Not to hijack the thread too much, but what is Canada willing to do to get that sovereignty? So far, it’s just been a back-and-forth battle of planting flags and patrolling the area. What happens when an oil or natural gas deposit is found and one country (particularly a third country who sees the area to be international waters) attempts to construct a platform there?
That’s what I was replying to. He asked what happened. I told him.
Then perhaps you should go explain to Mr. Harper that a sub can do everything an icebreaker can and more, and presumably better and cheaper or you wouldn’t be mentioning it. No doubt he’s simply unaware of those amazing facts.
Not if you’re interested in credibility.
They wouldn’t need to, either.
Because they don’t want to become part of the US (or any other country for that matter). Without it’s own defense, the US would have anexed it long ago, if for no other reason than to protect it against invasion. And I would consider such an annexation to be completely justified.
I know. But I couldn’t resist. 
Then Canada would have to use force, one supposes.
The silly little flag stuff is simply a way of clearly stating it belongs to Canada. If we DON’T say it, we really have no right to complain if someone comes along and does plant something there. Sovereignty must be exercised to mean anything; if Canada is unwilling to do anything to suggest that a given patch of sea belongs to it, why should anyone continue to act as if it’s Canada’s?
Take some Godforsaken place up north - say, Mackenzie King Island. What makes that island part of Canada? No Canadians live there. Nobody lives there at all, or would want to; it would be like living on Mars. It’s not contiguous to any part of Canada that is inhabited. If we don’t even have the capability to put Canadians there in a short period of time, why would anyone think it was “Canada?”
Clearly stating our sovereignty will, one hopes, prevent conflicts before they start. I am reminded of the Falkland Islands war; a different situation, obviously, since that’s an inhabited place, but the war occurred in part because the United Kingdom gave terribly ambiguous, badly mixed signals about their interest in protecting it, to a regime ill equipped to correctly interpret mixed signals. Had their willingness to defend the Falklands been clear - it was a shock to Argentina that they sent the whole Royal Navy to retake the Islands - it’s possible Argentina would not have invaded, the war never would have happened, and about a thousand people would not have died over a really stupid conflict.
Grig Gen. Hillier was speaking today about the requirements that the Canadian military needs for their forces in Afghanistan. Among the usual list of new equipment and such was a request for funding to set up a Tim Horton’s in Kandahar. I think he was being quite serious and I also think that would be awesome.
In 2002 (the last year for which I found data), Canada spent a whopping 1.1% of its GDP on the military. Canada is a member of NATO, and the NATO average is more than double that amount. In fact, of all NATO countries, only Luxembourg spent less. Australia, which is another isolated country and which doesn’t have NATO commitments, spends twice what we do on its military. That tends to indicate that the reason we don’t spend very much is that we’re essentially offloading our defense commitments on the U.S. and other NATO countries (which we’ve explicitly done with heavy airlift, for example. We also had to borrow armaments from the U.S. in Gulf War 1, and we had to borrow uniforms from Britain at the start of the Afghanistan war), or that we’ve relied on the goodwill of our neighbor (such as our failure to assert sovereignity in the north). All in all, it’s been irresponsible, and we could probably double our military expenditures and not be out of line, especially considering the deteriorating state of the world security situation.
Of course. I left that message to kick-start the discussion, not to close it. We’ll have to take a detailed look at the defense plan and see if it makes sense.
Don’t let ‘Airborne’ confuse you. The Canadian Airborne Regiment was essentially a Commando force or rapid deployment force. They would be used for rapid insertion into trouble spots and for tactical missions like retaking airfields, assaulting a terrorist camp, that sort of thing. They were also tasked with the ability to be rapidly deployed inside Canada as a deterrent force, say to protect critical assets that were under threat. Finally, they were trained as peacekeeping forces for extremely hostile and dangerous areas, such as Somalia. Exactly the kind of forces we need today. They have a proud tradition of spectacular accomplishment going right back to the D-Day landings, and always performed superbly. It takes a long time to build up a unit with the kind of history and culture that creates phenomenal warriors, and it’s not an asset to abandon lightly, as the Liberals did for cheap political points.
This is obviously tentative, since real discussions never took place with the Liberals, but my understanding is that the U.S. primarily wanted Canada’s cooperation for things like basing early warning radars, overflights, tests, and eventually basing interceptors in Canada I imagine. I don’t think Canada was ever asked to contribute much in the way of funding.
As for how useless missile defense is - The concept is more useful today than it ever was. There was a good argument to be made during the cold war about whether or not a missile defense could be saturated with thousands of missiles, or defeated with high-tech countermeasures. Today, the likely missile threat is a low-tech North Korean missile or two - something we might actually be able to deter.
But more to the point, just having the capability to deter a strike like that (or even being able to plausibly claim you can) is an incredibly useful bargaining chip if we wind up engaged in brinksmanship against Iran or North Korea - something that seems increasingly likely.
A handful of individuals ‘brought it on themselves’, along with a couple of higher-ups who didn’t do their jobs. That’s grounds for charging the ones who did the nasty stuff (which they were), and cashiering the superiors who enabled it (which happened). It’s NOT grounds for disbanding an entire regiment with a long, proud history of service to Canada. That was a gross over-reaction.
(Much supporting information deleted)
Well, of course. I really don’t understand what this response has to do with my comment. I agree we can AFFORD more. I’m simply saying that “We’re going to spend another $1.06 billion a year” is not compatible with “We’re going to hire 33,000 more soldiers and buy a whole bunch of awesome shit.” That latter sentence would match, say “$4 billion a year.” Can we afford another $4 billion? Sure, though I’d like to see it saved elsewhere. Shit, we could afford more than that. I just want them to be honest about the cost, and I’m sure you do too.
Perhaps even more precisely, I want this to be well planned.
Dude, I worked with Airborne soldiers. “Phenomenal warriors?” Not exactly. They were not an elite force in the sense that, say, JTF2 is. It was an airborne infantry formation, nothing more or less, made up of soldiers who were generally rotated in from the other infantry regiments, and it was my direct experience, and not just mine, that they were no more competent than, say, the PPCLI or Van Doos.
It’s fine to say “They would be used for tactical missions like retaking airfields…” Retaking an airfield is a mission, but it’s not a role. The RCRs could retake an airfield or blow up a terrorist camp. The role of an airborne formation is to provide combat capability with the option of airborne insertion. We did not lose that capability after 1995.
The Airborne had only been created in 1968, after all and was first significantly reduced in strength in 1977, when it moved to Petawawa; it wasn’t like the Army had never survived without one. Furthermore, it DID have significant disciplinary problems, far more mundane and widespread than the stories that got out to the media, owing largely to
A) The manner in which its ranks were filled, and
B) Further downsizing, which affected the availability of senior and mid-level officers, that had taken place in 1991-1992, so you can’t even blame the Liberals for that one.
It’s also simply not true that the Liberals disbanded them solely for political reasons; they had no clear role in the previous White Paper and, accordinglt to what I have read, NDHQ was already thinking of disbanding the unit. Simply put, it was not cost effective, it wasn’t working, and in 27 years they had not distinguished themselves. The Somalia affair simply gave the government an excuse, but the brass had been sharpening its knives for awhile.
I’m not suggesting that the manner in which the government handled the Somalia affair was anything less than retarded, or that the Liberal government in general ill-treated the Forces, but I suggest you spare your pity for the Airborne. It was a skelaton-manned formation wracked with disciplinary problems that by 1995 was substantially below the high quality of our other infantry units, and we frankly lost very little by disbanding it.
Unless my understanding of history is really off and the D-Day landings occurred after 1968, that is simply not true. The operational formation that was disbanded in 1995 was created in 1968. The unit that fought in Normandy was the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion and was disbanded when the war ended. There isn’t any direct connection between the two units at all.
Canada has always maintained some sort of Airborne capability and we still do. You are confusing the Airborne Regiment, the unit that existed between 1968 and 1995 and was not any more capable or distinguished than any other of our regiments, with the general concept of Canada having an airborne force, which we’ve had, more or less, since 1942. Taking a particular unit out of the line of battle is an administrative and logistical function, and in the case of a 27-year-old unit with no real battle honors, why the tears? We still had essentially the same airborne capability after the disbandment as we did before.
The current setup works FAR better, and provides Canada with far more capability - that is, we have a para battalion in each of the three regular regiments, supporting JTF2 on a rotating basis. The result is a cheaper and vasty more capable quick-reaction force, which has already distinguished itself in Afghanistan.
The only country that can approach us by land is America, so it would be foolish to waste money for an army that can’t compete. What we need is a world class navy to keep the rest of the world respectful. Remember when Canada had the third largest navy in the world?
Although I would be in favour to see the inheritors of the 1[sup]st[/sup] SSF come back to life, saying they were trained as peacekeepers is just flat wrong. In fact, being used as peacekeepers in Somalia (a job for which they were ill-suited) is what was the origin of the screams for their disbandment.
And the point of a large naval force capable of blue water operations near… where exactly?
If we’re going to be supporting NATO and UN peacemaking forces then we need an army. We’ll need an airforce primarily for domestic airspace control and a navy to compliment our allies in theater and protect our maritime borders. But of the three, it’s been the army that’s been used the most and the one most likely to be needed the most.
So did I. I had several friends who were airborne.
Well, yeah. Just like man for man, the U.S. 82nd airborne isn’t as good as the SEALS. Special forces are generally a cut above. But for what they were, they were pretty darned good. However, I could admit to some personal bias there.
Maybe. Of course, those others are no slouches themselves. And the airborne was operationally associated with the PPCLI and the RCR.
I don’t believe the Airborne ever deployed by parachute, anywhere. My understanding of their role was essentially to be a multi-role rapid deployment force. For example, they were deployed in Quebec during the October crisis, in Cyprus and Somalia as peacekeepers, and they provided security to the Olympics in Montreal.
This is true. And in fact, I think the 1992 downsizing was one of the big problems for the airborne, because it removed capabilities that they needed to provide a distinct role that couldn’t be filled by other forces.
The Regiment definitely traced its roots back to those units. While they were disbanded, and the Airborne Regiment wasn’t official created until much later, there is a direct lineage back through those units. The way I understand it was that the 1st and 2nd Parachute Battalions, which fought with distinction in WWII, were disbanded after the war but elements from both went into the Canadian SAS, and eventually the mobile strike force, then in 1968 the Canadian Airborne Regiment.
Granted, the threads are tenuous, but the Airborne guys I knew certainly felt their history went back to WWII, and the various Canadian Airborne web sites claim the same thing. Maybe it’s just part of unit esprit de corps to claim a valorous lineage, but if so it’s common to an awful lot of military organizations.
But certainly if you want to maintain that there’s no linkage, I won’t argue it. I think it depends on how you look at it.
Part of it is probably personal bias. I heard earfuls about it from military friends back when it happened.
That I can’t argue with. Nothing settles arguments better than results, and so far the Canadians have excelled wherever they’ve been deployed since 2001, even given their sub-standard equipment.
The best thing Canada could do IMHADO, is boost it’s West Coast Defenses.
China looms, & their Navy is getting hopped-up on pure money.
I always love it when SamStone and RickJay work things out 
Hey, we disagree sometimes, but we’re no opposed philosophically. 
I’m curious as to why people want this gigantic navy, though. Or more precisely, what kind of gigantic navy do they want? Our navy might actually be our strongest arm right now.
I want a giant aircraft carrier big enough to have its own hockey rink and an entire Tim Horton’s bakery. The aircraft can be used to drop relief TimBits on communities when they are snowed in.
I want Don Cherry as captain. And instead of carrying nuclear arms, it will have Celine Dione, and when countries become belligerant to us we will threaten to airdrop her in to spread crappy music throughout the land.
We will rule the oceans, I tell you.
:eek:
You fool! This kind of criminally reckless and dangerously irresponsible policy will only lead to two outcomes: proliferation and escalation.
Do Canadians see China as a military threat (particularly given the signficiant Chinese immigrant communities in BC)? It seems like this is more of a US phenomenon.
You seem to overlook the obvious: How does China view Canada? Under-armed? With a lot of petroleum resources?
Buy guns.
Bigguns.
I’m guessing that China doesn’t even semi-serious designs on Canada given that it is protected not just under the aegis of NATO, but backed up by the U.S. especially. China barely has enough military might to conquer a renegade nearby island, much less cross the largest ocean in the world and take over the second largest country in the world.
Besides, regardless of how China views Canada, if Canadians don’t view China as a military threat, then it’s a fair bet that they won’t spend their military budgets with China in mind.