Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, and committee members. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to address you in my private capacity, although it's one in which I have been associated with the Royal Canadian Navy over many years.
I'm going to drive a coach and horses through your remit in the sense that you were initially to look at the question of the RCN in the North American context. I want to step back and look at the global situation, and then come back to the RCN. As I suggested in the notes I sent forward to your administration staff, there has been a shift of the most staggering profundity in terms of the global naval balance. We've all heard, of course, of the way in which the global economic centre of gravity has moved from the Euro-Atlantic to the Pacific, and this has been replicated in the maritime realm.
Furthermore, I would suggest to you that the old front-line navies are in a state of dramatic numerical decline as a result of budgetary disarmament. If we look at the Royal Navy, in 1962, which admittedly is a very long time ago, it had 152 frigates and destroyers. It now has 19. If you were to take the two carriers they're bringing into service, that would absorb virtually their entire surface fleet to provide support.
Similarly, if we look at the United States Navy, which is critical to our future military calculations, we see that over the past 30 years the largest navy on the face of the earth has been more than cut in two numerically, falling from 575 ships to about 273 ships. We can see, parenthetically, that the Trump administration is dedicated, rhetorically at least, to building the USN back to 350 ships.
What's interesting, of course, is to look at what's happened in East Asia. In the past 25 years, the Chinese have built the equivalent of 22 Royal Canadian Navies end-on-end. Think about it: 22 Royal Canadian Navies in the past quarter century, more than 330 surface combatants. That has nothing to do with submarines; they have 60 or 70 and they're building them probably two to three times as fast as the Americans are. It's interesting to see that one of the leading authorities in the United States on the Chinese navy has argued before Congress that the real priority for the USN should be on submarines.
I'm not a submariner, ladies and gentlemen, but submarines have become over the past quarter century the coin of the realm in the Asia-Pacific, or Indo-Pacific, region. There are now arguably more than 200 operational submarines. Even tiny, bankrupt, reclusive North Korea has some 70 submarines, albeit midget and small, but nonetheless sufficient, particularly because they're now in the process of attaching ballistic missiles to their submarines, to complicate the overall western calculus dramatically.
What we can see, then, is that we have a rising hegemon in China, which has discovered, in a profound intellectual revolution, the value of sea-power, something that the Chinese never embraced before. So there's a rising hegemon looking to the sea, building suddenly the second-largest navy on the face of the earth in the past quarter century while we've been thinking in Canada about what we're going to do about the future, and an existing hegemon, the United States, which has traditionally projected its power, influence, and authority around the world using the United States Navy as the vehicle.
What we're seeing, I would suggest to you, is that the future suggests that if there is a collision, if there are great power frictions, they will increasingly play out at sea. This is the quintessential maritime era, and naval vessels will be one of the keys to inter-state relations.
I go on to suggest in my notes that the navies across the region are not only modernizing but are engaged in an arms race, a reactive active policy in which, for example, the Indians are building aircraft carriers, the Chinese are building aircraft carriers. The Chinese have just fleshed out three quarters of a carrier in about 25 months. Leaving aside the fact that they're now the world's largest shipbuilders, they're putting that to good effect.
In the second part of my commentary, I come back to what I see as the critical issue with respect to Canada. I would suggest, ladies and gentlemen, that frankly we have been engaged in an exercise of self-congratulation, not to say delusion, about where we stand in this whole operation. We have got to get moving. Urgency: I see no urgency whatsoever. I think back to maritime helicopters. When Singaporeans said they needed a maritime helicopter, 36 months later they'd identified, adapted, and deployed a helicopter. For us it has been 33 years, and we're still waiting for delivery.
This is a new maritime era, and I would suggest to you that we really have to address this question of defence acquisition, which David outlined eloquently. We have created a Gordian knot in which everyone is included but no one is responsible. The process is frankly, in my estimation, dinosaurian. It's multi-layered, it's sclerotic, and it simply does not deliver.
Of course, we're in the process of articulating a defence policy absent of foreign policy, which is the wrong way around. We need to know what our national priorities are and where maritime interests figure in that respect. I would suggest, parenthetically, that we have failed abjectly, each and every one of us around this table and beyond, to explain to the public what through-life accounting constitutes. I always say it's like buying a Honda Civic and being charged a third of a million dollars for it because you're calculating the value of your time behind the wheel 40 years from now. We don't do that properly, I think. It's not rocket science, but I think it really is incumbent upon us to in fact explain much more clearly why frigates cost billions: because we're looking at a very complex weapon system that extends over a very long period of time.
We've failed, as suggested, to meet our NATO commitments, and of course it remains to be seen the degree to which the White House will apply pressure on us in that regard. We tend all too frequently to lapse into bumper sticker self-congratulation that we're doing more with less, or that we're punching above our weight. Frankly, a lot of that, ladies and gentlemen, is rubbish. Do we do an excellent job on the battlefield? Absolutely. Canadian sailors, soldiers, airmen, and airwomen are among the world's very best. Are we in fact fulfilling our responsibilities to provide them with the requisite equipment? Absolutely not, I would suggest.
Sadly, defence is a partisan issue in Canada. In Australia there's blood and fur all over the walls when it comes to defence, but in the final analysis everyone pulls together. Here it's held to ransom for cheap, short-term political gain. And we can't run the biggest, most expensive operation in the government that way. We have to step back if we're going to make any sort of coherent, long-term commitment. We're fooling ourselves in terms of our stature globally. At one time we were seen as a major middle-power navy, but no longer; this is simply not the case. We're living on past glories.
The RCN itself, I would suggest, has been diminished by years of penny-pinching parsimony. We've parlayed prudence, financially, into paralysis. That's not the way to proceed. Quite clearly, we have to simplify and render, much more streamlined and swift, the whole question of defence acquisition. We've dithered in the defence of saving money, and we've spent 10 times as much in the final analysis.
Victoria class submarines are an illustration. We bought them on the cheap, and they came out of the darkness and bit us, big time. The navy's done a brilliant job of maintaining elderly vessels when they didn't have the spare parts and so forth. As I suggested in my opening comments, submarines are going to be the coin of the realm as we step forward.
The chair is about to “yellow card” me, so I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for hearing my passionate, I hope, argument that we're standing in a completely different maritime era. We have to be prepared if we want to project power and influence, and we have to get our act together in terms of defence acquisition. We can't go on in this ham-fisted way, which has become increasingly entrenched and institutionalized.
Thank you.
