Military Spending

June 26, 2006 | Category: Personal, Random Thoughts

It is finally happening or at least the announcements are being made over the next few days. The Conservative government is announcing the acquisition of new equipment for the Canadian Military. As the Canadian military continues its deployment in Afganistan it has become plain to see that they are not effectively outfitted to ensure our solders are able to safely carry out the tasks as assigned by the government. The previous governments have given the military the bare minimum and expected them to work miracles. It is disheartening to professional soldiers to be asked to complete tasks with inferior equipment or without proper equipment.

As Canada wants to be a good citizen of the world the governments have progressively committed the military to more and more operations whether they be humanitarian, peacekeeping or anti terrorist our military requires the equipment to do whatever tasks they are assigned by the government. It is refreshing to see equipment which is a basic necessity of any miltary now on the block for procurement. Having our own transport capabilities on both the sea and in the air is necessary to ensure our troops can get to deployments in a timely fashion and resupply can occur when required. At this point Canada has to defer to the US or the Russians for our heavy airlift requirements.

The list of new equipment will include new supply ships which are hopefully troop and equipment transport ships. Medium lift and Heavy lift transport aircraft, the heavy lift will probably be C-17 Globemasters made by Boeing and currently in use by the US. New trucks for the army which are overdue and finally new helicopters which will be for troop and equipment transport. All of these are necessary and will ensure the miltary are better able to carry out their assigned tasks more effectively and more safely.

I guess the only concern would be a future government cancelling some or all of the the programs as we have seen in past with the helicopter’s ordered by the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney and cancelled (with financial penalties) by the Liberals under Jean Chrieten in the early 90’s. Eventually the Liberals were forced to order new helicopters as they were required by both the navy and Search and Rescue.

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