Needed: Many more fighter jets

There are barely 20 CF-18S available to guard all of Canada

Over the weekend, General Tom Lawson, a Royal Canadian Air Force officer and currently the Chief of Defence Staff — Canada’s top soldier — told CTV’s Question Period that our CF-18s are a worldclass fighter capable of getting the job done in Iraq. The General noted, rightly, that although the CF-18s were first ordered in the early 1980s, and are thus more than three decades old, they have been repeatedly (and relatively recently) upgraded and modernized.

These planes have what it takes to bomb ISIS in Iraq, the General said, and that’s true, if not exactly saying much. ISIS isn’t believed to have much in the way of anti-aircraft ability. (There is a rumour that ISIS has captured some Syrian fighter jets and is trying to train pilots to fly them, but they’d look awfully cute going up against Western pilots with thousands of hours of training and advanced air-to-air missiles). But the General also said that, more broadly, the upgraded CF-18s are “amongst the finest” fighter aircraft in the world right now. Given that we have half a dozen in Europe, where they are patrolling the edge of Russian airspace in accordance with our NATO obligations, let’s hope he’s right.

Whatever the current state of our fighter force, however, there is something that can’t be denied: We need a much, much bigger air fleet than we currently have, or that we are expected to have after we purchase our next fighter jet to replace the aging CF-18s. Our current Air Force fields four operational squadrons (two administrative squadrons) of 12 CF-18s each, for a total of 48.

There are more planes than that, close to 80, at last count, but some are always out of service. We use jets for training missions, for long-term maintenance and upgrades; and some jets are even put at the disposal of our space agency for research purposes. Of the 48 jets actually assigned to combat squadrons, only about 35 are available at any given moment. This is because the CF-18, like any advanced fighter jet, is mission-ready only about 70% of the time.

Compared to the Canadian population, that’s only about one service-ready jet per million people. That’s not enough to provide cover to all of our major urban areas in the event of a sudden emergency, such as a 9/11 style terror threat that could see hijacked planes making runs on our population centres.

Moreover, because the RCAF is currently sustaining two missions abroad — six planes are in Europe, and six are on their way to Iraq — that leaves us with barely 20 for Canada. All of it.

Some might scoff and say that’s plenty, since there currently is no active military threat to Canada. The problem with that logic is that threats don’t emerge regularly or predictably. A year ago, no one would have predicted that we’d be sending combat units to Europe to help deter further Russian aggression, or joining a new war in Iraq. Our reaction time to developing threats needs to be days or weeks, at worst. And yet it takes years, even decades, for us to procure new military equipment. If Russia staged a major incursion into the Canadian North tomorrow, we’d still be decades away from having the hardware needed to deal with the situation.

We can’t afford to simply plan for what threats seem likely today. We need an air fleet that is large enough, and therefore flexible enough, to respond to all threats we may realistically face in coming decades. By 2040 or so, we may well be using drones instead of manned planes, but we aren’t yet. We need planes, lots of planes — enough of them to meet all our obligations at once, even ones that may seem unlikely today.

The Ha rp e r government has said it intended to buy 65 F-35s. That’s 15 fewer jets than our current total CF-18 fleet, which isn’t good enough. Canada needs enough planes to contribute to international missions abroad while patrolling our skies at home, with jets to spare for the unexpected. The most basic responsibility of any government is securing the sovereignty and security of the nation. In Canada, that means more planes.