By Dan Middlemiss, 2 December 2023
So, how bad can it get for the RCN and the CAF as a whole? During the past year, senior officers have been publicly depicting the steady decline in all branches of the Canadian military.
The latest revelation has come from the head of the RCN in a video recently released on YouTube.[1] Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee stated that Canada’s navy is in “a critical state” and “faces some very serious challenges right now that could mean we fail to meet our force posture and readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond.” He noted that the Navy had not achieved its recruitment targets for more than 10 years. While the RCN is understaffed as a whole, Topshee pointed out that the West Coast fleet is “beset with a shortage of qualified techs” which has meant that ships cannot meet operations and maintenance objectives.
Admiral Topshee stressed that the aging Halifax-class frigates could not begin being retired until the RCN had received at least four of the new surface combatant replacements. Thus, the Navy is in a precarious position, apparently with no way out.
Admiral Topshee was simply confirming the deteriorating operational readiness of the RCN, a situation that has befallen all three branches of the services. According to the latest DND Departmental Results Report for 2022-23, only 61% of the CAF’s force elements were available to meet their operational readiness targets, a figure that drops to only 40% for concurrent operations. For the RCN, only 51.2% were available to meet concurrent operations against a target of at least 60%.[2]
Other commentators have noted that the RCN had not participated in key international naval exercises because of the non-availability of ships, and another report showed that the RCN has not deployed a true 3-4 ship Task Group for some time, and had but one Single Ship International Deployer (SSID) which was ‘double-hatted’ as part of the National Task Group.[3] This was a far cry from the multiple Canadian Naval Task Groups that were promised in the 1994 White Paper on Defence.
The fact that Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) General Wayne Eyre and Vice-Admiral Topshee and other senior CAF officers are speaking out now about the woeful state of the forces is commendable. In a real sense, they have a duty to do so. The Canadian government and the people of Canada need to be told the truth. In a similar set of budgetary constraints in the mid-1970s, the then CDS Jacques Dextraze bluntly asked the federal cabinet which of the many missions assigned to the CAF they wished to have cut out altogether – there simply was not enough funds to carry them all out. At that time, this led to a complete high level review of the structure and funding of the CAF and, ultimately, to an increase in the defence budget. This was a real wake-up call for our political leaders in Ottawa.
If nothing is done now to improve the readiness of the CAF (and along with it the pathetic state of the entire process of defence procurement), then with respect to the navy, should we be asking: how small a navy will we be left with? And what roles and missions will this reduced number be able to carry out?
Notes
[1]. VAdm Angus Topshee, “The State of the Canadian Navy,” 28 November 2023. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuD6Q1HXsKw
[2]. Ottawa, Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces, “2022-23 Departmental Results Report,” pp. 43 and 46.
[3]. Ottawa, DND, ADM (Review Services), “Evaluation of Ready Naval Forces,” March 2019, p. 20.
13 thoughts on “Requiem for a Navy?”
What an embarrassment for OUR government to let our armed forces deteriorate like this. What are we to become another Ukraine? Shame on you….
I feel it’s going to be a challenge to not have to pay off even one Halifax class frigate in the next 10 yrs while awaiting delivery of the 4th CSC.
This is no great secret, and the decline has been going on for many years. You’re only seeing public comment from the leadership to embarrass the government and hopefully reverse the current budget cut. Recruitment is one thing; people just don’t want to join because the CAF simply doesn’t look after its people, and I can point out dozens of instances about that. It’s also one of retention. You can recruit all the sailors you like but if they leave it won’t get better. We need to make the CAF attractive to the new people joining but also the people mid career and end career and we’re failing miserably.
We have sailors living in tents, cars, couch surfing because the cost of living in Halifax and Esquimalt is astronomical. I just saw that the MFRC in Halifax now has a community “pantry”, in other words a food bank. The recent economic increases for the CAF was well under the inflation rate and in the infinite wisdom of the CAF decided that the delta between spec and non spec pay was too large and they reduced it so the techs that the CAF spent time and money to train received a proverbial slap in the face and many are looking for greener pastures that their hard work will be both appreciated and well compensated.
In the RCN the amalgamation of the Mar Eng, Electrical and Hull techs was a train wreck of mammoth proportions, so much so the MarTech trade may never recover despite recent back peddling. This was RCN’s doing along with the spec pay freeze and elimination of Spec 2 pay which directly caused dozens of techs to leave for greener pastures. In Halifax sailors pay upwards of $100 a month for parking which in better times normally wouldn’t be an issue, these days the difference between making rent or not. Guess who brought in paid parking when he was Base Commander, you guessed it the CRCN.
The replacement for post living differential for living in higher-than-average cost of living areas was changed and while many who never received it before now receive it, those who had received it many had theirs cut during the height of inflation. The number of releases that went in over this train wreck of a new policy caused the CAF to begrudgingly reinstate a reducing number of payments to the people cut off to get “used” to their new reality. Now Sea Duty Allowance will be reviewed and updated, more than likely sailors will end up taking home less money. What will that do to the RCN?
So where does this all this leave us? Well for starters the Naval Experience Program took in 100 new sailors this year and has 400 waiting to be trained so there’s that, although medicals and security checks are backlogging it. The Kingston Class is a burden for crewing, so much so three ships on the West Coast are essentially tied up. What we need to do is increase crewing by reservists to take the pressure off the fleet. Dedicate one Kingston Class, one CPF and one AOPS to alongside and at sea training, get sailors qualified. Consider for the time being going with a civilian crewing model for both JSS. Provide cheap accommodations to new sailors starting out, if that means building them tiny homes or a Alberta type work camp on base land then do so. Hire commissionaires for the ships for overnight duty watches or hire recently released sailors as security or lock the ships up at the end of the day. The Germans do it, why can’t we? That would increase QOL for many sailors. For the new CSC start now creating a campaign of selecting first crews, emphasizing the new technology and how better the ships will be in comparison to the old ones.
If we need to reduce operations then do it, the RCN was supposed to be a period of reconstitution but all it did was force the RCN to send more ships to sea given world events and stretch the RCN even further. I know some will say what about selflessly serving Canada before self but the uncertainty of not having a roof over your head or being able to pay your bills generally trumps that. We can do better and until we do this will continue to plague us.
Here is a fellow calling it like it is, yet we have a government taking another billion dollars away. Why? Is it to shift it to build more houses for the immigrants he wants to bring in? Are the immigrants more important than our own armed forces?
Almost 25 years ago, my colleague, Peter Haydon, and I, while conducting research for an article on the Defence Structure Review of 1974-75, came across a striking memorandom prepared by the VCDS for a briefing to the Defence Council.
The circumstances were similar to those of today – the CAF had been experiencing repeated rounds of cost-cutting, and there were prospects for further cuts. Senior defence planners were increasingly frustrated with what they perceived to be the chronic under-funding of the Forces in relation to the tasks and commitments assigned them by the cabinet.
In this memorandum, dated 29 September 1974, the VCDS warned the MND that the Forces had now
“come to the nitty-gritty. We are being forced to hold troops in garrison, ground
aircraft and stop our ships from sailing. I cannot help but be reminded of the
story of Procrustes, the famous robber of Greek mythology, who tied his
victims on an iron bed and fitted their limbs to the length of the bed . stretching
them if too short . cutting them off if too long. Your Department is now on a
Procrustean couch, scaled to an invalid funding formula of seven percent. With
current rates of inflation running well beyond this, we have begun to hack off
arms and legs. But the most worrysome (sic) part of this process to me, is that,
despite our best efforts of persuasion and leadership, there is a danger that we
may be unable to convince our sailors, soldiers, and airmen of the validity of all
of this. Our troops may see these drastic activity cuts as culminating proof that
the Government and their country neither understands nor cares for their
Armed Forces, especially if we have to perform further surgery this year. If this
be so, the exodus from the Forces may well (solve) some of our financial
problems, but this … can hardly be considered as a rational method of
restructuring the defence effort.”
History, it seems, does repeat itself for the Canadian military.
Totally agree and very well said Dan! Repeating history is what we seem to do very well! “The More Things Change………The More They Stay The Same!! Will we ever learn from our mistakes? Let’s get off this defence cutting wheel, stop all this foolishness and get on with ‘properly’ funding the CAF now!! Or am I just dreaming Dan?
Why is it so difficult to pay our CAF members properly? Given a national housing shortage, shouldn’t providing affordable housing for our serving CAF members be a good starting point for a housing strategy, one that the federal government does actually control? We are spending well below our NATO commitments, leave a couple of billion unspent each year because of procurement difficulties and apparently recruitment and retention are the CAF’s highest priorities. Try paying them for goodness sakes!
Hello,
Because “affordable housing” is anathema to our current economic model. Housing is one of Canada’s “best-performing” assets. Its value inflation is promoted as the major players in housing “make money”. The sellers can earn a significant differential if they purchased low in the past. The real estate agents make a killing, around 5% of sales price or more, regardless of the work they do. The lawyers take another $2k-$10K to push paper along. The insurance companies take another cut. The banks make a ton of money on high mortgage rates with long terms, ensuring the sold assets bring in 100%-200% return. The municipality takes a 1%- 2% land transfer tax. The moment the house is sold higher, its assessment increases significantly, which means higher tax revenue for the municipality. Same goes for the new housing developers/builders, who essentially run a monopoly on a limited consumer product. They will only build as much housing at any given time to maximize their returns and cover their costs and risks.
For “government” to get into the housing game, it must essentially take over the residential development business. If it sells housing at a capped level equivalent to construction cost, then the housing units are subsequently lost to the “market” and flipped. Even with liens on who is allowed to own the housing this can happen. If the housing is rental, then “government” or agency owns it and is responsible for its upkeep. That puts a significant “depreciating asset” liability on the books. All in all, if any level of government gets seriously into the housing business, everyone must be prepared to take a cut to return housing to an affordable level. That means current owners who bought high must be prepared for a massive devaluation and loss; the mortgage banks, who cannot lose, must get their pounds of flesh and cover the terms of the mortgages they gave; the real estate and insurance business must be prepared to lose their best performing product; so do the municipalities who will “lose” tax assessment and revenue.
This leads to all the crises we now see in CAF personnel, health care personnel, schools and infrastructure gaps. Our economic and civilization model is broken; the armed forces are enduring the consequences, same as every other sector.
So, any talk of affordable housing is poison and impossible in our current system, which equates the economy with money (debt). Eliminating debt through a jubilee, or through system-wide crash, or revolution, is therefore unthinkable. Government can’t keep printing money to cover this inflation, as it will devalue the CAD catastrophically and we can’t force other countries to buy our money, like the US has done the last few decades. At the same time, it must keep up the charade of prosperity, and social progress through frivolous spending. Something has to give.
Regards,
The decline in the RCN specifically has been going on since the 1970s, I don’t wish to be rude about it but there are much smaller countries and indeed less developed countries that have not only newer equipment but also more capabilities.
I think Canada relies on the USA both in proximity and also necessity way to much for its protection. It’s almost as if we are offshoring defence to the USA, and if that is the case then perhaps we should just bite the bullet and become the 12 new states of the USA.
The diabolical state of the RCN and the way it pays its people is another big one, as I mentioned in a previous comment months ago I would have to take a $80,000 per year pay cut to join as an enlisted person yet I am a person that exceeds the academic requirements for commissioned officer in my field (by some margin).
Lack of investment in people and equipment and this is where you end up, unfortunately it will get a lot worse before it gets better and I can honestly see the RCN having to shrink the Halifax frigates down before the CSC comes online.
Blair, yes I agree things will get worse, but I am less confident that things will get better even should the RCN decide to payoff some Halifax-class frigates before the new CSC replacements are accepted into the fleet.
Consider the following:
A. The RCN is apparently hoping to proceed with the procurement of up to 8 patrol submarines, to begin within the decade. This will require additional trained crews beyond those available for the current 4 submarines;
B. There is also the possibility of procuring an unspecified number of ships as Kingston-class replacements;
C. The new Canadian Surface Combatant may require a slight increase in crew numbers – not many on a per ship basis but these numbers add up over 15 warships, and, of course, there are planned to be 3 extra ships than are currently in the Halifax-class.
Moreover, the funding for the new surface combatants will have to overlap the funding for the new F-35 fighters, the 16 new CMMA, and the 9 new aircraft to replace the current Polaris fleet, just to list a few of the big-ticket items already approved. To this we might have to add new patrol submarines, and perhaps Kingston-class replacements.
Currently, the big unknown factor in all the foregoing, is the cost of the CSC ships themselves. As many of us have been asking, will the Canadian cabinet approve the funding for all of the 15 planned ships?
If the answer is no, then what is the bare minimum of CSC ships for the RCN to function as a credible navy?
So this is my take away from this:
A) we have now gone from 12 submarines to 8, which isn’t too bad a thing in my opinion 8 gives you 1 in 4 rotation and 4 boats for each fleet.
My chief concern is we will probably see those numbers dropped and what’s more I have doubt that we will start seeing these before 2030.
B) The Kingston’s need replacing but with what, they are not deep sea vessels really and with an increase in the frigates I wouldn’t be surprised to see a decrease in the number of OPVs possibly to 8 or 10.
C) The CSC were looking at 210 to crew her the Halifax is around 225 but, so yes we would need to expand crew numbers to cover the potential increase in the frigate fleet.
With regards to the extra 3 ships I’m skeptical we will get funding for it given the current climate.
The biggest issue with Canadian procurement is that they wait and wait and wait and instead of spreading the big ticket items about a bit more they gov seems to wait until its absolutely has to be done the net result is it costs so much more that actually getting it done when it needs to be done.
For me the bare minimum should be 16 vessels allowing 8 on each fleet, I would say we shouldn’t be going for blue water capability, the RCN is more green water in terms of capability.
Dan – I’ve been looking for that Greek mythological metaphor for some time. Thanks for posting it.
This state of affairs didn’t happen overnight; it’s been a long time coming. The response of successive governments to this multi-faceted challenge has been a mixture of apathy, complacency, lethargy and denial. Do the political class and the CAF hierarchy understand the concept of incentives, and what incentivizes people to consider joining the CAF or stay with (ahem) the ship?
What would a notional defence policy update bring? Rather little, I fear. The last one (2017) pledged to put our people first, or so said the PM. Thus the quality-of-life issues took center stage in the document. This was perhaps a good idea, as recruiting/retention are far and away the most important issues. But it also underestimated the pickle we would be in if the recruiting/retention challenge, procurement reform, etc., were not resolved. Now budgets are tight and the cost of (naval) re-capitalization is going through the roof, along with the cost of living for service members. The fact that SSE underestimated the changes underway globally now seems less important than the fact that we don’t have the trained effective strength to deal with any of it.
I wonder what the effect would be if the PM made the time – twice a year, let’s say – to visit a CFB with the media in tow, thank those present for their service, and then, facing the cameras, extol the virtues of this kind of public service. He or she could point to some of the investments that are being made or that are on the way, but the goal would be to verbally drive home the point that the CAF and its members are a vital part of the national fabric, and that the institution, for all its challenges, is worthy of Canadians’ support. That support could be shown by trying on a set of combats or naval work dress – not necessarily for 20 years, but maybe for a little while.
Granted, skeptics might point to the fact that the PM had never him/herself served. And the PM’s popularity could always influence the public’s reaction to the ‘sales pitch’. But drawing positive national attention to the institution on a regular basis surely couldn’t hurt. It may be one of many tools/means to re-constitute and revitalize the CAF, along with attention to the quality-of-life issues.
Hello again Barnacle Bill,
Yes, most of us would agree that the financial and personnel issues now confronting the CAF, and the RCN in particular, have been brewing for quite some time. There is a bit of a chicken-egg dimension to these issues. On the one hand, as you point out, governments have been reluctant to inject the levels of funding that would be required to enable the Forces to carry out the commitments, roles, and missions that our federal leaders regularly assign to our military. On the other hand, perhaps in response to this chronic under funding, when Ottawa occasionally is ready to provide funds for specific defence programs, the military tends to respond voraciously and to demand the ‘all-singing-all-dancing’ gold-plated best of equipment. Doubtless this rather undisciplined response stems from our military leaders’ belief (based on hard-won experience) that this procurement opportunity may be their last chance to purchase anything for the next 40-50 years. No real appetite suppressant here! Of course, it does not help the military’s ‘poor us’ complaints, when they are compelled to return sizeable sums of unspent capital funds each year, even ‘though the reasons for this are not entirely of their own making.
What is essentially missing from this unfortunate dynamic is a mutual, and reciprocal, understanding of the different organizational cultures that animate each of the political and military spheres of activity.
This is why I think the Defence Structure Review process of 1974-75 remains so instructive even today. In trying to assess the lessons of the DSR, Peter Haydon and I concluded in our article,
“The DSR was the culmination of a decade of the Forces unsuccessful attempts to live within an unrealistically restrictive funding envelope. The reason the Forces were successful in the 1974-75 DSR when they had not been previously, was that they grasped the core of what has come to be known now as the ‘commitment-capability gap’ in Canadian defence policy: namely, that continual reductions of the defence budget will at some point erode the Forces’ ability to carry out their politically mandated tasks. Moreover, the senior military planners not only recognized what was at the centre of this gap, but they also were able to devise a skillful strategy for rectifying it. Essentially,
they recognized that it was their duty, as CDS Dextraze put it to the Minister, Richardson, in one particularly intense discussion in 1974, to provide the Minister with ‘true facts expressed as a professional military assessment unmodified by political considerations’. And what were these ‘facts’? Simply, that it was up to the government of Canada to determine if Canadians still wanted a military in the first place, and if they did, to determine what they wanted this military to do. Once that was done, then the military pointed out quite forcefully that the Cabinet then would have a reciprocal obligation to provide the Forces with the funds necessary to carry out these agreed upon tasks and
commitments according to the best advice provided by the military itself, unadorned by ‘political considerations’.
If the DSR process of the mid-1970s has anything to teach us today, it is surely the wisdom and honesty of this simple tenet of mutual obligation between our military and civilian leaders.”
To bring this all back to your suggestions, I agree that it would be helpful if the DND and the CAF had an up-to-date and politically endorsed Defence Policy Statement to reference in their annual campaigns for appropriate levels of funding. Alas, when produced, such documents tend to be ex post facto rationalizations of whatever resources (people and equipment) the Forces happen to have on hand, rather than act as proactive guides to future action.
I also agree that it would be truly significant if the Prime Minister took the initiative in recognizing, publicly, the value of Canada’s navy not only for safeguarding our country’s security and prosperity, but also for enhancing the stability of the international rules-based order on which our core values and interests rest.
But I think the military needs broader recognition and political support within the cabinet as a whole. Harking back to the DSR process again, it was a very strongly worded document prepared by the Department of External Affairs – not DND – that made the most compelling case for retaining Canada’s NATO commitment, and the CAF’s role within it, and this document apparently helped convince the PM and his colleagues to address the defence funding problem more decisively