DrCaleb DrCaleb:
bootlegga bootlegga:
DrCaleb DrCaleb:
I bet buying Frigates and Icebreakers from the US is off the table too.
I agree that we should get a few FREMM frigates like the US, but I think Canada knows icebreakers much better than the US does. The US Coast Guard only has three or four operational icebreakers right now, although they're building a couple now.
We might know icebreakers better, but they build ships faster and cheaper. If we are buying a ready made fighter from them, why do we balk at buying a ready made icebreaker or frigate? We only have 2 heavy ice breakers, what would it hurt to buy a couple cheap?
Or Destroyer? We don't have those. Or a resupply ship? We could use one.
Faster maybe, but not necessarily cheaper. Their latest Arleigh Burkes cost even more than the planned CSC ships, coming in at about $5 Billion USD each.
You're correct that we don't currently have any destroyers currently (Thanks for nothing Stephen Harper), but we will when the Type 26 'frigates' are built. They will each come in over 8,000 tons, which is almost to double the Halifax FFGs (4,700 tons), and much larger than the previous Iroquois DDHs were (just over 5,100 tons). That's the same rough size as the Arleigh Burke Flight II destroyer.
I do agree we should get in on some FREMM frigates, which the US is building to replace their Littoral Combat ships, and which we came in much cheaper than the Type 26 CSC hulls we decided on.
The problem is that the US has the same problem we have - too many ships needed, but too few shipyards to build them in simultaneously. The reason China has surged ahead in number of naval ships is because they have a dozen or so shipyards cranking them out, while most western countries only have a couple shipyards each, which means we have long queues of ships waiting to get built.
For smaller countries like Canada, the problem is we build some naval vessels, then use them for forty or fifty years, then build again. So the shipyards downsize and layoff workers, which means it takes time and money to scale back up for the next big purchase. Harper's government tried to rectify this by spreading out our builds over two decades, but it also means we have to wait a long time for our new ships.
That's one reason why I've said we should be getting South Korea or Finland to build some of our ships. They could build the specialized hulls (AORs, icebreakers, etc.) while ours focus on frigates and destroyers. New Zealand got a brand new AOR from South Korea a couple years back for half the price we're paying for our AOR, and in half the time it's going to take to build ours too.
The problem with that is that military procurement is used to buy votes, and we don't get support if we build ships/planes overseas.
Thanos Thanos:
""Canadian kit", at triple the cost for the perfectly usable generic stock item, for the win, Alex. ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching!" - Department of Defense, Procurement Division
Our industrial offset requirements is a big part of why we pay so much more for our ships/planes/etc. - getting foreign companies to set up a factory/fabrication plant here for a decade or so costs a lot of money.
It's why Dassault (Rafale) and Airbus (Typhoon) pulled out of our fighter competition - they didn't want to spend a hundred million dollars to set up a factory here to build aircraft components here.
When we buy off-the-shelf, we get a better deal. The problem is off the shelf doesn't get your votes in the Maritimes or central Canada, so we hardly ever do it these days. Again, if we had South Korea build our AORs, we'd probably already have them and they would have been much cheaper than building them ourselves. But pork barrel politics prevents it from happening in a lot of countries, including Canada.
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