“It just seems like it’s slowly unravelling,” said an industry insider who specializes in aircraft procurement. “It’s a mess.”
Peter MacKay has doggedly championed the Royal Canadian Air Force plan to purchase 65 “fifth-generation” Lockheed Martin Lightning stealth fighters to replace Canada’s aging fleet of CF-18s. Last week MacKay sought, with only limited success, to deflect reports that the first batch of planes built by Lockheed will be incapable of communicating in Canada’s far North.
This minister has a knack for projecting blithe confidence. But in this instance he is increasingly offside with other members of the cabinet and with the Prime Minister’s Office, sources familiar with the situation say.
“They expected a whole bunch of kudos for doing (the F-35),” said one. “They believed this was win-win, industrially, that everybody would be happy it has kind of crept in that it just ain’t so.”
Indeed in defence circles, it is believed that Julian Fantino was installed as under-minister in charge of procurement partly to offset MacKay’s tendency to defer to the senior military brass, in this case the air force, in matters of equipment acquisition. “He is a total advocate of the people in uniform,” an industry insider said. “There have been no challenges [to the military] the whole time he’s been there.”
Be that as it may, MacKay has had an unenviable task, in trying to sell the F-35 purchase to a skeptical public. That’s because, even according to its supporters, it’s been unusual from the start. Since the aircraft is still under development, projections of its cost are estimates only. And the per-plane price tag depends on the number of units ordered for any given year.
That has made the cost an upward-moving target — originally $75-million per plane, now by most independent accounts between $115-million and $150-million — which has been politically costly, especially in a time of budget constraint.
As other members of the international F-35 consortium — including Turkey, the Netherlands, Norway, Israel and Australia have either delayed or curtailed expectations of the number of planes they will buy, price estimates have skyrocketed. But even the latest figures are just educated guesses.
“The reaction is, where’s the competition, where’s the bidding, and what do you mean you don’t know the price?” acknowledges Senator Colin Kenny, former chair of the Senate defence committee and a strong proponent of the F-35. The federal government, he says, has simply done “a lousy job” of explaining and selling the project to Canadians.
Kenny and other advocates say that when the F-35 finally begins rolling off the line in significant numbers some five years from now, it will be by far the most advanced fighter in the world, with stealth capabilities that confer a new degree of safety on Canadian pilots.
“Why would you buy a [fourth-generation] aircraft that has a clear radar profile, when you can buy one that is much harder to spot on radar, and have your flyers come home?”
Boeing’s F-18 Super Hornet, often mentioned as an alternative to the F-35, is still only a “fourth-and-a-half” generation fighter, experts say.
Moreover, in an era of integrated NATO missions, it makes sense for Canada to be flying the same fighters as our allies, and to share in the economic benefits of building them. Kenny estimates that, for a $200-million initial investment, Canadian aerospace manufacturers have already garnered twice that in spinoff contracts.
But there are three elephants in the room.
The first is that, having recently announced a $35-billion naval shipbuilding program that is wildly popular on two coasts, the government is bound to it, regardless of what happens to the global economy. The mammoth contracts for shipyards in Halifax and Vancouver are job engines and vote-winners. If something big has to go, it won’t be ships.
The second is that, with European leaders still struggling with the details of how they’ll solve their debt crisis and prop up their banks, and the European economy slipping into what may be a long recession, orders for F-35s from the eurozone are certain to dwindle further, making the price for Canada even more prohibitive.
The third is that the Pentagon itself, without whose massive order of 2,443 jets the project is impossible, has lately been making noises of serious unhappiness about rising costs. Last May, Senator John McCain, ranking Republican member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, said the U.S. should “start at least considering alternatives” to the F-35.
Given a choice between a rock and a hard place, the federal government could reduce the number of aircraft purchased, thus keeping within its original projected budget window of $9-billion, reiterated by Fantino earlier this month. However, having significantly fewer than 65 aircraft would nullify the rationale for having the fighters in the first place, defence experts say.
“I honestly don’t believe they can go below 65,” said one. “If you do that then you have to change the mission.”
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Source: National Post
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