Vanguard Magazine

M A R I T I M E www.vanguardcanada.com APRIL/MAY 2024 29 HMCS Harry Dewolf T he Royal Canadian Navy and the supporting portion of the Department of National Defence's (DND) Mate- riel Group – the Maritime Equipment Programme Division, which I lead, is at a crossroads. We have arrived at the end of service life for fleets conceived during the Cold War but delivered after it had ended. We've arrived without re- capitalization fleets at the ready. The essential question before us, there- fore, is how best to push our fleets be- yond their designed life. In broad terms what I'll talk about is how we got here, provide a short update on where we are now with the legacy fleets, and share a few thoughts on how to move forward. How We Got Here For those of us old enough to remember, we might point to two features of the 1990s that became influential. The first was the end of the Cold War and some fas- cination in the democracies of the world with a so-called "Peace Dividend." The second was the debt situation in Canada and the startlingly high percentage of our tax dollar that was, at that time, going to debt service. Both pressures together led to what former Chief of the Defence Staff, General Rick Hillier somewhat in- famously labeled the "Decade of Dark- ness." In the case of shipbuilding, it was closer to 15 years between the delivery of the last of the current fleets and the start of the effort toward the current Naval Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS). There were several key contributors to both the idea and execution of NSS. Amongst the more prominent figures were Peter Cairns – a fellow submariner and career Naval Warfare Officer who retired from service in the rank of Vice- Admiral as the Commander of Maritime Command (in modern parlance, Com- mander of the Royal Canadian Navy). Peter could easily have passed into full retirement from his military career, but he chose to continue to serve in indus- try where, in the late 1990s, he initially pitched the concepts that eventually became the National Shipbuilding Pro- curement Strategy, or NSPS, later the NSS. Another is Ian Mack, who retired from service in the rank of Rear-Admiral having served in a wide variety of senior roles, including as Canada's Defence At- taché to the U.S.. He chose to serve for an additional decade as a civilian Director General in the Materiel Group and driv- ing force behind the NSS. Separated by a professional generation, these two former naval officers - sup- ported by many other defence and ma- rine professionals - have left an enduring legacy in the form of the NSS. NSS itself hasn't been easy. I think it was Vice-Admiral Dean McFadden who first coined the term 'maritime blindness' around 2011 describing the strategic out- look for the great majority of Canadians, who – while landlocked – lead lives that are nevertheless still shaped in ways seen and unseen by what transpires on the world's oceans. Maritime blindness clearly extends into the industrial support base for our de- fence and marine sector. Too many Cana- dians don't understand that our shipbuild- ing industries were effectively shut down in the 1990s. Too many Canadians don't have a sense of how challenging, difficult and complex it is to restore an industrial ca- pability once it is gone. And too many Ca- nadians don't understand why we can't just stop and start production on demand, nor why it's taking so long to hit cost, schedule and quality targets. As one of the primary recipients of NSS output, I do understand, and my hat is off to everyone who has been inside the renais- sance that is the NSS. Achievements to date have been impressive and we are just getting started. Under the NSS shipbuilding pillar, a new Offshore Fisheries Science Vessel fleet has been delivered to the Coast Guard, and the Arctic and Offshore Patrol Vessel fleet is getting tantalizingly close to completion for the Navy. Work on the Production Test Module for the Polar Icebreaker was just completed, and Joint Support Ship #1 – the future HMCS Protecteur – will launch this year. The Production Test Module for the Canadian Surface Combatant will also start production this year. This work cannot be done without mak- ing mistakes along the way. Key going for- ward will be ensuring we don't fall back to the old way of simply assuming that indus- trial capabilities can be kept viable without orders, and that we achieve continuity of demand, both at build and in-service. This simple philosophy may prevent recurrence of the present challenges, but it requires people who can retain corporate memory, people who can effectively manage govern- ment investments in the space and people, including partners in other government de- partments, who will prioritize the effort.

• Cover