A failure of planning and foresight: blame the politicians

The lifespan of a fleet of aircraft isn't unknown or unknowable. Oh, you don't necessarily know the exact hour a part will fail, but you know the probabilities to a fair degree of certainty. This many hours of flying time will produce this much wear, and if we fly them at this rate per year, then presto!, the magic lifespan number appears.

It's not a secret, and contrary to my frivolous description above, it's not magic. It's math.

That's why when I read stories like this, my eyebrows draw together, my mouth tightens, and a slow and angry burn grows in my gut:

Ottawa has halted a $1.6-billion upgrade that would extend the life of Canada's aging fleet of Aurora patrol aircraft, CBC News reports.

The Defence Department has already spent more than half the budget of the planned 10-year overhaul – adding $1 billion worth of new equipment, such as navigation systems and flight data recorders, to the 18 planes.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay on Thursday confirmed the department is considering winding down the 30-year-old fleet and replacing it with new planes.

The Defence Department says it will make a decision by Nov. 20 on whether to replace the Auroras.

Ottawa could face financial penalties if the hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts is cancelled.

I get angry, because it didn't need to be like this. The wear and tear on the aircraft is so very predictable. And yet successive Canadian governments have put off funding the inevitable, leaving us in a situation where every option hurts: buying a whole new fleet at once, when we're already spending piles on other priorities; throwing good money after bad trying to keep planes far past their best-by date in the air; or going without a maritime air patrol capability completely.

It's disgraceful. It's disgraceful because it shows our government has either been incompetent (if they didn't know this was coming), or indifferent (they knew and just didn't care). Either way, the current state of affairs is an indictment of the Government of Canada.

You want to know how we should handle capital procurement? I'm hardly inventing the wheel here - this is Planning 101.

Start by figuring out what tasks you want to be able to accomplish. Then figure out what resources you'll need to accomplish those tasks. In the case of equipment, buy the best long-term value - that is to say, the kit that provides the biggest bang for the buck over its lifetime. Short-term solutions are to be avoided whenever possible, in favour of the long-term view; we're not going to be getting out of the defence-of-our-nation business anytime soon, so our planning horizon should be as far out as we can reasonably predict.

Then, look at when we'll need to replace our kit, assuming usage in line with what we've predicted our op tempo will be - hopefully with a bit of a buffer to err on the side of caution (Anyone remember the supposed "peace dividend" after the Cold War ended? How'd that work out?). Then look at how long it's going to take to buy and take delivery of new kit, and start planning for gradual replacement of worn items with new ones.

So, for example, when it comes to maritime patrol, we should have been planning and budgeting for replacements long ago, so that as our first high-time airframes came due, there were new ones to slip into the stream. A few at a time, too, not a whole fleet replacement all at once.

As I said yesterday, DND still hasn't got the procurement process completely squared away. They make mistakes. But by far the biggest mistake in Canadian defence procurement for decades now has been a lack of stable, long-term funding by the federal government.

Because, without that known funding level, DND can't do what it should.

What, you think the staff officers down at NDHQ don't already know everything I've just said? There's an officer sitting in a cubicle on some soulless floor of NDHQ who has staffed this problem to death. He or she knows just what it's going to cost to stop refitting now, or to stop refitting after the next block is complete - both in terms of capabilities lost, and of money spent, in some inverse proportion. There's probably another officer whose entire job is to look at what might be used next, after the grounded Auroras have all been cut up into scrap: do we go with another manned aircraft, or patrol with sophisticated drones? Someone in a sky-blue uniform was probably screaming about the Auroras years ago, in meetings, with memos, to anyone in the senior ranks who would listen. In fact, I suspect everyone in the maritime patrol world, all the way up the chain of command, knew this was coming. Hang around with staff officers for any length of time, and you can't help but understand that they've got a grip on the scope of the challenges they face.

What they don't have, most of the time, are the resources to meet those challenges. And that's a political problem, a budget resources problem, not a CF problem.

Canada is a big country. We have lots of airspace, lots of territory, lots of coastline and water that we have to protect. We're also a middle power in the world, economically reliant upon a stable international order, which means we have to engage and participate in the world outside our borders.

That. Costs. Money.

There's no way around it. So, to all those citizens out there who want a Canadian Forces, but don't want to pay for it, give your head a shake. And to all those politicians who understand full well the need for a capable military, but aren't willing to invest the political capital required to support that military, for shame. The defence of our country cannot be accomplished with one eye on the next election.

We desperately need more ships. We need more aircraft (manned and unmanned, fixed-wing and rotary). We need more kit of all sorts, and we need more Canadians in uniform to use it in the pursuit of our national interest.

Message to those who infest Parliament Hill: you can't plant and reap the seeds of national defence in one election cycle. Stop trying to, and start doing the right thing instead of the politically expedient thing.

Oh, and start asking the Air Force how they think we should patrol our nation's coastline when the Auroras are done. Because I can guarantee they've thought about it a hell of a lot more than you have.