Category: Canadian Military

NAPOWRIMO Day 26

On By WinstonIn Canadian Military, NaPoWriMo, Poetry, Politics, Society, Values, WarfareLeave a comment

Soldiers’ Lament

For glory and for honour and,
To uphold what is right,
These are the answers given when,
They ask us why we fight.

They  point to battles fought and won,
To tyrants we’ve destroyed.
Talk like we’re saving everyone,
Each time we are deployed.

No longer are things black or white,
The wars have gotten grey.
Who’s in the right, who’s in the wrong,
Now changes every day.

We do our best to do it right,
Trust those who ship us out.
But when you read between the lines,
Sometimes can’t help but doubt,

But still we stand and still we serve,
And still we question not.
And when we’ve given everything,
We’re tossed aside. Forgot.

Cheers, Winston

Bring Them All Home Alive

On By WinstonIn Canadian Military, Global Issues, Politics, Society, WarfareLeave a comment

The NATO mission in Afghanistan just sustained another giant kick in the groin. The head of the NATO mission has just announced the immediate cessation of joint Afghan/NATO patrols. To date, these joint patrons have been the norm and represented the cornerstone in the UN plan to train indigenous police and military forces to assume security duties from UN troops.

Why are these patrols being discontinued? Mostly, it’s because in the past year 51 UN troops have died in so called “Green on Blue” attacks. That’s the term they roll out when “rogue” elements of the Afghan police/military kill their UN trainers. This is probably the single greatest tacit admission yet that the Afghan mission is a total bust.

So how can they fix this problem? They can’t. This is the sad truth. The NATO commander is doing the only thing possible. Refusing to put NATO troops into unnecessary danger. The mission is ending shortly, so why risk lives for no gains? Keep the troops as safe as possible and let them ride out the end of the deployment with absolute minimum exposure possible.

There have been enough deaths to assuage the U.S. rage over 9/11. NATO may feel honor-bound to stick it out to the very end of their commitment, but that’s no reason to sacrifice more troops in this un-winnable debacle. Afghanistan isn’t changing any time soon. There are some parts of the society who long for change. Unfortunately those who want to maintain the status quo are much more aggressive about it. Contrary to all the propaganda that came out later, Afghanistan only got invaded because the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden. Saving the Afghan people from the Taliban only became a mission when Osama proved harder to locate than a socially conscious Republican.

They never set out to save Afghanistan. That was the worst sort of mission creep. With the impending drawdown of NATO involvement in the Afghan theater, it’s small wonder the indigenous troops are increasingly susceptible to Taliban recruitment. It’s one thing to have joined up to fight side by side with the invaders. It’s a whole other deal if you can show that you just wanted to get close enough to kill them.

Refusing to let the locals build credit with the incoming regime by killing NATO troops is probably the first smart decision made since the invasion. Now let’s make another one and get the hell out before anymore troops die for nothing.

Bring them all home alive.

Cheers, Winston

NaNoWriMo Day 2 And An F-35 Update

On By WinstonIn Canadian Military, Personal, Politics, TechnologyLeave a comment

Greetings from the land of poor but quick writing.  One of the key pieces of advice for this process is don’t edit as you write.  Just get the words down on the page and worry about everything else later.  That’s why I specify poor writing.  turns out it’s not too hard to write badly.

Writing quickly on the other hand is apparently another matter all together.  To achieve the stated goal of fifty thousand words by November thirtieth, I need to write one thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven words every day.  To put that in perspective, an average post here on Brain Bits is between two hundred and five hundred words.

So far, I’ve gotten just over two thousand words.  That leaves me with around thirteen hundred to write before bed.  Now all I have to do is figure out what the heck they’re going to be.

Of course, the more I write here, the less I’m writing there.  But there was one more thing just before I get back to it.  It’s a quick follow up to the post I wrote the other day about our pending F-35 purchase.

Michael Gilmore the top Pentagon weapons tester has put out a memo saying that training flights should be delayed for at least ten months.  The memo sites a variety of potentially fatal issues including an untested ejection system, a faulty generator, and incomplete flight manuals.

Mr. Gilmore expects it to take about ten months to get everything up to snuff to resume testing.  The U.S. Army and Air Force disagree with him, as does manufacturer Lockheed Martin.  Of course they do.  That’s why we have third party, civilian consultants.  No vested interest equals a better chance of honesty.

Yup.  That deal keeps looking better and better every time I hear more about it.

Cheers, Winston

Good Thing The Conservatives Hate Spending Our Tax Dollars

On By WinstonIn Canadian Military, Politics, Society, ValuesLeave a comment

So yesterday I wrote about the Conservatives plan to spend billions on new F-35 fighter aircraft.  Here’s a quick follow up.

The tab for 65 F-35 fighters will ring in around nine billion dollars.  But wait, it gets better.  When you purchase a bunch of shiny new aircraft, you need parts and service on them.  This is called a service contract.  If you’ve bought anything from Best Buy, you know what that is.  Now think about this.  If the geek of the week at Best Buy says “Sign here for the service contract, and I’ll tell you later how much it will be.”  Would you still take the service contract?  I suspect not.

Not so for Mr. Harper’s Conservative government.  They signed off on the F-35 purchase without getting an actual dollar figure for the accompanying support.  That apparently won’t be available until production is under way.  If that seems a tad peculiar, that’s the sort of thing to expect when you agree to single source your new aircraft.  That’s right folks.  We can only purchase our new jets from Lockheed Martin, and only they can service them.

But, there is some good news from our leaderless fears.  They’re also going to upgrade our navy.  To the tune of thirty-three billion dollars.  The good news, that money is scheduled to remain in Canada.  Twenty-five billion goes to contracts in Halifax, the other eight billion goes to Vancouver.  Which is exactly what I wanted for the aircraft update.  The project is expected to generate around fifteen thousand jobs.  Which kind of makes my point about the kind of jobs that would be created by building our own jets.  But for reasons best known to themselves, the Conservatives decided that it would be bad to create too many jobs all at once.

Now, they’re talking about maybe buying us some nuclear submarines. The used non-nuclear subs that we bought from Britain were a total bust from the get-go.  We’ve spent more rebuilding them than we paid for them, and they still aren’t actually sea-worthy.  So the only obvious solution is to buy some used nuclear subs.  The estimated price tag for all this plutoinum powered goodness?  How about three billion a pop.  If we replace our four leaky, crappy existing subs with spiffy new used subs it’ll ring in at around twelve million.  Cheap at half the price.  Yes?  Probably.

Here’s the fun part and the punchline to my headline.  During our recent federal election, the Conservatives were at great pains to tell Canadians how much money the Liberals would spend if elected.  The Conservatives would be our fiscal saviours.  Or maybe not.

F-35s=9 billion + unspecified multi-billion support contract.  New ships=33 billion.  Nuclear subs=12 billion.  Total 63 billion + unspecified multi-billion dollar support contract.

Good thing we didn’t elect those free spending Liberals eh?

Cheers, Winston

Two Reasons Canada Shouldn’t Buy F-35 Jets

On By WinstonIn Canadian Military, Global Issues, Politics, Society, Technology1 Comment

Actually, there are more than two, but I don’t feel like writing a twenty-thousand word essay tonight. So I’ll limit this to just a couple, or so.

First up of course is the idea of spending BILLIONS of dollars on new fighter aircraft. I’m going to assume that’s because we live in an unstable part of the world where we are constantly at risk of invasion. No? Maybe the Conservative government is correct and we need them to assert our Arctic sovereignty. Against whom?

Anyone who is likely to be trekking about in the high north isn’t anyone we’re likely to shoot at. Let’s face it. The only countries actively challenging us in the Arctic are the U.S. and Russia. It’s really unlikely that we’re going to shoot at either of them. I mean really. If the U.S. thought that might happen, they probably wouldn’t be selling us the aircraft to make that possible. Add to this Prime Minister Harper’s own comment. According to the man who wants to buy these planes, the greatest threat to Canadian sovereignty is “Islamicist Terror”. I think it would be nice if he decided which threat we’re supposed to address and who these jets will address either.

My next nit to pick regards a fairly simple question. Why don’t we build our own jets? We’ve got our own aircraft industry. We’ve got more than enough technical knowledge. The Conservatives keep talking about how they plan to create jobs. Seems like a no-brainer to me. It’s not like we have any imminent threat demanding we upgrade in the immediate future. Fact is this could be a long term investment in Canadian businesses, creating Canadian jobs and employing Canadian technologists. What a concept.

Lastly tonight, I would like to raise a point I noticed in an article in Maclean’s. The jets which Mr. Harper and his fellow Bedlamites want spend billions on to defend the Arctic from “Islamicist Terror”, seems there might be a little problem with that. Apparently they won’t be able to communicate from there. A lack of polar orbiting communications satellites renders these awesome beasts mute. Way to plan Team Harper!

If the same salesperson from the U.S. shows up and starts talking bridges, give me a call. For twenty bucks and a couple of beers I can do a better job of advising you than the “pro”s you had for this one.

Cheers, Winston

You Sorta Need Someone To Command & Control

On By WinstonIn Canadian Military, Politics, Society7 Comments

A report from a former Lieutenant General in the Canadian Armed Forces seems destined to be ignored…. again.  Apparently, there are as many military personnel in Ottawa’s National Defense HQ as there are on active duty in the navy or regular force army.  During the last six years, Command and Support has grown at four times the rate of actual deployable force.  That seems a tad disproportionate to me.

Andrew Leslie, the author of the report, wants to see that change.  Of course after years inside the Canadian military, he knows the odds against any of his recommendations being adopted.  In the last forty five years, not one plan to reform Canada’s Armed Forces has been fully implemented.  It seems like maybe it’s time for that to change.

When there are more people running the military than there are in it, it represents a really skewed set of priorities.  It’s hard to justify the amount of money we spend on our military knowing most of it stays right here in Ottawa.  The government talks about Force Projection, but the bulk of their personnel don’t seem to project much beyond DNDHQ.

My nephew served three tours in Afghanistan while upwards of twenty-thousand military staff did their best to bring peace and stability to Ottawa.  Recent stimulus spending has fueled a large part of this expansion.  Now that well is running dry, and the deployable forces seem to have been left off the gravy train.  Thirteen billion in awesome new jets is a grand gesture, but it’s meaningless if there’s no actual people to put them in the air.  The same is true of the army, and navy.  When the budget is being drained by a top heavy administration, there’s not much left for actual boots on the ground.

If you think of it from a business perspective, it’s not a good idea to have more staff at head office than you do actually doing whatever it is your company does.  That’s a recipe for disaster in the private sector.  In the Canadian Military, it’s business as usual.  The status quo has been institutionalized in the name of stability and a healthy dose of hidebound leadership.  Case in point, former Chief of Defense Staff Rick Hillier.

Hillier’s take on Leslie’s recommendations: “You try to implement that report as it stands and you destroy the Canadian Military.  You simply can’t take that many people out of Command & Control functions.”  Really?  How many bodies do you need in C&C per deployable person?  Apparently, the idea of a leaner more efficient military has yet to breach the fortifications around Ottawa.  While the deployable forces are tasked to do more and more with less and less, DNDHQ is doing a little bit more with a steadily growing mountain of resources.

Andrew Leslie’s own words seem like an appropriate wrap up.  “If we don’t do something along these lines, battalions will be disbanded, ships will be tied up and aircraft will continue to be grounded while headquarters continues to grow.”

Note to Defense Minister Peter McKay and current Chief of Defense Staff Walt Natynczyk: YOU SORTA NEED SOMEONE TO COMMAND & CONTROL!

Cheers, Winston