Quote:
Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
The trouble with this conversation is the assuption that we need a plane that is effective, frankly we don't, we are the Air National Guard of Canada, we will never need to 'sneak in' and bomb anything.
If we buy a US plane that can do the sneaking in and then we ever follow the yanks off to Iran they will find a mission to justify the money we shovel Lockheeds way but they don't need us there strategically and if we went out and bought a few old phantoms from Crazy Als discount Fighter Store it would make no difference to the yanks or us.
The purpose of our military is too enable the politicians to score brownie points with the yanks by throwing in a small force to what ever hare brained scheme they have come up with, the yanks neither want or need us militarily, they just want some token force to presuade the UN and their own people they arn't actually invading some desert crap hole, as it appears fairly clear the US people have no appitite for that any more it is unlikely anything we buy now will be used for anything other than tooling around Cold Lake or the like.
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Part of the Canada's strategy is to move away from that strategy which is frankly stupid.
Canada is trying to build a self reliant military force not a ######ed token UN peace keeping force which is failed thinking anyways.
Logistically Canada has decided that it has to be self dependant on deployed forces and be able to provide their own methods of transportation and supply instead of paying inordinate rental dollars to foreign countries. This also improves Canada's ability to be able to respond to natural disasters and other issues in this country.
One thing that we learned in Afghanistan is that we can't depend on other countries to provide support for our forces there in terms of fire support and in terms of in field transportation, and we can't keep renting these capabilities
Artic Sovereignty is also becoming a large issue and to do that you need to have a efficient interdiction force which includes a fairly robust airforce. People can deny it but Russia is spending a lot of money in upgrading their frontal aviation which includes long range bombers.
On the naval front the focus is on replacing our command and control 60 year old destroyers and enhance our frigate force so that we can patrol and protect all of our shores.
We are also repairing the damage not just caused by successive liberal governments but also the BM consevative government that nearly lead to the rust out of the armed forces and its destruction as an effective force in any way.
the thinking on your part is the same thinking that put our troops in the field in Afghanistan in woodland camo with inadequete vehicles that effectively killed our soliders.
the strategy of a smaller force with top line equipment is the smarter and long term more cost effective method.
On top of that, I think its ridiculous that we have an expectation of another nation protecting our sovereignty with no cost.
It leads to the quote by a president in our former CDS' book where he stated that in one of his first meetings with the President of the United States the newly incoming prime minister was told "Some day a man in this office, and maybe not this president will get sick of footing Canada's defense bill"