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I've been reading a couple books about the sad state of Canadian military procurement. I think procurement for the sort of country Canada is is a legitimately difficult problem, but one that's eminently solvable with better informed voters and if party leadership had some more integrity.
There are three or four principle problems with Canadian defense procurement, that date back to debacles like the Ross rifle which constantly jammed in WW1 and the Avro Arrow which was an overengineered interceptor, and are still issues with more modern boondoggles like the F-35 and the Seahawk replacement acquisitions.
The first is just that Canada is an expensive country to properly defend. We've got an enormous, sparsely populated country, so ships and planes need to be able to travel far distances and need to be able to do it with infrequent refueling. Plus they need to be able to withstand the extreme cold and the ice in the arctic. This is part of what killed the Avro Arrow; no other country wanted to buy it and help Canada recoup the costs because no other country needed the (expensive) capabilities it offered. This is just something Canada needs to accept, that sometimes it will have to pay more to get the job done in Canadian conditions.
The second is a desire to build in Canada, to provide jobs to Canadians and build up a Canadian defense manufacturing industry. I'm sympathetic to this idea- it seems like a great deal to pay just a bit more and keep all the jobs and capital within your own country right? But in practice it's not just a bit more, it's multiple times more. There was an Iltis Jeep procurement order that, if bought from Volkswagen, would've cost $26 000 per jeep. Because the government wanted it to be built in Canada, it cost $84 000 per jeep. At that point you're paying more to build in Canada than you are paying for the actual thing you want. It'd make sense if the alternative was buying military equipment from China or even a neutral country like South Africa, but not from a NATO ally. And if Canada does want to build up its industry, I'm of the opinion it should be done in the style of South Korea- only subsidize Canadian manufacturers if they can actually export internationally and produce stuff other countries want. That's the only test that can't be faked to confirm Canadian manufacturers are really producing good stuff worthy of subsidy. In general I think among allies, there should be more cooperation and specialization for military production. Let the USA build the planes, South Korea and Netherlands build the ships, Germany build the jeeps, and so on. Not to assign official responsibilities to countries, but to let them compete in a freer market, so whoever's actually best at making the goods can get the contracts. And if your country isn't actually competent enough to build anything anyone wants, you should just suck it up instead of spending tons of taxpayer money propping up an incompetent industry.
The third problem is that procurements become very political. In the Avro Arrow case, the liberal government stalled cancelling it even after they knew it was doomed to avoid the bad press for it; then the conservatives taking over after the next election also stalled cancelling it to avoid the bad press. Then with the Seahawks replacement, Chretien attacked the conservative government over the EH101 replacement for being too expensive. Then when he took over as Prime Minister, he wasted 500 million and years of delays trying to find a different replacement after realizing the EH101 was just the right choice for a replacement by any fair measure. Then Justin Trudeau did basically the exact same thing when he called the F-35s too expensive only to realize they were the only plane that offered what Canada needed, but only after he delayed their procurement for years and wasted tons of money in the process.
The fourth problem I honestly think is basically unavoidable, and that's that procurement has to go through a ton of bureaucracy. The Canadian Armed Forces, the Department of Defense, the ministry of industry, and Public Service and Procurement Canada are all involved in any big ticket procurement order. And if you try to bypass one, once it finds out it'll stall things up for a couple years insisting on doing its own analysis. One of the books I read recommended making a dedicated new ministry just for military procurement, like what the UK and Australia apparently have, to streamline things. Personally I doubt that'd make things significantly better. It sounds like the Yes, Minister sketch that goes "We've completed the study of which bureaucrats we can cut." "What'd you find?" "That we're short of 8000 bureaucrats". I think large bureaucracy in modern governments is basically inevitable, and trying to cut it down or reform it is basically a waste of energy until you've first fixed some larger scale problems like public sector unions.
Which Anglo country (I’d say which western country but I know the pedants would pull out some obscure example) handles defense procurement well?
Bare minimum competent execution without real threats: Norway, Sweden, Czechia
Decent execution to counter real threats: France (special case: bites off more than they should chew) Poland, Finland, Turkey
Competent execution to counter real threat: Japan, Korea, Israel
Criteria for procurement success generally falls into the following categories:
When broken down in this manner, competing incentive mechanisms become immediately obvious, but also indirectly exploitable. Excepting definitional abuses of the above conditions, procurement failures for even basic systems are the statistical norm. Supporting indigenous capability development is the usual means governments and defense service sellers drain the public purse for no benefit, but ego stoking by censuring or advancing defense adjacent causes is also a common cause for mission failures.
It must be noted that a fundamental cause for procurement failures is economic incapability. Even if procurement practices are perfect, some states just have a shitty threat environment and cannot actually react to any practical threat which manifests. For the most part, the post Cold War peace dividend has resulted in objective 2 flailing about, letting defense budgets wither and focus shifting to counterterrorism and intelligence capabilities. In this anemic budget environment, inventories and capabilities have withered, with institutional knowledge rotting away and unable to redevelop even at a glacial pace.
The main defense many countries have is the incapability of their proximate threats. Nations are rolling the dice and hoping their neighbours are both too weak to actually do something and too smart to want to do something to begin with A military action is ruinous to both aggressor and defender regardless of kinetic success, and for many procurement agencies their mandates service internal political requirements when no external threat is manifest.
Czechia?
The system is hopelessly corrupt.
What's not said is he asked for $20 million which were to fund a major political party (ODS). I highly doubt he wasn't working for them.
To be fair, I don't think you can name a single nation that has a military procurement system free of bribery. It's basically impossible to even operate at those scales without it. Even in total war people still seem to skim off the top.
The question is whether the corruption actively stymies proper ressource allocation or not. Czechia seems to at least be able to operate a somewhat competitive arms industry, so it's not exactly comparable to the people that are buying entirely fictitious fortifications.
Exactly this. Yes, the Czechs probably have money traded under the table even now, and employees in the French DGA treats Thales as their eventual employer, but in the end what matters is the force getting something they need.
Some charity can be extended to procurement agencies who have to react when vendors shit the bed, but bad procurement practices treat a procurement exercise as a shitshow to begin with. German procurement leaves their ground and air capabilities a decade behind their intented readiness posture because of insane litigiousness, Italians keep using shitty refurbished Arietes or Mangustas, Spaniards have no money at all, and did well developing assets jointly but shit the bed entirely with their domestic submarine program.
In the end what matters for military procurement is whether the stuff they have is fit for purpose, and if not why is it so. Much of military procurement failures like the OP example of the Arrow are a combination of vendors bullshitting the client about the expected capabilities of their equipment, and parallel evolutions in technology leapfrogging an in-development project, rendering the initial project entirely useless. Some capabilities are due to client interference, like the issue with the M16 powder in Vietnam causing fouling after the initial vendor failed to deliver on the scaled up contracts.
And of course sometimes clients and vendors both grab the idiot ball together and decide to hail mary, usually to failure but sometimes to success. The US littoral combat ship is a case of that idiot ball exploding in their hands, while the F35 needed time to cook, and cook it did.
And of course you have simple insane corruption for contracts in governments with no real threat forcing a reckoning. Headline assets like submarines or jets or ships or tanks or even the guns make the news, but I've seen an invoice where a shipment of chicken was 5x the supermarket rate. Thats where the real money is for corruption, and given the quality of the meal I would argue it fits my definition of 'failure to deliver'. A military is ultimately a transportation service for bad things to go into someone else, but my transformation into a walking biohazard is definitely not part of their food procurement specifications.
No, they aren't. If you've only got 10% of the air defense missile you need because your procurement is buying $1 million dollar gold plated bullshit with seeker heads that integrate radar, IR and god knows what else, and China and Russia are simply using command guided shit hooked to a powerful radar that cost 5% per unit, you're going to lose.
Because they won't have any problems with replenishment and you're out after a few battles.
This is what happened with the Houthis - they were firing milion dollar missiles at $2000 drones.
Replenishment dollar value is a metric accessible and understandable to the public. It is also fundamentally wrong.
Gold plated seeker heads filled with Raytheon pension entitlements aren't slugging one to one against Chinese slaved missiles, they're part of a warfare system operating according to the presumed threat environment based on battlefield realities. Taliban and Vietnam crow about beating back the USA, with the cheap cost of thousands of their fighters and population for the tradeoff where they melt away immediately in any setpiece engagement. Yes the dollar value per Afghan is minimal, and they expend bullets in exchange for a 1m GBU, but a colonel calling in a package doesn't think about some schoolnin Virginia that doesn't get built because of the money he spends, he fulfills the mission and keeps his guys alive. Afghans thinking their own lives are worth less than a thousand US dollars is their calculus and consequence.
China and Russia crow about their cheap shit, but even without factoring in PPP calculations their headline assets are still expensive. A S400 is a billion fucking dollars, and we've seen multiple S400s get destroyed by less than 50m worth of ordinance each. Russias cheap and 'effective' aircraft have to do long distance lobbing because they are too afraid to operate in a battlespace with uncertain air superiority. Cheap doesn't mean cost effective, it means cheap.
Cheap houthi skimmers are striking civilian ships, not warships. Warships are launching SSM interceptors to strike threats 20 to 40NM away, not 1-5NM. At closer ranges EW nukes all command guidance, and systems rely on terminal guidance for final strike, which is where your fancy gold plated shit becomes necessary and why Russia keeps jerking off about hypersonic manueverability weapons. EW against command guided weapons has been in effect since the 70s, and the west lost the first round with their shitty doctrine of launcher guided missiles... exactly as OP of this thread castigates.
Cost effective mass generation is warfare for the early 20th century. Modern militaries are making a risky calculation that deepstacking intelligence and precision striking allows for decisive victory at individual engagements. That is their decision to make and their requirements to communicate. We as observers are free to call them stupid money wasters who just need some cheap integrated shit, but unless you are willing to violate OPSEC then all we can do is shove our scenarios into warthunder for gaijin to prove doctrinal superiority.
Thinking any plane is safe today in an environment where $3000 thermal cameras are routinely used to blow up $5000 boomer-vintage frontline supply trucks is truly astonishing. What do you think would happen in a war ? You can't hide plane acoustics, even if you had a perfectly invisible plane Chinese are liable to have an acoustic network too. Coupled to their own air traffic control, it's going to know exactly where jet engines are operating, which means it can launch IR seeker missiles and those will find that plane given they have 2.5x speed. You're reduced to thoughts such as 'maybe NSA can take down Chinese military networks' despite those being run by Chinese, on Chinese domestic hardware, with no physical access whatsoever.
So no, you're not going to have battlespace superiority because of stealth aircraft, unless the US secretly borrowed cryo-arithmetic engines from god knows whom alone, ones capable of hiding a few megawatts of heat in the sky, cool the entire plane to sky temperature.
You're back to lobbing missiles and hoping GPS isn't jammed too hard.
Which can be something as simple as a thermal camera, which costs $5k today according to people sticking them on drones in the Donbass. Not $300k. Yet RIM-116 costs a million $.
The cheap command guided missiles used in for example, the Pantsir have a range of 15 km, mostly limited by missile size. Same with Crotale.. Your country's navy is dead set on engaging the Chinese mainland, which means a large quantity of middling class missiles can destroy the entire strategy by forcing a retreat. If Houthis managed that against the US navy, what would the result be with China ? Odds are the war devolves to a cringe standoff with both sides blockading trade and US hoping Chinese give in first. Seeing as they're the ones obsessed with building large stockpiles, not that likely.
Having gold-plated nonsense that might win a theoretical purely naval engagement if Chinese decided to treat warfare as a sport is quite the idea.
So why then is everyone using it ? You're surely aware multiple European countries are using evolved versions of the 1960s Crotale ? Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, disrupting a laser beam or a highly focused very powerful radar is ..actually pretty hard ?
EW against command guided missiles worked in the past when the signals weren't really powerful and focused. Today you're pretty much talking out of your ass because there's no way you can outjam a highly directional radar. To say nothing about laser-beam riding missiles.
You are taking propaganda at face value. 'Muh one-two atacms hits S400'. In reality it was probably quite different, seeing as ATACMS is a very bad missile with no evasion and no one will tell you what happened because it's likely secret and in any case involves some complex mission profile, probably EW or god knows what else. Even just to get GMLRS to hit a protected target required launching a MLRS salvo to saturate air defense.
Needless to say, US systems have entirely the same problem and are much more scarce.. One more example from Kiev..
Afghans won because US was totally and utterly clueless as to what they were doing there.
Yeah, and it's bullshit because as we have just recently seen, something as simple as a saturation attack by gently maneuvering ballistic missiles overwhelmed Israeli defenses and hit their air bases. And this was Iran, a relatively small, low IQ country with a shoestring economy, vs Israel, which has all the shiny US toys taxpayer money can buy.
What do you think would happen in the case of a war with China ? That was cca 200 missiles, something just the People's Liberation Army's Navy Air Force could launch daily.. Forget the actual Chinese air force which has about 3x that launch ability, forget the coastal defence missile batteries, forget the intercontinental range anti-ship ballistic missiles, just the land based naval air assets could send 200 mach 4 anti-ship missiles. The stated US tactic to deal with such is destroy the launch aircraft before that happens, which requires having air superiority at 500 km away from the carrier group.
Seeing how 'Prosperity Guardian' has fared, and how many drones US has lost over Yemen, it's clear you are talking total and utter nonsense. Were US in the possession of a sufficient number of stealth drones, they'd have not kept losing those defenceless drones over Yemen.
In reality your 'deepstacked' system of intel and PGMs cannot deal with a bunch of inbred half starved goat-herders launching harassment strikes on shipping using a small amount of thoroughly obsolete Iranian weaponry.
You'd think the strongest navy in the history of the planet would be able to convoy ships through and protect them from strikes, but apparently not, so shipping is down to 50% of last year.
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They’ll happily launch million dollar ESSMs, RAMs, and Nulkas at closer ranges, see the USS Mason. The US Navy is pretty far behind the Air Force in operational EW, I suspect it will be a long while before any captain entrusts EW with incoming threats over lobbing $10M in physical ordnance.
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