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www.defenseindustrydaily.com HMCS Protecteur in Pacific waters. Lerhe thinks Canada is caught in a policy quandary.
The Harper government is definitely concerned about the Arctic, but also has aspirations to negotiate a free trade agreement with the European Union and is deter- mined to raise its diplomatic and trade profiles in the Pacific. But, which strategic goal is highest and which is lowest? While ships may easily be deployed, they cannot be in more than one place at a time. Reports on the recent training accident between HMC Ships Protecteur and Algonquin illustrate the limitations of Canadian naval resources. All of this analysis focuses on the ships. Typically,
‘land thinking’ equates the direction of a perceived threat to the orientation of the defence forces. In ‘mari- time thinking,’ the direction of the threat is irrelevant. There are no flanks in naval warfare, no rear areas, and
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no equivalent to the land concept of encirclement. This is part of the reasoning behind the RCN’s resistance to changing its basing plans. Instead of direction, the key questions for inherently
mobile naval forces are these: how far do the ships have to go, how fast must they go to get there in time, and how long will they be required to remain there? All of these questions have logistical implications, and the navy’s lack of logistical capacity is the other part of the reasoning behind the RCN’s ‘stand pat’ attitude. Fifield is right when he says that ships can be de-
ployed from anywhere, but he does not say that the RCN has only enough logistically capacity to do it with one or two ships at a time. Lerhe is right that the navy’s two remaining sustainment ships will be most valuable in the Pacific, but he does not explain that they were
September 2013
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