[CaptainCrunch]

The funny thing is that the Government just wrote another check for 30 million to the F-35 project.

Also a look at the problems with Canada's defense policy going back to the 40's

https://ipolitics.ca/2017/12/13/cant...y-makes-sense/

Every time the Canadian Forces need a major piece of new kit, we have an opportunity to correct the mistakes made by every single federal government since the Second World War.
The need to replace the aging CF-18 fighter-bombers is the latest such opportunity. But so far, the indications are that the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is going down the same path of small-minded, narrow parochialism and political expediency well-trodden by all its predecessors.


And yet — because of the isolationism gripping the United States and the likelihood that its internal family feud will get ever more bitter — this moment still presents a golden opportunity to re-examine Canada’s future security.

Those countries manage coherent defence policies that, by and large, also mesh with equally consistent foreign and international trade policies. Canada has never managed those tricks — largely because this country has never had to look to its own security or to seriously dip its toes into the turbulent world of global commerce.


That golden age is rapidly coming to an end with every day that passes, but what the new world will look like is still uncertain. Here’s what ought to be obvious: it will not be infused by the values that have driven North Atlantic culture since 1945.


As China’s triumphalist President Xi Jinping says in almost every tub-thumping speech he gives, that new world will be antipathetic to the civic values that have been at the heart of the global stance of Canada and its allies for 70 years.

Harper already had shuffled the F-35 program off for review when Trudeau and the Liberals came to power with a promise to kill the scheme and start a new competition to replace the CF-18s.


This piece of cheap politicking had a grotesquely familiar face. When Jean Chrétien and the Liberals defeated the Tories in 1993, an early act was to kill the program to replace the navy’s wheezing, dangerously unreliable anti-submarine Sea King helicopters with CH-149 Cormorants. Chretien said the new helicopters were an unnecessary “Cadillac” option.


Trudeau on the F-35s and Chrétien on the Cormorants predate U.S. President Donald Trump’s fixation with removing any sign that Barrack Obama ever inhabited the White House. But they have the same flavour — of feral tom-cats marking the territory where their rivals were once supreme.


The farce over replacing the CF-18s has cascaded into fiasco as the Trudeau government prepares for a new international industry-wide competition.

The Trudeau government marked Boeing as a company that threatens the Canadian economy and cancelled the Super Hornet scheme.


Instead, Ottawa is going to spend around $500 million buying 18 Australian F-18s that are around the same age as the CF-18s due for retirement.


The whole thing has the stench of idiotic political expediency that has lingered over Canadian defence policy since 1945.


But it seems to be getting worse.


Soon after the Liberals returned to power in 2015, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan launched a defence policy review.


Well and good. But what on earth is the point of having a defence review that is not part and parcel of an equivalent and parallel review of foreign and international trade policy?
Those three arms of government are inextricably interlocked. Any attempt to refashion one policy without making it part of the other two is only going to produce a piece of flimflammery

There was also an appeal to nostalgia with a pledge to get back into classic United Nations peacekeeping operations with the deployment of 600 soldiers and 150 police. But this always had the pungent odour of politicking to win a Security Council seat in 2020.


This fanciful piece of retro nonsense has come up against a hard reality: there are no longer places in the world where Canadian soldiers in blue helmets can be sent as welcome mediators between two previously warring sides.


These days, there is only peacemaking at bayonet point, and usually between sides that have no interest in ceasefires or other civilized mumbo-jumbo.


Canada’s experience in Afghanistan is the new peacekeeping normal, which is why Sajjan and the government are no longer talking about sending Canadian blue helmets to Africa.
Mali and the Congo were on the list, but both look like turnstiles into new versions of Afghanistan. In Mali, 80 UN peacekeepers have been killed in the civil war since 2013. This week in eastern Congo, militants slaughtered 15 UN troops.


third African country where the UN has soldiers deployed — South Sudan — looks just as dangerous as the others. So, a couple of weeks ago, Trudeau announced that Canada’s blue helmet commitments will now involve “showing the way to others through our capabilities and specialized skills.”


As Canada has not put a military unit through a UN peacekeeping operation since 2001, it’s a bit of a mystery just how up-to-date those “specialized skills” might be.