The big push. From the advertising department of DND

The Jurist has just the right amount of sarcasm spread evenly on the subject. If the Department of National Defence has to go on an advertising blitz to try and convince people that buying a super-cool, enemy air-space penetrating high-tech bomb truck is such a splendid idea ... well it's looking like it might be a less than splendid idea.

The cross-country tour will cover seven cities in all. It started last Friday in Ottawa, skipping Parliamentary Press Gallery journalists who cover defence and focusing on academics and business contacts in the nation’s capital. It continued Monday with a roundtable for media in Vancouver and a separate session for academics and companies – a format that continued in Calgary and Winnipeg.

This is unprecedented. Never has DND gone out to gather a sales force to peddle a military acquisition project. It borders on the obscene.
To add fuel to the argument that the sales pitch is wrong-headed, a real military analyst takes a bite. 

Retired major-general Lewis MacKenzie said the PR blitz is an indication of how much grief Ottawa is getting over the F-35 deal, adding he can’t recall Defence previously launching such a campaign in support of a military purchase.

And then he leaves a welt on those who play the argument that we have to buy the "best" even if it's the most expensive.

The former senior military officer said the argument that the military needs cutting-edge technology is not always an easy sell, even for veterans of past wars.

“Talk to some of our tankers who went into World War II. They did a pretty damn good job, but they didn’t have the fifth best tank, let alone the best tank.”

The truth be known, Canada has rarely had the "best" equipment. More often than not, the equipment is suitable and we have lived with the knowledge that there was better, and more expensive, available.

The world's new slinky

Yeah. It's amazing!

Let's say you're a small country. Very small. Your means of defence is arrived at by some convoluted deal in which the country with world's largest and most expensive military keeps you at a level of military capability which will keep you fighting for about three weeks. After that, your ass depends on that other country either having swayed world opinion in your favour, (and the global cavalry comes over the hill to save the day), or they park a couple of super-carriers on your doorstep and neither confirm nor deny that they have it within their means to turn your opposition's cities into glass parking lots.

Still, you have enough moxie to know what you need to keep yourself going for three weeks and have the history to demonstrate that, with the right resources, you can dispatch all comers before you have to pull the fire alarm.

The problem is, being able to pull off that three weeks is expensive and most of your TO and E is paid for by the foreign aid contribution of that large country. Still, you'd like to be able to pick your own stuff and maybe even modify it to suit your needs.

Then, along comes the F-35 Lightning II. You view it as expensive and unsuitable for your needs. You have something different in mind. Until that large country, your defence benefactor, tells you otherwise.

It now turns out that unostentatiously, while overseeing the Israel-Palestinian peace talks, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton busied herself last week in Jerusalem with an errand of equal important to Washington: bulldozing Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak into agreeing to buy 35 Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning stealth warplanes for the Israeli Air Force at a cost of $4.7 billion.

This transaction Israel can ill afford. debkafile's military sources report it is opposed by senior ministers, especially Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, and even more fiercely by high IDF officers and heads of Israel's Aerospace Industries. Nonetheless, Clinton got her wish; a special committee the Prime Minister set up for the purpose approved the purchase after cutting down the final number of F-35 warplanes from 35 to 20 at a cost of "only" $2.7 billion.

Military chiefs, furious over Netanyahu's hasty action, said it makes nonsense of the drastic cuts just imposed on defense spending and means that the IDF will have to do without certain new weapons systems needed for facing up to threats from Iran, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas. One officer accused the prime minister of "shamefully and needlessly surrendering to American pressure."

Hmmm. DEBKA is unabashedly hawkish when it comes to Israeli defence and has a reputation for getting pretty chummy with right-wing journals. They also have a habit of using "unnamed sources" for just about everything. The problem, however, is that read as archival history, they have a reputation for accuracy.

The Israelis, no less than any other purchaser of a new and untested warplane, would want to be in on some of the production, and they, like any other country would want regional industrial benefits from such a purchase.

... military sources dismiss reports that Israeli industry will take part in manufacturing the F-35s on sale are untrue. On the contrary, the Americans have laid down tougher limitations than ever before against Israeli access to the production process.

Israeli aeronautical experts and technicians are denied access to the production lines of the plane. Israel's Air Force and Aerospace Industries are prohibited from installing their own homemade systems to the new plane or even altering the Lockheed Martin systems to meet their special needs without prior US consent.

Interesting...

A. You're buying this thing because it's "the best fighter ever". We don't care if you really want the Euro-fighter - in the end it's us paying for it;

B. No. You can't help build it. We already have "gentlemens' agreements" with other countries and if we jeopardize those IRBs they may cancel their order;

C. Lockheed Martin 'R' Us. We're in a world of hurt if we can't peddle this crate so ... shut up and buy them. Just tell everyone there was a competition and Boeing lost.

Even Israeli pilots will only see the finished product when it is ready for their instruction. This will happen towards the end of 2011. The first F-35s are scheduled for delivery in 2015.

Two ministers, Steinitz and the former chief of staff Moshe Yaalon, are skeptical about the US plane's ability to contribute much toward enhancing the IAF's standards. Its design has met wide criticism in military aviation circles. They fear that the decision to purchase it was guided by politics rather than military considerations.

Now where have you heard that before?

Tally Ho! Gadget sweet.Hotdog red.

Yes, I know that title is something akin to Greek to most readers. Some will actually understand it. Doesn't matter though, it makes about as much sense as the one that appeared in the National Post on Wednesday.

Mark Collins: Canada buys an attack plane for defence

Which then goes on to cherry-pick bits and pieces of information from the US Navy and Royal Navy about how the future employment of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter involves First Day Strike operations etc, etc.

Wonderful.

Here's a bit of news for the National Post and the editor who allowed that bit of spoiled milk to seep through.

1. The Canadian Air Force CF-188/CF-18A, acquired by the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau, is actually the F/A-18A, a strike aircraft, originally designed and built for the US Navy. The "A" part of F/A designates it as an attack aircraft.

2. The giveaway, (if there was ever a need for one), is in the public nomenclature of the F-35. It's in the shiny brochures and everything: Joint Strike Fighter, just in case people were confused about what "JSF" actually meant.

This is in no way intended to approve or condemn the proposed purchase of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. But Collins missed the mark, if he actually had one, by a Saskatchewan section. Whatever is chosen to replace our current multi-role combat aircraft should also be a multi-role combat aircraft.

There is amusement in the comments section to the Natty Post article where he is roundly thrashed by those who would call him a liberal.

Maybe Kelly McParland has an agenda of which we are not aware.

As an added bonus... Collins authoritatively goes on to tell us about the radar suite of a TU-95H. Cool! How about if he gives us the EW and ECM capabilities while he's at it. OK. Maybe just the PRF of their targeting radar.

The Chief of the Air Staff said what?

This is one of those times I wish I had more context to work with. The Chief of the Air Staff is quoted in the Globe & Mail making statements that you could fly a bomber through. Further, as opposed to the head air honcho taking the route of laying expensive capital acquisitions at the feet of the cabinet, he has repeated the Soudas/Mackay/Harper spin of pointing at TU-95 interceptions in international airspace as being the axiom for purchasing a particular brand of fighter plane.

Unfortunately, Lt. Gen Deschamps is quoted without sufficient context. So... (Emphasis mine)

Lieutenant-General André Deschamps, the chief of the air staff, responded to critics of the government’s planned purchase of high-tech F-35 stealth fighters by asserting that the aircraft will provide a needed capability for defence at home, and not just for fighting air battles abroad.

“If they can’t detect us and don’t know where we are, it dramatically changes their potential tactics. So it is a deterrent,” Gen. Deschamps said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

Problem. Speaking to people who do not understand deterrence in the first place. I would expect a much more defined answer from the Chief of the Air Staff in regards to a future fighter's capabilities than that. That answer is about as thoughtful as "they go really fast". We already have a deterrent. We just don't know how relevant it will be in 15 years. And the "stealth" qualities of the F-35 is still being debated. Notwithstanding, by the time the F-35 is wheels up over Canada potential adversaries will have already started to develop countermeasures. A more important point, (and one which seems to have slid by), is the ability to maintain relevant interoperability within a NORAD force and contribute effectively. Whatever the question was, the CAS apparent answer doesn't say much. If he is so confident that the F-35 is undetectable by current and future potential adversaries it could be argued that we don't need to fly to meet long range air patrols at all. Better reasons and rationale behind the requirements are here.

The Harper government has pointed to recent flights of Russian long-range bombers near Canadian airspace in the Arctic and off the east coast – intercepted by CF-18s – to assert the need for top-notch fighters.

Gen. Deschamps said he’s not seeking to amplify “the noise around the Russians,” but pointed to the interceptions to argue that the F-35s will let the Canadian Forces observe foreign planes unseen, and the potential surprise will deter interlopers.

Repeating the words of the prime minister's communications director is a fools play. This hang-up with "stealth" is getting really boring. Sometimes you want the opposition to know you're there. I understand where the CAS is coming from, but he needed to spell it out. Everyone is spinning those "interceptions" as the raison d'etre for buying that particular aircraft. Repeating the crap produced by some smarmy creature like Dimitri Soudas doesn't score points with any thinking individual. Again, lack of context clouds the picture. Deschamps may not have wanted to amplify "the noise around the Russians" but that's the only thing he succeeded in doing.

Despite analysts suggesting that the air force has some nefarious secret reason for pursuing a 5th generation fighter, the obvious answer is to get something which increases your overall capability, folds a multitude of roles into one asset and remains serviceable and relevant for as long as possible.

No country other than Russia will be a potential threat in Canadian airspace for decades, said Philippe Lagassé, a defence analyst at the University of Ottawa.

He doesn't know that.

Stealth capability won’t assert sovereignty against the occasional long-range Russian bomber that is intended to be seen, Mr. Lagassé said. “It doesn’t fit with the threat environment. Let’s be frank: The real value of this aircraft is inter-operability with allies overseas.”

Agreed. The stealth factor is being highly overplayed. The inter-operability factor however is just as important for domestic operations as it is for anything which might occur overseas. Lest we forget that we rely heavily on NORAD to maintain sovereign airspace and if we can't operate within the NORAD environment we either subcontract our defence requirements to the Americans completely or pay a whole lot more for an air force.

As has been said in post after post, the problem most people have is the sole-sourcing of this very expensive project after the minister of national defence said there would be a competitive process.