Canada’s decision to terminate the lease agreement for MV Wloclawek (IMO Registration No.: 8302313, pictured above) leaves the military without ready access to a sealift capability. You can read more on the original charter on the Operational Support Command website here. The department will now have to hire a ship […]
Canadian Strategic Sealift
Murray Brewster’s article entitled “DND to drop costly cargo ship” in the Thursday, 28 July, issue of The Chronicle Herald reports on the continuing problems with commercial charter arrangements to move large volumes of military equipment and supplies. Readers should check Dave Perry’s first post on this subject to get […]
Brian Stewart, formerly Senior Correspondent for CBC’s national news programme “The National” and now Distinguished Senior Fellow with the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto, filed a report on 10 February about the performance of the navy in response to the Haitian earthquake. You can read his report here. […]
The cost factors Ken Hansen outlines demonstrate the ongoing need for sealift. Indeed, with sealift costs being between one-tenth and one-seventieth the cost of airlift, coupled with the fact that many of our shipments to Afghanistan are routine in nature given the four year plus length of our current mission, […]
The Pentagon's request to Congress for $750M in 'emergency funding' to move Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) by air for use by U.S. Armed Forces in Iraq (detailed here) is an example of really 'loopy logic' when it comes to logistical planning. At a cost of $135K/vehicle, the amount […]
Robin Allan refers to the requirement as a "Big Honking Ship". The term is somewhat overly generous. The projected full load displacement of the JSS is about 28,000 tons, about 3,000 tons greater than the new US Navy San Antonio-class LPD, about the same for the Spanish Navantia LHD design, […]
This plan (David Pugliese, "Forces to lease supply ship", Daily News 18 July 2007, p.12) to charter a cargo ship for a period of a year or more was described in a presentation at the Maritime Security Conference by Lieutenant-Colonel Martha Stouffer from Canadian Operational Support Command, which was entitled […]
Everything that Peter Haydon says in his article on the "Canadian Naval Task Group" is accurate. The task group has been fundamental to our past success and it will likely be equally critical to our navy's future. The problem, however, is that the world is changing and the task group […]
The Canadian navy's sea-lift capacity has been mentioned previously in these quarters, in the context of the rumoured Conservative plan to pay-off the existing Protecteur-class replenishment ships a full two years before their replacements, the Joint Support Ships come into service. This issue resurfaced, indirectly, in Eric Lerhe's comments about […]