More to warships than money: building Surface Combatants in Canada a strategic choice

Recent op-eds in The Hill Times by Alan Williams, former assistant deputy minister of materiel at DND, and investigative researcher Ken Rubin paint bleak pictures of the Canadian navy's future: its new warships cost twice as much as alternatives, domestic shipyards should compete with foreign ones to reduce costs, and the ships' operational costs would be unaffordable. Such emphasis on cost of the Canadian Surface Combatant (CSC) project to build 15 frigate Navy ships ignores the strategic worlds where the future fleet and Canadian shipbuilding will be situated. They also don’t account for drastic spending increases budgeted in the latest defence policy. Canadians must recognize the world’s largest navy is no longer our southern neighbour. Rather, that distinction now belongs to the country holding our citizens hostage as political pawns: China is churning out warships at a rate unmatched since the United States in the Second World War. While their ships may not be as good as the best Western counterparts, their numerical advantage is supported by extremely long-range anti-ship ballistic missiles. The competition between liberal versus authoritarian world orders is taking place on the oceans, and Canada must prepare for that world. Our navy thus needs ships that are as capable as possible to maximize our confidence in sending them into harm’s way. Ensuring this capability is especially challenging due to Canada’s fleet being split between Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Each coast’s fleet faces the rule of thumb that if you want one ship, you need three: one in scheduled maintenance, one in training, and one deployed. To save costs, Williams suggested a mixed fleet of three high-end warships combined with a larger fleet of low-end options, but that has dramatic operational drawbacks: the coast with only one air-defence ship has no backup option if it is in drydock for maintenance and would only be able to send more vulnerable, cheaper ships. Given the half-century lifespan of naval ships, we cannot bet on the long-term combat relevance of a low-end combatant as the only ships we can reliably deploy. While Williams asserts the Royal Canadian Navy has previously been successful at running a "mixed fleet of destroyers and frigates," that does not mean that it was ever optimal. Unlike the mid-Cold War, modern submarines have anti-ship missiles requiring even anti-submarine warships to have advanced air defence systems. So a high-low mix is out of the question. What about a different high-end ship that promises to be cheaper? Williams proposes Canada re-run the competition, confident that a much cheaper offer is available based on a last-minute Franco-Italian offering in December 2017. The bidders guaranteed 15 ships at only $30-billion, or half the Canadian Surface Combatant’s budget. However, the bidders never submitted a formal proposal through the process that all other bidders complied with. In other words, the $30-billion figure was submitted without, seemingly, the necessary homework to show how they intended to meet Canadian industry requirements. Such lack of transparency and blind trust in foreign defence companies directly contradict Williams and Rubin’s critique of allowing prime contractors to dictate terms. But ships need shipyards to build them. Excluding aircraft carriers, the United States today has only two shipyards producing major surface combatants. This increases to three by 2025 to accommodate their new frigates, but this means Canada will provide roughly 25 per cent of North America's high-end surface combatant shipbuilding capacity. North America cannot afford to give up this capability in an age when authoritarian states are massively outbuilding the liberal democratic allies. While some commentators suggest Canada purchase ships from abroad, this would be a strategic folly: billions of dollars would be held up overseas to the goodwill of the contracted country for decades while the fleet is being built. This will constrain Canada’s foreign policy freedom, where we can’t criticize the country in question should it adopt objectionable policies due to government changes or another major power’s coercion. A navy should support and enable a country’s foreign policy, not hold it hostage. Finally, Williams claims that at $286-billion in lifecycle costs, the CSCs will consume the entire Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) capital budget. But it is misleading to compare the lifecycle costs of CSC with just the capital budget of the rest of the CAF: compare either lifecycle costs for both or only their capital costs. Mixing them up is irresponsible. Secondly, Canada's defence policy—Strong, Secure, Engaged—already plans for a dramatic increase in both capital and operational spending. Combined, they increase from $18.7-billion in 2017 to roughly $30-billion per year in the 2030s. Assuming this figure is sustained, one can multiply it by the planned 30 years of the CSC's lifespan, resulting in a total of $900-billion—far above the $286-billion figure that Williams is concerned about. For a maritime nation dependent directly and indirectly on seaborne trade and where most military threats will be overseas, spending less than a third of the defence budget on our navy’s only major warships is far from unreasonable. Shipbuilding is difficult and may require an increase in our woeful rate of defence spending. But Canadian defence discussions need to move beyond its myopic focus on dollars and take greater consideration of operational and geopolitical contexts. At the end of the day, it all comes down to our national ambition: are we willing to act like a mature G7 nation and put our money where our mouth is, or will we only ever penny-pinch our way on the backs of our allies? Timothy Choi is a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. He is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Calgary's Centre for Military, Security, and Strategic Studies, where his dissertation is entitled, “Maritime Strategies of the North: The Seapower of Smaller Maritime Forces in an Era of Broadened Security.” The Hill Times

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More to warships than money: building Surface Combatants in Canada a strategic choice

Canadian defence discussions need to move beyond its myopic focus on dollars and take greater consideration of operational and geopolitical contexts.

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