Defence budget...and The Torch in the major media

Further to these posts,

Which Defence Item Would You Delay?

Canada after Afstan: Demilitarization?

The CF's budget--and missions--after Afstan

Babbling gets quoted by CTV News:

Defence spending freeze 'big mistake,' analysts say
...

Damian Brooks, the founder and main contributor to the widely read military blog The Torch, worries about "stealth cuts" -- budget cuts hidden under hundreds of pages of documents and graphs in the federal budget documents.

He says the military has already been asked -- quietly -- to find "cost savings" of nearly $180 million in the current fiscal year [more here, here and here from the Ottawa Citizen's David Pugliese].

"And the only reason that those numbers came out was because (army commander Lt.-Gen.) Andy Leslie stood up and publicly complained about it," he said. "Otherwise, we would never have heard of them."

Those cuts hit the Canadian Forces just as it was beginning to recover and Brooks says it's unfair to say that some cuts are justified after the large spending increases since Sept. 11, 2001.

"The increases to date have been the least that we could do to rebuild the Forces," he said. "They're not rolling in dough -- the Canadian defence budget is still only a miniscule percentage of our GDP."

He fears that the defence budget will be cut where it is least visible, in the Canadian Forces special forces command, including the secretive JTF-2 commando unit, the Canadian Special Operations Regiment and other specialized units.

"The easiest cuts for the Canadian Forces to make are the ones that no one can see," he said, "and special operations are invisible because they don't tell the public what they do. They can't: it's all top secret."

Yet special forces have been one of Canada's most valuable contributions to missions abroad and at home, Brooks said [see these 2009 posts: "Canadian special forces ops in Afstan (and CSIS)"; "UK SAS to Afstan/Blackout on our special forces"; and '"War wagons"!?!' ]...