A common phrase, one recently used by Jeff Kibble, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford who serves as the Shadow Minister for Defence Procurement, in relation to the proposed purchase of F-35 fighters.
A common and occasionally popular phrase, a slogan that sounds good on first hearing but one that does not stand up to rational analysis. In reality cost, interoperability, defence-industrial policy and dare we say it , even politics play a vital role in every military procurement so that in the end 'the best' must give way to 'good enough'.
A good example would be the Sten gun of WWII fame. Sten guns were cheap. Cheap and fast to make. As Stephen Hunter the novelist described it, "No uglier gun existed. You could not love it unless it saved your life countless times, and even then it would take some willpower. It was just a variety of steel tubes welded together at 4:57 P.M. Friday, British summer war time, three minutes before the end of the shift. Blobs and smears of liquid weld, now hardened into little disfigurements, littered its ostensibly smooth surface. They looked like lumps of butter hardened and spray-painted. It was beyond nuance, as if designed at the kitchen table, and in fact, that was where it had been designed. It rattled, nothing in it fit well, all angles were sharp and punishing to the hand or body. It was just a tube with stuff sticking off it at weird angles. The magazine inserted horizontally so that it was infernally out of balance; its trigger guard appeared to have been engineered before anyone thought up the curve. It lacked elegance, streamline, grace, ergonomic concession, or solidity. It lacked a front sight; its rear sight was a small nubby projection with a hole in it, which was why nobody ever used them. It even had a stupid nomenclature; machine carbine. The only thing it did well was kill people."
Money and resources and time not spent on making a better weapon than a Sten gun could be used to make other weapons, like Spitfires or aircraft carriers or tanks. Weapons that won the war for the Allies. The Sten gun may be an extreme example but it makes the point. Defence budgets have limits, choices have to be made and sometimes quantity really does have a quality all its own.
'Only the best for our troops', may have an appeal but there are reasons that the Canadian Army refrains from issuing every soldier with a Leopard II main battle tank and that the RCN fleet includes so few nuclear powered aircraft carriers. The same logic which motivates these decisions also suggest that it may not be appropriate to give every fighter pilot in the RCAF an F-35.
'Best' can mean a lot of things, and there is no guarantee that the F-35 that Mr. Kibble is recommending is the best for Canada. The stated goal at this point is to purchase the Block 4 variant of that aircraft. Unfortunately it doesn't work as advertised. The program has faced notable schedule and technical setbacks. While some core elements of its futuristic design features are being delivered, full delivery of the complete Block 4 feature set has been pushed out into the early-to-mid 2030s, with some scope scaled or phased over time. It should be noted that this is only the latest postponement, that time line has been pushed back several times and there is no reason to believe it won't happen again. At this point the F-35 Block 4 is not cleared for combat.
Added to these issues is the cost factor. Depending upon which accounting model is used the operating and support costs for the
F-35 in U.S. service runs approximately $34,000 to $46,000 U.S. per flight hour, The U.S. Department of Defense estimates it costs roughly $6.6 million to $6.8 million U.S. annually to operate and sustain a single F-35A. Contrast this with the estimated $22,000 U.S. per flight hour of the F-35s competitor, the Saab Gripen.
Based on these factors it only makes sense to look at the option of purchasing both aircraft. There is no reason to believe that the RCAF can not operate a mix of F-35's and Saab Gripen aircraft in a combination which mixes both the resilience which comes from having a larger fighter force and a military-industrial policy that suits our defence and strategic needs.
Let us be clear, the Saab Gripen is nothing like a Sten gun. It is an expensive, exquisitely manufactured, piece of high technology. There is no way of funding a cheap fighter force any more than there is a way of navigating procurement choices with bumper sticker slogans like "Only the best for our troops!"
