What Should Canada's Navy Be?

As the navy spends billions to update its fleet, Canadians are starting to ask important, long-overdue questions about what function the force should serve.

In the midst of its year-long centennial celebration, the Canadian navy is in a quandary. Pomp and ceremony have done little to convince anyone of the navy’s strategic importance. Instead, headlines focus on problems with both the Joint Support Ship and Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ship programs. Looming in the background is an approximately $27- to $30-billion price tag for replacing the 12 frigates and three remaining destroyers (estimated at $1.5 billion per frigate and double that per destroyer).

The rancour over the F-35 fighter purchase is a harbinger of an even bigger furor about the navy’s stated need for new and better warships. Destroyers have quietly reappeared in the plan, even though the sinking of one of them as a target lent credence to the navy’s former view that a uniform fleet of frigates was preferable. A new naval vision is in the works, but it is being generated without public consultation. To be credible, the vision needs to honestly appraise the extraordinary changes in the maritime security environment over the past 100 years.

In his 1977 book Navies and Foreign Policy, British international-relations theorist Ken Booth described the three roles for naval forces: military, constabulary, and diplomatic. Beyond this simplistic typology, each contains a wide variety of functions and subsidiary tasks. Sometimes they are the navy’s sole responsibility. In other situations, a combination of naval, coast guard, and maritime police forces are employed. However, each role and function requires a degree of specialization; there is not a one-size-fits-all solution in maritime security-force planning.

Canada has enormous territorial responsibilities but limited resources to safeguard them. Cooperation between the navy and the coast guard is required, since neither is adequate alone. Moreover, with its many political, cultural, and economic affiliations, Canada has a wide variety of ties, both formal and informal, that prevent it from adopting a policy of strict neutrality. These simple facts compel Canadians to be concerned with issues that develop far from our shores, making naval responsiveness, high endurance, and operational sustainment of great importance. While the military role and its functions take precedence in cases where a traditional threat exists, should they still supersede diplomatic and constabulary roles when one is absent?

Canadian naval theory maintains that the military role is the only basis for a credible force. The new security calculus of the post-Cold War era is based on much broader definitions of threats and effective protections. Despite this, the navy continues to defend a status quo structure and a like-for-like replacement plan.

The case for maintaining existing capability for the military role is probably best made on the inability of successive governments to provide a steady and reliable supply of modern warships. Pulsed firepower, through a proliferation of missiles and other precision-guided weapons, makes it likely that marginally inferior forces will be swept from the principal areas of combat in short order. The victors will be technically proficient, highly practiced and confident operators from the world’s most advanced navies. The victims will be everybody else. The advent of the “Age of Robotics” will make tasks associated with high-intensity combat even more problematic for Canada’s navy.

The counter-argument stems mainly from the assessment that major destabilization will result from issues of human security and public safety. With globalization, natural disasters, and radical fundamentalism causing such a rapid pace of change, can we afford investments in naval military functions that are only tangentially relevant to the security situation? Effective action for these problems will involve a combination of diplomatic and constabulary responses, supported by naval logistical enabling and sustaining functions. The need for combat capabilities will be diminished, but not eliminated, due to the historically proven global nature of modern naval warfare.

While the traditional “all ready all the time” posture was appropriate before, the new security environment calls for fundamental change. In the absence of a recognized threat, the public and political perception of utility must take precedence over a military view of what is needed or useful. So too should the naval fleet that will serve the maritime security requirements of the country.

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