Canada's Defence Industrial Strategy and the Gripen
Canada has published a Defence Industrial Strategy for the first time. The extensive documents released by Ministers McGuinty, Joly, and Fuhr spells out a vision for the country that uncouples us from the Americans… eventually. There is an immense amount of analysis coming out about it, but I want to home in on one sentence.
I have made no secret of my disdain for Canada buying the F-35, even before Trump had retaken the American presidency. Going back at least 16 years, even the Auditor General warned that it was a terrible investment for Canada.
With Trump’s return, it becomes a security risk as well as an economic albatross. Relying on American support to keep our fighters airborne when the United States is the primary threat to Canada is, or at least should be, self-explanatory as a bad idea.
If a country is openly threatening to annex you, buying their weapons systems without taking ownership of the technology behind them is to hand them the keys to the front door. No matter how good the F-35 is, it is useless to us if it is not usable in combat.
Regardless of quality, the Americans want to force us to buy their toys. American Ambassador Pete Hoekstra told Canada in January that failing to buy the F-35 would render NORAD obsolete and cause American fighters to patrol Canadian airspace of their own accord. In other words: we either buy aircraft that take away our sovereignty, or we give up our sovereignty anyway. And some people still think these people are our allies.
When Carney came to office nearly a year ago, he put our committed purchase of the F-35 fighter jet up for review. Since then, the Swedish Saab J-39 Gripen has re-entered the race, with the company publicly pitching Canada on a 78-plane deal that includes 72 of the fast, small, cheap, and relatively easy to maintain fighters as well as six Global Eye early warning aircraft, as well as a host of economic and industrial benefits, and, critically domestic control of the technology we will be using.
Since that freeze, the whole country has weighed in on the debate over whether to stick to the 5th-generation American fighters or the so-called “4.5th-generation” Swedish aircraft.
Whether we still want them or not, Canada is getting at least 16 of the American jets, and news reports this week reveal that we’ve also paid fees for long-lead time parts for another 14. If we are going to have a mixed fleet, 16 is probably not enough aircraft to be a viable weapons platform for us. It is barely a single squadron. In that context, buying another 14 makes a small amount of sense, especially if we take into consideration the fighter plane’s “serviceability” rate.
That rate is, essentially, how much of the time the planes will be operationally ready versus in maintenance. For the F-35, the availability rate is, according to the United States’s own data, between 50 and 60%. The F-35A variant that Canada is set to acquire has the lowest overall availability rate of the three variants, at 40% by seven years of age, with full mission availability dropping to just 20% at the same age.
Boiled down, that means that if we receive delivery of 16 F-35A jets in 2027, by 2034 only three will be mission-ready at any given time with the other 13 in maintenance.
It is just enough to have a single plane on each of Canada’s ocean coastlines at any given time to defend our entire country. That’s not a combat aircraft, that’s a monument in a municipal park. If we have 30 aircraft in our fleet, at least those three aircraft will each get a wingman for their mission.
So back to the Defence Industrial Strategy. As Philippe Lagassé’s excellent piece notes above, it is possible to read it more or less how you want to. There is enough vagueness in the overall document to leave our relationship with the United States in particular open to interpretation.
However, there is one section which lays out a series of specific targets and objectives that it is worth taking a closer look at. They address availability rates for different services under the heading “Achieving Results for Canada.” In that block of text is this critical line:
Raise maritime fleet serviceability to 75 per cent, land fleets to 80 per cent, and aerospace fleets to 85 per cent to meet training and operational readiness requirements;
The F-35 does not meet the 85 percent readiness requirement laid out in this plan. The American aircraft type does not even come close to that benchmark, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s report referred to earlier, where F-35As already have a 70% availability rate after their first year in service.
One cannot expect a small fleet of unreliable foreign-controlled aircraft to reasonably support basic defence requirements, much less the applied assertion of Canada’s sovereignty.
The Saab J-39 Gripen, on the other hand, is a far more reliable aircraft. Against a requirement of 85% in the Defence Industrial Strategy, the Gripen has an availability rate of 85% as confirmed in Switzerland.
This is unlikely to be a coincidence, and is a strong indication that, through all the rumours, discussions, and debates, the federal government is laying the groundwork in this document to show how the Gripen is the obvious and essential choice to meet Canada’s actual requirements in protecting our economic and military sovereignty.