Late Learners

Abstract

Looking at the process that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper tried to use to replace the Royal Canadian Air Force's aging CF-18 Hornet fleet with 65 Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters, it is hard to disagree with Andrew Coyne's assessment that the acquisition program was fiasco from top to bottom, combining lapses of professional ethics, ministerial responsibility and democratic accountability into spectacular illustration of how completely our system of government has gone to hell.1 For the evolution of Canada's participation in the F-35 program-from the first memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by the Liberal government of Jean Chretien on 2 January 1998 to the so-called reset of the program in December 2012-readily fits the nouns the Canadian media so commonly used to characterize the F-35 acquisition: fiasco, debacle, mess, scandal, and shambles in English, or fiasco, scandale, incompetence, gâchis (mess), gouffre financier (money pit) in French.Because the F-35 acquisition in Canada went so badly off the rails, it inevitably invites comparison with the last time the Canadian government had to replace an aging fleet of fighter aircraft. By the early 1970s, Canada's mixed fleet of fighter aircraft-CF-101 Voodoos, CF-104 Starfighters, and CF-5 Freedom Fighters-all were coming to the end of their expected service lives. The Liberal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau was determined to replace the mixed fleet of Air Command-as the Royal Canadian Air Force was then called-with a single multi-role fighter aircraft. It approved the New Fighter Aircraft (NFA) program on 17 March 1977, and three years later, on 10 April 1980, the cabinet formally selected the F-18/A Hornet, manufactured by McDonnell Douglas Corporation (as it was before its merger with Boeing Corporation in 1997). In 1982 the first of 130 aircraft began to be delivered to Canada.While the CF-18 acquisition was not without its controversial aspects, the procurement process itself has been widely hailed as a model of rational defence procurement-2 Certainly that was the conclusion that Michael M. Atkinson and I reached 30 years ago, when as junior political scientists at McMaster University we researched the CF-18 procurement.3 Others who examined the NFA program after we did drew similar conclusions. Looking at the NFA in comparative perspective in the late 1980s, for example, Frank L. Boyd Jr. characterized it as one of the most rational decisions in defence procurement.4 Likewise, Martin Shadwick noted that in 1980 there was a strong and prompt consensus across the government that the CF-18 was the right choice.5 More recently, Anton Bezglasnyy and Douglas A. Ross have argued the NFA procurement was a success story: the NFA process produced a capable aircraft for the air force, a big boost to domestic aerospace manufacturing, and all at an acceptable cost.6What accounts for such a major difference in the politics of fighter procurement in just generation? What lessons, if any, might we draw from this historical procurement? In this paper I argue that the lessons from the NFA program of the late 1970s were not learned by the Conservative government, because, I suggest, the Conservatives came to office in February 2006 with particular blind spots that caused them to overlook the implications of the governing structure for the replacement of the CF-18 fleet that they inherited from the Liberals. As a result, the F-35 program derailed quickly, and by the time the Harper government had imposed a new governing structure on the program, it was too late to do anything but reset the replacement program.GETTING IT RIGHT: THE NFA ACQUISITION7On 17 March 1977 the Trudeau cabinet approved the NFA program, creating an interdepartmental NFA Program Office (NFA/PO), staffed by officials of the Department of National Defence (DND); the Department of Industry, Trade, and Commerce; and the Department of Supply and Services (as Industry Canada and Public Works and Government Services Canada were then known). …