By Scott Taylor
Defence spending has been making a steady stream of headlines recently with the Carney Liberals announcing a number of major acquisition promises.
One of the biggest was the July 6 announcement that TKMS of Germany was selected as the preferred bid in the Canadian Patrol Submarine project. The plan is for the Royal Canadian Navy to purchase up to 12 diesel-electric powered attack submarines at a life-cycle cost of over $100 billion. That announcement was made personally by Prime Minister Mark Carney from the flight deck of HMCS Robert Hampton Graytied alongside the Halifax dockyard.
Two weeks later Carney and his entourage were in London, Ontario to announce a $2 billion contract to General Dynamics Land Systems -Canada. While not nearly the same magnitude as the sub purchase, GDLS-C will build an additional 190 Armoured Combat Support Vehicles (ACSV) for the Canadian Army.
In 2019 the Trudeau Liberals had ordered a fleet of 360 ACSV's to replace the Army's aged out fleet of Bisons, M113s and Coyote reconnaissance vehicles. The ACSV is essentially the same chassis as the Light Armoured Vehicles (LAV) that have been the backbone of the Army's combat fleet since entering service in 1999, albeit the ACSV's have a remote weapon station in lieu of the full turret, mounting a 25 mm cannon, as found on a LAV.
This latest purchase will bring the Canadian Army's fleet of ACSV's to 550.
It was also announced last week that the bidding field in the Light Utility Vehicle (LUV) replacement project has been narrowed to just two potential Canadian companies. The scope of this procurement aims to purchase between 1600 - 2100 Light Utility Vehicles to replace the aging out fleets of Mercedes Benz G-Wagons and the Chevrolet Silverados currently at the end of their service lives.
The funding range is between $1 billion to $5 billion and will include a mix of armour-protected vehicles for overseas deployments and civilian standard vehicles for domestic use.
For many NATO allies, something as ubiquitous as trucks and jeeps for the army, they are not purchased on a batch basis every couple of decades. Instead they refresh their logistic vehicle fleets on an annual basis.
If done at 10% replacement and retirement per year, you would not have vehicles more than 10 years old and you could alter your order each year to get the specific variants you require.
For some unknown reason Canada persists with buying a whole fleet at once and then waiting until the maintenance costs are at their highest for the entire fleet before scraping up the money to replace them.
In the early 1990's the Canadian Army's fleet of Iltis Light Utility Vehicles was burning out and it was affecting the operational readiness of our far flung UN Peacekeeping missions. From the former Yugoslavia to Cambodia many of the old Iltis jeeps were not trusted for lengthy road moves.
In 1993 the Mulroney Conservatives announced an urgent replacement LUV-Wheeled project valued at around $200 million. That October, the Chretien Liberals swept into power in a landslide election.
During the election campaign Jean Chretien had vowed that if elected he would cancel the contract to purchase a fleet of EH-101 helicopters to replace the aged out Sea King and Labrador fleets. Chretien did exactly as he promised and then one step further in cancelling the Iltis replacement program at the same time.
Thus when our troops deployed to Afghanistan in 2002 they were still driving the un-armoured, open topped, un-reliable Iltis utility vehicles. While putting up a brave front to the Canadian public saying that symbolically these open topped Iltis showed the Afghan people that we trusted them, behind the scenes officials were scrambling to acquire better vehicles - fast.
Mercedes Benz of Canada was the only supplier that did not pack up their tent when Chretien cancelled the LUV-W project. As such they got the contract for 802 Gelandewagens (G-Wagons) in 2003 and another order for 357 more in 2004.
It was too little too late for Corporal Jamie Murphy. On January 31, 2004 while on patrol in Kabul, Murphy's Iltis was attacked by a suicide bomber who leapt into the open vehicle before detonating his explosive device.
Murphy became the first of 158 Canadian fatalities in that conflict.
I wish the current LUV project managers Godspeed in issuing a contract and propose calling the new vehicles the Murphy as a reminder of what happens when necessary military procurement gets hijacked by politics or delayed by bureaucrats.
