Admiral expects Joint Supply Ship announcement soon

Lots of jobs; first delivery 2113.

The navy is expecting an announcement about replacements for its aging supply ships by the end of the month, says the region’s top sailor.

Irving is part of a consortium vying to bring the $2.1-billion contract to build and maintain the three 28,000-tonne joint support ships to Halifax. If it wins the bid, Irving estimates the project would employ about 400 workers at the Halifax Shipyard during the peak building phase.

"It will definitely be announced before the Parliament recesses for the summer," said Rear Admiral Dan McNeil, the commander of Joint Task Force Atlantic.

"My guess is they all want to go home to the beach in July and August. So my guess is by the end of June."..

"It’s about time we built some more ships, and I’m not just talking about joint support ships," said Rear Admiral McNeil.

"I’m talking about recapitalization of the coast guard. . . . We need some shipbuilding around here. It’s not for the navy. It’s not for the coast guard. It’s for the country. Because what we’re doing is stupid."..

"So we need a shipbuilding program."

Two groups, Canadian North Atlantic Marine Partnerships and BAE Systems Inc., are seeking to build the three joint support ships in Newfoundland and Labrador. The final bidder, SNC-Lavalin ProFac Inc., wants to construct the vessels in Victoria...

Delays may be tied to Tory plans to spend more than $8 billion on military equipment, including new transport aircraft, helicopters and logistics trucks.

"The hold-up is political announcements," said Frank Smith, business development director for Peter Kiewit Sons’ Co., which is working with Canadian North Atlantic Marine Partnerships. "They want to announce all the . . . stuff at the same time. And the aircraft one is the directed purchase (of four C-17 Globemaster long-range cargo planes from Boeing for $2.5 billion). So I think there’s some political flak going on."

The final contract for the joint support ships is slated to be awarded in 2008 with the delivery of the first of three ships scheduled for 2013...

Now, what about the amphibious ship?

As for the Coast Guard, it desperately needs new vessels (full text not online). It should get any new arctic icebreakers (the Navy has not operated them for 49 years), which would be perfectly adequate in Coast Guard service for asserting arctic sovereignty. The Conservative election promise of armed Navy icebreakers was simply silly.

Canada should replace its fleet of rusted-out coast guard ships before buying armed icebreakers for Arctic patrols, internal government documents obtained by CanWest News Service suggest.

A briefing book prepared for Conservative Fisheries and Oceans Minister Loyola Hearn, who is also responsible for the Canadian Coast Guard, says the current fleet is "experiencing significant rust-out," making it less reliable due to breakdowns and more costly to run.

"Further, meeting demand for year-round winter navigation in all Arctic waters will require a type of icebreaker that currently does not exist," bureaucrats warned in February.

"To design and build an icebreaker that could operate efficiently in winter Arctic ice conditions is considered possible, but this could take up to 10 years and could cost in excess of $1 billion."

Protecting Arctic sovereignty with armed icebreakers was a major plank in the Conservative election platform, but the current 25-year plan to update the coast guard fleet doesn't call for development of replacement icebreakers until 2017 [but they're need much sooner--see below]. The project, slated for completion in 2037, has an estimated cost of $1.8 billion...

Although the Department of National Defence would own and operate the ships under the Tory plan, critics have said the responsibility should remain with the coast guard.

That it would take at least 10 years to develop new, high-tech icebreakers makes pursuing the plan all the more difficult. Russia is the only country in the world with surface navigation capacity in the Arctic winter...

Predate: A May 30 National Post story(full text not online) says the Navy may be looking at a vessel for the icebreaking role. Question, given the slow speed and the fact that they would not needed in the north most of the time, what other roles would they be good at? And why waste money by building them in Canada?

The Conservative government is considering buying a fleet of new "ice-capable" corvettes [not really a "corvette"--see last para.] to allow our navy to patrol Canada's vast Arctic waters and abandoning, at least for now, a campaign pledge to build new armed icebreakers for the Canadian Forces.

Defence sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said senior admirals have proposed instead that Ottawa buy as many as eight warships with reinforced hulls that could sail through all but the thickest Arctic ice.

And Gordon O'Connor, the Tory Defence Minister, is looking favourably at the idea, according to one senior officer, in part because of the prohibitive cost and emerging difficulties in building and operating the armed icebreakers promised by the Conservatives in the last election campaign.

The navy's plan would instead order six to eight new patrol vessels based on the Royal Norwegian Navy's Svalbard class, a 6,100-tonne, 100-metre-long warship with a crew of 50, a 57-millimetre deck gun, missile launching tubes and a helicopter pad.

The Norwegian ships, almost as large as the Canadian navy's workhorse frigates, have reinforced hulls that allow them to sail through most ice conditions in the North. They cannot break through "multi-year ice" however, the permanent ice cover over the most northern parts of the Arctic Ocean...

...However, a bid to build the ships -- which would cost between $200-million and $300-million apiece -- could be ready for a second presentation to Cabinet planned for the fall, the source said...

Rob Huebert, of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, said the corvettes would be useful in many situations in Arctic waters but not all and not year-round.

"They're a possible solution for the navy, but they're not a permanent solution to the Canadian problem ... of protecting our northern sovereignty," he said. "They are not going to be able to go into areas with multi-year ice ... that's the stuff that's extremely hard: it's the ice that sinks ships."

Prof. Huebert said the Coast Guard's tiny fleet of icebreakers are ageing and urgently need to be replaced, no matter what the navy ends up buying. "We're going to have a resource gold rush in our North in the next five to 10 years," he said...

The Norwegian vessels really are light icebreakers. A comment at Army.ca gives details. Why not just buy new icebreakers for the Coast Guard, which knows how to use them, and speedier blue water vessels to supplement our inadequate coastal defence vessels? Are we really planning to fight anyone (i.e. the US, UK, France or Russia) in the Arctic?