I bet you won’t see this reported in our major media, esp. given a possible motivating factor:

Sweden to Strengthen Presence in Afghanistan

Four days after the first jihadist suicide bomb on Swedish soil injured two in an attack in downtown Stockholm, lawmakers voted 290-20 with 19 abstentions on Dec. 15 to extend the country’s military presence in Afghanistan.

The decision allows the government to add troops to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. About 500 operate there now; the government now has authority to increase that to 855. Next year will also see more UAVs and tactical and troop transport helicopters sent to the theater [of course no Canadian political party will consider keeping our Air Wing in Afstan].

The vote in parliament, which was supported by the opposition Social Democrats and Green Alliance [emphasis added], gave no firm date for the provisional withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan. The expectation among government and opposition groups is that this may happen in 2014.

“We will not be intimidated. Our resolve is firm. What we are trying to achieve is to bring security and well-functioning civilian institutions to Afghanistan. When the U.N. calls, Sweden will come,” said Fredrik Reinfeldt, Sweden’s prime minister…

So a country with a population just under a third of Canada’s will be keeping almost as many troops in Afstan as we will after 2011. And the Swedes will not all be inside the wire:

…
A group of Swedish officers and soldiers who are part of the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team (OMLT) are based at Camp Mike Spann, about 12 kilometres south west of Mazar-i-Sharif. They act as mentors to the Afghan army and currently support commanding officers at corps and brigade level…

Seems those Vikings, even the neutral Swedes, get things–esp. the Danes (see the “Danish note” here; the Danes, unlike the Swedes, have had a serious combat role and are continuing it–unlike us).  I regret even thinking this but just maybe this country needs a real terrorist attack to wake up.

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

Mark
Ottawa

Who would?  It’s a money-losing chasm:

Feds’ plans to sell AECL melting down amid weak interest in Candu technology

Earlier:

Good

Mark
Ottawa

Poor Peter MacKay (note the US GAO report near end at link) might do well to read this post by CDN Aviator at Milnet.ca:

…
The December issue of “Air Forces Monthly” summed up the issues with the F-35 program pretty well i think. In summary ( i dont have a digital copy, sorry) :

- A rapid and major redisign to save weight occured in 2004-2005 led to an 18-month delay and follow-on issues;

- Prototype AA-1 is now unrepresentative of the planned production model

- AA-1 suffered a critical electrical failiure on may 3rd, 2007 and has remained dogged with problems inducing further delays in the tet program;

- All versions of the F-35 are suffering from cooling nd thermal management issues. This resulted in the F-35B requiring a major re-design of the lift-fan doors;

- The F-35C was designed with a hamilton Sundstrand power generator that, reportedly, supplies only 65% of the required electrical output;

- The F-35 is now at tyre-limiting speeds due to an increase in T/O speed;

- The US defence Contract management Agency has found that the project is in serious disaray with design changes and on-time delivery by 3rd party suppliers;

- In August 2010, LM admited to production problems where key parts of the wing were delivered well after the wing had already been installed. This required the wing to be partially disassembeld and forced LM to slow production;

- F-35 flight testing has acheived less in 4 years, with more aircraft, than F-22 testing accomplished in 3 years;

- F-35 OT&E is 13 months behing schedule. This is 13 months behind the schedule established in May 2008, a schedule that was already 18 months behing what was established in 2001. this means a 4 year program delay;

- Flight testing has failed to hit its objectives in 2008 and 2009;

- Most of the SDD aircraft are at least 6 months late flying;

- Mission system test aircraft delays have been more serious despite the use of the B737 CATB;

- There are growing concerns that the F-35 will enter service well before OT&E is completed. This has obvious follow-on effects and will likely result in lenghty modifications programs;

- The US Congressional research Service identified a cost growth of 38% for the F-35 between 2001 and 2007. This put the cost of an F-35 ( minus R&D) at 81.2 million dollars 9 original LM estimates were a $50M flyaway cost). Further GAO evaluation put the F-35 cost ( without R&D) at $112M;

- Only certification by the Sec. Def. that the F-35 was essential to national security (and that no other alternatives exist) has allowed the program to survive N-M cancellation;

- RAND corporation estimates cost of an F-35A at $108.7M, the F-35B/C at $127M. This is very close to the $138M production cost for an F-22;

- F-35 operating and support costs will be significantly higher that the fighters it replaces ( in stark contrast to what L-M was promising). The USN now estimates that the costs of F-35 ownership will be 40% higher than that of the “legacy” Hornets and harriers;

- There are still serious concerns WRT to exactly what will be delivered to international JSF partners;

- The F-35′s small weapons load is of growing concern to USAF officials;

- The F-35B will not be able to operate in the same conditions that the AV-8 could.

Anyways, not advocating anything here, just posting a bit of a summary of issues.

Mark
Ottawa

Bouhammer’s Afghan Blog explains some realities.  The Afghans are Muslims and people too:

…
COIN is just another mission in combat, no different than a deliberate defense or a movement to contact. COIN is also not new, we have been doing it for years. We did it in WWII, Vietnam, etc., etc. Our US Special Forces have been executing COIN since their inception in the 60s. It has had other names like Foreign Internal Defense (FID) which it was known as for years in the Special Ops Community. And just like the risk that SF takes or our ETTs and MITT teams have been taking for years, the teams must always have their guard up and always paying attention to the local nationals, never fully trusting them. When I was an ETT a few years ago my team was always in “RED” status on our weapons and we always had at least one weapon with us on the FOB. Since we lived with the Afghans on the FOB, our guard was always up that one of them could turn on us. There have been embedded advisors (ETT, PMT, STTs) being killed by Afghan forces since we started embedding with them. Does that mean we just abandon the mission and not train them anymore?

…I am not saying to trust them all, as I never did 100% because they didn’t have US ARMY on their chest, but you have to trust them some as we are tasked with embedding and training them. Just because they are an Afghan or a Muslim does not mean they are the enemy. I have met many Afghans that I would and I did proudly fight side by side with. I have many good memories of breaking bread with them and drinking chai. I have seen Afghan soldiers killed, tortured, and wounded as a result of trying to defend their country and sometimes trying to protect and defend Americans fighting with them…

So the West should just give up, especially Canada–a country of some 33 million that has taken some 150 dead, almost all in the last five years. A war that averages 30 dead service members a year? Quelle catastrophe, or, what does a country have armed forces for?

Update: From the rather sceptical NY Times:

NATO Push Deals Taliban a Setback in Kandahar

KABUL, Afghanistan — As the Obama administration reviews its strategy in Afghanistan, residents and even a Taliban commander say the surge of American troops this year has begun to set back the Taliban in parts of their southern heartland and to turn people against the insurgency — at least for now.

The stepped-up operations in Kandahar Province have left many in the Taliban demoralized, reluctant to fight and struggling to recruit, a Taliban commander said in an interview this week. Afghans with contacts in the Taliban confirmed his description. They pointed out that this was the first time in four years that the Taliban had given up their hold of all the districts around the city of Kandahar, an important staging ground for the insurgency and the focus of the 30,000 American troops whom President Obama ordered to be sent to Afghanistan last December.

“To tell you the truth, the government has the upper hand now” in and around Kandahar, the Taliban member said. A midlevel commander who has been with the movement since its founding in 1994 and knows it well, he was interviewed by telephone on the condition that his name not be used.

NATO commanders cautioned that progress on the battlefield remained tentative. It will not be clear until next summer if the government and the military can hold on to those gains, they said. Much will depend on resolving two problems: improving ineffectual local governments and strengthening Afghan troops to fight in NATO’s place.

The Taliban commander said the insurgents had made a tactical retreat and would re-emerge in the spring as American forces began to withdraw.

But in a dozen interviews, Afghan landowners, tribal elders and villagers said they believed that the Taliban could find it hard to return if American troops remained…

Meanwhile, maybe this is the paper’s effort to be fair and balanced:

Taliban Extend Reach to North, Where Armed Groups Reign

The growing violence is the north is not exactly new news, see here and here.

Mark
Ottawa

Interesting that the supposed price is very similar to that for Canada ($9 billion for 65 planes), that Lockheed Martin says it can start deliveries in 2016 (the same year we are supposed to take first delivery),  and that LM is promising the Koreans lots of industrial benefits. Yet our government refuses to hold a competition of our own. Here’s what the company is saying:

LOCKHEED DISPELS DOUBTS OVER F-35 IN S. KOREA’S FIGHTER JET PROJECT

Lockheed Martin Corp. can deliver F-35 fighter jets as early as 2016 if it wins South Korea’s multi-billion dollar contract for a fighter modernization program, a senior company executive said Tuesday, dismissing doubts over a delay in the new warplane’s flight-test schedule.

South Korean officials say the cost rise for an individual F-35 aircraft, stemming from the delay, is a potential obstacle for Lockheed in an upcoming tender by Seoul for 60 fighter jets, valued at 9.7 trillion won (US$8.5 billion).

Seoul is expected to invite bidders as early as next year for the third stage of the fighter modernization program to replace aging F-4E and F-5E/F jets that have been involved in several deadly crashes in recent years. The delivery of new aircraft is scheduled to start in 2016.

The delay in the flight-test schedule, however, would force South Korea to buy F-35s after 2018 if it selects Lockheed, South Korean officials said. Lockheed, Boeing Co. and a consortium of European firms led by EADS have expressed interest in the tender.

“We are confident in our ability to deliver aircraft to the Republic of Korea (South Korea) Air Force beginning as early as 2016,” Steve O’Bryan, Lockheed’s vice president for F-35 business development, said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency…

Officials at the South’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration, the agency in charge of the F-X program, said they will make technology transfer one of the top priorities in the upcoming tender, so it is important to produce fighter jets with basic stealth capabilities.

O’Bryan said the F-35 would be advantageous in this context.

“The unique opportunities that exist on the F-35 program from an industrial perspective allow a country’s industries
to recapitalize their capabilities at the same time their air force recapitalizes with the next generation of fighter aircraft,” he said…

Hmm. As for getting work for industry…

F-35: UK making out like bandits? MND MacKay “blowing smoke out his tailpipe”/Dutch Update

Update: A relevant comment at a Maclean’s blog comment thread:

…If the South Koreans (a nation infinitely more likely to have to fight China in the future than we are!) are holding a competition to determine if the F-35 makes the most sense for their air force or not, why didn’t we again? ‘Cause Lockheed Martin seems to indicate that should the South Koreans choose the Lightening II, they are going to get their F-35s at the same time as us, for the same price, even though they’re holding a competition between the Silent Eagle, the Typhoon and the JSF.

Upperdate: At Defense Technology’s “Ares” blog:

A third F-35A [the version our government plans to buy], the first to be equipped with the mission system, arrived at Edwards AFB in California on Dec. 11 to begin flight testing…

…it’s worth remembering that, in September last year, the JSF program office leadership was pojecting that 12 aircraft would be flying by now, each logging 12 test sorties a month. That goal is unlikely to be achieved until well in 2011.

Mark
Ottawa

…he can’t remember where to find it.

Mark
Ottawa

The end of a Wall St. Journal story; our media do not seem to have noticed so far:

Training Shortfall Persists
Defense Officials See a Shortage of NATO Specialists to Teach Afghan Forces
…
U.S. defense officials said they are hoping they can persuade Canada to help close the training gap. Canada has said it will send 950 trainers—not necessarily specialized—to replace its combat forces after they leave at the end of 2011. Washington wants Ottawa to send at least some of those trainers earlier.

A spokeswoman for Canada’s Department of National Defence said planning for the training mission was still under way [see 2) here].

I wonder how the government will respond.

Mark
Ottawa

I wish the Dippers and suchlike, and our major media, would read things like this from Bouhammer’s Afghan Blog; ain’t them Yanks and Rebels just awful?  Hell, it’s in the public domain so not worth the attention of Assiduous Asshole Assange.  Nor, more’s the pity, of the major media.  Not their agenda either:

Tobin’s Pass: Bridging a river, bonding the people

The following was sent to me by good friend JC who is currently serving in Afghanistan

PARWAN PROVINCE, Afghanistan – From pursuing insurgents over the
daunting mountain peaks of Afghanistan to rescuing a local villager’s
car over a 130-foot bank, the soldiers of 2nd Platoon, Troop A, 1st
Squadron, 172nd Cavalry Regiment, have proven their dedication to the
people of Afghanistan and fortified a steadfast bond with the people
of Parwan province. Nowhere is this bond more evident than in the
Ghorband District Center where laughter and song poured out of the
small concrete buildings as soldiers spend evenings sitting
side-by-side cross-legged on pillows with their Afghan National Police
counterparts.

This figurative bond is exactly why the soldiers were determined not
to leave Afghanistan without building a literal one for the people of
Ghorband, who desperately needed a bridge to cross a swift river that
parted two villages from the local bazaar and medical clinic…

U.S. Army Spc. Brian Lucas, a food service specialist from Sugar Hill, N.H., stops to take one last look at a bridge soldiers from the 2nd and Mortar Platoons of Troop A, 1st Squadron, 172nd Cavalry Regiment [more here], finished Nov. 10 for the residents of Ghorband District. (U.S. ARMY STAFF SGT. WHITNEY HUGHES)…

I do wish the Canadian government, through the Canadian Forces, allowed similar expression. Note that the immediately preceding link is an official one.

Mark
Ottawa

…just like the US one (and all other prospective buyers).  The end of a post yesterday:

“Rivals Target JSF”/ More on why Update
…
Meanwhile our government claims our F-35s will cost 74.5 million each.  Sure.  The most recent limited production batch for the US have prices (without engines) of around $150 million each, it would seem.

Now we see the government finally coming somewhat clean:

…
[David] Burt [director for air requirements] conceded the $70-million to $78-million price tag per plane is not guaranteed. It could rise or fall, he said, depending on the timing of the delivery. Lockheed Martin has only recently started the F-35′s mass-production process. The earlier the slot in which an aircraft is produced, the more costly it is [emphasis added, our government says the Air Force will start receiving the planes in 2016--when full-rate production will just be starting and the full-rate price will therefore be at its highest].

Burt added that commodities prices and other factors could also drive up prices. “But they could also drive prices down,” he noted.

Talk about grasping at refuelling nozzles:

Does anyone really think the acquisition costs for 65 aircraft will stay anywhere near the $9 billion the government has budgeted? So how many F-35s might the Air Force end up with if the government does not add more money (most unlikely under continuing budget pressures)?  Our slowly shrinking fighter force–unless we hold a competition?

And note this from 2008, and how our government is now being exceedingly economical with the truth when it says the F-35 was somehow selected under the Liberal government in 2001 as a result of the American JSF competition:

Canada Lowers Number Of Planned Fighters

Canada has reduced the number of new fighters it plans to purchase to 65 from 80, and stresses that it has not formally selected the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) despite having participated in its development…

Despite the widespread and understandable assumption that Harper was referring to the F-35, Canada has not yet selected its next fighter, the DND emphasizes. Like several of the international participants in the JSF program, Ottawa plans to evaluate other candidate combat aircraft before making a decision, which is required by 2012.

Yet the government rushed to a decision two years early in 2010; this, I think, is the reason.

Update: A version of the post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog. Below is a list of contributors to the blog, weird:

David Bercuson
Douglas Bland
Derek Burney
Paul Chapin
Mark Collins
Mark Entwistle
Jack Granatstein
Colin Robertson
Hugh Segal

Upperdate: Tom Burbage, Executive Vice-President and General Manager F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program Integration, will be appearing at 1530 this afternoon before the Commons’ Standing Committee on National Defence, video will be here. Somehow one doubts the discussion will be terribly informative or to the point.  One suspects there will a great concentration on jobs (pork) from all parties.

Uppestdate: No video, only audio.  The opposition parties performed better than the government, asking a fair number of fairly substantive questions as opposed to the Conservatives’ cheerleading ones.  Though no MP seemed to have a serious grasp of the related issues involved.

Mr Burbage held to the LM “all is well” party line, as indeed he would, wouldn’t he? He did make clear that Canada would pay the same price per plane as the US for the A model (unless there is Canadianization, e.g., for method of aerial refuelling).  He maintained that the $74.5 million per plane price, for deliveries starting in 2016, was well inside the ballpark. But that depends on the numbers in actual US full-rate production at that time, does it not?

No-one knows what the production rate will actually be in 2016 (if we actually start receiving the aircraft then); therefore Mr Burbage cannot really know the price per plane then. That depends on unknown US government–administration and Congress–decisions. So our government cannot know the real costs when even the Americans do not.

As for industrial benefits, Mr Burbage made it clear that the gazillions Canadian companies are touted to make by our government depend completely on total F-35 sales world-wide. And those are increasingly unclear, both in the US and elsewhere, think of those European budget crunches. So the industrial winnings remain a crap-shoot.

There are an awful lot of assumptions in play.  Mr Burbage (an intelligent and informed professional, what he must have made of our MPs) also made it clear that Canada had no substantive role in the 2001 competitive selection of the F-35 by the US, and that Canada was in no wise committed by that selection.  Not the line our government has been spinning.

Meanwhile at the Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs:

…
Canadian Commentary
…

Mark Collins — The 3Ds Blog
F-35’s final cost is unknown – More…

Beyond Uppestdate: Our media simply regurgitate Mr Burbage’s opening statement. Pathetic reporting:

Canada could lose out on billions in contracts if F-35 deal yanked: Lockheed Martin

U.S. jet exec shoots down criticisms of F-35

The Brits, for their part, are reducing their planned F-35 buy, probably severely. UK companies have the largest share of non-US F-35 work. Will that be reduced with the Brits’ much smaller F-35 acquisition? That’s what Mr Burbage said would happen to Canadian companies if we do not buy the F-35.  And if we do buy the plane will our firms pick up some of that UK business? That would follow Mr Burbage’s logic.  One wishes an MP had asked the question; and one wishes our media would.

A final note on developments abroad:

JSF in Crosshairs of Dutch Defense Review
…
Dutch defense minister Hans Hillen says the F-16 replacement program — effectively the purchase of F-35s — will be part of the larger review of force structure in light of planned reductions in defense spending…

The Dutch are slated to buy 85 aircraft, but there has been much talk about reducing that figure to slightly more than 50 units.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to pressure Lockheed Martin for cost reductions.

Mark
Ottawa

Its analysis side certainly was no great shakes in the case of Iraqi WMDs.  And certain former officers have been very critical of its operational activities, as discussed in this essay in the NY  Times Book Review:

…these new memoirs cannot be shoved aside so easily. The most intriguing come from the case officers, like Jones, who actually meet foreign agents and collect information for the C.I.A. on a daily basis.

In book after book, operatives describe an agency that hires smart, aggressive and patriotic Americans, and then does its best to make sure they fail. Since 2008, two memoirs, Jones’s “Human Factor” and Charles S. Faddis’s “Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the C.I.A.,” have gone so far as to call for the agency to be abolished and replaced.

While not the best written of the recent books, Jones’s paints the fullest picture of the agency’s troubles. He claims he served under “nonofficial cover” — that is, overseas and without diplomatic protection — for more than a decade. The agency never publicly discloses how many similar operatives are working, but Jones’s account makes clear that the number is tiny, at most a couple of hundred worldwide. A vast majority of employees work either at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va., or under diplomatic cover in American embassies.

Jones regards this breakdown of resources as worse than shameful. Employees under diplomatic cover are generally known to the intelligence services of the countries where they work and can operate only with the tacit approval of their host nations. Only nonofficial operatives can recruit agents in true secrecy. Only nonofficial operatives have a real chance of meeting or infiltrating terrorist groups. But these operatives face much higher risks than those under diplomatic cover, and the C.I.A. fears using them…

Charles Faddis, a case officer for 20 years, argues in “Beyond Repair.” Faddis describes the agency as rife with incompetence at every level and compares its leadership training unfavorably with that of the military. “Sixty years after its founding,” he writes, the agency “has never developed any system for the selection, training and cultivation of leaders.” Even the Sept. 11 attacks did not produce meaningful change. Faddis argues that adding a director of national intelligence to oversee the agency simply imposed another layer of bureaucracy. Of the 4,000 new employees in the director’s office, “not a single one of them runs operations. Not a single one of them recruits assets or produces intelligence. What they do produce, however, is process, lots of it.”..

The two books are also discussed at this earlier post,

9 to 5: The spies not in the cold…

where I write that…

…
I have little confidence that any newly-created Canadian foreign intelligence agency would be any different and I doubt the need for one.  From an earlier post:

…I do not think a separate Canadian foreign intelligence agency (i.e. HUMINT) should be formed; the Conservatives thankfully dropped their 2006 election promise to create one.  Early in the campaign they had pledged to “Expand the Canadian Foreign Intelligence Agency”–then they realized one didn’t exist (see “Securing our borders…The plan” at link).

Mark
Ottawa