Liberal government’s new Indo-Pacific strategy raises concerns about additional pressure on Royal Canadian Navy At a time when it is already grappling with a shortage of sailors and warships.
The new strategy includes the promise of millions of dollars in additional funding to boost Canada’s military presence and operations in the Indo-Pacific region, along with greater trade and diplomatic investment.
A hallmark of the new plan is for the Canadian Armed Forces to maintain a semi-permanent naval footprint, while laying the groundwork for closer military cooperation and collaboration with traditional and non-traditional allies in the region.
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Yet officials acknowledged during a background briefing on Monday that they are “engaging” to meet the government’s requirement to maintain a continuous rotation of frigates in the Indo-Pacific.
This is because the Navy has many other commitments, including Europe and a limited number of frigates. The Navy is also short of about 1,300 sailors as the military struggles with what senior officials describe as a personnel crisis.
“We don’t have operational plans yet,” said an official, who could not be named as a condition of the briefing. “It is a strategy. Operational plans will be completed, developed each year as we look forward to the sailing season.
Even before the new strategy was unveiled, the Navy was forced to make a difficult choice of where to send its frigates.
HMCS Vancouver and HMCS Winnipeg were both deployed to the Indo-Pacific in June, the first time two Halifax-class frigates have sailed to the region together. Both are now returning home.
The deployment, which coincides with the return of two minesweepers from a stint with a NATO naval task force earlier this month, marked the first time since Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014 that Canada left without a warship in European waters. Is.
Vice-Admiral Angus Topshey, commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, told the Canadian press in September that Canada’s inability to deploy more frigates to Europe while in the Indo-Pacific was due to a shortage of two warships.
The navy’s capabilities are also being stretched as its aging frigates require more maintenance to operate safely, with only six available to protect Canadian waters and operate overseas. The rest are docked for repairs and refits.
Irving Shipbuilding was tapped in 2010 to build a new fleet of 15 warships. But while the first of those ships was expected to be in the water by 2025, officials now say Canada’s first combat aircraft won’t arrive until the early 2030s.
On Monday, the official insisted that the government “has been able to strike a balance where we can have an additional frigate in the Indo-Pacific while meeting our commitments elsewhere in the world.”
Defense expert Adam McDonald of Dalhousie University, who previously served as a naval officer, said the new Indo-Pacific strategy represents a major adjustment for the Army and Navy.
“If you’re going to try to build a consistent year-round presence in an area that we don’t really do anywhere else other than Europe … that’s a big deal,” he said.
“Now there is political direction. And it’s not just operational discretion. There’s political direction now being given to the Navy by the government that this is what’s going to happen.
McDonald said the fact that the Navy is being tasked with taking the lead makes sense given the geography of the region.
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Yet he questioned how long the Navy would be able to sustain such attention given the many other challenges and commitments on its plate, and the threat of new priorities should the war in Ukraine or the situation in Haiti become more dire.
“It could be something like the peacekeeping initiatives that were first announced by the Trudeau government, which seemed big and ambitious, and then were really small and very small,” he said.
The Navy’s current limitations in terms of people and ships mean “there isn’t a lot of room for more ambitious outcomes,” agreed University of Calgary naval expert Timothy Choi.
“While even more money could help, converting money into capabilities will take time, and in the near term, I would be surprised if there was much military commitment to the region.”
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