Does Canada need F-35s?
The controversial procurement of 88 new F-35 fighter jets for the RCAF was back in the news again last week. An anonymous whistleblower leaked documents to National Post columnist John Ivison which resulted in an article entitled How Canada’s military-industrial complex made sure Ottawa bought its preferred fighter jet.
For those of us who have closely followed this two-decades-long procurement process to replace the RCAF’S aged-out CF-18 Hornet fighter jets, there is little in Ivison’s piece that would be considered new information. It is alleged by the whistleblower that from the get-go in 2004, the senior leadership of the RCAF wanted to purchase the F-35 and only the F-35.
It mattered not at the time that only a single prototype of this fifth-generation, stealth fighter was in existence. Nor did it matter that the teething problems suffered by the early models of the Joint Strike fighters caused aviation experts like then-u.s. Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump to threaten to cancel the entire project if he was elected. In short, Trump was elected and he did not cancel the F-35 purchase.
In Canada, it was the Conservative government of Stephen Harper which first announced in July 2010 that we would be buying 65 of the F-35’s at a purchase cost of $9 billion. The first delivery of these new fighters was to be in 2016. To sell the idea to the Canadian public, then-defence Minister Peter Mackay actually posed sitting in the cockpit of a full scale mock-up of an F-35 at the Museum of Aviation in Ottawa.
To this day, I have no idea how the Conservative government was able to use the grounds of a federal museum to display something which Canada had yet to actually purchase, let alone fly operationally. The Lockheedmartin-owned mock-up belonged on a military trade show floor, not in a museum dedicated to the history of aviation in Canada.
THE FIX WAS IN
The images of Mackay sitting at the controls of a fake air force plane have not aged well given the turbulence encountered thus far in Canada’s purchase of this aircraft. In brief, in 2015 the Trudeau Liberals vowed not to purchase the F-35 if elected. The Liberals were elected and the RCAF were then told to hold a competition to find the best possible replacement for the CF-18 fleet. As Ivison’s whistleblower now claims, the fix was in for the F-35 to win.
In 2022, the Liberals were thus forced to announce they were buying 88 of the F-35s for the purchase cost of $19 billion. Remember, this was the one plane which the Liberals had told voters they would never buy. The first delivery is not expected until 2026.
Which begs the question as to how, 20 years later, the Joint Strike Fighter is still the best possible solution for Canada’s military?
DRONES THE WAY OF THE FUTURE
In that interim, we have learned the lessons of our prolonged occupation of Afghanistan in that in a counterinsurgency against a primitively armed foe, the modern fighter jet has no role. The war in Ukraine has shown us that manned aircraft are too vulnerable to modern air defence systems and that unmanned aerial systems such as drones are the way of the future.
To see the speed with which modern warfare evolves, the Russian army has now developed what they call “Turtle Tanks” wherein an armoured shield is welded atop their armoured vehicles to counter the threat of antitank kamikaze drones. While presently enjoying a measure of success against Ukrainian defenders, this will no doubt soon be countered with more sophisticated, delayed-action, shaped charges married to the existing drones.
With Trudeau’s Liberals dropping in the polls, maybe it is not too late to bring out their old campaign promise to axe the F-35 contract if elected again? The $19 billion in savings would buy a boatload of disposable drones and the truth is that by 2026 the RCAF will be hard pressed to find any pilots to fly the new F-35’s.