Sea Control - Sea Control 165 - Canadian Fleet Recapitalization with Tim Choi

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Links:1. Canada Chooses BAE-Lockheed Proposal to Build Frigates Based on UK's Type 26-design.2. Keel Laid for Royal Canadian Navy's Future Joint Support Ship3. Halifax Shipyard Launches Canada's Second Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ship4. The Quest for the Unconventional-Conventional Submarine5. Military Shows Off New Cyclone Helicopter Days Before First International Deployment

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha shipmates and welcome aboard Sea Control. Today we're discussing Canadian maritime challenges. Our guest is Tim Choi. As a reminder, our opinions are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be associated. And Tim, on that note, I'm going to ask you to explain your own bio there. There were a lot of notes, and I ran out of space on my sheet. Thanks very much, Jared. And it's great to be back on Sea Control. I think I was here around four years ago talking about the South China Sea issue with former President Hippo.

Oh, okay. Yeah, so that was a great time. Anyway, it's great to be back. So my name is Tim, and I'm a PhD candidate in my last year at the University of Calgary Center for Military Security and Strategic Studies. And I'm also a research fellow with the Center for the Study of Security and Development at the Dalhousie University in Halifax. And in 2017, 2018, I served as the International Security Studies Naval and Strategic Studies Fellow at Yale University. And right now, I'm also serving as the photo editor for the Canadian Naval Review. And my dissertation looks at Nordic and Canadian sea power.

Quite a number of things, but there we are. so how did you decide to get into the study of sea power and i mean that you study canadian sea power makes a lot of sense to me if you're canadian but why did you decide to wrap nordic sea power into that as well is do you just enjoy being really cold or yeah i mean i was born in hong kong where it's quite warm and coming over here uh you know the cold it's always refreshing change of pace although it's been a long time now so but anyway um so my gun to the whole arctic maritime and naval issue shtick when I was doing my master's also at the University of Calgary where I took a course on Canadian Arctic security challenges and there for my course research paper

I looked at you know the recent procurements by the various Arctic countries in terms of their naval assets and really a question back then was you know how did they stack up to each other you know if things really get out of hand you know how did they how well would they compare are they all equally ice capable? Do they all have different combat capabilities? And to what extent does that actually matter in any kind of realistic scenario? So from then on, I wanted to look at for my PhD, well, you know, what was the purpose of buying all these things? And why asking why, you know, especially for Nordic countries who are usually not known for heavy defense spending? Well, why are they spending, you know, billions of kroners on, you know, new Aegis frigates for

regions and multi-mission long-range combatants for the danes and i figured well let's compare that to you know what other countries of north are doing such as canada and what are those you know relative differences and similarities between their own maritime challenges in the arctic waters so that's sort of how i got there and in terms of how i got into maritime studies in first place was mostly you know i started out after high school i was building ship models and I still do. I like to say much better now, but I want to get into, you know, sort of naval architecture and design, but it turns out I didn't really want to stay up until 4.30 a.m. and get my C++ code to compile. And so I was like, ah, nevermind. Let's go and look at history and

political science instead. And so that's how I sort of got into that stream. And where I found out that, well, at least in Canada, and I think most people agree for around the world, there really aren't a lot of people in the international security space who actually focuses on the maritime dimension although that's changing the last four or five years you know around 10 years ago you know there'd be barely anybody who actually focused thoughts on you know 70 percent of the global world's surface so i figured that's a prime space for me to be in and i really sort of took that and ran with it thank you yeah not wanting to stay up until 4 30 working on computer code is extremely relatable can you tell us a little bit about the calgary center for military security

and strategic studies? Because Calgary sounds like an unusual choice as far as some place where you're going to study maritime from. Yeah, for sure. And sort of one of the surprises that I got when I asked my undergraduate advisor on, well, where can I do graduate studies in, you know, given my maritime focus? And the fact of the matter is that Calgary's CMSS, the center that I'm with, was formed back in the 90s. And they really want to focus more on traditional questions of military and strategic thought and this is a time that continues on to today where you know there has been a broadening of what constitutes security issues and our center was sort of well we're more interested in looking at the traditional cold war and more historically you know traditional

realms of security studies but of course we've had to change over the last 10 years or so and so we add security to the name and now we do you know a pretty broad spectrum number of things And long story short, though, back when I was applying for graduate programs, the center, CMSS, had a quite large number of professors who had at least a focus or at least an interest in naval history and maritime security and that kind of thing. And so it became a fairly obvious choice for me at that point to apply here as well over in Dalhousie by the ocean to do that kind of thing. But one of the interesting things about Calgary that most people don't know about is that we have a naval museum here, and it is probably by square footage the largest one in the whole country.

And, you know, large enough that can fit several of our old aircraft carrier-borne aircraft inside, indoors, along with the four of, you know, naval armaments and such. So it's kind of amusing sort of take on this whole thing. And I think part of that is just because during the Second World War and even the First World War, a lot of the recruits were from the prairies, people, farm boys who have never seen the ocean before in their lives. And so they go from those rolling fields of wheat to the towering waves of the North Atlantic, trying to just see what the whole world is about. And, you know, when they came back, they brought back with them a lot of, you know, that naval sort of interests with them. And so there continues to sort of be this undercurrent of, you know, naval awareness, despite this province being, you know, landlocked. Thank you. Yeah, you're plucking at my heartstrings a little bit there. I grew up in a farm community myself in the middle of Illinois.

And yeah, the desire to go to the sea and see the world, again, extremely relatable. I can understand particularly in Calgary where I think it's probably a little bit colder and a little more perhaps barren seeming than where I grew up but yeah we don't have too many tall trees or anything well we got the mountains we got rocky mountains I can see it's not on my window right now which is very nice but yeah it's good 40 minutes away so let's talk fleet recapitalization because that seems to be the order of the day for the Canadian navy right now And Western defense pundits like to refer to 2014 as the year expenditures really started picking up related to events in Crimea. Is Canadian fleet recapitalization linked to those events, or was Canadian hardware just old?

Because I think, and you correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean, the Canadian Navy right now is largely a Cold War fleet. And, you know, I think you're looking to replace a lot of ships. Well, actually, I will correct you on that. So the mainstay of our surface fleet right now are the 12 Halifax-class frigates. And while they were designed in the 1980s, they weren't actually built until after the Cold War. They were built sometime between 1991 and 1997. And so right now they just finished their midlife refit. Gives them another good 20 years or so in their lives of operational life.

And so it's a little-known fact that actually Canada has some of the world's largest fleets of multi-mission frigates, at least for any single one class as well. And that's something that a lot of Canadians don't know about, and a lot of the world kind of forgets that we have, on a per capita basis, I think we have actually more surface combatants than even the Americans do in terms of frigates and destroyers. So it's one of those interesting little things that has managed to happen. But anyway, in terms of the question itself, it was 2014 and Crimea, the impetus for recapitalization to an extent. Obviously, the national shipbuilding strategy under which all this recapitalization is going on, that actually happened a good half decade earlier. It was really proposed in the late 2000s and early 2010s and implemented in, you know, around 2011 or so. and at that point we didn't really know exactly which kind of ships we'll be getting what their capabilities are what's the roughly a high low mix if there was going to be one and but we knew

at that point that we were going to have to you know recapitalize the navy and the whole point of that or part of the point of the national shipbuilding strategy was to avoid this thing called boom and bust of the shipbuilding industry to avoid this thing where we build ships really quickly over a period of seven years or so and then afterwards the shark the yards will have to shut down and lay off all the workers and then you know 20 years later we'll have to rebuild all the yards again and then rehire all the people with incredible expense and delays and such and so the whole point the nss was to try to afford this kind of thing and kind of start our shipbuilding out a little bit earlier and spread the remaining rest of the builds over you know multiple decades to

try to prevent that kind of you know boom and bust cycle what Crimea really sort of did for the shipbuilding strategy was to inform and shape the replacements for service combatants and so when the NSS was announced we had actually more or less just lost the use of our destroyers our three Iroquois class air defense destroyers they're armed with 28 I think Mark 41 PLS's that they got refitted back onto at the end of the Cold War. But by that point, their radars were already quite old and far from sufficient. We didn't really have any sort of replacement for them. And we thought about, well, what are we going to do, just buy three new ships on their own?

I mean, yeah, that's sort of what the Australians did, but we didn't really want to get into that without being ready to replace the rest of the fleet. And we knew at that point that the Halifaxes also needed to be renewed at some point in the future in the early 2030s, starting at that point anyway. And so, well, let's roll them all up together. Let's roll up the whole shipbuilding plan so that we're replacing both the air defense destroyers and the multi-mission Halifax-class frigates at the same time under the same program.

And Crimea, though, and the general rise of great power competition really sort of focused the Navy on, well, what are these new ships going to have to do? at you know earlier in this decade when a lot of us observers were wondering well what's the over under on the number of high-end destroyers versus you know low-end frigates and a lot of it was obviously catered more towards the cheaper end of things and that's because that's how Canada usually does things or that's the reputation we tend to have of ourselves is that we'll spend a lot less and we'll cheat belt and you know that kind of thing but obviously I think great competition, and Crimea really highlighted the need for high-end multi-mission vessels. And so

we came around to the idea, you know, not too long ago that, yeah, something like the Type 26 with its space ray radars and purpose-built anti-submarine warfare hull, that these were going to be the best match for what we think we need in the coming decades. Well, most observers, you know back in 2015 or so when the Trudeau government you know came to power they weren't really saying much about like how much they're really willing to spend in terms of the quality of these new equipment we were all fairly pleasantly surprised when they announced that we will be not just replacing the frigates themselves we'll be also replacing the their defense destroyers and all of them with the same high-end you know Canadian service combatant

based on a type 26 hull and so essentially within the next over the next 20-25 years or so we're going to have a force of basically 15 Aegis warships and that's well and beyond what the former air defense stores were capable of and so this is not just a one-for-one replacement but also an actual one-for-one plus three upgrade of basically the entire surface warfare fleet structure okay so you're actually purchasing 15 of the type 26s on yeah oh wow well that that's what they're saying i mean that's promising of course we'll see whether budget pass over next you know 20 years yeah i will check back with you in 20 years and uh we'll see how it came out yeah um so they announced the purchase of bae lockheed martin design type 26 destroyers which

is a British design. Do you know what the intended split is as far as east and west coast? Because that's always the balancing act that the Canadians do is they seem to split theirs between their coasts and like the ships stay on those coasts. There's not a lot of Panama Canal passages that I'm aware of for the Canadian area. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so they haven't actually said anything about the split. And indeed, I think that's something that's going to be considered on a rotating bases as we move forward over the next you know several decades and there was talk earlier back when President Obama was talking about the pacific pivot whether Canada would follow suite and transfer you know one or two of our frigates over to the west coast of course that never

happened we're still stuck on the seven frigates on the east coast and five on the west but you know at the end of the day it doesn't really matter all that much where they're placed because you know where we usually deploy them is over on the other side of the world and whether you deploying from Esquimalt in British Columbia or deploying from Halifax, it's still a long way to go. And sometimes we have frigates that do the whole, you know, around the world sail, just because it's part of, it just made sense. And so sometimes you'll have a Pacific frigate operating in Europe, sometimes you have an

Atlantic frigate operating in the Indo-Pacific region. And so where they're actually placed doesn't really matter as much because of the very long endurance that these ships have especially now that we have uh we finally got back our at sea replenishment capability after a you know for a half decade of pause in that regard yeah we'll talk about the at sea replenishment capability because that's another part of this recapitalization project as well i want to talk uh you had mentioned crimea sort of focused the direction that the shipbuilding industry was going to go with these frigates what is the intended mission of these ships from the Canadian perspective?

Well, it seems they're trying to do a little bit of everything, and not just a little bit of everything, but actually quite a lot of everything. So right now, they certainly do seem to be general-purpose multi-mission combatants, and with the idea that, of course, they will be able to slot into alliance missions, and, of course, as part and parcel of Canadian foreign and defense policies, that we do contribute to alliance task groups abroad, so we're not operating just on our own. and so we're definitely putting a premium on anti-submarine warfare capabilities right you

know choosing type 26 over the other competitors at a time sort of demonstrate our seriousness in that regard that we wanted the dedicated silencing construction that the type 26 is supposedly superior at and but at the same time you know we're not gonna cheap out on the air defense side stuff too and so it's quite a surprising for i think a lot of us when it was revealed that our new service combatants will be having a brand new Lockheed SPY-7 phased array radar that's basically you know a miniaturized version of the long-range discrimination radar that's being used for ballistic missile defense in Alaska so obviously it's not going to be quite as capable as that giant multiple stories high array that's being put up there but the technology is the same

and with the same range I was told by Lockheed that as the old SPY-1D, although the sensitivity may be different. So, you know, it'll give Canada basically the world's largest planned Aegis warship fleet, second only to the U.S., so it's not too shabby at all. But it seems certainly we're wanting to do basically everything with these vessels. So is there any thought to using those vessels for BMD that you've heard? it's going to be not for continental range bmd i don't think so but for task group defense i think you'll it's definitely a mission that they haven't put off the table and indeed one would might even

ask is it even possible to actually exclude a regional immediate near-range bmd mission from any you know service combatant over the next 50 years right with the advent of anti-ship ballistic missiles and you know similar weapons that would require that kind of capability so with the more advanced air defense capability do you think we'll start to see canadian frigates deploying with the american carrier strike groups i know we've already seen the germans and norwegians do that with their more advanced air defense frigates yep and so we've actually uh had our frigates deployed with care um your carrier task groups uh over the last 15 20 years and that really came belt because the Halifaxes themselves were, you know, well trained and had the cooperative

engagement sort of capacity and the linkages required and to really cooperate and work with the carrier task groups. The American carrier commanders have generally been quite confident in our ability to slot in and work with them overseas. Our frigates were with the earlier task groups after 9-11 in the Gulf. So we've actually been working quite closely with American task groups for the last several years. So we definitely expect that whenever our new service combatants will come to service, they'll perfectly slot back right into that role as well. So you mentioned the replenishment at sea capability coming back. What does that capability look like now? That's something I haven't tracked as closely, but it's another piece of this

national shipbuilding strategy I think that's interesting. We're also seeing other partner countries or other NATO countries build more of these replenishment vessels? Yeah, that's right. So up until 2011 or so, we've been using a pair of Cold War era AORs. And they were getting quite long in the tooth at that time. And while we were planning on keeping them in service until our new construction joint support ships, which are basically just AORs, but they wouldn't be coming to service until around 2023 now. And so when both of them actually got into some sort of troubles in terms of their machinery, one of them actually caught on fire,

another one went and got in a form of collision, they had to be basically taken out of service much earlier than planned. And as a result, we had a sort of five-year gap where we didn't have our own SC replenishment capability. And we ended up doing this very contentious issue of having an urgent build, an urgent conversion of a civilian container ship into an AOR by one of the yards not involved in the national shipbuilding strategy at the time. And so from 2015 to 2017, Dave's Shipyards in Quebec, they took the old cargo ship Asterix and they basically stripped it all down inside out. And they bought a superstructure from Finland, tacked it on top, put on some replenishment gear on it, packed it up and sent it back out to sea. And she's been serving very well over the last four years or so, really showing the worth that, yeah, one, Canada can actually procure something on a fairly quick basis if we really need it to, and two, that they can do it well.

Of course, how long such a conversion based on a civilian hold will last, we don't know. We'll look again in 10 years' time to see where she is at that point. but at least you know we now have our own replenishment capability that will fill the gap before two new berlin class joint support ships will be built and i say berlin class because that's the designer based stuff of obviously we're calling them support canadian protect you same as same names as the old ones that they're replacing but uh yeah so that's where we're at in terms of replenishment capability yeah that's a really positive commentary on industrial capacity as well to go from need identified to having a hole in the

water and operating in what sounds like about a three-year period 15 to 17 and an innovative approach as well yeah but of course somewhat contentious in a domestic political space and was a source of a sort of scandal for one of the admirals that was involved in pushing forward this project and the government was not quite happy in a certain ways in which it was handled but pass on that for now. So before we talk submarine modernization, I know there's a segment of our audience who's familiar with the Victoria-class submarines, but it's a bit of a saga as to how the Canadians came to have these boats. So could you explain to us where the Victoria-class boats came from, where they are in their current status, because that has pulled a lot of headlines as

well, and then where submarines fit in the recapitalization scheme? Yeah, sure. So the victoria class or the former upholder class the type 2400s because that was their tonnage um built for the royal navy back during the 1980s and so they entered world navy service in i think around 1990 or so for like one or two years and then after the cold war they had the rn had their review and they decided to go all nuclear for all of their boats and so they basically just sidelined the upholders for the next little while trying to find a buyer abroad and kept them in a kind of um you know limbo at a state of minimal maintenance in salt water and while canada spent a better part of the following eight years in the 1990s to try to um decide whether to buy them

before committing you know there were several other buyers as well from south america i believe the result was that the boats basically sat in that kind of salt water environment for nearly a decade with not a lot of maintenance and so they develop a sort of rather negative reputation not least due to one of their one of the boats chikutomi's fire while attempting its transit to canada sea state six while transiting on surface it's not an easy time for submarine and multiple bouts of seawater pouring down the conning tower while trying to fix the things here and there resulted in significant seawater entry into the hall caused some fires and the death of one of the sailors, while attempting to transit to Canada.

Sort of the sad story of that, of course, she had brought back into Scotland, where she had left, and be put on board one of those submersible, semi-submersible transport ships to be brought back, brought over to Canada. And so over, you know, once all four had been brought back, brought over to Canada, I think in the early 2000s, they entered a brief period of sort of active service

mixed with a bit of modernization here and there. And then they all took turns entering a deep overhaul and refit that brought them up to more modern standards, along with some new Canadian equipment. And since that time, basically early 2010s, they've entered what the Navy calls a steady state of deployment and maintenance, with one sub in deep maintenance and receiving updates, such as the same sonar processing software and equipment as American Virginias, trying to really get them out to sea at least every once in a while. And so the big highlight of all of this was the year before last in 2018 when we had two of the subs, so half the fleet, was deployed overseas. And for those who are aware, of course, this is a fairly significant feat for non-nuclear subs.

It's not very often that you'll have an SSK going the other side of the world for a long period of time before deployed. But, of course, this comes at costs and puts quite a lot of stress on fleet and infrastructure. So actually last year, in 2019, none of the subs went out to sea because there's the need to make sure they can be maintained as a decent state. And, of course, this year, though, they do expect that there will be, again, two more subs that will resume operations sometime later this year. So that's sort of where our subfleets are at. and they you know generally speaking they're not as outdated as uh you know canadians like to think that they are they have the same basic you know sonar capabilities as virginia classes so that's

quite impressive capability and we're trying to maintain them up to date over the next several you know years while we try to figure out what to do and so in terms of their fleet recapitalization how does it fit within that well sadly there is no real discussion on you know how they'll actually be replaced right now there is actually no discussion on that replacement right now the only plan is to actually just update them and keeping them modernized through till the 2030s probably not least because of the focus on replacing the rest of the fleet at this moment and so you know adding four or whatever number of submarines to that will be a considerable strain in terms of both the navy itself and also on the back end public services and treasury board

and you know the politics behind shipbuilding all that would somehow have to work into this whole submarine recapitalization project which god knows yes so what does the re-establishment of the u.s second fleet mean for the canadian navy i mean for us it means essentially that we will have to return sort of back to our roots in the north atlantic in terms of anti-submarine warfare because over the last you know 20 years or so ever since the end of cold war we've been doing a lot of expeditionary operations a lot of you know it's not quite force projection but at least supporting force projection operations um by our allied countries and of course also doing a lot of the um you know maritime security operations such as anti-piracy anti-drug trafficking and

North Korean sanctions enforcement, all that kind of stuff, that's quite an area for us. So reestablishing U.S. 2nd Fleet and having one of our admirals actually in the 2nd Command position there really highlights the importance of being able to operate in the North Atlantic in that ASW capacity and surveillance capacity here at home. Yeah, and I would imagine they're not only the admiral, but there are also a number of Canadian staff officers down there filling out that staff as well. Yeah, that's right. So there'll be a lot more of that international, well, bilateral cooperation in that regard.

Of course, we're not the only ones there. You know, I think you have one or two Norwegians and some Germans also in that staff. Oh, I'm sure it is heavily populated with the personnel from the NATO countries. Just based on my own experience in Germany, that was a hot ticket to fill. There were a lot of people making phone calls trying to come over to Norfolk and work with Second Fleet. so the next one it's going to go into sort of the law enforcement zone i wanted to ask first is is law enforcement an actual mission for the canadian navy because it's not traditionally a mission for the u.s navy like we'll normally embark coast guard personnel if we're going to

go out and do that because the coast guard personnel have title 14 responsibilities the navy is under title 10 yeah that's right yeah so similar to you guys uh our navy itself does not have law enforcement capacities, really. But we do have on board people who do, right? And so sometimes when we're sending our little 700-ton Kingston-class coastal patrol ships down to the Caribbean for drug hunting, we have on board some of your Coast Guard folks who do have that arresting law enforcement powers, whereas at home we'll have, for such things as fisheries patrols, We'll have our own Department of Fisheries and Oceans fisheries inspectors on board, and they'll have that capacity. And sometimes we'll have, where it's needed, we'll embark RCMP, Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers on board to, again, make sure they have that law enforcement legal capacity on board.

So then let me ask, what is the mission of the Harry DeWolf class, the new offshore patrol vessels? yeah so that's one of those interesting things where i think they'll have to match they'll have to um also do a similar thing where they will have to embark the relevant authorities depending on the mission and so the harry the wolf class coming in at around you know 6400 tons they're pretty hefty ships they're oh yeah oh yeah they're big they're chunky as they say um they're much larger than you know well they're you know a thousand or two uh tons larger than our current frigates although they're a little bit shorter and really they're equipped with the ability to operate in sort of you know one year first year ice environments of around 1 to 1.2 meters of

thickness and that's like what maybe three feet of ice for you guys and they've been somewhat contentious their history has been one of like their only order because the politicians at the time want to get elected on an arctic sovereignty platform but over time i think they sort of developed into a vessel that really is a traditional naval mission but it's not one that most people would think of as naval missions because really what they are it has been described to me by certain people involved is that they act as basically giant pickup trucks and doing a lot of things that are you know a lot of non-warfare stuff that navies around the world do but which canadian navy has over time sort of forgotten or has been using you know frigates for and so

they fulfill basically two functions they do both the offshore patrol duty um in our ez on our atlantic and pacific coasts and of course they'll have their unique ability to operate up in the canadian arctic um at a time that's most needed and so some of the early criticisms and that's still being sort of you know hanging around like a dead albatross on them is uh the idea that they're the slush breakers you know that they're not true ice breakers and you know therefore apparently completely useless well as well it's true that they're not you know real dedicated ice breakers and you probably won't see them serving as you know escorts ice breaking escorts for you know other ships um the ability for them to actually operate in first year ice and um up to you know

1.2 meters that is significant capability and really it ensures that they can operate just ahead and just after the busiest of the traffic seasons up in the canadian arctic and so it's not about being able to go into the winter depths you know in high arctic when there's nobody there and trying to do everything that an icebreaker can but rather to be there where enforcement will actually be necessary or is most likely needed to be happening and so that's a balance between you know capabilities versus what's actually necessary so when the wolf class was first conceived the government at that time the conservatives were saying oh we're gonna buy six to eight of them and then eventually by the time they powered they that number had went down

to rank five and then when the liberals replaced them they didn't really say much not regarding eventually they bumped that number up to six for the navy and then the other two ships seven eight will now be assigned to the canadian coast guard in a demilitarized form and i think the idea behind that was that we also need to replace our offshore fisheries patrol ships because they're actually quite long in the teeth as well and so they thought well this is a decent way to replace those in a roughly timely fashion while also bridging that gap in the canadian shipbuilding industry between the completion of the wolf class and the start construction for our surface combatants and that's you know to avoid that boom bust thing that we're talking about earlier

yeah so the chinese have become very active in the arctic in the last few years and of course russian activity has really spiked is the wolf class a response to that is it i'm not sure that it was per se um there's certainly this nebulous idea that when the wolf class was conceived that there is a sort of concern over arctic sovereignty and the image at that time was very much the russians planting that flag into the bottom of the arctic ocean and that's the sort of image that government at the time wrote in on to try to justify these vessels and so the impetus i think yes i would say that impetus is because of greater great power interests in the arctic but the carrying force that justifies your continual procurement throughout is more on the day-to-day

sort of you know pollution response fisheries protection humanitarian assistance up in the arctic all the soft so-called soft maritime security issues that still remain not very relevant today and will continue to remain the dominant security concern in the Canadian Arctic for the years to come. And so, you know, so again, you know, the answer is one of those things where yes, to some extent, but you know, what sustains it throughout is, you know, recognizing that security concerns are not just about, or indeed, it's very little about sovereignty as much more about just general day-to-day security for arctic users up in the north i like your use of the term soft to describe the capability of those vessels there's there's not i don't know as i look at

them online it doesn't look like a ton of warfighting capacity on the other hand that's not necessarily what you need on a day-to-day basis up there yeah exactly and so some people will say well you know they're too they're too under armed well then what are you going to use them you know why you know a 25 millimeter gun that's too small well what is a large enough gun large enough gun then and you know do they need missiles or anything or torpedoes or anything like that i'd be like yeah sure under certain circumstances like they're serving as some kind of surrogate offshore patrol anti-submarine ship yeah i could see that but you know that's not what they're built for and in other cases we have the rest of the fleet right that's what

they're for too and so some people tend to see them as sort of this box the black box that sits on its own you know without support from the rest of the canadian military which obviously isn't true and you know the analyses tend to be sort of a you know stodgy in that regard of course that being said you know the ships are i think equipped to be backfitted with certain higher end capabilities if necessary they were you know during their request for proposal some of the documents and the criteria some of the criteria in the document said that they should be able to carry a towed body where necessary so obviously it's towed sonar of some sort either for just root surveying just to you know map the seafloor in the arctic or for actually you know locating

underwater submarines or something like that although that's highly unlikely so let me ask too we'll stay up in the arctic with the next couple questions where does the new icebreaker fit in this discussion i think there was an article that came out last week about is now the time to replace the missing icebreaker yeah so the ice icebreaker services in canada operated by our coast guard which do not have um an armed enforcement capability generally speaking and so replacing our icebreaker fleet i know you guys have your issues with asian icebreakers but you guys aren't alone we're there too although we have a lot more of them you know our main polar icebreakers at louis saint laurent i think she commissioned in 1969 or so and we're really

trying to you know squeeze every last drop out of her while we try to figure out well where do we build this um new heavy icebreaker and the original idea for this polar icebreaker was that it will be built in the c-span yard in vancouver which is responsible for the non-combat vessels such as a lot of the Coast Guard ships as well as the two joint support ships. The thing is, though, because of the timelines involved and the fact that that yard is limited to basically one major vessel like the JSS at a time, maybe one and a half, you really have to try to figure out, well, what's the build order?

What's more urgent for the Canadian fleet? Is it a new heavy icebreaker or is it a new permanent replacement for the replenishment ships? And so that there is a lot of dancing around as to which of those things would come first for replacement to be built. And I think it's gotten to the point where, you know what, maybe we need to start looking at a quicker, more expedient way to gain that heavy polar icebreaker capacity. and so over the last couple years or so they've been extending the national shipping strategy beyond the original two yards beyond the vancouver yard beyond halifax and they've sent it now to davy shipyard in quebec which will be building six medium icebreakers but they're not really

going to be used in the high arctic too much so there still needs to be that heavy polar icebreaker that needs to be built somewhere and right now they're just started they just released this request for information to the canadian yards asking well how fast can you actually build this new polar icebreaker can you build it in time to for delivery and service before the end of this decade literally december 31st 2029 and so that's you know 2029 as the actual sort of expected maximum in-service state for this new icebreaker is a far cry from the original idea that we'll get one by 2017 and that's just the reality of you know how long it takes to to actually build a new shipyard so you can actually build ships and which construction

order it should go into and all the other things like that so this is a question i had actually saved for later but i'll ask now because we've sort of stumbled into the topic is the canadian shipbuilding complex equal to the task of doing all this recapitalization simultaneously Who are your shipbuilders and where are they located? You mentioned two yards. Yeah, so basically we have three major yards in Canada now. We have C-SPAN shipbuilding in Vancouver. So if you ever go to Vancouver and look towards the North Shore,

there's this big blue gantry crane, and that's where C-SPAN will be building their Coast Guard multi-mission vessels, the science vessels, fisheries, and the two joint support ships. and then over in halifax along the waterfront they're all indoors almost all indoors that's where they're building our combat vessels so the harry the wolf class along with the future canadian service combatant they'll all be built there meanwhile quebec which actually a davy shipbuilding actually has the largest yard and has most capacity of all three that's been around for quite a long time and in a continual basis but they didn't they weren't able to win the

original um shipbuilding contract because they were actually went to bankruptcy at that particular point in time now they managed to uh you know rescue themselves out of that hole over the last 10 years and they've been doing quite well in terms of a lot of the um maintenance refit and you know new builds of smaller simpler passenger vessels but it remains to be seen whether they can actually build from the hull up from ground up from you know raw plates to an actual complete um advanced federal vessel um like a icebreaker or entry to any kind of combat ship not that they will be but you know that kind of thing and so basically canada has three main large vessel shipbuilding yards and um it's taken some time to get them up on their feet but they are delivering

vessels and c-span over in vancouver they've they've delivered um first of two the first two We have three offshore fishery science vessels for the Coast Guard, around 3,000 to 4,000 tons there. And then Irving has launched and, you know, is putting sea trials. The first, Harry DeWolf class, and the second one is now in the water. And the third one is just in final stages of having their mega blocks being assembled with two or more in various stages of construction inside a yard. And so we do have a fairly significant capacity that's been built up now. but are does it have enough capacity to build you know more vessels than at the current rate i'm not quite so certain that it does you know davy certainly think that they can i'm not sure

if the personnel are quite there for it but they actually have the space for it meanwhile in sea span and in irving in halifax their yards were basically designed specifically with the schedule the original nss schedule and the ships that they're going to be building in mind and so the capacity they have is built is almost specifically to fit that scheduling in terms of like you know having one ship at a time sort of thing that'll be on the ways at any one time of course you know both those yards they can build multiple pieces of multiple ships at time but in terms of how many ships will actually be outside in nearing completion well i think it's pretty limited right now so again there is this desire to use our shipbuilding industry for export potential

and you know i'm all for that but do the yards actually have that capacity in the near term for that i mean towards the end of the shipbuilding um you know our order after the federal orders are nearing completion and sure there'll be excess capacity in that regard but in the meantime they may well be um only able to serve canadian needs for now yeah i think it's also a question of having the design capacity as well because everything we've discussed are they're not being designed locally for the most part the JSS you mentioned Berlin class that's German design and then the BAE Lockheed Martin that was developed over in the UK in the surest sign that I have a strong bias against aviation I completely neglected to ask you about Canadian

maritime aircraft i would actually like to start with the sea king replacement my first thought was i'm just going to go online and look and see what's there before we have this conversation and the wikipedia page is just a gold mine for the ch-148 cyclone because the first line is canada began to seek replacement for the sea king maritime helicopter in 1986 yep so tim i'm going turn it over to you from there to uh go with the narrative of how we came to get the cyclone today sure um so it was the end of the cold war and well it was at the height of it actually of course 1986 uh yes nobody really quite saw the writing on that wall yet and the idea was that the developments in asw technology had become so complex and heavy by that time that the sea

kings that we had which were around i don't know around 25 30 years old by that point were considered too small um to be used for asw duties in the coming years coming decades and for those of you have been to air shows have seen the sea king and you know more familiar seahawk side by side you know the sea king itself it's not a small helicopter now nonetheless canada decided that well we're gonna need to get something new in 86 and we decide that we'll go with you know the the latest and greatest at the time, which was, you know, the EH-101, later termed the Augusta Westland. And the thing is, by the time we got around to saying, oh, yeah, we decided on this particular helicopter and then we want to buy it, it was the end of the Cold War and with rising

unemployment and a lot of other, you know, budget deficits and all that, the government decided at that time that, well, maybe not, maybe we don't need what the prime minister at the time called the Cadillac of helicopters, that we didn't need a massive brand new flying machine with all the bells and whistles for ASW at a time where, you know, half the former Soviet fleet was now rotting in its harbors. So they basically canceled it, although at first they kind of rolled it into the Air Force's own search and rescue helicopter replacement, and in an attempt to, you know, have cost savings from buying more airframes. But in the end, they essentially cut off the entire maritime helicopter element and replaced only the search and rescue helicopters.

And so those became the CH-149, the Cormorants. And that is indeed based on the EH-101 airframe. And after that, it became sort of this political hot potato as to who would spend the billions required to replace the now continually aging sea kings and for the next you know decade or so it became sort of this thing that nobody really wanted to talk about but you know people were always sort of clamoring on and would later on use as this perfect example of canadian procurement gone awry so it wasn't until around the early 2000s that we decided to run this competition again and see which of the latest offerings are now available well you know as it turns out of Because the EH-101 is now in service more or less with some of the European navies.

But then Sikorsky also offered their S-92, the Superhawk, which is in civilian service and still is. And they decided that, well, they'll offer that as a, you know, in a maritime helicopter environments and improvement with the added capabilities. And, of course, it was built to service offshore oil rigs. And so it had the range and it had the capacity of a large cabin and all these essential basic airframe characteristics that the Navy needed and wanted. Of course, it was the S-92, which would later become the CH-148, the Cyclone that we did buy. The militarized version was not proven. It was still very much in its infancy in terms of the design stage in that early 2000s period. but nonetheless for a number of reasons which still have been completely um settled we decided

to go with that rather than some more experienced and proven um airframe and so you know we started you know setting the design by the mid-2000s and then we'll get our first airframe uh more or less by the late 2000s and of course due to several delays because of course it is a brand new aircraft we didn't actually get them until or the first ones until the early 2010s and even then was delivered of only a partial capability without all the bells and whistles that was you know part of the reason why we want to replace ck in the first place um when we first got them but you know when we first got them was enough to serve as a sort of training tool for maintenance and pilots etc etc and so it wasn't until 2015 then that we actually had enough of a competence and

number of airframes required to start replacing the original Sea Kings, which by this point was probably in the mid-40s in terms of their age by then. And actually, no, it was around 50 years old by then, actually, half a century old, the Sea Kings were. And we eventually, we got enough by around 2017, 2018 or so, so that we, all the times where our frigates needed to deploy with a maritime helicopter, they no longer needed to deploy with a Sea King. And from, you know, as of a couple of years ago, all of the frigates now deploy with a CH-148 Cyclone. Although I'm not quite sure as to whether all of, again, those bells and whistles of the ASW suite are actually installed and ready to use. Now, one of those interesting things that during 1991, of course,

for the Gulf War, our Sea Kings were up until that point dedicated for, you know, anti-submarine warfare and so when we sent them to the Gulf we decided that well they actually needed some additional capabilities that would make a more suitable and useful against an enemy that didn't really have submarines and you know part of that was actually backfit you know very in record time the Sea Kings with a sort of um you know infrared search and track capability and uh machine gun mountings for you know that sort of anti-surface warfare capability which would become sort of their most used purpose for the remainder of their lives which was of course another you know 20 years or so. Is there any thought to adding a missile capability as well

something along the lines of Hellfire a Canadian equivalent or European equivalent? No I haven't really seen any talk about giving them that high-end anti-surface warfare capability they're only really meant for that ASW and you know carrying a pair of torpedoes on their little stubby wing pylons that they've got but they're very large helicopters and if you ever see one up in real life it becomes quite immediate you know how much larger it is compared to you know the seahawk that most people are familiar with yeah i've looked at a couple of pictures online you can just tell by looking at it the size of those things that's an enormous helicopter to be flying out the back of a frigate can they actually take two on a on one of the canadian frigates or just

one uh just one um and i think you'll still just be one even for the new surface combatants as well um only the supply ships will be able to carry two okay uh so then the other major procurement action for the aviation arm of the canadian navy is maritime patrol aircraft and you have been flying the aurora for i don't know 30 years now can you tell us a little bit of the history of the aurora yeah sure the um the aurora for those who are less familiar is the canadian variant of the p3 orion so you know pretty outwards they look the same uh in size they have very different um avionics suite and sensors and whatnot but generally they serve comparable roles and we actually got the arovas in the around throughout the 80s and so they're not as old as the sea kings

were when they start to be retired so you know for as far as we're concerned they got plenty of life left um in order to extend that life um we've been giving them what's called incremental extension or life extension modernization program and we recently completed the block three um improvements which included um sort of mostly replacing mission computers and sensors right radars eo ir esm all that kind of stuff and that was finished more or less by last year and so Right now, they are going through the process of the Block 4 and the final incremental improvement program. And these 14 aircraft will be equipped with that Block 4 upgrade. And basically what that includes, and this becomes quite apparent externally, is a beyond line of sight satellite communications array.

And I think this manifests as a fairly distinctive ray dome or bump in the back of the aircraft. plus a LINK-16 data link, as well as a self-defense system. And you can sort of see the passive warning sensors in additional bumps in the floor quarters of the aircraft. So the Block IV ROAs become one of the most capable and distinctive looking of all the different P-3 variants that are flying around the world. We had the first one of those more or less completed this year, just a couple of weeks ago, actually. and they'll enter full operational capability in around two years' time. So that's sort of where we are with that one. Have there been any real discussions on an actual final total replacement on it?

Again, I think it's mentioned here and there in various sort of policy documents, but it's not really been budgeted and there hasn't been any kind of program record in requesting proposals for that kind of thing. So mostly right now it's just people talking about, oh, what could be nice as a replacement? And obviously the P8's right up there, but you also got the Bombardier Saab combination variant. So those are basically our two main options in the next 10, 15 years or so. Yeah, I mean, the P8 actually seems like the easiest plug-and-play replacement just because of the relationship with the U.S. at this point

as far as the CP-140 being sort of a derivative of the P-3. But I can also understand, no hesitation, the P-8 is an expensive aircraft. And I guess how active has the Canadian Aurora fleet been in the last few years? Because we see a lot about Russians sending their submarines into the north of Malacca more often. And are the Canadians taking part in the search or surveillance of those submarines? It seems so, but they've been keeping that stuff pretty hush-hush. It's not one of those things that gets a lot of external attention, or they don't even really want to advertise it all that much.

It's one of those things where, for us, the AROAs do a lot more than just, of course, ASW. They do a lot of maritime monitoring and surveillance and even sovereignty missions in the Arctic, in our offshore areas for even the surface vessels we even use them from time to time to support fishing regulations especially in the northern pacific so it's a very multi-mission multi-purpose aircraft that we you know use for a variety of things and becomes difficult to see like what exactly they've been used on but i think um you know more recently we've been used on operation neon which i think was the north korean sanctions mission so they've been you know supporting that serving that kind of expeditionary mission quite a common mission for them and

actually now come to think of it they do also operate out in the middle east and supporting operation artemis which is um are constantly rotating mission in the arabian sea to sort of monitor drug traffic um terrorists trafficking and you know that sort of other illicit maritime security activities that goes on in that part of the world so we use them for a large number of things and i think you know anti-submarine warfare is one of those things that they don't talk about a lot so last question for you because we're starting to run a little low on time but this one is not necessarily naval in nature as the canadian navy renews all its halls both governments are also looking at replacing the north warning system and that's a system of

radars along the northern canadian and alaskan coasts originally designed to detect soviet bombers and missiles coming over the pole what type of spending increase does all that represent to canada and is there thought being given to compatibility of that system with all the naval vessels rolling out and particularly the destroyers are going to have aegis capability yeah so i think you're actually one step ahead of the government there that one of the big criticisms that a lot of canadian defense scholars have right now is that there are no plans to replace the north or at least very little it's not the spending for that is not incorporated within our latest defense strategy and there's no you know rfis or fps or anything like that for um funding that

kind of thing or finding interested parties who'll be able to do that and not least because part of it is that the north morning system was significantly um funded by the americans by you guys um when it was built you know without that kind of support you know it's kind of hard to see where that money will come from nowadays especially you know sort of the animosity between our mutual heads of government so really there isn't um any kind of spending increase involved in updating the north warning system and that's but that's one of the big ticket items on order of i think around 10 billion dollars if we were to actually do it that will have to be slotted in somehow somewhere and it's not immediately evidence that we can at this point so fairly a dire look at

that in terms of our ships having you know asia's capability yes they'll of course they'll have that significant airspace monitoring capacity um but of course you know our surface combatants will only be able to operate in the arctic in you know summer conditions right yes and you know the danes the danish you know they're sort of having the same issue where you know their own airspace monitoring over greenland is quite lacking and right now they've sent their air defense brigades over to greenland for the first time uh specifically to fill that air surveillance gap at least in the near term before they try to figure out, well, what's a permanent solution to all this? And so, you know, navies have that interesting capacity to plug in where and as needed.

But, you know, it's a fairly expensive proposition, and especially in the north, it's limited by, you know, sea ice access. So, you know, we can use the CSE for that, but it's going to be a very limited solution, limited to only certain times of year. So we'll see. Thank you, Tim. Unfortunately, I think we're out of time here. I had more questions written down, but maybe we can get you back on again.

I'd like to thank my guest, Tim Choi. Tim, where can we find you online and what's next for you? So online, you can usually find me on Twitter. So at Tim.Choi. I spell it all out in words. What's next for me? Well, I just need to actually finish this dissertation. Got some job interviews that I went in for.

I'm still waiting to hear back from. And we'll see where the world takes me. I'm not particularly picky. As we all know, the academic job market is a crapshoot. and sparely anything that actually hires it. So I'm willing to look into government in private sector as well, whatever it's willing to look for

and actual naval expertise of some sort, especially in the Arctic region. So thank you, Jared, for having me. Thank you. And thanks for our listeners for tuning in. We'll see you next week. I walked up to the far-oom counter Way, hey, bully in the alley

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