National Defence Committee on Feb. 9th, 2012

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

My first question concerns the acquisition program for the F-35, the additional capabilities of this aircraft in comparison with a 4.5 generation aircraft and the difference in cost between the two aircraft. Do you think the difference in cost is worth it? Would a 4.5 generation aircraft provide us sufficient operational readiness in Canada? Would the savings be greater than the additional capabilities this aircraft would provide us with?

[Steven Staples]

Thank you very much for your question.

It's a very good question.

There's an old saying in the defence industry that goes, “The last 5% of performance is 50% of the cost.” I think that's a general rule of thumb that can be taken into consideration for the F-35. The fact is we don't really know what this plane is going to be capable of. Its testing is very early on. In fact, there has been some good news in the F-35 program. Last month they did their first test of flying the plane at night. We now know it works in the dark, which seems incredible, considering that they're already producing these aircraft and they hadn't actually tested them at night yet.

So it's very early days. This is the reason why, as you read this week, the Pentagon's chief officer responsible for purchasing the aircraft declared that the F-35 was acquisition malpractice—that it has gone into production far too early without proper testing. It was all of these qualifications and specifications, and performance was mostly based on computer modelling, which has turned out to be quite flawed. I think there are some real questions about what the performance is going to be of the F-35.

You also asked about this four generation, five generation.... To be honest, I've never found anybody who could explain to me clearly what the first four generations of aircraft were. It seems to be, ironically, a made-up generational number. I don't know if anyone has come before this committee who can explain what the first generation was, or what the second generation was. I've never seen that clarified. It's generally a marketing term.

I think there are questions about our needs. I did the report on the F-35 in October 2010, and at that point we said that first we need to be clear on what our capabilities are and what's going to be required of our aircraft. I think everyone agrees that we need to replace them, but with what kinds of capabilities--and is stealth, in particular, one of those capabilities that's required? The stealth factor limits the performance of the aircraft quite a bit. It limits its range, for instance. You can't put additional fuel tanks on because then it loses its stealth capability. You can't mount weapon systems out on the plane's wings. They have to be all carried inside the aircraft in order to maintain the stealth capability. It's something, for instance, that South Korea, which is about to enter a competition for the replacement of its aircraft, has pointed out as a major problem. They want to be able to use weapon systems mounted outside.

I think there are significant questions around the performance and whether the F-35 is the right aircraft. It can only be solved through a clear statement of the requirements for the replacement of the CF-18s, and we would have to see an open competition.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Do you feel that the additional cost associated with an F-35 aircraft compared with a Super Hornet, for example, is really worth it? In this period of fiscal austerity, considering there's a threat of economic crisis, do you find that this investment is worth it?

[Steven Staples]

No, I think it's clear that given the financial situation we're in right now, there are going to have to be significant reductions to defence spending if we're to maintain other priority areas of government spending. The Canada First defence strategy is in essential need of review. The fact that this capability has been written into the defence strategy demands that we re-look at this strategy that's requiring us to buy an F-35 aircraft.

I don't think the expense is warranted. There are many other cheaper aircraft out there that could perform just as well as, if not better than, the F-35 is advertised to be, and could provide capability equal to our CF-18s.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

To wrap up, with respect to the F-35, the initial tender for research and development for a fifth generation aircraft was issued in 1996. So that was before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I'd like to know what you think about the fact that the needs assessment was done before we went through that situation. Have adjustments been made to the needs after everything that has happened on the military side?

[Steven Staples]

I don't know whether you've spoken to Alan Williams, but I think he makes a pretty compelling case that with the initial contributions of Canadian dollars into the development phase—there were three levels you could participate at, and we were at the lowest level—it was not intended that we actually purchase the aircraft. Our participation was really a subsidy to our industry so that they could get access to the technology and be part of the global supply chain for that aircraft and prepare for the eventual production. The acquisition was separate.

I take him at his word for that. However, at the time, organizations such as ours were warning that continued investment into the research and development phases of these aircraft was going to put pressure on us eventually to purchase the plane. As we have now found out, this was pushing us in that direction. We were issuing that warning.

However, circumstances have changed dramatically. Given the economy, given the change we've had in winding down in Afghanistan and other missions, and the changing geopolitical situation, just as the United States and our allies are looking at their defence policies and their budgets, so should Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Alexander.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thanks for the presentation.

I think what many of us around this table and many Canadians will be taking from your testimony so far, Mr. Staples and Mr. Macdonald, is a call for lower levels of readiness.

We invited you to testify at our study today in the context of a study on readiness. I think we are quite satisfied as a committee that readiness is based on three main factors: highly qualified personnel, plus their training, plus equipment, which may be technologically advanced or not. You're calling for cuts—potentially dramatic cuts—in all areas, which would lower levels of readiness.

What leads you to think that lower levels of readiness would be acceptable or required from the Canadian armed forces in this decade, when we seem to be facing not lessening demands for expeditionary capability, but greater ones, and potentially unexpected ones? There are uncertain situations in the Middle East, peace-building and conflict resolution required in Russia, diminishing commitments, as you said, from some of our allies. These don't mean that there will be less pressure on us, but rather greater pressure to look after our own sovereignty and meet some of the demands that were previously met, throughout the Cold War, by our allies.

Why this call for lower levels of readiness?

[Steven Staples]

Thank you. That's a very good question.

I'm heartened to hear the mention of peace-building and conflict resolution. That's certainly an area we are concerned about.

In terms of readiness, I think many people and our organization have argued that we should be making increased contributions to UN peacekeeping operations, for instance. We have traditionally been a main contributor, and at one point we were the highest-level contributor of troops to UN peacekeeping operations. Right now we're down somewhere around Malawi. According to the latest numbers we have for 2011, you could fit all of our soldiers who do UN peacekeeping missions in a single school bus. We have 35. In fact, we send more police on UN peacekeeping operations--about 163--than troops. So I think that's a shift that would be supported by Canadians. They want our forces to contribute internationally. UN peacekeeping is definitely one of those areas that we want to do.

Mr. Alexander, I'm not suggesting that we be less ready. I believe we're overspending on national defence right now. We've had a tremendous increase over the last ten years of more than 12% a year. It has outpaced government spending by one and a half times the amount of growth. We are now spending more than we were at any point during the Cold War. This seems to be a tap that only turns one way.

Listening to some of the other presentations here, there's always an argument for more and more. But as members of Parliament, you know that there's only one taxpayer, as they say. Every dollar you contribute here means a dollar that you're not able to contribute over there. You have to balance these out. That's your responsibility as elected representatives and as members of the government on your side.

I think we need to be smarter. Certainly reductions need to be made across the board. Defence could bear more of those. I don't see it as being less ready. For instance, we're spending millions of dollars on submarines that are not operational right now, and there's very little chance of them ever being operational. I think that reducing spending on them would not diminish our readiness in any way. I think we've wasted more than a billion dollars on Leopard tanks that we've hardly used and are set for retirement. I'm not sure we actually needed all of them. Close combat vehicles are another issue. I don't think the Canadian government needs to go ahead on them, in addition to the F-35s. I would put them in the same category.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

I would simply like to correct the record about peacekeeping. In the UN mission managed by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in which I served, on every day I was there, no bus on earth could have held all of the Canadians who worked for that one mission. So let's not exaggerate.

Canadian Forces have been engaged in non-UN missions because the UN doesn't have the capability to run a combat mission. It self-declared that it lacks that capability. There have been combat missions to which, regrettably, we have had to contribute, and for which we've had Canadian support broadly and deeply.

But my question is really about spending levels. You talked about our having surpassed spending during the Cold War. Are you aware that for decades at the end of the Cold War, and certainly in the 1990s under Liberal governments in every case, we had the second-lowest per capita spending of any NATO country, slightly higher than Luxembourg? Is that the kind of record we should be repeating now?

[Steven Staples]

Thank you for that.

We've heard the example of Luxembourg raised before, and I think you may have meant as a percentage of GDP, as opposed to per capita. NATO uses three measurements of military spending in order to compare: one is actual dollars; the second is percentage of gross domestic product; and the third one is per capita spending. Most defence analysts would agree--and I think Brian MacDonald would say the same thing--that the per capita measurement is probably not the best one, because it understates spending by countries like India and China, which have large populations.

Secondly, you can look at a percentage of GDP--that is a very common measurement. Canada's spending as a percentage of GDP was around 1.1% or 1.2%--a respectable amount. That puts us more in the middle of the pack along with Spain, Germany, and Belgium. I'm not sure if it's the only way you would want to look at it, because as one of my interns from Carleton University, whose home country is Pakistan, pointed out yesterday, Pakistan spends 25% of its GDP on defence. I don't think that's the gold standard we want to aspire to.

Our view is that you have to look at the actual dollars. That's how much money you're able to spend on equipment, how much firepower you're able to deliver. I think that is the best measurement.

In the 1990s, the so-called decade of darkness, all countries in the world were reducing defence spending. The Cold War was over. Anybody who kept spending levels up at the end of the Cold War would have been seen as living in a cave somewhere, because of course the Cold War was over: defence reductions were warranted. In fact, some studies we've done have shown that Canada's defence spending declined at a much lower level than the global average did--although you'd be looking at countries like Russia, which really dipped fast, and those would pull the average down, admittedly. So I think that was warranted.

Defence spending started increasing, actually, with Paul Martin's first surplus budget around 1998. As you see on chart 1, it started increasing at that point.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

I'm going to have to cut you off there, Mr. Staples, because time is dragging on.

Mr. McKay, it's your turn. You have the last of the seven-minute rounds.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you both for coming.

I'd like to engage Mr. Alexander's question further, but I'm not going to. It's always a truism that an army marches on its stomach. The truth of the matter is the military marches on its budget. So as budgets go up, military spending generally goes up. As budgets go down, similarly, military capability therefore goes down as well, which is exactly what's happening in the United States and pretty well every other nation on earth. So the actual lower levels of readiness are going to be dictated by the government's ability to raise funding. If we read the newspapers and listen to what Minister Flaherty and Minister Clement are saying, it's something in the order of 5% to 10% across the board. I have an extraordinary amount of skepticism as to whether that will actually occur, but nevertheless the government is in fact lowering its own level of readiness if in fact there's a direct correlation between money spent and readiness, which is, as you properly point out, not entirely a direct correlation.

However, having said that, I did want to go to what I thought was an extraordinary presentation by Colonel MacDonald earlier. I assume you were in here. He made a pretty vigorous, and I thought far more eloquent defence of the F-35 than anything I've ever heard from a government minister. His argument essentially was that stealth kills non-stealth. He cited some study showing that the unprecedented kill record of 144 to zero justified the acquisition of the F-35.

So I'd be interested in your response to what I thought was a fairly articulate argument justifying the government's, I would say, almost bizarre commitment to this program. If we put aside all of the issues of industrial benefits, and put aside who knows what the price is going to be, and instead focus on the military issue, I'd be interested in your views.

[Steven Staples]

Thanks so much.

I was here for that presentation, and I did find that aspect of the discussion a bit curious, because what he was describing in terms of those numbers of 144 to zero kill rate was not the F-35. He was talking about the F-22, which is an entirely different aircraft.

I know he was trying to make comparisons that the planes were essentially the same and would have the same performance because they are both stealth, which was the inference, but that's not the case. They're completely different aircraft.

For instance, a lot has been made of the number of engines a Canadian plane should have. Our F-18s have two engines. The F-35 has one engine. Now, the Americans have a plane that they won't sell to anybody, which is the F-22. How many engines does it have? It has two engines. So I think you can tell immediately that there is a performance capability gap here between these aircraft. The F-22, in terms of charts that I've seen, in terms acceleration and these kinds of things, really does rank very high. It's a very expensive aircraft. It's the most expensive fighter aircraft ever built, and the production line, as Colonel MacDonald mentioned, is closed. But that's not the plane we're going to buy. The plan is for the F-35, which can't even accelerate as fast as our current F-18s.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

But isn't his underlying assumption, though, that the F-35 is going to be better than the F-22?

[Steven Staples]

Well, it was a bit unclear, I found, in his presentation because he seemed to be easily ascribing characteristics of the F-22 over to the F-35, when—let's be clear—we're not buying the F-22.

The F-22 exists. We can go and see it, it flies, and we can measure it. We can't say that for the F-35.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

The other point I thought he made, which was kind of interesting—and I think it was in response to one of the questions over here—was with respect to our strategic needs.

In your paper you make the point that we generally aren't at the pointy end of any combat mission. We're kind of the follow-up guys, and that's been true back into World War II as far as I recollect, and the Korean War. Any time we've flown jets we don't do the pointy part; we come in afterwards.

Now the government, for whatever reason, wants to be at the pointy part--you know, first in and forget whether we have to use missiles or drones or anything like that. We want to have the first jets in.

My question is, why. Are we going to be fighting the Russians over the North Pole, or are we going to be fighting the Chinese somewhere? On a strategic threat assessment, how realistic is that, given that you'd like to be ready for everything but you're never going to be ready for everything?

[Steven Staples]

Yes, we can't afford to be ready for every imaginable circumstance. Maybe we could if we could imagine a budget as big as we wanted it to be, just magically, and then we could be ready for any scenario we could dream up. But the fact is that we live within the confines of our finances and other competing needs, like social programs and other things. So these all have to be weighed together.

The point is that the F-35 is designed to be first over the beaches in a shock and awe type of mission. That's what you would have the stealth for, in order to have the radar-evading capability for ground defences. That is in the unlikely situation that they would actually activate ground-based air defences, because once the radars light up, then they reveal their location, as I'm sure you probably know. But that's what the role of the F-35 would be. Some have described it as a bomb truck. It's meant to go in on the first strike on the way to Tehran or somewhere like that. I can't imagine any situation where Canada would be involved in the first wave of strikes like that.

Let me just draw one quick comparison to the F-22. If stealth were so required now for a type of mission when you're first in over the beaches to take out air defences, you would imagine that the attack on Libya would have been led by F-22s. It wasn't. They never deployed the F-22s to Libya. The Americans held them back—I think maybe because they're so expensive and they didn't want to risk losing any of them—and they didn't really need to use them, because all the air defences were taken out with British and American cruise missiles.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

We just have a few seconds left.

Just let me ask the fundamental question here, because your point is that military spending is rocketing way ahead of government spending—62% to 40%, and that sort of thing. Given that our encroachment in the world is through military, diplomacy, and aid, have those other two budgets—diplomacy and aid—achieved a similar level of increased spending? And are you able to provide the committee with the figures with respect to both aid and diplomacy over a comparable period of time that military spending was spent?

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. McKay, your time has expired.

Whoever responds, whether Mr. Macdonald or Mr. Staples, a very quick response, and if you can't supply the information, then you can always do that at a later date.

[David Macdonald]

Expenditures for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, looked at as a proxy for diplomacy, have increased less rapidly than expenditures for the Department of National Defence. As everyone knows, the aid budget is now frozen at $5 billion a year. I don't have the aid figures in front of me to see how much they've grown, but certainly to try to increase the funding has been an ongoing battle.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

If you can answer that question in writing, it may be the best way to go about it.

Mr. Strahl, it's your turn for five minutes.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First, I think I saw the gleam in some eyes across the way when you talked about a return to soft power as the exclusive tool in Canada's foreign policy arsenal.

I would say from my perspective that we're talking about real lives here, real people. I have a cousin on the ground in Afghanistan right now as a member of the Canadian Forces.

I recall that when our troops were asked to go overseas previously, since there had been significant reductions in military spending they were sent with open-air Iltis jeeps built on a Volkswagen Rabbit chassis. They were given green forest fatigues to fight in a desert theatre. They were provided with axe handles to fend off wild dogs because we hadn't done the planning in the decade prior to that to allow our military to do the job we asked them to do at the time of need.

So I think to say we don't know what's going to happen so we should cut military spending significantly is very short-sighted. As we've heard when we've been talking about readiness, it's a requirement to have the right people with the right training and the right equipment being able to be delivered at the right time. If you take out the training and the equipment, you can't deliver the troops at the right time and they'll be ill-equipped, as they were when they first went into Afghanistan.

We've had other examples. When the ice storm hit Canada, instead of being able to deploy our troops domestically, we had to rent Russian aircraft to move our people and equipment around the country.

So that would be a commentary on what we can look to as to what happens when we don't plan, when we don't keep a level of investment in our forces that allows us to be mobile and respond to a number of different missions.

I want to go back briefly to when you said the stealth capability of the F-35 is not worth the cost. We heard the colonel say previously that the stealth capability keeps our pilots alive or will do so in these scenarios. So what price do we put on the safety and the lives of our soldiers? Should we be treating that as a cavalier...? Is that not a very real question that should be answered? Do you agree or not that stealth capability will keep our pilots safer?

[Steven Staples]

I'm not convinced. Stealth has been around for a number of years. We had the F-117 Nighthawk, which flew in Bosnia. That had stealth capabilities. The B-2 bomber was a stealth plane that was built in the 1980s. It's been around for many years.

As I mentioned, I think if the stealth requirement was absolutely necessary for the United States in Libya, they would have deployed those F-22s right away, but they didn't do it. Nobody really knows why. It's an unanswered question, why the F-22s weren't sent to Libya. I just don't think that is the be-all and end-all. You also would have to look at the other capabilities of the aircraft: for instance, its speed--it's slow. It's not as fast as even a 30-year-old F-18.

So what is the main capability that's going to keep a pilot alive? Is it the radar-absorbing paint on the outside, or the fact that it can fly at Mach 1.8 instead of Mach 1.6, or the range? I think you have to consider other factors.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Right.

How much time?