{"id":30844,"date":"2015-04-01T03:00:40","date_gmt":"2015-04-01T07:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30844"},"modified":"2015-03-31T11:05:06","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T15:05:06","slug":"the-rcns-victoria-class-submarines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/04\/01\/the-rcns-victoria-class-submarines\/","title":{"rendered":"The RCN’s Victoria<\/em> class submarines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Damian Brooks linked to this article<\/a> in The Walrus<\/em>, calling it “Easily the best piece on Canadian submarines I’ve ever seen in the mainstream press.”<\/p>\n

The threat of fire is ever-present on warships, which is why fire training is conducted every day a Canadian vessel is in port and at least once a week when it\u2019s at sea. But the fire on Chicoutimi<\/em>, which already had experienced a four-year delay in getting out of port, could hardly have come at a worse time for Canada\u2019s \u201csilent service.\u201d It fuelled a controversy that had begun in 1998 with the purchase of the ship and three other mothballed Upholder<\/em>-class submarines from the United Kingdom\u2019s Royal Navy. From the start, critics questioned the deal, which was supposed to cost $800 million for the subs and the conversion work required to bring them up to the Royal Canadian Navy\u2019s requirements. (Few put it as succinctly as Mike Hancock, the British MP who asked, \u201cWhy were the Canadians daft enough to buy them?\u201d) The fire simply added to what Paul Mitchell, a professor of defence studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, calls an already \u201cwell-established narrative of waste and dysfunction.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

In 1943, thousands of Canadians bought a book, co-authored by humorist and early supporter of the RCN Stephen Leacock, that gave a reasonably clear account of the U-boat attacks on the St. Lawrence in 1942, which claimed twenty-one ships and 249 lives, including 136 aboard the ferry SS Caribou<\/em>. Ultimately, Canada emerged from the war with the world\u2019s fourth-largest navy, most of which was quickly scrapped, or \u201cpaid off.\u201d In the late 1940s, the threat posed to transatlantic shipping by Soviet submarines led the navy to purchase the aircraft carrier HMS Magnificent<\/em>, which was replaced in 1957 by HMCS Bonaventure<\/em>. When the Trudeau government decided to decommission the carrier \u2014 Misadventure<\/em>, as some wags had dubbed it \u2014 commentators intelligently discussed the anti-submarine capabilities of the ships that would replace it.<\/p>\n

What passes for naval debate today is, by contrast, too often uninformed and sloppy. The Halifax Chronicle Herald<\/em> reported in September 2011 that Chicoutimi<\/em> was being \u201ccannibalized\u201d for parts for HMCS Victoria<\/em> (not acknowledging that this practice, known as a transfer request, is standard RCN operating procedure). And most articles about the submarine program are riddled with errors and boilerplate references to the 2004 fire. Compare that to a 1969 fire, which killed nine men aboard the destroyer HMCS Kootenay<\/em> and quickly vanished from a more sea-conscious news.<\/p>\n

For much of the late twentieth century, Canada\u2019s three British-built, diesel-electric Oberon<\/em>-class submarines served an important role as \u201cclockwork mice\u201d \u2014 targets for anti-submarine training exercises by Canadian and other Allied navies. After being equipped with passive sonar and Mark 48 torpedoes in the mid-1980s, these \u201cO-boats\u201d became true weapons platforms capable of performing their NATO missions in the Canadian Atlantic Submarine area. (Not until 2009 did the public learn of the \u201csurreal moment\u201d in late November 1986 during which Lieutenant-Commander Larry Hickey worked out the coordinates that, had he detected an offensive move, would have guided a torpedo from HMCS Onondaga<\/em> into the hull of a nearby Soviet submarine \u2014 and possibly precipitated World War III.)<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Last October, at the Naval Association of Canada conference in Ottawa, speaker after speaker lamented the public\u2019s ignorance of these topics and, in many cases, its outright hostility toward submarines. Frigates, with their flared bows and graceful lines, intercept pirates in the Arabian Sea and hurry supplies to disaster areas after earthquakes and tsunamis. They sail to Toronto for the Canadian National Exhibition and make for good photo ops while passing under Vancouver\u2019s Lions Gate Bridge. Part of the image problem, one speaker wryly noted, is that \u201cyou can\u2019t host a decent cocktail party on the deck of a submarine.\u201d Nor can the Victoria<\/em>-class subs assert Canada\u2019s sovereignty in the Arctic in the muscular terms employed by Stephen Harper in his 2007 \u201cUse It or Lose It\u201d speech.<\/p>\n

The submarine\u2019s most important characteristic is its stealth. Far from being appreciated as a strategic asset, however, stealth jars with the public\u2019s notion of a peaceable kingdom. Former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy went so far as to declare the ships \u201cun-Canadian,\u201d echoing British admiral Sir Arthur Wilson\u2019s 1901 comment that they are \u201cunderhanded, unfair, and damned un-English.\u201d According to Commander Michael Craven, gathering intelligence, joining with coalition partners to close off choke points, enabling \u201ccovert delivery and recovery of Special Operations Forces,\u201d and performing a constabulary role against illegal fisheries and drug smugglers is exactly consistent with what Axworthy called \u201csoft power.\u201d That is, global influence exerted via \u201cideas, values, persuasion, skill and technique\u201d and other forms of \u201cnon-intrusive intervention.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Damian Brooks linked to this article in The Walrus, calling it “Easily the best piece on Canadian submarines I’ve ever seen in the mainstream press.” The threat of fire is ever-present on warships, which is why fire training is conducted every day a Canadian vessel is in port and at least once a week when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,15],"tags":[745,364],"class_list":["post-30844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-military","category-technology","tag-rcn","tag-submarine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-81u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30844"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30845,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30844\/revisions\/30845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}