That Canada is still considering purchasing the F-35 fighter jet, given what a monumental bust it has turned out to be, beggars belief. Photo: File That was a cracker of a column my Postmedia colleague, Michael Den Tandt, unloaded the other day, taking the Harper government to task for its “disjointed, underfunded, poorly understood (and) chronically secretive” defence policy.
For all the prime minister’s tough talk about the growing list of strategic and security threats to the democracies — Russia, Iran, Islamic State and beyond — there is, he noted, a widening gap between Canada’s professed readiness to “do its part” and our actual ability to do so. Indeed, so bad is the “rust-out” that “unless there are dramatic changes soon, it’s fair to ask whether Canada will even be able to field a capable military in a few years’ time.”
Others have offered the same criticism, usually with reference to recent cuts in spending on national defence. The specific complaint of underfunding strikes me as overstated. Defence spending rose more than 50 per cent over the first seven years of the Harper government, from $15 billion in 2006 to $23 billion in 2013. If it has since been cut back somewhat, it remains higher, both as a percentage of program spending and as a share of GDP, than it was when they took office.
The more telling critique, it seems to me, has less to do with how much the government is spending on defence than how it is spending it — notably the enduring fiasco of military procurement.
A Lockheed-Martin F-35 jet fighter.
It does beggar belief, for example, that we are still considering purchasing the F-35 fighter jet — there are reports, denied by the government, that it has quietly agreed to buy four of the jets next year, perhaps as a sort of amuse-bouche for the original order of 65 — given what a monumental bust it has turned out to be. Chosen without competition, to specifications that were written after it had been selected, the much-delayed “fifth-generation” aircraft has been buried in mounting costs and growing doubts about its strategic purpose or even basic flight worthiness.
All this is quite apart from the comic opera surrounding the government’s public costing of the plane, in which it gave out an initial figure that would later prove to have understated the true cost by a factor of five, then refused to provide Parliament with the supporting documentation. Only after it had been safely re-elected was it discovered that it had maintained two sets of books, one with something closer to the correct number and one for public consumption, along the way stonewalling and deceiving the parliamentary budget officer and smearing the auditor general for backing him up.
So: worst procurement effort ever, right? No, that honour must remain with the still uncompleted attempt, four decades after it was begun, to replace the Sea King helicopters, now in their 52nd year in service. You remember: first the Mulroney government signed a contract to purchase 50 EH-101 military helicopters from a European manufacturer; then the Chretien government cancelled it, allegedly because it was too expensive, only to have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation; then it decided, a decade later, to purchase the Sikorsky Cyclone instead, only to find that it did not work as advertised. The military historian Aaron Plamondon says this is quite possibly “the most poorly executed military procurement ever undertaken — anywhere.”
But those are just the highlights. There has also been the bungled purchase of four Victoria-class submarines from the United Kingdom, the delays in obtaining new fixed-wing search and rescue aircraft, on and on and on — and looming as the next big procurement mess, the $35-billion (actually more like $110-billion, when operating and maintenance costs are included) National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy, already mired in the same sorts of delays, dubious costing and sole-source contracting controversies as the F-35.
An F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Lightning II, built by Lockheed Martin, takes off. AFP/Getty Images
What this long history of incompetence and waste should remind us is that messing up military procurement is a glorious bipartisan tradition. Plenty of factors are at work — political interference, DND empire-building, the endless susceptibility of all concerned to the contractors’ tales of high-tech wizardry — but the most consistent is the tendency of governments of whatever party to treat procurement as an economic development program, making so-called “industrial and regional benefits” the focus rather than simply getting the best equipment at the lowest price.
Not only does the resulting laundry list of local-sourcing requirements add materially to the end price but promises of job creation and technology “spinoffs” become yet another means by which defence contractors dress up military mutton as lamb for the benefit of gullible ministers and bureaucrats.
This is bad defence policy, but it’s even worse economy policy. When a government agrees to pay more than the competitive price for something, military hardware or anything else, it is effectively subsidizing the higher-cost provider. That isn’t just at the cost of the taxpayer, or foreign competitors. It’s at the expense of other domestic industries, outside the defence sector, from whom subsidy diverts scarce capital and labour.
Yet, incredibly, last year’s defence procurement strategy paper re-committed the government to the same failed approach, this time marked up with a lot of giddy verbiage about identifying Key Industrial Capabilities and “moving up the value chain.” To the extent this means anything, it means more costs, more lobbying, more pork-barrelling — and less hardware for our forces in the field.
With our military needs on the rise and our budgets constrained, it would seem more important than ever that we get the most bang for the buck out of every dollar of defence spending. Dare I suggest a different approach, based on a radical new idea — that military procurement should be about military procurement?
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