Quote:
Originally Posted by IliketoPuck
I agree CC. As a casual military buff myself I am disheartened by the way the Canadian Forces have been left to rot over the last fifty years. Canada used to actually carry some military weight in the world, but the result of a lack of government funding has turned our fighting forces into a shadow of what they used to be. By no means am I asking that Canada spend on the military what the Americans do, but I do want Canada to have stand alone capability as a military force. What that requires, I'm not completely sure, but upgrades across the board seem to be necessary, and I am all for the Airforce receiving top tier fighter planes.
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At the end of WW2 Canada had the 3rd largest navy in the world, one of the best trained small armies on the planet, and a fairly formidable airforce.
But its unrealistic for anyone to expect a pocket power like Canada to retain that kind of strength.
The problem with the way the Canadian Government is that they had no vision and no concept of what was important. What was even worse was that we had a series of prime ministers who had no grip on military matters or ones who outright hated and didn't trust the Canadian Forces (I'm looking at you Pierre and even more so at you Jean) we also had prime ministers with good intentions and no execution (Yeah thats you Brian and Paul).
It always urked me that our government was so willing to call on the forces to execute missions that we weren't equipt for. Every prime minister would send us on UN peace keeping missions with ratty equiptment inadequete training and criminally low levels of support.
Through it all and through the destruction of Canada's fighting moral they still tried hard and trained hard and tried to be a professional army only to be thrown into situations like Coatia where the PPCLI was labeled as the Can't do regiment, not because they couldn't do the job, but because the Canadian Government did an embarressing job of setting up a working command structure and wanted to command the mission from Ottawa.
Basically the greatest enemy to the military were not only successive liberal governments but leaders that outright hated the military and its members. Then just when we had a smattering of hope in Mulrooney who promised that he would turn things around and reinvest, he turned out to be full of crap as well.
In terms of the Military the Conservatives have taken the first good steps so that the army, navy and airforce can respond to their mission mandate of anytime and anywhere by providing the CF with air lift capability, dumpting the Itlits jeeps, leasing battle tanks that can function, and slowly deploying search and rescue helicopters these are only first steps.
Our frigates still need adequete replacements for the Sea King helicopters, the new EH-101's are coming but until they arive the Frigates are lacking one of thier biggests components.
We still have a massive problem with search and rescue, being able to handle logistics for over seas deployment ourselves and dealing with disasters.
At this point, the budget has gone from levels of pathetic where we were in the bottom 2/3rds of GDP spent to the middle.
but each year we have to look at replaceing equiptment in key areas, not all at once but we have to start keeping things relatively current.