The Canadian Forces never used any of the 12,600 projectiles it purchased for between $1,500 and $1,800 each in 1988. Today, the stockpile is sitting at the Canadian Forces Ammunition Depot in Dundurn, Sask., while Ottawa waits for a firm to step up to the job of destroying the projectiles and the more than one million bomblets they contain.
“That’s money that’s gone that we’re never going to see again,” said Derek Fildebrandt, national research director at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “It’s a positive thing, though, that we never had to use them.”
The projectile in question is particularly controversial.
111 countries have so far banned it under the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions because each canister scatters dozens of bomblets over an area the size of a football field and can act like landmines when they fail to detonate on impact.
Canada signed onto the convention in 2008 but has yet to ratify the treaty with domestic legislation.
The Conservatives tabled a Senate bill in April, but critics say it fails to ensure Canadian troops are not complicit in using the weapons when working with allies such as the United States, which has not agreed to the ban.
“The government is doing good things by destroying the stockpile, but there’s a lesson to learn in this: Mistakes were made in procuring a weapon we never ended up using,” said Paul Hannon, head of Mines Action Canada. “We spent money procuring the munitions, and now we’re spending money destroying them. That doesn’t seem like a useful way to spend taxpayer dollars.”
A spokesperson for Defence Minister Peter MacKay referred questions to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird because of the international diplomacy at play. Foreign Affairs did not comment specifically on the multimillion-dollar purchase under the Mulroney government, but an official said the department is “committed to reducing the impact of armed conflict on innocent civilians around the world.”
Most Canadians would agree it is a good thing the Canadian Forces never used a weapon blamed for maiming children and killing civilians in places such as Lebanon and Iraq, where the cluster bombs were nicknamed “steel rain” after the Gulf War. But with a price tag of tens of millions of dollars, some say the purchase proves the military is a different kind of machine — one where over-spending is inevitable.
“A lot of military equipment has been bought in the past, and will be bought in the future, that is never used,” said retired Col. Alain Pellerin, executive director of the Ottawa-based Conference of Defence Associations. “Preparing for war is not a science — it’s an art … You have to buy equipment based on various possible scenarios, going from humanitarian intervention to a full-scale war. It’s not like running any other company.”
When Canada bought the Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions [DPICM] from the U.S. company Day & Zimmermann more than two decades ago, toward the end of the Cold War, the ground-based projectiles were deemed an operational requirement. Militaries around the world thought they were ideal for blocking forces and pushing enemy troops into killing zones, and governments started buying different kinds of cluster bombs by the thousands — it not millions, as is believed to be the case in the United States.
By 2007, though, Canada removed the DPICM cluster bomb from operational status. A year later, National Defence said it was working with Public Works and Government Services Canada on awarding a contract to safely get rid of the stockpile. Another four years have passed and Canada has destroyed three of the 12,600 projectiles. [According to Canada’s recent report to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, the three canisters were taken apart at the Dundurn site, where a total of 264 bomblets were destroyed using “electric detonator and liberal application of blasting agent with C4 plastic explosive.”]
A separate stockpile of so-called Rockeye bombs, the only other kind of cluster munition Canada has ever bought, were destroyed over the course of two years at the same Dundurn site. By 2006, the depot had destroyed 248,000 Rockeye bomblets.
But the much larger job of getting rid of the 1,108,536 DPICM bomblets is very much a work in progress. Public Works posted a letter of interest to its online procurement site only recently, on July 5, with a closing date of Aug. 10, 2012. The department confirmed the only North American company capable of destroying such a large stockpile is located outside Joplin, Mo., although it indicated Canada could outsource the job to Germany, Norway or possibly Spain.
National Defence said it typically budgets somewhere between $2-million and $5-million annually for ammunitions disposal; this latest job is expected to cost $2-million.
Mr. Hannon called it a “good investment” to get rid of the cluster bombs, but added: “All militaries, not just the Canadian, should have been much more diligent in their purchasing and assessment what they needed the weapon for, rather than just buying what was trendy at the time.”
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Kathryn Blaze Carlson
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