I'm sure there are security reasons, but it still seems so wasteful.
I suspect it makes absolutely zero sense for Canada of the 50s to be designing and building its own fighter-bomber jets, but the mythos is strong.
And the vibe of the whole thing is very topical, of course, with the US basically demanding we spend more money subsidizing their defense industry by buying their overpriced armaments from them while at the same time key people in the administration openly musing about the elimination of our sovereignty.
The US: having it both ways ("be our subservient raw resource provider and nothing else" and "oh, but it costs so much to defend you") since forever.
Surprised this doesn't get mentioned more.
If Canada wanted to, we could easily scale military spending by investing it in homegrown projects instead of spending it at the altar of the mililtary industrial complex.
It's easy for America to complain about other countries not spending as much when it's the one that owns the market we all shop at.
We're about to find out if we want to. This is a major point in Carney's defence plan.
I personally would love to contribute in whatever way I could to homegrown manufacturing, tech, and maybe even defence sector, and am willing to put in the hours and even compensation cut to make things happen in this country.
I just hope there's investors out there willing to make things happen, and that the gov't doesn't just do its usual thing of protecting a few existing corporate buddies.
Sweden has one heck of a domestic defence industry, but it's tailor made for its requirements and expensive. The SAAB Gripen is one of the best planes in the world for what it was designed to do: operate dispersed off of regional roads when your main infrastructure is destroyed or unavailable. But its flyway cost is the same as an F-35 because hundreds have been built instead of thousands. And the Gripen's engine is still from General Electric.
The NLAW anti-tank weapon is a good example of export success. It was developed jointly with the British and has had a lot of exports and proven success in Ukraine.
On top of that, Canada's defence civil service is terrible at procurement. Even when we buy foreign, we manage to drive up the costs to the point where its rediculously price just to shove in some domestic "advantage", rather than focusing that money on stuff we are really good at (we tend to kick ass at sonar and anti-sub tech, for example).
You could remove "defence" from that and describe almost every large company or gov't in this country, too.
We need a moral and civil reform in this country, to really build again like we used to. Civic spirit revival.
Look at the joke of the Eglinton LRT, or even more so the Hamilton LRT. Even when we commit to building things, it turns into a swamp of mismanagement and a game of political hot potato.
Most embarassing thing about the Eglinton LRT is it sounds like its our (software) profession that is to blame for the latest series of dysfunctions. I'm disgusted.
Something similar happened to the RAF Nimrod: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12294766 , although I think the safety case was much stronger there after one caught fire in the air.
It's very Trumpian. Perhaps the steelman argument might be "if we leave this thing in limbo, people will continue to advocate spending more money on it". Sometimes institutions or individuals in them will have a pet project that they keep pushing beyond economic sense, and the only way to get them to stop is to shoot their pet.
Separately, the planes were all very old, and had been constructed over several years so were all slightly different. Projects that tried to do fleet upgrades usually went massively over-budget because each airframe had to be treated as a special case, even for things that you would expect to be standardised like the basic fuselage and wing dimensions.
[Edit] The Haddon-Cave review was exceptional in that it actually named and shamed those in the MOD and industry who helped develop the bodged safety case. People in the MOD and industry lost their jobs after the crash.
[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
> Prime Minister John Diefenbaker [ordered] all the completed planes (five plus a nearly finished sixth) to be chopped up and destroyed, along with all plans and blueprints so that the plane could never fly again.
Stopping the program was understandable, but the destruction is mysterious and the article doesn't say a word about why. Strange.
For pure speed, they notched 1,852 mph. They could climb to 98,425 feet in four minutes and 3.86 seconds and ultimately reached an absolute altitude record of 123,520 feet.
For anyone on mobile (android/chrome at least) select "Desktop Site" under browser settings to see five historical images. They don't show up for me at all in the default mobile view.
The so called "Deifenbunker" is now a museum open to the public. Pretty interesting, being in it feels like being in a ship.
UncleSlacky•2h ago