Broadside over navy’s costlyKatrina gesture
BILL ESTIMATED AT $20M Hurricane mission ‘ like using Ferrari to haul gravel’
Three Canadian warships are sailing home this week after spending five days in the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone on a mission that some observers say had more to do with public relations than aid.
“It was basically a goodwill gesture,” said Howard Marsh, a retired army colonel who is now an analyst with the Conference of Defence Associations. “But it was an expensive goodwill gesture ... and not a very efficient use of our navy.”
The Canadian Forces sent three warships and one Coast Guard vessel from Halifax on Sept. 6, loaded with more than 100 tonnes of humanitarian aid and relief supplies, to help victims of the deadly hurricane in Louisiana and Mississippi.
But the destroyer HMCS Athabaskan, and the frigates HMCS Toronto and HMCS Ville de Quebec spent less time in the disaster zone than they did travelling there at a cost some experts have estimated at more than $20-million.
One veteran sailor, one of the almost 1,000 Canadian Forces personnel sent to help victims of the hurricane last week, shrugged when asked if he thought the mission, codenamed Operation Unison, was worthwhile.
“If you ask me, sending a frigate on a mission like this is like hauling gravel in a Ferrari,” he said sardonically, watching his shipmates chugging ashore on a U. S. Navy landing craft. “You get it there awful quick, but at the end of the day you can’t fit much gravel in the trunk.”
The Coast Guard vessel Sir William Alexander will remain off the Gulf coast for the next few days at least, working with the U. S. Coast Guard to repair and restore buoys and navigational aids destroyed or shifted by the hurricane.
And a team of navy divers and army engineers will remain in the region for an undetermined time.
But the three warships should be back at their home port by the weekend and Col. Marsh suggested their mission may have cost more than it was worth.
Although spokesmen for the Department of National Defence say the final cost has not yet been calculated, Col. Marsh said frigates and destroyers cost about $200,000 a day to operate.
“ That’s $ 600,000 a day,” he said. “ Add another $5-[million] to $ 10- million for bits and pieces they added on and that should give you a pretty good handle on how much it cost.”
Col. Marsh said that the military could put that money to better use elsewhere.
But Commodore Dean McFadden, commander of the task force, disagreed, saying that only the navy could have got so much heavy freight and equipment into the disaster area that quickly.
“ Airlift is quicker, but it can’t move the heavy stuff,” he said, during a news conference last week outside a Gulfport, Miss., veterans’ home that Canadian sailors were helping to clean up. “ The navy is the only e ffective way to move volume into a disaster area.”
And the sailors aboard the three warships became a work force that was not reliant on services and supplies that are often scarce or non-existent, the commodore said.
“ Could I have flown those sailors down? Sure I could have,” he said. “But once I land them, I have to house them, I have to feed them and give them a clean water supply ... [ and] I have to take up hangar space and runway space for the aircraft.”
“ All of that can be in short supply, or it doesn’t exist, because of the disaster.”
But he acknowledged that his frigates and destroyer were not the best ships for the job, especially because they had no way of moving heavy cargo or large numbers of people ashore.
Richard Gimblett, a former naval officer and research fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute in Calgary, said the mission revealed some glaring weaknesses left by more than a decade of neglect of the Canadian military.
“ This was a pretty miserable way of doing humanitarian relief,” Dr. Gimblett said. “ Two frigates and a destroyer and a Coast Guard ship are better than nothing ... but think how much more we could have done.”
He said that what was really needed was one of the navy’s planned Joint Support Ships, large refuelling, cargo and troop transport ships that are to be built by 2011.
Three of the proposed vessels are on the drawing boards for a total cost of $2.1-billion, but Dr. Gimblett said the Canadian military needs them now.
National Post
cwattie@ nationalpost. com