What does canada’s nonsensical and tragic mission in Afghanistan have to do with the feds’ F-35 procurement scandal? More than the current uproar over the auditor general’s report would suggest, actually.
The document, issued last week, is a trek through the government’s detailed obfuscation, fudged numbers and contempt for oversight and process, all showing how jets with a near-$24 billion price tag were made to appear to cost $10 billion less.
But when you get beyond the conniving and scorn for Parliament, you start to smell the desperation. The Department of National Defence went to the wall to join its Yankee counterparts in a high-tech shopping spree justified in the name of quick and easy wars and more coalition-of-the-willing-type romps.
That fevered momentum was disguised by high-minded trumpeting of all the Canadian jobs that would come via contracts for the 65 fighter planes, as the report shows. You have to admire the auditor’s restraint as he pointedly notes the complete absence of any employment guarantees in the deal (no local sourcing rules were applied) and the fact that Canadian firms would have to bid against other nation partners.
Our generals wanted a stealth jet. How thoroughly modern of them. That, of course, neatly eliminated all other purchasing options but the F-35. But Winslow Wheeler of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, who’s been on the reality-check path for several years on military purchasing, has made mincemeat of stealth reliability.
He told Canada’s Standing Committee on National Defence – and this reporter as well – that stealth features only operate at select angles and that a craft’s radar-averting capability adds “weight and drag,” hindering acceleration and grounding the plane for excessive maintenance. The F-35, he’s fond of saying, is “unaffordable” and a “technological kludge.”
So what was the attraction? Lieutenant-General André Deschamps, after some preliminaries about the F-35’s ability to protect Canadian airspace, got to the sexy stuff in front of the standing committee.
“We will have inter-operability with our partners and allies that will be seamless, safe and effective within NORAD and NATO and on coalition operations,” he enthused.
And that is the essence of the matter. DND went quite the distance in pursuit of its integrationist desires, falsely claiming that U.S. experts had validated the price tag, telling politicians costs had stabilized when it was clear they hadn’t, and deftly avoiding the exchange of info with other government bodies. In other words, the department went deeply rogue.
I couldn’t help thinking of The Unexpected War: Canada In Kandahar as I trudged through the week’s reportage. Authors Janice Stein and Eugene Lang wrote that the DND has “always been preoccupied, almost obsessed with their relationship with the U.S. military.” The Canadian Forces, they point out, have become increasingly dependent on their colleagues to the south for equipment, training, doctrine and intelligence as a result of reductions in our own defence spending over two decades. “It is hard to exaggerate the almost seamless integration at the senior levels of the two forces, reinforced by personal networks and long-standing friendships.”
It was this quest for military fraternity that got us into Kandahar in the first place it’s certainly what animated General Rick Hillier as he bulldozed a vacillating Paul Martin into this most foreboding of missions, as Stein and Lang make clear.
Having had this noxious experience, do Canadians really want to subsidize further fusion with the U.S. defence establishment? Or buy war toys presaging another round of self-righteous invasions?
Afghanistan showed us the extent to which our foreign policy independence, such as it was, has rusted away like discarded military hardware.
Last week’s flap over a fighter jet has given us a chance to politicize this loss once again.3
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