Quote:
Originally Posted by Envitro
This country is a disgrace when it comes to defence spending.
When will we take this seriously? When it's too late?
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Dude, its too late now.
I wrote a long and lengthy post a loooong time ago talking about rust out and a loss of capability, that I'm too lazy to find, because it was probably a decade.
But once you lose readiness, and once you achieve complete rust out, unless you do a monstrous capital investment, you never get it back.
At this point a bump in annual defense spending isn't going to do it, you need to do a re-investment and then increase your defense spending to at least maintain it.
There are equipment problems every where. I expect that the F-35 purchase will get kicked down the road with the prayer that F-18's don't start falling out of the sky. Besides we're so far down the manufacturing Queue that we won't see them for a while.
Our submarines are end of life. The ship building program is more about pork barrelling Government friends, and there are questions around the actual ships we are building.
Ground Forces has been sucking hind tit for a while.
Moral is low due to poor leadership. And people aren't signing up because frankly we're not paying properly, and why would you sign up for a service that the government doesn't give two craps about and yet uses them beyond their current capability. Why would you sign up for a combat trade and not only risk your life in deployment but risk your life using rusty and obsolete equipment.
They just announced today that after a decade they picked a pistol to buy. That's an outright joke.
JL Granetstein (sp?) wrote an excellent book a long time back called "Who killed the Canadian Armed Forces. Now we know.
Its dead or close to dead Jim.
When a chunk of cash is returned from the budget of a cash strapped military unspent its because the bump was for political purposes, but the back stage order was not to spend it. Our current defense minister Anita Anaud who I had great hopes for, mainly because she was replacing a complete incompetent dirt bag, hasn't fought very hard in her department.
Oh sure, we sent howitzers and a lot of ammunition and other equipment to the Ukraine, but we had no plans to replace it.
Its dead and nobody has the guts to take the necessary steps to fix it.