SOS – Save Our Ships!

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Jan 2016

The Canadian Surface Combatant ship program looks to be in trouble and it’s going to take political oversight by the Prime Minister’s Office to make sure this program doesn’t go completely off the rails.

The CSC program is designed to replace all of Canada’s current fleet of surface combatant ships: the entire fleet of twelve Halifax-class frigates as well as the HMCS Athabaskan, the last tribal-class destroyer.  But how many ships will the program actually put into the water to replace these thirteen?

The program was originally planned to produce “sixteen or seventeen.”  That number has since been downgraded to “up to fifteen,” but, as reported in Esprit de Corps, some retired naval officers believe the number acquired get as low as eight to ten.

The program appears to be whipsawed by three factors in conflict: cautiousness, a “kid-in-a-candy-store” fascination with capability, and a budget cap said to be $26.2 billion.  The project is in such a state of confusion that Esprit de Corps could actually report that the current envelop is $26.2 billion for up to 15 ships, but the actual cost and number of vessels to be built will not be known until the definition phase is complete!

The basic plan is to order one single type of hull and then staple various modules onto one.  One grouping of stapled on modules will create a ship that provides area air defense and Task Group Command and Control capabilities, while another grouping will create a direct replacement for a Halifax-class frigate.

When you get into the proposed capabilities you begin to see the combination of caution and kid-in-a-candy-store fascination.  The core-capabilities include anti-submarine, anti-air, and anti-surface capabilities, combined with maritime interdiction and naval fire support.  The area air-defense C-and-C would add sophisticated electronic suites including capability for fighter control.

None of this planning appears based on a vision of the kind of real-world enemy the RCN expects to encounter.  Based on this list, the RCN brass are simply carrying on with the comfortable niche they filled during the Cold War.  But the Soviet Union is now defunct, and the existential threat to Europe over the next thirty years does not look like it is going to come from Russia.

Being able to convoy ships across the North Atlantic does not look like it is going to be the priority over the next thirty years.  Thus anti-submarine, anti-air, fighter-coordination capability for battle in the North Atlantic, while it may once have been a core-competence of frigates, looks like a poor place to invest our scarce fighting dollars over the next thirty year time-frame.

We will need some anti-submarine, anti-air capability on ships for defense of Canadian waters, but these are needed to keep the Russians honest rather than to repel a serious onslaught.

This is why supervision by the PMO is going to be important.  Left to their own devices, the RCN brass are going to reprise the safe things they have done in the past, but with the latest bells and whistles so that they can hold their pride across the mess table at dinner with their colleagues from the naval services of other countries.  Canada has a chance to change world diplomatic calculus with this acquisition program, and the PMO needs to ensure that old convention doesn’t win by default.

If old convention does win, that should be a conscious political choice. Changing world diplomatic calculus is a political decision, which Admirals can propose, but one that is taken by the Prime Minister.  Plainly, by going with frigates from the start, the RCN brass is not adventurous enough even to propose something new and daring to a Prime Minister and cabinet quite unfamiliar with naval and military power and their beneficial effects on peacetime diplomacy.

It would be useful for civilian and political figures of the PMO to visit friends high up in the Pentagon and get a perspective how the United States Navy develops new programs.  They are the real experts, with the scars to prove it.  Canada is going to be getting much of its weapons systems from United States suppliers anyhow, so the welcome mat ought to be out.

An American Arleigh Burke class missile cruiser displaces twice as much as a Halifax-class frigate, and has warfighting capabilities undreamed of for Canadian ships.  It costs the United States about $1.9 billion to build one.  Do the math.

PMO support for unconventional thinking may help deliver a worthwhile program.

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A version of this was published in Esprit de Corps magazine