National Defence Committee on April 1st, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you.

I will give the floor to Mr. Hawn for five minutes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a couple of cleanup things here. First, I want to point out or clarify that we are not just replacing the Buffalo; we're replacing the Buffalo and the Herc in the fixed-wing SAR program.

We talked about equipment in Afghanistan, about all the stuff that's coming home. Are we leaving some stuff there, or selling some stuff to allies?

[Dan Ross]

Yes, sir. We will do a triage on all of that materiel there. If it's beyond economical repair, we will either destroy or dispose of it, donate it to our allies, sell it to other allies perhaps. With stuff that we don't have requirements for, or that costs more to bring back than to actually donate or sell locally, we do the latter. We do that through the whole inventory of materiel in a mission.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

And the figure I heard a while ago--and I can't remember whether it came up here or not--is that for all of the IEDs and all of the destruction and so on with the LAVs, we had only actually lost three LAVs that were not repairable. Is that a--

[Dan Ross]

No, it's significantly higher than that.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

One other note and I'll give it back to Mr. Payne.

You talked about the in-house design team for joint support ships. Are they doing a keel-up design, and then we're going to industry to say okay here's our design, how do you think you can match that or build that?

[Dan Ross]

We have contracted a world-class maritime design firm who are working with our maritime engineers, and it's keel up, 100%.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Okay.

I'll give the rest of my time to Mr. Payne.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you.

Mr. Hawn was just starting to talk about the 17 Hercules, and I have a couple of questions for you. You did indicate that the first one would be received in May. So the question is when will the last one be received, and what is the total cost of that program?

[Dan Ross]

If I could refer to my notes, we will receive two this spring, May and June. We'll receive three in November and December this year, and we'll receive the remaining 12 in 2011. I think the last one is the beginning of 2012. And the total acquisition cost is $3 billion, but that's not just with Lockheed Martin. That's spare parts, transportation, contingency, set up of in-service support, everything.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Okay.

I do have a little time left, and I do have another question. I just wanted to commend your department and Public Works in terms of the reduction in time from 107 months to 48 months. You did also talk about buying off the shelf, sort of the cookie-cutter. Is there any way you can reduce that time further from 48 months down to another shorter period of time for buying these types of things that would be off the shelf, so to speak?

[Dan Ross]

We're actually down to less than 48 months now. I'm being conservative in what I publicly say. I'm not sure we can do much more when we've gone to performance-based procurement.

In the past it took five or six years to write a technical specification for something that actually turned out to be kind of a Frankenstein solution that no one had ever built. You take all the technical, operational, and cost risks associated with that.

So we are doing performance-based procurement. We are taking off-the-shelf solutions. We're minimizing technical specifications. We're going to work hard to synchronize our work with Public Works, but I'm not sure you're going to get much better than where we are.

These are tough programs that involve a lot of money. Parliamentarians, cabinet ministers, industry, and lobbyists all want a say. It takes more time in a democracy to make sure all stakeholders have a comfort level about where you're going than it takes for me to finalize the statement of requirement and the RFP with my colleagues. You get billion-dollar programs and you get them south of sort of 36 months. I'm not sure you're going to get a lot better.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you, Mr. Ross.

Thank you for making yourself available to the committee. Committee members greatly appreciated your comments. They will help us to carry out our work and to clearly understand your role in this process. So again, thank you very much.

We will recess for five minutes and then reconvene in camera to discuss the future business of the committee.

Thank you.

[Proceedings continue in camera]