Shorthanded in air defence
Auditor general warns defence department’s plans are insufficient
Canada’s Air Force is desperately short of technicians and pilots and stuck with an aging fleet of fighter jets that is fast becoming obsolete, the auditor general warns.
Michael Ferguson cautions that the aging CF-18 fighters — which have gone more than a decade since any significant upgrade to their combat capabilities — risk becoming toothless tigers against better equipped adversaries.
In a report released Tuesday, Ferguson took aim at the $3billion plan to augment Canada’s aging CF-18s, and bluntly concludes it will do little good.
That’s because the defence department lacks a plan to deal with the “biggest obstacles” in meeting the demands on the fighter fleet: a shortage of pilots and the declining capabilities of jets that are three decades old.
“National Defence still does not have enough technicians to maintain and pilots to fly the aircraft,” the report concluded.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced Tuesday that Canada had concluded a deal with Australia to buy 18 used F-18s to bolster the Canadian fighter fleet, but he admitted that the true fix to the Air Force woes will come only when new aircraft arrive and personnel shortages are resolved.
“That ultimately is what's going to fix the problem, while at the same time, we’re going to be making sure that we look at all the policies in place that focuses on retaining our skilled pilots and technicians,” Sajjan said.
Defence analyst Dave Perry says both the Conservative and Liberal governments bungled the purchase of new fighters. “These things should have been replaced about 10 years ago, which is what the original plan was,” said Perry, vice-president and senior analyst at Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
In 2016, the federal government directed the military to have enough fighters to meet its obligations to both NORAD and NATO at once, a change that meant a 23-per-cent in- crease in the number of fighter jets that had to be ready for operations.
“It was a significant change, as it came at a time when the Royal Canadian Air Force was already facing low personnel levels, was managing an aging fleet, and had not yet identified a replacement fleet,” the report found.
In December 2017, the government announced it would proceed with a competition to buy 88 new fighter aircraft. That means the fighters now in service will have to keep flying until 2032.
To help bridge the shortfall in the interim, the federal government initially sought to buy 18 new Super Hornet jets, even though the defence department’s own analysis indicated it would not help the operational gap and would only make the personnel shortage worse, the audit found.
“The department stated that it needed more qualified technicians and pilots, not more fighter aircraft,” the audit said.
That was abandoned in favour of buying second-hand F-18s from Australia that the auditor general pointedly notes are the “same age and have the same operational limitations” as the jets now flown by the Air Force.
But a shortage of technicians to service the 76 aging CF-18s and a dearth of pilots to fly them threaten operations. The Air Force has just two-thirds of the pilots it needs and they are leaving the Air Force more quickly than new ones can be trained.
“If CF-18 pilots continue to leave at the current rate, there will not be enough experienced pilots to train the next generation of fighter pilots,” the report found.
The audit also raises serious questions about the combat capabilities of the CF-18s in service, which are now more than 30 years old, noting they haven’t had a significant upgrade since 2008. Air Force planners expected they would be replaced by 2020.
Lt.-Gen. Al Meinzinger, commander of the RCAF, said that the Air Force is looking at upgrades to the CF-18 fleet — items such as sensors, weapons and self-protection — to ensure the jets remain “operationally relevant.”