Canada has a problem with its doctrine of how to best use what little resources it has for its military. Canada believes in a token force to keep its military capable of expanding only when needed.
The main problem of only maintaining a token force is that when needed it has to expand rapidly and in this new era of high tech and long waits for military hardware this is not going to work. Canada needs to diversify. This includes all branches of the military. An example is trying to only have one type of frigate that will defend our waters and do anti-piracy as well as blockade and escort. This idea that one ship can do everything is just silly. We need coastal patrol ships for coastal patrol, we need to invest and train our sailors so they can do multiple tasks. Another sad reality is right now we have no anti-mine capability for our navy. We have no ground to air defense for our army. When we decide on our next jet fighter, it will have to be an interceptor, a dogfighter, and be able to do ground strikes. Why can we not have mostly Gripens with a few (8-16) F15EX for NORAD. Our military needs the right tools and have the training to do the missions we ask of them. This is not the case now. As an example, we put our pilots in the air over Kosovo with missions being 50% at night without night vision capability in our fighters (no night vision goggles or canopy dimming lights). We deploy our ground forces to Latvia without close air defense. Our military it seems can not take on any mission without the support of some other nation. This is policy or in some cases just poor planning. We need less politics in our military decision processes. Let us let Canada develop policies that lead us to developing at home solutions, after all, we are a G7 country with a GDP of over 1.7 trillion.
Canada needs to diversify because variety equal resilience. We need more options so our military has the flexibility to field what is needed for the task. We do not need to send a Type 26 frigate that costs 3-5 billion dollars to patrol off the coast of Africa or South America when a 800 million dollar coastal patrol ship could do the job better. We do not need only stealth fighters that will need to spend more time “in the shop” than in the air. What Canada needs are planners that can commit to creating a military force that is viable and do it now, not just another paper for some other government in the future to cancel
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- important_documents2: jon.t | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Generic