Kill Super Hornet purchase, Senate committee says

OTTAWA The Senate defence committee released a report Monday blasting the Trudeau government’s “political decision” to purchase Super Hornet fighter jets, while all but endorsing the F35 stealth fighter.

The report was the second in a series published by the committee over the last month, the first of which called on the government to double defence spending to two per cent of GDP over the next decade.

This latest volume provided a veritable laundry list of items that senators felt the government should buy with the extra $20 billion such an increase in spending would entail.

That included purchasing 12 new submarines, acquiring attack helicopters and increasing the Air Force fighter-jet fleet to 120, among other things.

The committee also said it had concluded, based on concerns raised by a dozen retired air force officers, that buying 18 Super Hornets to temporarily augment the aging CF-18 fleet was unnecessary.

The government says the Super Hornets are urgently needed because of a shortage of airworthy CF-18s, but opposition critics and others allege the plan is actually part of a larger effort to avoid having to buy the F-35.

The committee called on the government to launch a competition to pick a replacement for the CF-18s by June 2018, rather than the five years the Liberals plan to take.

But committee members weren’t completely agnostic about which plane should win.

The report estimated buying Super Hornets on an interim basis would cost billions and create a “significant burden” on taxpayers and the military, the latter because of the need for extra training and infrastructure.

“This burden would be eliminated if the government were to move forward with the selection of the F-35s,” the report said.

While Conservative senator and committee chair Daniel Lang said the report did not presuppose the F-35 would win a competition, he did suggest buying Super Hornets would hamstring the military.

“If we go the route that we’re presently going, it’s going to be a cost of $5-$7 billion,” he told reporters, “and then the Air Force will have an air fleet that is not going to meet the responsibilities that we expect of them.”

The Senate committee’s overall recommendations would see the military expand to a size unprecedented since the Cold War, for which Lang was unapologetic.

“It is ambitious,” he said. “But the world has changed, and the day of the free ride is over.”

Asked where the money would come from, he noted the Liberal government has racked up billions of dollars in debt over the last two years without any new investments in the military.

The committee’s report comes as the Trudeau government prepares to unveil its highly anticipated defence policy, which the Liberals have suggested will address years of underfunding to the military.