Is it buying a fighter jet or is Canada buying insurance. The fighter replacement program of Ottawa, which used to be discussed as a mature decision, is now being applied as a bargaining chip to a larger issue, the extent of operational freedom and industrial capability that Canada wants to place in its future generation of airpower. The most talked-of idea within that rethink is a mixed fleet, maintaining only a smaller fleet of F-35As, but transitioning a larger portion of the total program to Saab Gripen E, with the addition of the GlobalEye airborne surveillance aircraft as an add-on.
The description going around Canadian military is laid as not more than 40 F-35A stealth planes with up to 80 Gripen E fighters. Canada would at least under that arrangement receive the smallest tranche conditioned on its being part of the program- 16 F-35As- but leave the rest of the initially planned 88 to be looked at. A summary of the posture of the government was made by Canadian Defense Minister David McGuinty; he stated that “no decision had been made.”
The shift has been given the policy language of strategic autonomy. Prime Minister Mark Carney said in Davos that allies will “diversify to hedge against uncertainty” which he added “They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will be increasingly anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.” The appeal of a mixed fleet, here, is not merely aircraft performance, but a bargaining chip in terms of sustainment, upgrades and dependency on suppliers, should political circumstances become difficult.
Such reasoning is soon in conflict with continental air defense realities. Washington has made public warnings of the fact that fighter commonality is embedded in the daily NORAD operations. The argument that NORAD would be forced to change in the event that Ottawa does not take the 88 F-35s has sharpened the debate in Canada, with the U.S. ambassador quoted in comments carried by CBC News saying as much. Interchangeability is more than just an abstract debate topic; it applies to data connections, the mission planning process, training pipelines, and the generation of fighters to respond to quick-reaction alerts over huge distances.
The counterweight presented by Saab has been developed to render the sovereignty argument factual at factories and work packages. To achieve the announced goal of maximizing up to 12,600 jobs in Canada, the company has pegged its Canadian industrial commitment to a certain number of orders namely, 72 Gripens and six GlobalEyes. Of equal significance, the concept of Saab focuses on control points nationally: final assembly, integration, testing, and sustainment is done with Canadian partners with planned production centers in Ontario and Quebec.
The GlobalEye part of the package is based on another but similar capability gap. Canada has been trending toward the acquisition of an airborne early warning and control aircraft as its first, it is to obtain an airborne node capability, capable of view beyond ground radar, and with a larger capability to control a battle space. GlobalEye is attractive, as well as its Canadian business-jet heritage, in its multi-sensor surveillance design and endurance profile: an aircraft capable of detecting and tracking air and surface targets at altitudes of up to approximately 450 km, and of having endurance of up to approximately eleven hours. In northern and maritime strategies where the geography restricts radar coverage, such persistence will alter both the speed of fighter cueing and the duration that they can sustain operations.
Nevertheless, the mixed-fleet conception involves friction of engineering and manpower against which no industrial plan is impertune. The entry of two new fighter types into a force that is already moving out of CF-18s would introduce redundancy of training, run parallel spares pipelines and two programs of upgrades with software-defined upgrade timelines, which is exactly the mechanisms that define readiness when aircraft are spread over the long operational distances in Canada.
The review of Canada, that is, is moving beyond being based on a single “best jet” and more on the amount of risk the supply chains, interoperability and domestic capacity will take because each of these options alters the appearance of NORAD operations in action.
