No, this is not an article about hockey. That was just a teaser to suck in readers who thought they were going to see a life-long Leafs fan losing his mind about the fact that they can’t ever seem to protect a lead and close a game out. Sorry gang, not happening.
Instead, this article is about the disastrously weak and mismanaged state of Canada’s military. It is about decades of failure and inefficiency. It’s a completely bi-partisan condemnation – Conservatives in power were just as utterly ineffective as the Liberals have been for the last nine years.
I am going to touch on information from quite a number of sources in this article, but I want to note especially the CBC. The CBC is seen by some as “large L” liberal biased – a mouthpiece for the Liberal Party. In terms of the defence portfolio though, I think the CBC has done a terrific job of trying to alert us to the problems with our military. There are several probing articles by Murray Brewster and Ashley Burke and others that certainly don’t come off as favourable to the current government.
A Murray Brewster article from March of this year provided information from a Department of National Defence (DND) internal presentation. If we were called on by NATO to support our allies in Europe, we would be able to meet only 58% of our troop commitment. We’ve set aside equipment for such a mobilization request, but 45% of the designated equipment is “unavailable and unserviceable.” Overall, 55% of the CAF airplanes, 54% of our Navy ships and 48% of our Army equipment is not deployable. The Navy commander says that his ships are past end of life and he may not be able to meet readiness commitments next year. The military is short staffed by almost 16000 bodies and 10000 of those personnel we do have are not deployable because they are untrained.
Bill Blair, the Minister of Defence appears ready to acknowledge the problems. He recently described the staff attrition and recruitment issue as a death spiral and called the equipment unavailability issues completely unacceptable. His boss, on the other hand, chooses to try to put a positive spin on things by pointing to increased investment in the military without mentioning the fact that we’re still far short of our commitments on defence spending.
Last week the government produced a new defence policy , and committed, quoting CBC, “an additional $8.1 billion in new defence spending over the next five years and commits to an additional $73 billion in defence spending over the next two decades…The Liberal government estimates that the new policy will see military spending rise to 1.76 per cent of GDP by 2029-30.” A year ago, in “Ukraine, 1 Year After” I reported that the Parliamentary Budget Office projected defence spending increasing from 1.33% to 1.59% of GDP. So now the new policy, backed by this week’s budget promises to get us up to 1.76% of GDP. That is encouraging but there are two problems with that projection.
Andrew Leslie, former head of Canada’s Army forces, and a former Liberal MP (2015 to 2019) was interviewed two weeks ago on the occasion of the 75thanniversary of NATO, and he didn’t pull any punches about Canada’s standing in NATO. He said “NATO has done extraordinarly well since Russia’s attack. We have not, quite frankly. We seem to be really good at promising stuff that never happens… Just about every NATO ally is extraordinarily irritated with Canada for not having spent, or planned even, to get to 2% GDP….It’s horribly (embarrassing), as is the state of our armed forces…there hasn’t been a significant piece of combat capability purchased by the Liberal government in nine years….Canada lives in a bubble… military leaders (in the United States) are quite frankly fed up with Canada and our lack of defence spending and for not taking security seriously. ”
(I have seen Mr Leslie interviewed on several occasions and I have never failed to be impressed by his straight-talking manner. He’s my write-in candidate for PM.)
So, the first problem with the defence policy as highlighted by Mr Leslie, is that we’re still not committing enough. Murray Brewster reports on the CBC website that “Dave Perry, president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, said NATO has been clear that two per cent of GDP is the floor for military spending, not the ceiling, and allies expect each nation to have a plan to meet the goal.
“There is actually no articulated plan [in the policy] to get to two per cent, which I think our allies are going to be quite attuned to, and it will not go unnoticed,” said Perry”.
The second problem also shows up in Mr Leslie’s interview. We’re good at promising things and terrible at delivering on those promises. If we promise 1.76%, what are the chances that we’ll manage to spend that money on defence capability?
Murray Brewster, reporting on this week’s budget reports that the $8.1B promised with the defence policy announcement also includes
“the Communications Security Establishment — the country’s electronic spy agency — and Global Affairs Canada… the internal cost-cutting exercise ordered by the Liberal government means the military can expect roughly $635 million less than what had been forecast in the 2023 federal budget.”
A 2021 Auditor General’s report on the status of Canada’s National Shipbuilding Strategy. The audit covered a two year period from January 2018 to January 2020. In that 24 month period, delivery targets on 12 different support vessels slipped by an average of 11.5 months each. And those are just the support vessels.
The strategy also includes 15 surface combat vessels. The government put out a Request for Proposals in October 2016. It took 30 months to get to issuing a design team contract in February of 2019. In October 2022, Lockheed Martin announced that preliminary design was complete. A year later, in August 2023 the government announced planned spending of $463M to help Irving Shipbuilding Industries with infrastructure needed to actually build the ships. The 2021 audit tells us that the combat vessel first predicted delivery was mid-2020’s in January 2018, but had slipped to 2030 by the end of the audit period in January 2020. On the current schedule we’ll get the 15th warship in 2047.
Between 2015 and 2020, while we issuing a design team contract, China built 105 battle force ships.
The Shipbuilding audit concluded in part, (and rather mildly I thought), that “during the audit period, the National Shipbuilding Strategy was slow to deliver the combat and non-combat ships that Canada needs to meet its domestic and international obligations. The delivery of many ships was significantly delayed”. Slow to deliver? In 8 years we’ve gotten to the point where we’re going to help our contractor expand his shop. That’s not “slow to deliver”. That’s a total failure to deliver.
Surprise, surprise, the cost of the combat ship program appears to rising too. Original estimates were $26B for 15 ships. The Defence Dept now maintains that their current projection of $56B to $60B is holding fast but the Ottawa Citizen has an estimate of over $80B, and a Conservative MP (a reliable source of course and never inclined to inflate the estimate) says he believes it will exceed $100B.
As a result of the delays and the cost estimates, some critics have called for the program to be suspended. That’s the worst thing we could do. We need new ships. The current ones won’t do the job. Get on with it! Put in some additional oversight, whip he project into shape, fire a few people until you find someone who can keep it on track if you must. But we’ve done far too much navel-gazing (forgive the unintended pun) already. Don’t stop.
Things are no better in the world of air defence. In my March 2022 essay on defence, I reported on a Senate Standing Committee on Defence report recommending that we not purchase second-hand F18’s from Australia. That report forecast that we’d be among the last users of that equipment and stated that “the long term costs of supporting the software, replacing worn out parts, and attempting to upgrade the aircraft against obsolescence will far outweigh any potential savings at the time of initial purchase.” In November 2023, a confidential report commissioned by the Defence Dept, but leaked to the Globe and Mail, told us that our RCAF fighter fleet was now “not credible in a NATO context against many of the higher-end mission sets”.
The replacement for the F18 is the F35. That’s the aircraft that the Trudeau Liberals swore they’d never buy. They stuck by that promise, wasted eight precious years, and spent a lot of money on crapped out F18’s, before bowing to the inevitable and ordering F35’s in 2023. The first four F35’s will be here in 2026…maybe. Ken Pole, writing in Skies magazine, tells us that Lockheed had about 2 dozen F35’s on back order at the end of 2023.
We also have some helicopters on order. That’s another cluster…story. In 2005 under Liberal PM Paul Martin, Canada ordered 28 Cyclone CH-148 helicopters, a militarized version of the Sikorsky S-92. In 2013 the Harper government toyed with cancelling the contract, but decided to carry on because we already had $1.7B in the project. Almost twenty years since being ordered, they have not all been received, and those that have been are not yet been rated fully operational. The supplier has delayed delivery of the final two units owing to supply chain disruptions. And if you can’t get parts to make new helicopters, then it’s hard to get parts to maintain the ones we have. In an internal document, the commanders of 12 Wing in Shearwater Nova Scotia where many of the Cyclones are based questioned the “sustainability of the CH-148 Weapon System” in the medium and long-term.” The problem, says one expert is that “the Cyclone is what the military calls an “orphan weapon system” — no other countries are flying it and it draws on a small pool of replacement parts.”
Here are a few suggestions about what we might want to change.
First, we need to take the military needs seriously. We could easily get drawn into a war in Ukraine. The Israel/Gaza mess could easily explode into a wider scale Middle East conflict that could involve NATO forces. Russia, our neighbour in the Arctic is re-emerging as an aggressive global force. Relations between China and the US are becoming dangerously competitive. The Australian Defence Minister says “China’s military buildup is now the largest and most ambitious we have seen by any country since the end of the second world war.” Andrew Leslie says “The world is now much more dangerous than it’s been at any other time during my lifetime….Far more dangerous than the Cold War.” To suggest that 1.75% of GNP by the end of this decade is good progress is to be blind to the current geopolitical risk picture.
Second, we need to stop being so goddamn cheap. Would you like to send your son, daughter, or grandchild out to serve the country in a clapped-out submarine we bought from the UK after they figured it was done? Or fly F-18’s we bought from Australia even though the Senate report predicted that we’d be stuck with orphan technology?
Third, and perhaps most importantly, we need to get effective at procurement. Canada’s defence spending last exceeded 2% of GNP in 1987. We’re approaching forty years of under-funding our military. Is it any wonder less than 50% of our military equipment is serviceable? We’re asking our young people to fight our battles with worn out shit because we’re too cheap to buy new stuff and when we do try to buy new stuff, we generally screw that up.
Now-retired general Tom Lawson was reported to have said that the “Canadian Armed Forces do not procure capabilities unless they’re absolutely necessary to the attainment of our mandate. The attitude of ‘we’re not going to buy it unless it’s absolutely necessary’ has been shared by both Liberal and Conservative governments since the end of the Cold War…. “There is a competing and almost intractable attitude between departments like public works that want to somehow design a perfect, impenetrable contract that will stand up against any challenge,” MacKay said.
“The Department of Industry Canada wants every nut and bolt and washer made in Canada.”
The desire not to spend money on defence unless it’s clearly critical, and the inability to procure stuff when we finally do decide to act is why “the Canadian Army went into a desert war in Afghanistan wearing green camouflage fatigues and in unarmoured vehicles.”
I defy you to find a military procurement press release in the last 40 years that doesn’t brag about how many jobs are being created. And sure, jobs are important. But it’s more important that we buy the right thing – which normally means that we fall in line with our NATO partners. So let’s agree to buy the best available off the shelf equipment without re-inventing the wheel. We can do our best to get at least some of it made in Canada, but let’s make that subservient to the need to get the right contract out the door in a reasonable time. I would suggest that we get every bureaucracy in Ottawa out of the military procurement business except for DND. And perhaps we tell DND that we’re going to have the auditor general looking at every major contract and heads will roll if you fail to perform. Make the military accountable for their spending and free them to go get the stuff they need, independent of every other bureaucracy in Ottawa..
In February of this year, the Canadian Press filed a story based on a report from the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) about defence spending. To the government’s credit, planned defence spending has increased by $50B over the last two years. However, we never spend what we plan. “Delays in military procurements have meant the department spent almost $12 billion less than it planned since 2017….The report found 62 per cent of capital spending has shifted to the latter half of the 20-year period instead of being evenly split, as it was when the PBO last reported on it in 2022.”
Andrew Leslie had something to say about this too. “Liberals and Conservatives both have found a neat trick of telling Canadians that they are increasing defence spending, that the capabilities are on the horizon, but then somehow never getting around to fine-tuning the various procurement systems so that the money gets out the door… “And of course,” he added, “at the end of the year, the cycle [of handing back unspent money to the federal treasury] starts.”
The final thing I would like to see for our defence is a munitions industry in Canada. A year ago, I wrote “One area where we could be spending is to develop an in-country munitions industry. The gravest threat to Ukraine right now isn’t the lack of fighter aircraft, nor tanks nor artillery pieces. The gravest threat is that they’re running out of ammunition for those weapons to fire…. One senses there’s a market out there, so let’s jump in and help meet the need.”
It would make sense for us to try not to rely 100% on the rest of the world for ammunition. And the truth is that we do produce some munitions. “Canadian manufacturers produce a variant of the 155 mm shell known as the M107, which is shorter-range and considered less desirable than the M795.” We’ve increased production of those shells from 3000 to 5000 per month. The embarrassing truth is that they are yesterday’s technology, but we’re doing our best to make lots of ‘em.
The Government announced in March of this year that they are investing $4M to get proposals for producing the longer-range howitzer shells that Ukraine needs. Estimates are that it will take some $400M to develop that capacity, and probably three years to get into production. In the meantime, NATO has issued about $4B in munitions contracts since the start of the Ukraine war. A CTV article says “Contributing nations to those agreements will either shore up their own supplies or provide the ammunition to Ukraine….Canada is not one of those contributing nations.”
“Canada is not one of those contributing nations.” That says it all. We belong to the NATO alliance but appear to be not contributing very much.
8 responses to “Maple Leaf Problems with Defence”
The whole situation is dismal, and has been since I joined the Army in 1972 (commissioned in 1977 – i.e., started active service). One of the biggest problems is the procurement system which pits the operations/engineering folks within DND against the Procurement folks within DND and finally against the really bosses with the money, PWGSC (new name? Public Services Canada?). The bullet proof contract is way more important than a bullet-proof vest! Somehow, during the conflict in Afghanistan, Gen Hillier was able to make weapons and vehicles appear like magic, with very little lead time. If it could be done once, it could be done again. But be prepared for screaming when a bunch of money gets sole-sourced to Liberals in Quebec or to the Irvings in NS/NB.
To be fair, DND should also look inside to see if they are not part of the problem. Tech specs are written to clearly identify the “best” item (i.e., the one that the Colonel likes) and not necessarily one that will do the job with the best bang for the buck. We do have a habit of ordering Cadillac systems when sometimes a bunch of Volkswagens would do.
There is clearly negligence on the part of the military, DND, and Governments (Liberal and Conservative) when we can only scrape together 8 serviceable Leopard II tanks out of a fleet of 80-some. There is also a lot of blinkered thinking when our military withholds serviceable equipment from Ukraine because we need it for training; with some changes I’m sure we could free up more equipment for Ukraine and still keep our troops trained.
The manpower issue is a key one. For a variety of reasons, our military is short some 16,000 people and will be short even more if we ever do field some of these magic future systems that the Government is promising. We need to get rid of the sexual criminals and start making a real effort to integrate more women, more gays, more people of colour, and more landed immigrants if we want to fill the ranks. It might require more money for pay and benefits. It might require some enlightened leadership; I know a young man who has been stuck on a remote base for about 5 years with little hope of ever seeing civilization again – unless he quits the Forces. Perhaps if NDHQ was in Cold Lake there’s be a better understanding of this issue!
As a former Army officer, this whole situation is very disappointing to me. The Forces are supposed to be all about leadership; officers are trained from Day 1 to be leaders, to look after their men and women, and to have high standards of personal integrity and ethics. I am afraid I see little evidence of that in the current sad state of the Canadian Armed Forces. But after so many years of neglect and even outright suppression by the politicos, Liberal and Conservative, it may not be surprising if the attitude is “Screw This – I’ve got my pension!”
Thanks for the comment, Terry. There are clearly many things to be solved and cured. Recruitment and attrition of staff. The whole procurement process. Leadership, as you so rightly noted. And perhaps chief of all, advocacy. We need military leadership and politicians to advocate for a world-class military service. We can no longer accept being America’s little brother, leaving all serious matters of protection to big bro.
Comment received from a reader:
I think we should turn the military into a civil defence force to deal with increasingly frequent natural disasters and just pay the US to defend us!
Kidding, of course, but we do need more civil emergency capability.
My response: I have had the same thought in the past. However, one of the complaints that the leadership of our military has is that being a civil emergency response Unit is distracting from the military mission. You can’t fix broken down crap out equipment if you’re in Northern BC fighting fires.
Well, the Maple Leafs analogy actually held up pretty well despite your intentional misdirection. I’m reminded of a book I read for my comps many years ago about the history of the Canadian military in the interwar period. We starved it then, too, even in the face of rising international tensions. Of course, today we have NATO commitments to expose our incapacity. It didn’t cost any govt at the polls.
What is the polling I wonder on current public attitudes towards Canadian military spending as a relative priority? After all, we need to fathom “why” as well as “what.”
At Ogdensburg long ago we signed to have the US defend us from the rest of the world (instead of the UK). But who will defend us from the US?
Thanks for the comment Ed. Somewhere in the reading I did for this article, I believe there was a news report that said that public is becoming more aware of the dangerous world for living in, and more supportive of spending for the military. I don’t remember the numbers, but there is a trend. And it’s not surprising – you have to have your head fairly firmly buried in the sand not to understand that the world is becoming pretty chaotic.
Your last question is key. Who will defend us from the United States? There are those who don’t believe that the United States would attack us, but that’s not the only risk. An increasingly isolationist America led by an increasingly deranged Trump might well standby and do nothing if we were under attack from a major international force like Moldova or North Macedonia…. Or Russia in the Arctic.
I’m proud to be a Canadian in many respects, but very embarrassed to be one when it comes to how we treat our military. Small wonder we have recruitment issues. As a nation, we are definitely not very good team players in Nato, and we are naive to think that is acceptable. So frustrating for those who have committed their work lives to defending our country and its ideals. Disturbing article, but very much needed in this increasingly dangerous world.
Thanks for the comment Dave. It is indeed, an increasingly dangerous world. The big failure for our government is to have been lulled into a sense of security in times of peace. It’s easy to believe we need military spending when the world is dangerous. It’s more difficult to justify military spending when there isn’t an immediate threat. But that is what prudent politicians with some guts would have done.
This is a comment I received from a reader by email.
Yes, it irks me about our underfunding of the military. Unfortunately, the importance is recently highlighted by a very unstable world, whereas in the past two decades we have seen relatively very stable times (amongst the world leading military and economic powers). This has changed. It also disturbs me that meanwhile, our government has increased their own salaries and workforce rapidly (more to do less…). Lining their own pockets and spending foolishly in many areas while underfunding healthcare and military.
“A recent Fraser Report says public sector spending in Canada is bloated and unsustainable. Workers earn on average 13.9% more in wages than their private sector counterparts. They retire 1.3 years earlier and 77% were covered by a pension plan, usually a cushy one with defined benefits. And while the report lumps together all levels of government — municipal, federal and provincial — Ontario has certainly heaped its share of sugar onto the sweet deals the public sector enjoy.”
Here’s how I responded:
Thanks for the comment Brian. There is always a tension, isn’t there, between too much government spending and too little? I think you could place government spending in four big buckets – social programs, military, infrastructure/business environment, and international affairs. I would argue that we’ve historically under-funded the military and probably infrastructure, to enable spending on social programs. I used to believe that we are over-spending on social programs, but my research since I started this blog tells me that countries that spend a lot on social programs actually fare pretty well on a number of international scales – like quality of life, citizen happiness, wealth distribution, and democracy index. So, I’m gradually becoming less resistant to the notion of higher government spending and correspondingly higher taxes. And yes, I think we need to tax the rich more, mostly because that’s where the money is.
I checked out your comment on government salaries. I found a National Post article that says the basic MP salary is the second highest salary in the world for elected officials, trailing only US Congress and Senate. So yes, they’re doing pretty well for themselves. But it’s really not a factor in the underfunding of the military. Here’s why.
We pay about $200,000 for an MP. Cabinet Ministers etc get additional funding – the PM gets about $400K. And on top of that we pay some amount of office staffing etc. I haven’t tried to nail down how much in total we spend for a constituency office, but I doubt if it’s less than $1M per constituency. So with 338 constituencies, call it $338M. Hell, raise it to $500M to make the math easy. Now, let’s assume that efficiency cuts could reduce that total by as much as 20%, which is a fairly savage cut. That means that we might be able to free up $100M, or $0.1B. The Defence budget for 2024 is $33.8B. So the proposed office savings could only increase the defence budget by about 0.3%. No, the real questions are how much total government spending we can tolerate, and how we apportion that spending in those big spending buckets.
By the way, I don’t trust anything I read from the Fraser Institute. I’m not saying that their article is wrong – just that I would need some independent validation of their conclusions. Mediabiasfactcheck.com says “Overall, we rate Fraser Institute as strongly Right-Center biased based on policy positions that favor business and Mixed for factual reporting due to false and misleading claims regarding global warming.” In February 2023, if you’re interested, I wrote an article tracing a flow of money from American right wing billionaires to the Fraser Institute.