As the chart below illustrates planned production for the US services keeps slipping away.  Though I’m not convinced the aircraft is in a “death spiral” as the author of the post at Flightglobal suggests:

Johan Boeder, a Dutch defense analyst and editor of jsfnieuws.nl, has compiled a chart showing how the Department of Defense’s planned F-35 orders have declined since contract award in October 2001…

Learning curve theory posits that manufacturing costs decline by 12% each time output doubles. With each new delay that results in a further production cutback, the F-35′s affordability challenge becomes more difficult…

	2001	Sep-06	Nov-06	Apr-07	Nov-08	Aug-09	Jan-11
FY05	10
FY06	22
FY07	49	5	5	2	2	2	2
FY08	82	18	16	12	12	12	12
FY09	108	52	47	16	14	14	14
FY10	156	70	56	30	30	30	28
FY11	170	98	64	43	43	43	32
FY12	170	133	103	82	82	82	32
FY13	170	143	135	90	90	90	42
FY14	170	157	157	116	110	110	62
FY15	170	160	160	130	130	130	81
FY16	170	160	160	130	130	130	108
Totals	1447	996	903	651	643	643	413

Earlier:

F-35s for our Air Force in 2016? Good flipping luck

Canadian Government has no idea what the F-35 will cost…

Mark
Ottawa

First, from an earlier post:

…
Canadians, because of labels and their own ignorance, simply fail to recognize that President Obama and his actual policies are well to the right of our so-called Conservatives. I challenge anyone to name one major issue of public policy that would disprove my assertion, e.g.:

Health care
Afstan
Missile defence
Income tax levels
Foreign ownership of the media
Military spending
Immigration control of borders
Dealing with terrorism suspects
Capital punishment
Etc., etc., etc…

Earlier on the theme at Daimnation!:

Bush-lite

When will besotted Canadians wake up to the real Obama?

Stephen Harper is no Barack Obama

…

Now Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, much brighter than most of our dim pundit herd, makes the point that our Conservatives are hardly conservative compared to US Republicans–or Democrats sometimes (in fact much more often than Mr Gardner recognizes, see above):

…our erstwhile Reformers look remarkably moderate — which is to say, sweetly Canadian — and are getting steadily more so…

Yes, Conservatives and Republicans may both be “conservative” but they are remarkably different creatures. Name the issue. Health care? If the most right-wing member of the Conservative cabinet gave a speech about his government’s policies to Republicans, he’d be tarred, feathered, and put on the no-fly list. Multiculturalism and bilingualism? The Conservatives have said nothing that would offend a San Francisco city councillor. God, gays, guns? Stephen Harper is slightly to the left of Barack Obama on all three [emphasis added].

And so on down the list…

On economics, there’s an even bigger gap.

“Appropriate, well-timed stimulus measures have yielded dividends in jobs and growth,” Stephen Harper said in a press release this week. Got that? In effect, Harper said, “our Keynesian approach worked!” If he were a Republican, he would have been excommunicated.

To today’s Republicans, economic policy begins and ends with tax cuts. No matter what the circumstances may be — boom, bust, surplus, deficit, whatever — the solution is always the same. Always. “Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,” Republican Tom DeLay once said.

But not just any old tax cut will do for Republicans. The focus has to be on cuts for the rich…

Much to their credit, Canadian Conservatives seem to recognize that cutting taxes won’t magically erase the deficit. And back when they had a surplus to spend, they took two points off the GST, which made the overall tax burden more progressive. In supply-side terms, that’s heresy. But supply-side is a religion with few followers among Conservatives…

Mark
Ottawa

Our government, i.e. the prime minister, has basically lost interest (if they ever really had much)–even while the CF have some six more months of combat:

Conservatives shut down key Afghan cabinet committee
…
Military historian Jack Granatstein questioned whether the committee accomplished anything.

“I guess the question is: what has it been doing up till now?” he said. “There are a number of people who think it hadn’t been doing anything.”

Mr. Granatstein said Mr. Harper, and Mr. Harper alone, guided Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan and that his sense of direction lately has to be questioned.

When Mr. Harper came to power in 2006, he pledged that Canada would never “cut and run” while he was prime minister.

After Parliament approved a two-year extension to July 2011, Mr. Harper was adamant that the mission would end as scheduled, but he eventually agreed to have non-combat military trainers stay on for three more years.

Douglas Bland, chair of the Defence Management Studies Program at Queen’s University in Kingston, lamented the disbanding of the committee because it focused bureaucrats from several departments on important national security issues and forced them to work together.

“A lot of bureaucrats have come to understand the broad meaning of national security and they need leadership from the cabinet to keep that up, otherwise they’ll wander off and do other things that bureaucrats do in the stovepipe democracy,” Mr. Bland said [emphasis added, likely a key consequence of disbanding the committee--civilian bureaucratic institutional structures, and knowledge, related to conducting war will rapidly atrophy].

“The lesson has been (that) war-like operations — and that’s what this was — require the attention of ministers and especially the prime minister.”

Mr. Bland said it is simply not good enough to leave the Afghanistan mission as an agenda item for cabinet’s Foreign Affairs and Defence committee…

Actually it’s been clear for three years or so that Mr Harper had lost any real commitment to the military mission:

Prime Minister grumpy about Afghanistan

Meanwhile his tardiness while finally flip-flopping to agree to an ongoing CF training mission is leading to its own problems:

Well, well, well: The consequences of delaying our Afghan decision

Great way to run a (serious?) country’s war effort. As for combat:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to send an additional 1,400 Marine combat forces to Afghanistan, officials said, in a surprise move ahead of the spring fighting season to try to cement tentative security gains before White House-mandated troop reductions begin in July.

The Marine battalion could start arriving on the ground as early as mid-January. The forces would mostly be deployed in the south, around Kandahar [emphasis added--to where our soldiers now are?], where the U.S. has concentrated troops over the past several months…

Mark
Ottawa

A delightful piece of writing by Paul at Celestial Junk, do read to the end:

The Remaking of the Liberal Party of Canada

Earlier:

PMSH=WLMK?

Mark
Ottawa

Unfortunately not Canadian:

A Marine Corps squadron recently returned to the United States after a historic deployment as the first of the service’s F/A-18 Hornets to operate from a ground base in Afghanistan.

With Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232 operating out of Kandahar Air Field, the unit’s pilots were much closer to infantry troops than they were during previous deployments when they operated of off naval aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea or Persian Gulf.

Their proximity to ground fighting during their last deployment allowed them to be more responsive and increased the number of successful combat missions, according to unit leaders.

That “feet dry” presence let pilots flying the squadron’s dozen F/A-18C Hornets and a couple of twin-seat F/A-18Ds work closely with some dozen ground combat units operating around Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province.

Sgt. Deanne Hurla / Marine Corps Cpl. Scott Esker, a plane captain with Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 232, directs Capt. Daniel Tongson, a VMFA-232 pilot, into a parking space at Kandahar Airbase, Afghanistan. The squadron became the service’s first to operate from a land base in the country, rather than from Navy aircraft carriers…

Our government, for its part, has not been willing to employ our CF-18s in Afghanistan to support the CF and allied forces there even though urged to do so by our allies.  Too fearful of political and media reaction if a bomb or missile killed some civilians accidentally, don’t you know.  Yet our Air Force supposedly needs stealthy, initial attack, bomb-truck F-35s while the US Navy, in addition to planning to buy F-35Cs, continues to acquire new Super Hornets.

Update: Latest F-35 scuttlebutt:

U.S. to detail $100 billion in Pentagon savings, cuts: sources
…
The Pentagon’s largest weapons program, the Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, is facing another restructuring that could extend the program’s development phase by up to two years, said a third source familiar with the plans.

The program was already restructured last year, adding 13 months to the development phase…

If the program is so delayed there is no way Canada will start getting the planes in 2016 as the government has claimed. Nor will they cost in the $70-$80 million range. See this earlier post:

Canadian Government has no idea what the F-35 will cost…

Also recent and relevant:

F-35 Begins Year With Test Objectives Unmet

Upperdate: A version of this post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

The Jerc has landed:

Canadian pilots will be able to drop cargo to troops on the ground with far greater accuracy now that a new Hercules aircraft has arrived in southern Afghanistan.

The first of Canada’s new Hercules C-130J aircraft arrived at Kandahar Airfield over the weekend, with a second scheduled to arrive later this spring…

The new aircraft look almost identical to the old ones, except that they are slightly longer and can seat up to 125 people instead of 92.

But that’s about where the similarities end. The new Hercules are largely automated and require fewer crew members.

Pilots say it will be easier to drop supplies to soldiers because a computer now calculates wind speed, weather conditions and other variables. The computer can hit a drop point within 30 metres. Before, when it was done manually, supplies could land much farther from the drop point.

“When we’re doing an air drop, the computer’s actually doing the drop and we’re monitoring it. So it tends to be much, much more accurate,” Wintrup said.

Most of the flying to ferry troops and equipment around Afghanistan is done by Canadians.

The Conservative government ordered 17 new Hercules aircraft from Lockheed Martin three years ago at a cost of $1.4 billion [more here]. So far, the company has delivered five aircraft. Two will be in Kandahar and the rest will be based at the air force base in Trenton, Ont.

The entire order is supposed to be filled by the end of 2012…

From the DND news release:

…
The first CC-130J Hercules tactical aircraft arrived in Canada on June 4, 2010, six months ahead of the original scheduled delivery date. The Air Force team demonstrated its agility, flexibility and professional capabilities by readying the aircraft and its crews for deployment to Afghanistan in less than seven months. Training, maintenance and operation procedures needed to be adapted to the specific characteristics of this aircraft, while ensuring an efficient and effective implementation schedule that will facilitate safe, effective, and sustained operations…

All 17 CC-130Js will be based at 8 Wing Trenton, along with the future Air Mobility Training Centre that will house the equipment and personnel required to train the operators and maintainers of the CC-130J Hercules aircraft…

More on the plane here and a photo:

Remember all the controversy over the Conservative government’s effectively sole-sourcing this contract, ignoring the Airbus A400M? Well the A400M was a paper aircraft in 2006 and the Jerc was a real one–and has been delivered ahead of schedule. Meanwhile the A400M is still in flight testing and will be several years late entering service.

Our four C-17 strategic airlifters were also, sensibly, sole-sourced and arrived quickly and on time. Another plane that had been proved in service. In the case of both these transports there really was only one aircraft that fit the CF’s bill. Whereas in another case we really do not know.

Meanwhile another very-long planned aircraft purchase continues to go nowhere.  This from the Liberals’ federal Budget, March 23, 2004, “The Importance of Canada’s Relationship to the World“:

…
Another major priority for Canada’s military is the purchase of modern Fixed Wing Search and Rescue aircraft (SAR) to replace older Hercules aircraft and Canada’s fleet of Buffalo aircraft. Under Defence’s current plan, deliveries of the new aircraft will begin much later in the decade. This budget sets aside non-budgetary resources to allow the Department of National Defence to move this acquisition forward in time without displacing other planned capital investments. By doing so, the Government will accelerate the process so that deliveries of the replacement SAR planes to Canada’s military can begin within 12 to 18 months…

Well it’s now 2011 and just last spring this government essentially went back to the drawing board on the whole project–see also “Rescue Required: Canada’s Search-And-Rescue Aircraft Program”. I strongly suspect a major cause for delays is lobbying by Bombardier to have a (unsuitable) version of its Q-Series considered. And others are lobbying too:

Union selfishness and new Air Force aircraft…

Almost seven freaking years and no competition is now under way. Help.

Update: A version of this post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

You can’t always get what you want. See this Nov. 17 post by BruceR. at Flit:

I hear Mazar in spring is even nicer than Kabul in winter

Matthew Fisher continues to perform the sin of actual journalism by trying to pin down people on where Canadian troops in Afghanistan post-2011 will be going and what they’ll be doing. This was telling:

As Canada is insisting that most of its trainers will be in or near the capital, which is already awash with trainers from other countries, there is immense interest in what specific training tasks Canada is to be assigned by NATO and how its trainers will be shoehorned into already-crowded bases in the capital…

…the demand for what could be readily offered [by the CF] becomes rather small. So in the Kabul area, there were only 106 critical jobs in police and army training that could be filled by “regular” soldiers as of the NTM-A [NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan] annual report, dated three weeks ago… far less than what Canada is now offering…

Looks like Bruce was bang-on:

Canadian trainers likely to be sent across Afghanistan

The Canadian Forces is rushing to draw up a list of military trainers to send to Afghanistan once Canada’s combat mission ends next summer, but senior officers say training positions in the safer regions of the country are already growing few and far between.

The federal government announced earlier this year that up to 950 Canadian soldiers would participate in a three-year mission to train the nascent Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police force.

The Conservative government insisted that the Canadian trainers would be based “inside the wire,” working in secure bases in the relatively stable area around Kabul, the Afghan capital.

But the NATO training organization in Afghanistan is expanding rapidly and needs trainers at sites across the country.

Many of the training jobs in Kabul have been snapped up by nations who committed to the training mission much earlier and Canada may have to send its soldiers into riskier regions of the country.

Maj.-Gen. Stuart Beare, the Canadian deputy commander of the NATO training mission, told CTV News that the coalition needs military and police trainers in almost every province of Afghanistan…

Col. Paul Scagnetti is one of a group of Canadian officers that helped establish the Afghan Army Command College in Kabul, helping to train the Afghan army’s future leaders.

“They know how to fight, there’s no doubt about that: They’ve been doing it for 30 years,” Scagnetti said. “What we’re trying to do is give them a structure, an organization that’ll make them more effective in their fighting.”

But Scagnetti and his fellow trainers have been so successful that they’ve put themselves out of at least one training job: when the new Canadian-funded college opens next spring it will be run by Afghans [I think that may well be the staff college that Brian Platt posted about when he was in Kabul--unembedded--in early November] .

Caught by surprise at the government’s announcement of the training mission, the Canadian Forces is now working overtime to draw up plans for where the Canadian troops will go and what exactly they will be doing.

Lt.-Gen. Marc Lessard, the head of Canadian Expeditionary Force Command, acknowledged that Canada may have little choice but to send soldiers into more volatile regions of Afghanistan.

“The direction I have from (Chief of Defence Staff) Gen. Natynczyk is that it is to be Kabul-centric,” Lessard told CTV News. “And what that means is that the emphasis is to be on Kabul, but not solely Kabul.”

Details of the training mission may become clearer after a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels later in January…

Update remark: Politics, politics, all is politics.

Mark
Ottawa

Further to this post,

Militants? Insurgents? Nice flipping guys?

Douglas Bland does not speak with forked tongue in the Ottawa Citizen:

Merely stating the obvious
It is quite proper for a military counter-insurgency manual to identify native Warrior Societies as a potential threat to Canadian sovereignty

A masked Mohawk Warrior protests in Kanesatake in January 2004. To suggest that the Mohawk Warrior Society can be viewed as an insurgency is not to label anyone, or any organization, terrorist, argues Douglas Bland.
Photograph by: Shaun Best , Reuters, Citizen Special

The Canadian Forces does not owe the Mohawk Warrior Society or the wider First Nations an apology for references to the society in the first draft of the armed forces manual on Counter Insurgency Operations, or COIN…

The various so-called Warrior Societies proclaim in their several websites that their organizations are armed forces meant to act as a type of militia in the defence of First Nations communities and their rights. They are, arguably, an open challenge to the sovereignty of Canada, unless, of course, Canada surrenders in some fashion its right and responsibility to defend all Canadian territory and all Canadian citizens, including every reserve and all aboriginal people, to the self-appointed Warrior Societies…

…to suggest that the Mohawk Warrior Society can be viewed as an insurgency is not to label anyone, or any organization, terrorist. To suggest that the Canadian Forces prepare its commanders to conduct anti-insurgency operations in Canada, as they did against the FLQ and at Oka, demands no apology.

The entire discussion, however, may be moot given the government’s apparent preference to cede its sovereignty to every First Nations challenge [emphasis added, Dauntless Dalton is no better] – including this one — a policy that will surely inflame disputes and make the Canadian Forces COIN training all the more necessary.

Douglas Bland is chair of the Defence Management Studies Program at Queen’s University and author of the novel Uprising, the story of a future aboriginal insurgency in Canada.

Mark
Ottawa

I cannot imagine any Canadian political leader saying this with reference to, say, Jim Balsillie:

…How are we creating opportunity for everybody? So that we celebrate wealth. We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products. We expect that person to be rich, and that’s a good thing. We want that incentive. That’s part of the free market [productive greed is indeed a Good Thing?]…

Then there’s this earlier at his press conference today from the supposedly oh so progressive Democratic President Obama:

With respect to the issue of whether gays and lesbians should be able to get married, I’ve spoken about this recently. As I’ve said, my feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this. I have friends, I have people who work for me, who are in powerful, strong, long-lasting gay or lesbian unions. And they are extraordinary people, and this is something that means a lot to them and they care deeply about.

At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have. And I think — and I think that’s the right thing to do. But I recognize that from their perspective it is not enough, and I think is something that we’re going to continue to debate and I personally am going to continue to wrestle with going forward.

If Prime Minister Harper had sad anything similar to the two above quotes he’d be crucified by the Canadian opposition and most of the punditocracy.

Canadians, because of labels and their own ignorance, simply fail to recognize that President Obama and his actual policies are well to the right of our so-called Conservatives. I challenge anyone to name one major issue of public policy that would disprove my assertion, e.g.:

Health care
Afstan
Missile defence
Income tax levels
Foreign ownership of the media
Military spending
Immigration control of borders
Dealing with terrorism suspects
Capital punishment
Etc., etc., etc…

Earlier on the theme at Daimnation!:

Bush-lite

When will besotted Canadians wake up to the real Obama?

Stephen Harper is no Barack Obama

Please take a look at the above links for a dose of reality. And at this in comparison with the official left in the UK:

Canada’s odd approach to immigration, or, currying favour

Only here would the current government be considered even remotely conservative. The terms of political discourse in this country are, to be polite, out to flipping progressive lunch. To conclude:

Stephen Harper’s agenda is so well hidden…

Mark
Ottawa

…all things considered, compare with the US below; most of us are clearly proud of how the forces have fought in Afstan (so much for the torture fracas, always mainly an inside the Queensway thing, not a Timmies’ one–see the third para here):

Canadians trust military more than government: Poll

Canadians have more trust and confidence in Canada’s armed forces than they do in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government, according to a new study.

The study, based on polling conducted by Leger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) and released exclusively to iPolitics, found that 75.7 per cent of respondents had trust and confidence in the Canadian Forces to do a good job compared to only 54.1 per cent who trusted the federal government.

While faith in both the Armed Forces and the federal government tended to rise with age, one of the sharpest divides was among English-speaking respondents — 80.3 per cent of whom trusted the military and 52.7 per cent of whom trusted the federal government.

The military also outranked the federal government among francophones. The poll found 71.7 per cent of French-speaking respondents had confidence in the military while only 49.2 per cent had confidence in the federal government.

The gap was much smaller among allophones, those whose first language is neither English or French. The poll found 67.3 per cent of allophones [hurl! that's PC-speak for most immigrants, esp. more recent] trusted the Armed Forces while 57.5 per cent trusted Harper’s government [really good news for the government and for Jason Kenney].

The lowest support for the military was among 18-24 year olds — only 51.2 per cent trusted the Armed Forces to do a good job. That age group was also the least likely to trust the federal government with only 47.8 per cent confident it would do a good job…

The U.S. military, which has been embroiled in Iraq, had the confidence of 80.7 per cent of respondents. President Barack Obama’s administration, which has struggled to restore the U.S. economy, had the confidence of 41.5 per cent…

Via Spotlight on Military and Other News (changed title). I was surprised the Anglo-Franco (more PC-speak, really RoC/Québec) split is so small. And quite depressed about the young people. Just shows what progressive education and a likely reliance on television (if any) news can do.

Mark
Ottawa