[CaptainCrunch]

I thought I'd throw this out there since there was discussion in the Federal Elections thread. While Defense spending isn't a big piece of this election, its something that's worthy of discussion since Defense spending is one of the vital roles undertaken by the Federal Government.

Successive Liberal and conservative governments have all received failing grades, from Pierre Trudeau's hatred and mistrust of the military, to Brian Mulroney's broken promises, to Jean Chretiens blundering of the files, the Federal Government has continually put men and woman in harms way while callously putting their lives in danger.

For a while there was hope when Harper took power, but his methods have been half measured and over focused at best, when Canada went into Afghanistan the Conservatives did a decent job of reacting after the fact in replacing the ultra terrible Iltis jeeps, upgrading the armored forces, improving individual soldier kits and training, pouring money into Special Forces Command and restructuring it to become more self sustaining, they failed on the helicopter file and the F-35 file and allowed the navy to rust.

So before I start I just wanted to throw a couple of things out there.

First of all the term Rust Out this was and is a very real term that basically will describe what happens if the Canadian Forces doesn't replace equipment and relies on older technology. Military Hardware is run hard and because of that it becomes more and more failure intensive until it fails and the Forces loses the capability of using it. We saw and continue to see this with the SeaKing Helicopters where they needed 8 to 10 hours of maintenance I beleive for every hour in the air and were starting to suffer from global failures. We're seeing this in the CF-18's who are now starting to suffer from microfractures in the air frames and the inability to further upgrade the birds to extend their end of life cycle. The best example was in the Navy where we lost our ability to service and support our own ships at sea due to the retirement of auxillary ships, we also lost the ability to form effective task forces with the loss of the Iriquois Destroyers.

For the ground forces the LAV upgrades and purchases of new ones was effectively canceled even though the LAV's were beaten up in the rough environments of Afghanistan.

The only areas that really came out ahead were in terms of transport and airlift which got out out of the stupid strategy of renting airlift and logistics. And in terms of Special Forces it was smartly re-organized into the Canadian Special Operation Regiment (CSOR) which included Aviation, Intelligence, JTF-2 and Nuclear, Chemical, Biological response forces.

NATO and our role in it

Canada is a staunch supporter and a wishy washy member of NATO. Basically the NATO alliance was formed to counter the Soviet Threat in Europe in the 70's and 80's. Since then it has evolved to be a multinational strike group that is designed to do what the UN can't which is to attempt to impose military solutions.

However the one key element of this is the domestic role of NATO.

There is a misnomer that you can adjust you're armed forces to act as a specialized element of NATO but it doesn't work that way, NATO has a requirement that you have to be a able to competently defend you're borders or at least fight a delaying action until NATO help can arrive. So be a member of good standing within NATO the standing rule is that you have to spend at least 2% of you're countries GDP on your military. In Canada's case that dollar amount would be approximately $36 billion dollars. Instead Canada will spend about $18 billion on defense this year and its expected stay about the same.

Responding to a crisis

In one of Jack Granatstein's excellent books "who killed the Canadian Military" He ran through a scenario where the Canadian Forces would be screwed if they had to respond to two domestic crisis at the same time. He ran the theory of a major earthquake in Vancouver and another domestic issue in Toronto. Due to a shortage of regular forces troops and the ability to transport them and supplies and other vital equipment, Canada would have to make a choice and then beg for help from other nations. Even with our improved airlift capability Canada would struggle in this case, and it would frankly break the Canadian Forces forever.

We saw after Afghanistan when our Prime Minister stated that after the long deployment that Canada would need a long time to rest and rearm and resupply before we could commit to a battlegroup type of deployment again, this was also noticed by our NATO allies. Frankly the days of our military being able to respond when needed and where needed are gone.

So what do we need? Frankly with the advancing age of nearly all our equipment the Canadian Forces is paying a lot more money then they should on maintenance and repair and upgrading then if they just went into a procurement and training cycle.

Navy

As stated in the election thread, Canada's Navy is at what I would call a low point. While Canada has 12 excellent frigates, Frigates don't lend to an effective navy on their own, they have very little in the way of offensive weapons, and their sensor bubbles are relatively small. As task force can project a multi level bubble over hundreds of miles (air, sea, underwater) and effectively prosecute targets within that bubble. A Halifax Frigate is a good anti-sub platform, a decent secondary anti air platform, and not great at projecting offensive power and protecting water ways.

When you add that command and control element in that can combine multiple sensors and have a ship with offensive punch (guided missile destroyer for example) you become much more efficient.

On top of that with no auxiliary ships, unless Canada rents and pays for seaborne resupply which then becomes very expensive, you are forced to take ships into port often and the ability to maintain ships with spare parts becomes more difficult.

On top of that Canada still doesn't have an effective helicopter anymore that mates with the Frigates. A helicopter can extend range, act as a targeter and increase the effectiveness of submarine hunting. With continued delays the CH-148 haven't reached the front lines, and these birds while decent aren't anywhere near as capable as the helicopters canceled by Chretien.

So where is Canada going?

They've announced the ship building strategy for this century. Which includes up to 23 new surface combatant ships at a cost of I believe $122 billion dollars spread over 30 years.

Canada will receive

8 Arctic Patrol Ships, 2 Joint Support ships, 15 surface combatants (Frigates and Destroyers) based around the Bergamimi class multisurface combatant.

Canada's submarines

Currently Canada has 3 operational Victoria Class hulls with one still fighting through problems with its weapons systems. While the Victoria/Upholder class was an interesting concept mating a SSN's capabilities with an SSK's powerplant, the Victoria class has to be seen as a failure in terms of naval strategy. With a greater emphasis on Arctic sovereignty, The Victoria would have trouble operating in the North Seas. While some deem Submarines as irrelevant they are probably one of the best intelligence gathering frames in the modern military.

More later, I'll put up some points on the Airforce and Ground Forces.