CF-18s and Afstan: Toronto Star fixation

As milnewstbay puts it at Army.ca (Babbling has his own post on this):

An Apparently New Discovery by MSM: the military plans things before they're asked to do things, so that if they're ordered to, they can do them (or explain why not). What a concept!

While there is some news value in the planning details reported in Bruce Campion-Smith's Toronto Star story, the consideration of a deployment is not the hot scoop that the story implies. In fact Mr Campion-Smith was writing about it last September and in last October (Star links no longer work) took credit for having spilled the beans:

The Toronto Star revealed last month that Ottawa was making preparations in case its fighter jets were needed in Afghanistan. That included a $1.9 million contract with the U.S. government for "deployment support" for the CF-18s.

Rather than getting Star readers in a tizzy of righteous upset by raising in today's story the spectre of the CF's being even more warlike,

Today, a CF-18 deployment remains a sensitive topic for senior federal government officials who fear the public may perceive Canadian jets in Afghanistan as an escalation of Canada's involvement in a divisive mission...

Mr Campion-Smith might have at least mentioned that the possible deployment itself is indeed old news and that the government has denied for several months there will be such a deployment.

In any event, so long as no other country is operating F-18s in-country, I suspect logistical and maintenance problems would make a deployment of our planes impracticable. Though strategic airlift from CC-177s might help.

By comparison, the US, The Netherlands and Norway all have F-16s in Afstan and the latter two can benefit greatly, in terms of efficiency, by operating alongside the USAF. And the Belgians may be sending four F-16s this year (Belgian and Danish F-16s have taken part in the past).