The coming $26 billion windfall for the Canadian Armed Forces. What to buy?

[Admiral Beez]

I am now recovering from an operation to fix a ruptured aortic aneurysm. You have no idea of how glad I am to be Canadian at the moment.

It is fashionable to gripe about our healthcare system, but having had family go through childbirth, cancer, burst brain aneurysm (St. Mike's was great for that), injured backs, heart attacks, Covid, and a host of things, my family has always been okay with the care we get. Now, we used to live in New Brunswick, and there it was very difficult to get care.

 

[Thumpalumpacus]

Holy crap! And you are alive! Best wishes for a speedy recovery.

Good he ain't going broke staying alive, too.

 

[Howard Gibson]

... (St. Mike's was great for that)...

I went to St. Joseph's Hospital. They sent me by ambulance to to St. Mike's. It can be so nice to be in a big city.

 

[Howard Gibson]

We should never have made the Avro Arrow. It was a dumb move by Ottawa, Avro and its British owners at Hawker-Siddeley. In the world of ICBMs, none of Canada, NORAD or NATO needed another large interceptor to chase the increasingly non-existent threat of strategic bombers. What we should have built is a multirole competitor to the McDonnell F-4 Phantom II, which first flew in 1958, the same year as the Avro Arrow.

I have two thoughts about the Avro Arrow.

1. Canadian literature generally states that the Arrow was as fast as or faster than current aircraft. This is true, because in the late fifties, turbojet powered aircraft were approaching the maximum possible speeds for turbojets. The new generation of aircraft that came out in the seventies took advantage of experience in the Vietnam and the Middle East to learn all the stuff that actually matters in jet combat, like manoeuverability, and vision out of the cockpit.
2. The F4 Phantom was originally designed as an interceptor that would protect carrier groups. It turned out to be good at all sorts of other stuff. The Phantom and the Arrow may not look similar, but if you check out Wikipedia, they turn out to be very similar aircraft. Two big engines. Pilot and radar operator. Performance way above mach two, etc. Based on playing with the Arrow model on Flight Gear, the view out of the cockpit was awful, and would require redesign before going anywhere near hostile aircraft.

Canada is a big place with a small population. There is a lot to be said for a fast, long ranged aircraft. Inevitably, this would be a big, twin engined aircraft. The F-35 meets our NATO commitments. It does not protect Canadian sovereignty.

Canada has a requirement for a national interceptor. Since it is primarily defensive, stealth is not important. The requirement would be for range, speed, manoeuverability, and good electronics. Australia has similar requirements, and might be interested in participating in the project.

I am not sold on stealth technology. People are claiming that they can detect stealth aircraft. Stealth is nice if it does not cost you anything, but if it increases cost and reduces performance and view out of the aircraft, it might not be a good deal.

There is a massive difference between no radar signal, and a weak radar signal. I have worked on LiDAR. In LiDAR, you fire a laser at something, and you look at the backscatter. You expect a strong signal, so you filter out noise. Radar must do the same thing. How about we don't filter out noise. We examine the noise, and see if any of it is not moving around. A stealthy aircraft cannot use its radio, its radar, its LiDAR, or anything else we can detect.

 

[GTX]

Canada is a big place with a small population. There is a lot to be said for a fast, long ranged aircraft. Inevitably, this would be a big, twin engined aircraft. The F-35 meets our NATO commitments. It does not protect Canadian sovereignty.

Errr...technically by meeting NATO commitments it does help protect Canadian sovereignty...

Also, what other platform do you think would do a better job?

Canada has a requirement for a national interceptor. Since it is primarily defensive, stealth is not important. The requirement would be for range, speed, manoeuverability, and good electronics. Australia has similar requirements, and might be interested in participating in the project. I am not sold on stealth technology. People are claiming that they can detect stealth aircraft. Stealth is nice if it does not cost you anything, but if it increases cost and reduces performance and view out of the aircraft, it might not be a good deal.

You obviously don't understand where "stealth" comes into play. The combination of technologies/techniques/tactics that is commonly referred to as Stealth or Low Observability (LO) is nothing new. Almost as long as there have been fights, people have been looking for ways to gain an advantage over their counterparts. When we were relying on visual detection methods only, we relied on technologies such as camouflage or misleading paint schemes or tactics such as diving out of the sun. When radar became more prevalent, the idea of flying below the radar gained popularity. Now days, when we are applying these new LO technologies we are doing so because they remove some of the limitations of the past – therefore a modern combat aircraft with modern LO technologies applied is able to fly at medium altitude which increases range and also reduces pilot fatigue or potential for attack by guns/flak. So in essence, modern LO technologies are not in fact compromising a platform, rather they are in actual fact expanding its potential/capabilities/usefulness!

To go even further, one needs to revisit the concept of the OODA loop - the operator (pilot or just as equally SAM operator or Tank Commander or Infantry soldier or Submarine Captain or…) who is able to Observe the enemy first, and who are able to Orientate themselves first and then Decide faster before finally Acting, all faster then their enemy, will win the engagement.

So what does this have to do with LO/Stealth? Well, if the enemy can't see you or if they are not able to fully discern which way you are headed or whether you are friend or foe until it is too late then that could provide the few extra minutes or even seconds necessary to get in a first shot. The OODA Loop is what it is really all about here!

This is also just as relevant for Defence as for attack.

And BTW, this has also been proven with the likes of F-35s defeating F-15s etc numerous times in exercises.

A stealthy aircraft cannot use its radio, its radar, its LiDAR, or anything else we can detect.

Have you heard of low-probability-of-intercept comms or radar?

 

[SaparotRob]

Have you heard of low-probability-of-intercept comms or radar?

I haven't.

 

[GTX]

I haven't.

Radartutorial

www.radartutorial.eu

 

[Admiral Beez]

The F-35 meets our NATO commitments. It does not protect Canadian sovereignty.

I am concerned for my fellow Canadians being asked to fly a single engined jet aircraft over vast distances of inhospitable tundra and forests.

F-35 Engine Running Too Hot Due To 'Under-Speccing,' Upgrade Now Vital (Updated)

The F-35's engine is having to work harder to cool and power the aircraft's systems, leading to a logistical mess.

www.twz.com

Overtaxed F-35 engines rack up $38 billion in extra maintenance costs

US government auditors say a failure to improve output and cooling capacity on the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine powering the Lockheed Martin F-35, while simultaneously increasing the load from heat-producing sensors and radar, has significantly increased wear on the powerplant and the cost of...

www.flightglobal.com

What we really need for the NORAD role is twin engined fighters, ideally the unobtainable F-22s. I'd settle for new F-15s, but with the US only offering the world single engined 5/6th Gen fighters, perhaps after the last of the F-35s is delivered in the 2030s we should look at the twin-engined offerings like the KAI KF-21 Boramae, TAI TF Kaan, Mitsubishi F-X or BAE Tempest. BAE is the successor to both Hawker-Siddeley and its subsidiary Avro Canada. Perhaps the Tempest should arm both the RAF and RCAF of the mid to late 2030s.

 

[ThomasP]

Canada had the option to buy F-15s if they wanted to, but the analysis that Canada ran on the different aircraft available indicated the F-35 was the best buy. I do not know the detailed reasoning behind the decision, but significant parts of the decision were based on the NATO equipment commonality concept, effectiveness of the aircraft, and cost.

 

[Howard Gibson]

Radartutorial

www.radartutorial.eu

This is the classic problem that happened during WWII. Somebody makes a radar of some sort. Somebody else figures out how to countermeasure it. Then they make a better radar, and then that gets countermeasured.

You mention camouflage. This is a fascinating and complex subject. Do we paint the airplane blue, gray or black, so that it matches the sky? Do we paint it green or brown so that it matches the ground it is sitting on or flying close to? The RAF's RDM2 "lamp black" Special Night Finish was estimated to take as much as 20mph off the top speed of a Mosquito, so they switched something else. At some point, the USAAF decided that a bit of green paint was not fooling anyone, so they switched to natural metal. This eliminated a manufacturing process, and it added a couple of MPH to their top speeds.

Engineering is all about compromises.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Our government's about to go tits up, so let's see what defence spending looks like in 2025. Likely PM, Pierre Poilievre was a minister in Stephen Harper's 2014 government which drove down post-war defence spending to its lowest ever at 0.98% of GDP.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigns from Trudeau's cabinet | CBC News

In a shocking move, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced Monday she's resigning from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's cabinet — just hours before she was set to deliver the government's fall economic statement.

www.cbc.ca

The exiting finance minister's resignation letter was biting:

"We need to take that threat extremely seriously. That means keeping our fiscal powder dry today, so we have the reserves we may need for a coming tariff war. That means eschewing costly political gimmicks, which we can ill afford and which make Canadians doubt that we recognize the gravity of the moment."