Roy Rempel served as defence policy advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2010 to 2015Mark Carney recently announced his government’s intention to increase defence spending by more than $9 billion in order to “rebuild, rearm and reinvest” in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF.) The government declared that this positions Canada to meet the target of spending two percent of GDP on defence this year. The prime minister further promised that: “We will rapidly procure new equipment and technology... Canada will seize this opportunity with urgency and determination.”.UPDATED: Carney unveils new military defence plan.Notwithstanding these words, Canadians should not expect the announcement to result in significantly enhanced or accelerated military capabilities.The prime minister’s assertion that Canada would “rapidly procure new equipment” may be borne out if limited to certain emergency acquisitions. However, with defence costs spiralling across the board (including, for example, a 50 percent increase in the cost of the F-35 fighter program and significantly increased costs for every project under the National Shipbuilding Strategy,) much of the new money is likely to be absorbed simply in keeping pace..Even so, there are some components to the announcement that are potentially interesting, most notably the plan to lay the groundwork for a defence industrial strategy. While unfortunately a decade was wasted in failing to build on the defence industrial strategy that the Harper government launched back in 2014, the prime minister’s announcement (along with the pledge of $2.1 billion to support it) is at least a rediscovery of that original idea.Yet, major procurements themselves are unlikely to be accelerated.The planned fighter acquisition is a case in point. In her recent report on the F-35, the auditor general found that the Department of National Defence will have problems just meeting current procurement timelines. This of course assumes that the government proceeds with its acquisition of the F-35. Should its current “review” of that decision result in an abandonment of the purchase, then the process will be longer.Other major defence procurements are even further in the future. While the navy’s new River-class destroyers are about to start construction, they will not enter service in sufficient numbers until at least the latter 2030s. The result is that Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) will somehow have to soldier-on with its already aging frigates (now around 30-years old) for up to two more decades.The navy’s submarine service is in an even more dire predicament. Its four submarines are approaching 35 years in age and it is a struggle to keep them operational. The government has declared that it intends to replace these vessels with up to twelve new submarines. However, based on allied experience, this is likely to take decades.A decade ago, both Norway and the Netherlands decided to replace their own submarine fleets which are of a similar age to Canada’s vessels. For Norway the process, from its initial decision to the envisaged in-service date for its first new submarine, is 15 years. For the Netherlands, it will be about 20 years. .While the Canadian government has declared that it hopes to beat those timelines, the recent history of Canadian military procurement makes it unclear where such optimism comes from. Were Canada just to match allied timelines the navy’s first new boat would arrive in the early 2040s.It is an open question whether there will still be a Canadian submarine service around to receive and crew those vessels at that time..In this sense, the prime minister’s announcement is less about real capability enhancements than it is about three things. First, there is a general signal that the government will try to do things differently going forward: it wants to redevelop the long overdue defence industrial strategy and diversity Canada’s international defence relationships. At this stage these objectives are largely aspirational, having to overcome decades of over reliance on the United States if they are to have any chance of success.Second, there is an effort to plug some glaring defence holes that have long been evident. This includes money to “repair and sustain” CAF infrastructure as well as to strengthen cyber defence. Most significantly, $2.6 billion will go to supporting a major CAF pay raise. This is certainly important to try to arrest CAF’s pervasive recruitment and retention crisis which has resulted in acute personnel shortages in key trades.Yet, there is a total absence of honest discussion about this chronic problem, which former defence minister Bill Blair termed the CAF’s “death spiral”.The seeming inability of the CAF to attract and retain qualified people impacts operational readiness across the board, contributing to personnel burnout and the unavailability of equipment. Money alone will not solve this systemic problem; there is a profound lack of rank-and-file confidence in the overall state of the CAF and its general direction. There appears to be no willingness in either the government, or the senior leadership of the CAF, to ask the hard questions about what this means and about the long-term implications..Third of course, the primary purpose of the prime minister’s announcement was political. The desired media headline was that the new government would meet NATO’s two percent spending target. The objective is to (re)build credibility with both the Trump administration and in Europe where the government is now seeking to strengthen Canada’s defence partnerships. While the declaration that Canada will meet the two percent goal is clearly being assisted by some bureaucratic sleight-of-hand (most notably by adding the budget of Canada’s unarmed Coast Guard to the defence portfolio,) there is now tacit acknowledgement that Canada has been underperforming on defence for decades; that it is no longer in its interests to be seen as free riding.The success of this announcement in accomplishing that primary political objective remains to be seen. Indeed, NATO’s (and the Trump administration’s) goal for defence investments have already moved from 2 percent to 5 percent. However, on the more fundamental level of improving Canada’s real defence capacity, hard questions that this announcement largely avoids will actually have to be tackled. Roy Rempel served as defence policy advisor to Prime Minister Stephen Harper from 2010 to 2015.
