What a beating Canada’s military capacity seems to be taking. And it’s a beating coming at us from our erstwhile friends allies, nations with short memories who ought to know better.
These are important considerations for us to keep in mind as we spend our way to the 2% of GDP threshold we committed to as part of our membership in NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Some European countries question our reliability as an ally if we can’t seem to reach that 2% threshold, which is bonkers. Canada has a much higher GDP — Gross Domestic Product — than all but three of our European NATO allies, those nations being Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The first we defeated in battle (twice), the second we fought to restore their territorial integrity (twice) and the the third we came to the rescue of (twice).
My point is the higher the GDP, the more money on defence spending that 2% represents. Which means that, despite spending less than that percentage, Canada spends more in real dollars than 26 of our European allies.
So stuff it.
Can’t be relied upon?
Tell that to the over 66,000 Canadian military personnel who died in the First World War, and tell it to their families. Tell it to the over 44,000 Canadian war dead in the Second World War, and tell it to their families. Tell it to the Germans who used to fear our presence on the battlefield.
You want to talk about Canadian reliability? Talk to anyone in Holland, a nation that still respects our role in major conflicts, especially since we were the ones who did the tough fighting to liberate the Dutch from the oppressive and murderous boot of the Nazis.
Talk to the Dutch. They’ll tell you.
All I know for sure is that, when the going gets tough, really tough, Canada is there every single time, even after the nations victimized have stopped fighting themselves, or have openly collaborated, as in France.
No lessons to be learned from any of those folks.
Not reliable my ass. If things ever get stupid enough that we see the Russians rolling across Eastern Europe, it’ll be Canada and Canadians that will be there, no matter the danger, no matter the peril, to make things right in the face of an oppressive dictatorial regime.
We always have. And we always will.
We’ve always been kind of different with respect to other nations. We fight and we fight well. We fight hard. And we see things through until they’re right again. We don’t cut and run like some of our bigger brothers and sisters, nor do we sit on the sidelines and watch it all happen like the Americans do, only to sweep in at the last moment like the cavalry in the old American westerns.
Canada fights, not for treasure, not to take another’s land, not to enslave others. We fight so that others may be free. Can’t make it any simpler than that.
The Americans do fight for treasure, for land, and to dominate others for their resources, and if they have to support a murderous regime in any nation of interest, they’re perfectly happy to do so, so long as the tyrant protects American financial interests in that country. Hardly the White Nights of anything.
All of this should figure into where we spend our defence dollars moving forward. Aside from military aviation, Canada spends little on American military equipment. But with the Americans veering into their deplorable selves again, even that is likely to come to an end.
The biggest procurement item on the table right now is Canada’s commitment to purchase 88 American-made F-35s. Yet the Americans won’t share the source code for the aircraft, meaning that they could inflict a potentially damaging vulnerability on our air force should they so choose, and recent events have indicated that something like that may not be as far-fetched as we might have thought not long ago. But, rightly and legitimately, we don’t trust them anymore.
Another little American thing is that they’ll sell American weapon-systems to us, but sell a “dumbed down” version and keep the high-end stuff for themselves. Well how about that?
With friends like this…
It’s interesting how the Americans got a whole bunch of other countries, like us, to invest in the production of the F-35s so that they could actually afford to build the thing, then cut us all off from the best features of the final product. I wonder if that was part of the deal?
No matter, we’re not going to buy them anymore. We’ve committed to accepting some 18 of the Dummy 35s , but after that, good Ol’ Uncle Sam can take a magic carpet ride into a brick wall. Keep your source code. We don’t need you anymore.
Canada, moving forward, would be very wise to move away from the Americans, and even Europeans, when it comes to purchasing military equipment.
Yes, I’ll advocate for purchasing a boat-load of Gripen fighters from Sweden, but that’s Sweden, a nation that seems to consider its national integrity as an important aspect of what they’re all about. So instead of 88 “dumbed down” F-35s, we can have 100 “dumbed-up” Gripens, a 4.5 generation world-class fighter that can skate circles around the flying pig the Americans are offering. Plus they’ll build them here, share the technology, and not treat us like children. It’s almost as if they like us.
Not just that, but they’re in the running to sell us submarines as well, and they make good ones. Not the nuclear-powered behemoths made by the Americans, but an extremely efficient weapons/surveillance system that ranks up there in Swedish quality as much as any Gripen, Volvo, or Saab.
There’s a whole whack of nations gunning to sell us their versions of subs, including Germany, France, South Korea, and Japan. And all those countries sell top-crank submarines.
We just bought cutting-edge air defence systems from Australia. Even before the Americans could get them for themselves.
Speaking of South Korea, they’re now becoming a military equipment powerhouse, and are now the fifth top weapons exporter on the planet. It was South Korea that sold a ton of military hardware to Poland as part of that nation’s military buildup in the face of Russian aggression next door in Ukraine. So if one was to go shopping for South Korean weaponry, they need only go to Poland to see it.
Most impressive, aside from their subs and frigates, are two pieces for the army, the K-2 Black Panther main battle tank and the K9 Thunder self-propelled howitzer, which fires the standard NATO 155 mm artillery round. These are not trifling weapons systems. They are, rather, formidable pieces of ground combat warfare and are a significant overmatch for just about anything any potential enemy might array against us. And they’re arguably on par with the comparable American weapon systems for the same purpose.
But, with these, we’d be getting the “grown-up” versions.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 