surveillance, warning and control system is a new radar and some people have suggested that the AN/SPY-7(V)1 radar, sometimes called Aegis Ashore, might be a useful (and proven, it is in use, on land, in Japan, and will be fitted on Canada’s new Type 26 (destroyer-frigate) combat ships) solution. This radar is eminently suitable to be part of an enhanced (conventional) NORAD and of a CANUS continental ballistic missile defence system.

There are many technical (and logistical) advantages to using that radar on both our, Canadian, warships and in a land-based role, too.

The AN/SPY-7(V)1 radar produces a lot more information than do the current AN/FPS-117 and AN/FPS-124 radars which are used in the NORAD role, today, and were built in the 1980s using 1960s and ’70s technology.

(Please don’t worry about the AN/*** designations. They are part of a very sensible American system which was designed to make it simpler to identify both Army and Navy systems (hence the AN/ at the beginning). The three letters following the AN/ describe the system:

  • The first letter describes the installation. F means Fixed, on the ground (land) and S means on a ship;
  • The second letter means the type of equipment, and P means radar; and
  • The third letter means purpose. S means search (detection and locating) and Y surveillance and control.

Thus the SPY-7 is a shipborne surveillance radar and the FPS-117 is fixed (land-based) search radar. The numbers just differentiate one system from another.)

If Canada chooses an advanced radar, like the SPY-7, two engineering problems will need to be addressed:

  • First, these things use a lot more power than do the existing radars; and
  • Second, they produce much, much more information which needs to be “transported” instantly, to control centres in places like Canadian Forces Base North Bay, where all the data from all the radars is analyzed and used to effect NORAD’s mission. If the radar sites are located below (about) 72°N, as would be the case for coastal radars in BC, NS and NL, this is not a huge problem because the station is within the “footprint” of the big, high bandwidth satellites in geostationary orbit. But if the radar site is too far North then a terrestrial (possibly microwave, maybe tropospheric scatter) network (in which each station needs electrical power, too) will have to be installed to move the data to a satellite ground station. (Or a non-geostationary, high bandwidth, satellite system will have to be deployed.)

January 24, 2020

From a Canadian perspective, “NORAD … is more important than NATO”

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, History, Military, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The American government has once again expressed a strong desire to update the 1957 North American Air Defence Commmand arrangement between the US and Canada for defence of the North American continent. It’s a Cold War relic to some (particularly some in the Prime Minister’s Office and cabinet), but it has a very real value to Canada, as Ted Campbell explains:

In 1957 Canada and the USA agreed to create the North American Air Defense Command. It is a “combined” command, American and Canadian people, civilian and military, work together, in combined headquarters, to conduct an active aerospace defence effort over the continent we share. Americans and Canadians work side-by-side managing the airspace, detecting intruders and identifying and intercepting them and so on.

NORAD, I would argue, is more important than NATO.

First, it is about defending our own homeland.

Second, it is about defending the US strategic deterrent, which has, arguably, done more to keep global peace than all the efforts of the United Nations, combined.

NORAD modernization and expansion should be at the top of Canada’s defence policy agenda. Specifically:

  • First, billions of dollars, likely tens of billions of dollars are going to be needed to upgrade the surveillance and warning system. We need new radars, terrestrial and space-based, and upgraded control systems to do the job properly;
  • Second, Canada needs to buy enough (85+ is just the very barest of bare minimums) of the right new fighter jet; and
  • Third, Canada needs to join the American ballistic missile defence system.

I believe that this issue: the shared defence of our, shared, continent and, therefore, the defence of the American heartland and of America’s strategic deterrent is a key, perhaps even the key element in our most important foreign relationship. […] The knowledge that Canada is doing a full and fair share of defending our shared continent, of defending America, is not lost on admirals and generals, diplomats and senior civil servants, representatives and senators in the US Congress, pundits and political leaders in waiting in the think-tanks and senior staff in the White House, even if Donald J Trump is not impressed … IF we are doing a full and fair share.

Right now, we are not.

An orbital analyst tracks the Kosmos 1402 spy satellite in orbit in the Space Defense Operations Computation Center, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) on 18 February, 1983.
NORAD photo by Master Sergeant Hiyashi via Wikimedia Commons.

January 12, 2020

The shoot-down of Flight 752

Filed under: Government, History, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh discusses the destruction of Ukraine International 752 in the historical context of the Vincennes incident (later on Friday, the Iranian official position appears to have shifted to accepting responsibility for an accidental missile launch):

Some of the wreckage of Ukraine International flight 752 near Tehran, Iran.
Photo from MOJ Newsagency via Wikimedia Commons.

It has become fairly obvious, whatever the Iranian authorities may say now or later, that Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was shot down after departing Tehran. This was, in truth, overwhelmingly probable the moment the news broke, but there was still widespread shock and disbelief on Thursday when several Western heads of government announced signal-intelligence evidence of a missile strike. There are still “How could such a thing happen?” reactions pouring forth — mostly from people who are old enough, in theory, to recall the USS Vincennes accidentally shooting down an Iran Air Airbus A300 in 1988.

I say “in theory,” but the truth is that popular memory of the Vincennes incident has been much diminished — outside Iran — by later events in the region. This must qualify as one of the good Lord’s most sadistic jests. The United States wasn’t officially at war with anyone in the region at the moment when its best-trained sailors, equipped with scorchingly new and uncannily powerful missile and battlespace-mapping technology, blew up a commercial airliner full of religious pilgrims.

The Navy was in the Gulf not to fight or oppose anybody in particular, but to protect neutral shipping from the Iran-Iraq War. Up to the time of the accident, it was Iraq that demonstrably presented the greater danger to American warships. Ronald Reagan was still president. The First Gulf War wouldn’t kick off until 1990.

In other words: we forgot. The memory of Vincennes was overwritten by a generation of Middle East conflict, like an old computer file.

Which leaves a paradox. Liberals who regard recent U.S. history as one enormous, indistinguishable mass of bloodthirsty actions don’t seem especially aware of one of the most horrifying tactical blunders in American military history. What’s one jet plane more or less in the black ledger of imperialism? Conservatives, meanwhile, are racing to accuse Iran of “murder” in the case of Flight 752.

Blunders can be worse than crimes, according to one of the most famous of all military maxims. But if one points out that Iran’s “murder” of innocents is starting to look like a nightmarish replay of Vincennes, one risks being accused of postulating “moral equivalence” between the United States and Iran.

August 17, 2019

The “remarkably worthless” Sea Sparrow missile launchers on RCN Iroquois-class destroyers

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

Earlier this week, Tyler Rogoway posted a fascinating article about one of the original weapon systems installed on Royal Canadian Navy Iroquois-class destroyers. It was developed specifically for this class, and was eventually replaced with modern Mark 41 Vertical Launch Systems during the ships’ mid-life modernization refits:

Image posted to the Reddit r/WarshipPorn subreddit by u/Admhawk.

From manually aimed box launchers, to automated ones like the Mk29 still in use today, to vertical launch variants, the Sea Sparrow was adapted for many different launching methods. Yet the strangest had to the one found on Canada’s Iroquois class. About seven years ago, someone who had worked with RIM-7s on U.S. Navy vessels told me about how nuts the Canadian launch system was that he had seen demonstrated in the late 1980s. In fact, he said it was so clumsy and slow reacting, that it largely defeated the main purpose of the missile system, at least in a multitude of circumstances. “Remarkably worthless” was the way he described it. I had long forgotten about this exchange until recently when pictures of this exact system popped up on the always lively Reddit page r/Warshipporn. At first, when I saw the images I was flabbergasted as to how weird the setup was, then the memory of the conversation hit me. This is what my contact was talking about!

Four Iroquois-class destroyers were commissioned between 1972 and 1973 and all served until 2005, with the last example being retired two years ago, in 2017. They featured the MKIII Sea Sparrow system fitted inside their forward deckhouse, with doors that opened up on each side and overhead swing-arm launchers carrying four missiles each (eight in total, four on each side) that extended out from their garage-like enclosure that hung out off the side of the ship strangely when at the ready. The whole arrangement looks like something far from conducive to high sea state, not to mention rocket blast from the missiles, or a combat environment, for that matter. 32 missiles were carried in all, with twelve at the ready on each side, but reloading the system as a whole was a slow process.

In addition, it’s said that the Hollandse Signaal Mk22 Weapon Control System wasn’t really up to the task and just deploying the missiles and warming up their guidance systems could take minutes or longer. All of this is far from ideal for what is supposed to have been a fast-reacting point defense system capable of quickly fending off sea-skimming anti-ship missiles that arrive with little warning from over the horizon.

HMCS Iroquois (DDG 280) at Port of Hamburg, near Övelgönne, after mid-life refit replaced the Sea Sparrow launchers (via Wikimedia Commons)

January 3, 2018

BAHFest London 2017 – Louie Terrill: Why the Kessler Syndrome is key to humanity’s future

Filed under: Humour, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BAHFest
Published on Dec 11, 2017

Watch Louie Terrill at BAHFest London 2017 present his theory, “Making sure we’re all in this together: Why the Kessler Syndrome is key to humanity’s future.”

BAHFest is the Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses, a celebration of well-researched, logically explained, and clearly wrong scientific theory. Additional information is available at http://bahfest.com/

July 18, 2014

The Israeli-Palestinian situation is difficult to solve, but not complex

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:14

David Harsanyi responds to a silly post at Vox by Max Fisher:

    This is the one thing that both Hamas and Israel seem to share: a willingness to adopt military tactics that will put Palestinian civilians at direct risk and that contribute, however unintentionally, to the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Partisans in the Israel-Palestine conflict want to make that an argument over which “side” has greater moral culpability in the continued killings of Palestinian civilians. And there is validity to asking whether Hamas should so ensconce itself among civilians in a way that will invite attacks, just as there is validity to asking why Israel seems to show so little restraint in dropping bombs over Gaza neighborhoods. But even that argument over moral superiority ultimately treats those dying Palestinian families as pawns in the conflict, tokens to be counted for or against, their humanity and suffering so easily disregarded.

A “partisan” writing about a conflict as if he we an honest broker is distracting, but read it again. You might note that one of the institutions he’s talking about is the governing authority of the Palestinian people in Gaza, which, applying even the most basic standards of decency, should task itself with safeguarding the lives of civilians. Instead, it makes martyrs out of children and relies on the compassion of Israelis to protect its weapons. This is a tragedy, of course, but Israel does have to bomb caches of rockets hidden by “militants” in Mosques, schools, and hospitals. Since Hamas’ terrorist complex is deeply embedded in Gaza’s civilian infrastructure there is really no other way. And that only tells us that one of the two organizations mentioned by Fisher has purposely decided to use Palestinian as pawns and put civilians in harm’s way.

It is also preposterous to claim that Israel is showing “little restraint in dropping bombs over Gaza neighborhoods.” Actually, Israel is far more concerned with the wellbeing of Palestinians civilians than Hamas. This week, 13 Hamas fighters used a tunnel into Israel and attempted to murder 150 civilians in Kibbutz Sufa, with Kalashnikovs and anti-tank weapons. On the same day, Israel issued early warnings before attacking Hamas targets – as it often has throughout this conflict in an effort to avoid needless civilian deaths Hamas is hoping for. It was Israel that agreed to a five-hour cease-fire so that UN aid could flow into Gaza last week. It is Israel that sends hundreds of thousands of tons of food to Gaza every year, millions of articles of clothing and medical aid. That’s more than restraint.

[…]

I often hear people claim that the Israel-Palestinian situation is complex. It isn’t. It’s difficult to solve, indeed, but it’s not complex. One side refuses to engage in any serious efforts to make peace with modernity and with Jews. So, for those like Andrew Sullivan and some of the folks at The American Conservative, who argue that Israel is the one drifting from Western ideals, I think Douglas Murray has the best retort:

    A gap may well be emerging. But not because Israel has drifted away from the West. Rather because today in much of the West, as we bask in the afterglow of our achievements — eager to enjoy our rights, but unwilling to defend them — it is the West that is, slowly but surely, drifting away from itself.

Update: Charles Krauthammer says this is a rare moment of moral clarity.

Israel accepts an Egyptian-proposed Gaza ceasefire; Hamas keeps firing. Hamas deliberately aims rockets at civilians; Israel painstakingly tries to avoid them, actually telephoning civilians in the area and dropping warning charges, so-called roof knocking.

“Here’s the difference between us,” explains the Israeli prime minister. “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”

Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity. Yet we routinely hear this Israel–Gaza fighting described as a morally equivalent “cycle of violence.” This is absurd. What possible interest can Israel have in cross-border fighting? Everyone knows Hamas set off this mini-war. And everyone knows Hamas’s proudly self-declared raison d’être: the eradication of Israel and its Jews.

[…]

Why? The rockets can’t even inflict serious damage, being almost uniformly intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system. Even West Bank leader Mahmoud Abbas has asked: “What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?”

It makes no sense. Unless you understand, as a Washington Post editorial explained, that the whole point is to draw Israeli counterfire.

This produces dead Palestinians for international television. Which is why Hamas perversely urges its own people not to seek safety when Israel drops leaflets warning of an imminent attack.

To deliberately wage war so that your own people can be telegenically killed is indeed moral and tactical insanity. But it rests on a very rational premise: Given the Orwellian state of the world’s treatment of Israel (see: the U.N.’s grotesque Human Rights Council), fueled by a mix of classic anti-Semitism, near-total historical ignorance, and reflexive sympathy for the ostensible Third World underdog, these eruptions featuring Palestinian casualties ultimately undermine support for Israel’s legitimacy and right to self-defense.

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