By Scott Taylor
In recent weeks, Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff, General Wayne Eyre has been publicly urging the Defence Industry to ramp up production to what he terms a ‘war footing’. It is Eyre’s professional opinion that an increase in domestic military hardware will make it easier for Canada to continue supplying weapons and munitions to Ukraine.
It would also better enable Canada to replace all of the lethal and non-lethal aid, which has already been drained from the Canadian Armed Forces arsenal in order to keep Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
The crux of Eyre’s argument is that the current Russia versus Ukraine conflict provides the catalyst for boosting military equipment production.
In an interview with CBC last May, Eyre told Canadians “I think what this [Russian Ukrainian conflict] has shown, though, is the need for us to increase the capacity of the defence industry. Given the deteriorating world situation, we need the defence industry to go into a wartime footing and increase this production liner to be able to support the requirements that are out there, whether it is ammunition, artillery rockets … you name it. There is a huge demand out there” said Eyre.
All of this may be music to the ears of those executives toiling in the military industrial complex but I think it will be harder to sell the Canadian public on the concept of increased defence spending being the answer to global security.
For decades the fearmongering NATO pundits all warned us of Russia’s incredible martial power. During that campaign of deliberate disinformation, Putin used these over-hyped capabilities to inflate his own political status.
Perhaps Putin actually began to believe the NATO propaganda himself. However, the minute Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, the myth of Russian military invincibility began to unravel.
The NATO spinmeisters did their level best to keep frightening the world by writing off Ukraine’s military and speculating on which western European countries Putin would gobble up next.
The proposed Russian ‘Special Military Operation’ was to last just 72 hours and result in the establishment of a pro-Kremlin regime in Kyiv.
The initial armoured thrusts by the Russians were thwarted by a determined and proficient Ukraine military. The opening act of the war also drew back the curtain on a Russian military hobbled by corruption and incompetence.
As the Russians were driven from the battlefield, analysts began to admit what they had known for years: The Russian military is woefully unprepared to support itself logistically outside of their own territory.
The subsequent months of fighting have also proven that the NATO- supported Ukraine military is superior to the Russian invaders in terms of sophisticated weaponry, training, tactics and above all morale.
The Pentagon estimates that as of Oct. 13, the Russians have suffered a total of 80,000 casualties, which includes over 20,000 deaths.
In terms of military hardware, the Russian losses have been extreme, with literally thousands of tanks, artillery, armoured vehicles and supply trucks having been destroyed or captured to date.
The prolonged conflict has also seen Russia expend the majority of its guided weapon systems such as cruise missiles.
To address this shortfall, Russia has resorted to using Iranian supplied low-tech suicide drones to attack Ukraine’s power grid.
As a quick aside, I would like to issue a quick reminder to those NATO cheerleaders who are currently denouncing Putin’s targeting of civilian infrastructure as a ‘war crime.’ Back in the spring of 1999, NATO air forces – including Canada – spent 78 days deliberately bombing Serbia’s power grid – and we bragged about the new graphite bomb technology which we employed while committing what we now call a ‘war crime.’ But I digress.
Russia has also expended so much artillery ammunition that if NATO intelligence is correct, Putin has had to beg North Korea for resupply.
As one gloating pundit commented, for Russia to seek assistance from North Korea is “scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
It is impossible to predict just how long Putin will continue to reinforce the failure of his Ukraine invasion.
His recent draft of 300,000 reservists would indicate that, for the time being, Putin is prepared to keep the meat grinder rolling in the form of conventional combat – with the ever present threat of nuclear escalation held in reserve.
Whatever the outcome, we now realize that the Russian military capability was never what our NATO cheerleaders claimed it was, and after this Ukraine conflict it will be decades before they can ever again be considered a credible threat to European security.
With Canadians focused on emerging from a pandemic, rampant inflation and climate-change related natural disasters, General Eyre will have a tough sell on convincing the public that we need to spend billions of dollars to make more weapons.
