Defense Watch Watch: a Hundred Billion Dollars of a Post

It's leaking hydraulic fluid in heaven, now.

I've been reading Charlie Foxtrot: Fixing Defense Procurement in Canada, and I think anybody who enjoys this feature will like it.

Stuff has happened the past few weeks:

Some 40 years after the program to replace them began, the CH-124 Sea King helicopters have flown for the last time.

Canada chooses design for Canadian Surface Combatant. The winner is the LockMart-BAE joint project Type 26 Frigates. 60 Billion will be spent constructing 15 Frigates. This move has been expected since 2017, when other bidders started complaining the fix was in for the Type 26. This is because the Type 26, unlike the other contenders, hasn't been built yet, something that the competition explicitly said was a selection criteria. Alion just filed a lawsuit against Canada about this, the second major lawsuit coming out of the NSS after Vice Adm. Norman's wrongful dismissal lawsuit.  This has caused the Canadian International Trade Tribunal has ordered a halt to the aquisition process until it can assess the validity of Alion's claim. The Government is continuing contract negotiations despite this ban.

edit: and...backtrack on the ban. The trade comission is still going to investigate, but that will take up to 90 days, while the government was hoping to get this in the bag by early January. I imagine the real concern here is to get-er-dun over Parliament's long Christmas break.  

Good things about this choice: well, integration with other forces shouldn't be an issue, as Britain and Australia are also procuring them. The fact that two other nations are buying them is useful, as it will mean systems and subcontractors might be a bit more competitive in bidding. The Type 26 also seems to have capabilities much closer to Canada's rusted out Iroquois-class destroyers, with anti-submarine and anti-air abilities being greatly expanded compared to the Halifax class frigates. In addition to modern anti-ship and anti-air missiles, the Type 26 also has the option to mount cruise missiles - namely American Tomahawks. I'm fairly confidant that this option is a first for a RCN vessel. 

Prime contractors for the Type 26 are LockMart and BAE - apparently BAE has been BFFs with Irving the past few years. The Canadian Fed and Irving hoped to have the actual contract negotiations locked up by early next year - though the Fed made noises about having no problem going on to the next contractor. Each bid has been ranked; if the LockMart/BAE group prove intractable, they'd move on to the Spanish or Alion design. The sticking point is believed to be about American IP. Big surprise, LockMart wants to lock Canada in to only being able to get shit serviced with them, and the Fed (sensibly) thinks that a dumb stipulation, especially as the RN and Australia are building Type 26 and will presumably have contractors who can add a little completion to subcontract bidding. 

Bad things: well, the aforementioned lawsuit, and the whole "we, the government, have laid out are requirements as to what we want in this gigantic procurement contract and are already ignoring what we decided."  The tech risks are also completely voluntary, since other bidders had working ships that they have gotten the bugs out of. This isn't a small thing, as the track record of LockMart and BAE in ships has been spotty in recent years. LockMart is behind the infamous Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), that has proven to be bad at everything and very expensive, and BAE's Type 45 Destroyer is prone to breakdowns so severe that they are likely to be rendered blind, deaf, and defenseless in combat situations. A winner of a headline: Royal Navy will retrofit type 45 Destroyers to keep them from breaking down.
 
Government rejects suggestion it replace Victoria class subs. Their reason for rejection is, for once, rather reasonable: that with the replacement of nearly all other Navy ships happening, keeping the adequat -if-very-slow-to-be-useful Victoria class seems like another course in an already enormous meal.

The gravy in this plot then thickened, with a FOA request revealing that the useful life of the submarines is expected to be up, starting in 2022.

This will either mean the subs must be retired, or go through another expensive cycle of refurbishment. The last time this fork in the road came up, the Harper government choose to spend $8 billion on refurbishment, which was, frankly, incredibly dumb, as the same amount of money could have replaced the entire fleet of used Jaguars we use now with brand new, state of the art Swedish or German designs. I predict that the government remain stupid on this, unless Canadian shipyards that can work on Victoria-class submarines are tasked with other things, which will cause them to just ignore the problem. 

 A switch to the Swedish Gotland class or the German Type 212 submarine is probably what the senate was trying to nudge the government toward. Both subs have Air Independent Propulsion, allowing them to cruise under pack ice like a nuclear submarine. Our allies would also really like us to stop half-assing submarines, especially as Russia is making all sorts of big, bordering on grandiose, plans about the Arctic. While the bear, anemic from economic problems, blusters a hell of a lot, I have to point out that Russia is investing lots in this area, from new icebreaker/patrol ships like Canada wants to build, to its substantial investments in submarines. Canada retired its last oceanographic/defense research ship (I shit you not, on a Friday before a long weekend) in 2016, while Russia has two submarines that do that job, that can also launch and recover its own ROVs and intelligence subs.

 Canada's hold on the high Arctic is something that has produced anxiety, and papers, and books in Ottawa. Having some capacity to operate Naval units year-round in the Arctic would be an actual step to addressing those fears, instead of aimlessly fretting and producing symposia----

The first supply ship, (the leased, not bought ship, the Government of Canada really can't emphasize this enough) with the shade-endorsed name Asterix, had nothing to do with the NSS, and is the only ship the RCN has taken deliver of that came in on time and on budget. The fed of course fought like a starving mink to keep from having to buy it, despite the RCN's demonstrable need (#2 man in the Canadian Military being fired because senior civil servants though a ship being up to snuff would make the NSS 'look bad', etc, etc.) Oh, and to no one's surprise, the Davie Shipyard (and by extension, the province of Quebec) wants to make a second supply ship for the RCN. The Canadian government is of course fighting like starving minks, again, to not buy another ship produced in Canada, on time and on budget, to address a desperate need for the RCN if it's going to operate across oceans. Transport Minister Marc Garneau continued that great Canadian tradition of defending the Government's decisions in Parliament with arguments literally nobody believes.

Military complaints program set up along the same lines as the Wells-Fargo Financial ethical complaint line: as a way to identify troublemakers.

On fighter jets: the French have bowed out. This makes me sad, and the Dassault Rafale was probably the best overall solution for Canada, and definitely the best looking. The invaluable Canada's next fighter blog has the details, but in short, using French rather than British or American systems had frictional costs. Oh well, c'est la vie.

Not surprisingly, with the fighter portfolio, the Auditor General who managed to make Con incompetence on this issue sting, is now writing the same sort of criticism regarding Liberal handling of the issue.  Liberal repost: some projected future dates for the CF-18 replacement. It's a tight schedule, it has to be, as 2025 is the furthest the ol' buses could be made to fly. I don't see any mention of the 'fighter competition'.

Speaking of doing a bad job, Canadian Pols let $60 billion in tax revenue go annually [and this figure ignores tax dodging by the rich], but it's okay because look at how virtuous they are, obsessing over the 0.063% of that first number it'd cost to renovate the PM's residence from it's  "we're gonna have to condemn it" state. Canadian priorities in a nutshell.