I approve of this way raising military spending. Good to see it going to real people.
The actual pay increase is 13% or less for everyone who isn’t 1st year private (or equivalent rank). The rest is in additional benefits, such as Land Duty Allowance, domestic operations pay, etc. Still a decent increase overall.
That said, this barely keeps military pay in line with inflation at this point. While military pay does get small yearly increases, they’ve lagged way behind how much more expensive everything is getting. All in all, much needed, and honestly still a little underwhelming.
There are some substantial amounts ear-marked for sign-up and re-signing bonuses for trades that are particularly struggling for members, which might help a bit with recruiting and retention. Unfortunately it doesn’t solve either of the other two huge impediments to recruitment and retention. The first is that the entire process takes far, far too long. Most people cannot wait a year to get a job. There has been some improvement in this area with the move to process security clearances while people are in basic (because, let’s face it, you learn absolutely nothing in basic that’s sensitive information) but there still needs to be serious improvement in how quickly things are processed. In particular, Ottawa’s handling of medical files needs to be completely overhauled. Right now it takes way too fucking long to sign off on fitness for service.
The second big issue is that the structures of military life were established at a time when families lived on one income; that meant that you could, as a service member, haul your family off to whatever place you get posted and things would basically be OK. Yeah, relocating always sucks, but it didn’t come with the added difficulty of your partner likely needing to find a new job. The best solution the present day army has for this is “Oh, well, uh, we’ll find them some kind of civilian admin role that pays dogshit.” If your partner has any profession more specialised than “Secretary”, they’re fucked, especially as most bases are located somewhere between Butt Fuck and Nowhere. So as soon as any service member marries, and especially if they have kids, asking them to relocate is often tantamount to asking them to quit. While intake is a problem, retention is an even bigger problem and this is a huge part of why. Unfortunately solving this problem is a lot trickier. I could get into some of the changes that would help, but this getting overlong already.
To be clear, I don’t want anyone to think that everything is bad and not getting better. There have been improvements, especially with the update to the housing differential; moving from a flat percentage to setting the allowance based on pay is a massive improvement that really helps out lower ranks posted to places with higher rents (y’know, everywhere). And as I mentioned earlier, the changes to the security policy have helped speed up the recruitment process.
In all, there’s still a lot that needs to change, but this is definitely a welcome step.
(Full disclosure: I am part of a military family.)
I hope they spend even more on the people and less in American war machines.
As someone with friends both in the military and looking to enlist, it takes like 2 years to actually join. My friend who wants to enlist has been waiting on medical clearance for over 6 months and the recruiting office has nothing to tell him.
I wonder how many people just find a different job during the wait and tell them to fuck off when they finally come calling, because it’s not like they give you updates and most people don’t really want to make a decades-long career out of it.
I wonder how many people just find a different job during the wait and tell them to fuck off when they finally come calling, because it’s not like they give you updates and most people don’t really want to make a decades-long career out of it.
A lot. It’s one of the biggest issues with recruitment. You think about your average 18 year old picking the military as their career; by the time they get told they can swear their oath and head off to St Jean, they’re 20, probably have a girlfriend, a job that they’ve been at for a year or more, if they’re really lucky maybe even the prospect of promotion or perhaps an apprenticeship that they’re working on. Suddenly the idea of packing up your life to spend two months in basic, then sit around waiting for anything from months to years for your occupational training, before you can finally start a career really doesn’t seem all that appealing.
To give an idea of how bad the problem is, when they opened up recruitment to permanent residents (a smart move, no argument there), they got 20,000 applications right away. Two years later, they had recruited 77 of those applicants. That is fucking dire. As a result of that they’ve reconfigured how they process security clearances, which will help some, but as you noted the medical stuff is a huge hold-up and there’s no excuse for it. The entire medical review process needs to be completely overhauled. It should not take as long as it does to clear someone.
Wow, 77 out of 20,000 is truly ridiculous regardless of immigration or citizenship status. I had no clue it was that bad. Thanks for sharing.
And those who do get hired get bogged down by a lack of capacity in training for their designated profession.
Every western country needs to boost their military spending if they’re to keep the imperialist powers of the US and Russia in check.
Yeah, I don’t want to become Poland in 1939 or Czechoslovakia in 1938.
I’m okay throwing money at an existential threat.
We still buy arms from the usa
Time to start looking into other suppliers or begin producing domestically, then.
If the US continues its 51st state rhetoric, what weapons will Canada defend itself with during an occupation?
If the arms are clearly superior and Canada owns and is able to maintain them, AND they are not integrated into other systems, I don’t see why Canada should buy US arms.
If any one those conditions are not true, Canada should refrain from purchase. F-35, anybody?
While I under your reasoning, that is still enabling the aggressor by giving them loads of cash.
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Well, yes, although not that many. Small arms in Canada are almost all domestically produced. Armoured vehicles are domestically produced with the exception of the Leopard, which is German. Even stuff that has an American name on it, like Textron, gets built up here (Textron stuff for Canadian use is all made in Quebec). Our ships are built by Irving. We use the Carl G and the RB-70, both from Saab. Our M777 artillery pieces are from British Aerospace. Even American sounding weapons like the M2 Browning (which is only used by reservists, not reg-force) are actually made by FN Herstal, a Belgian company. Despite the oft-touted fact that Canada maintains a lot of weapons compatibility with the US, that doesn’t mean we’re sourcing everything from them.
When it comes to the things we do buy from them, like, say, the M72 LAW, or our night vision systems, you can’t just turn that stuff around overnight. This shit with the US has only been going down in earnest for less than a year. Military procurement requires massive standardization; if you replace one soldier’s night vision with a new model, you replace it for every soldier, because everyone has to be using the same kit. So swapping out something like the M72 means evaluating options until we find something that has enough firepower, is light enough, reliable enough, accurate enough, easy enough to use, doesn’t cost too much, and comes from a supplier we can trust (or can be produced domestically under license) and then replacing our entire stockpile of M72s with that new weapon. That’s no small task.
The main area where we rely far too much on the US is aircraft. That’s tricky, because finding better options isn’t as easy as it sounds. The F-35 is the only fifth gen fighter on the market. That matters, and at the time that we made the original commitment to buy it really was the best option going. No, it does not in fact have all the issues that Russia Today claims it does (wow, I wonder why they would lie about that?), and yes, stealth does in fact really, really matter in air to air combat; if you detect your enemy before they detect you, you win. It really is that simple.
Obviously, we now have to re-evaluate that choice, based on the very serious questions that have to be asked about the reliability of the supplier. But where does that leave us? The CF-18 is also America, and desperately out of date. The Gripen, or any other similar option, are 4.5th Gen at best. Good planes, but already out of date. There are several 6th Gen fighter projects already in the works. There’s no good choice here. I suspect the least bad option is to buy the Gripen as a stopgap and then immediately start evaluating both European 6th Gen projects, but that’s just me. I don’t envy anyone having to make that decision.
And that’s not even considering all the other aircraft that we source from the US. It’s one of the very few areas where they have actually managed to maintain a serious lead. Finding better options will not be easy, and as I mentioned above, it’s not just a matter of changing who we buy from; we’d have to switch out entire fleets, in order to maintain manageable logistics and training. There’s no way of solving that which doesn’t come with massive costs.