The Department of National Defence announced on July 26 that they
would purchase 1148 new C6A1 FLEX General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMG) from Colt
Canada. The announcement made note of the fact that the contract with Colt
Canada would result in approximately 13 new jobs and that it would contribute
to maintaining approximately 100 jobs at the company. The press release
indicated that first deliveries of the new C6 were anticipated for September
2018 with final deliveries anticipated for June 2019 and that the value of the
contract is $32.1 million (taxes included).
Brent Davis,
writing in the Waterloo Region Record
provides more details on the specifics of the contract.
The initial contract is to replace aging C6 machine
guns in the military's arsenal that are showing wear and tear or have been
taken out of service. With about 3,500 C6s in active service a second contract
with Colt Canada, yet to be formally approved, would replace the remaining
30-year-old C6s that have reached the end of their effective service life
according to a Department of National Defence spokesperson. Although the second
contract hasn't received formal, approval to proceed it is considered a high
priority and according to the same spokesperson “it's in the plans."
The article points out that the $32.1-million
contract for 1,148 guns implied a cost of nearly $28,000 per weapon. However Department
of National Defence spokesperson Ashley Lemire said that about one-quarter of
the contract cost goes toward setting up a production line at the Colt Canada
plant, including engineering validation and certifications. It was noted that
although the company has supplied parts and components for the older C6s, it
has never built a complete C6 from scratch.
It is also reported that each new gun will be
supplied with a second barrel, as well as ancillary items including cleaning
and repair kits, spare parts and carrying slings. Those components are included
in the total contract cost, which also includes taxes.
However National Defence isn't disclosing the exact
cost per unit.
On the face of it this is a good news story. The C6, a 7.62-mm is a
fully-automatic, air-cooled, gas- and spring-operated medium machine gun that
is well liked by the troops of the many western nations which use some version
of this weapon. Based on the Fabrique Nationale (FN) MAG it has been used by more than 80 countries, and is
made under licence in several countries, most notably the USA where it is known
as the M240. It is many ways
the standard machine gun, used by all our allies.
A closer look suggests that this announcement
reveals everything that is wrong with Canadian defence procurement.
For our $32.1 million we get 1148 new C6A1 machine
guns (with cleaning and repair kits, spare parts and carrying
slings), 13 jobs which it seems reasonable to assume are for the length of the
contract, i.e. two years, and a production line including
engineering validation and certifications. Or perhaps more accurately, Colt
Canada gets a production line at the Colt Canada plant.
Even if we accept that the implied a cost of nearly
$28,000 per weapon should be informed by the fact that about one-quarter of the
contract cost goes toward setting up a production line it still means that each
weapon is costing almost $21,000 each.
The price of the equivalent US weapon, the M240, is
somewhere between $6,600 US
and $9,200 US depending on
which model is being purchased. This means that, at current exchange rates, if we were to
purchase the weapons from FN’s U.S.plant they would cost us about $10,000 each, in Canadian dollars. This
in turn suggests that we would save at least $12, 628,000. If you assume that in this case we don’t have
to buy Colt Canada a new production line it works out to a savings of almost
$20 million dollars.
This is the real cost of those 13 jobs for 2 years,
over $750,000 for each job per year.
One would think that jobs that cost taxpayers
$750,000 per year would raise questions.
Questions like; do we need to make our own machine guns, especially when
we consider that they are almost universally available from a number of our allies
and that we have the proven ability to maintain them ourselves?
If Colt Canada wants to move the production line for
machine guns that we purchased for them to one of their operations in another
country is there anything we can do to stop them?
Is there any way we could use $20 million to create
more than 26 person years of work?
Did anyone ever consider using the money to hire 50
soldiers to operate machine guns for eight years might be a more consistent
with the governments stated goals of properly equipping the Armed Forces and
providing “good middle class jobs”?
Let us be clear, C6 machine guns are not Ross Rifles, they are not
dangerously inferior weapons, on the contrary they are excellent pieces of
equipment that our army needs. Where
they mirror the Ross rifle, and so many other examples of Canadian military
procurement, is in the political calculations that went into this announcement.
Who will ask the questions? Who would want to
question defence dollars being spent in Canada and jobs being created? What
political party would want to miss the opportunity for press releases and photo
ops and a little grass roots patronage?
This then is the real tragedy of Canadian military
procurement. For most of those involved the purpose of the defence budget is
not to secure the military defence of Canada, it is to secure political
advantage, no questions asked.
New
Machine Guns for Canadian Armed Forces
Second
machine gun contract likely for Kitchener’s Colt Canada
C6
7.62-mm Medium Machine Gun
FN
MAG
M240
machine gun
Globalsecurity.com
M240 7.62mm Machine Gun
The
M240L: The Myth of the $86,000 Machine Gun
FN
America, LLC, U.S. subsidiary of FN Herstal, S.A.
Ross
Rifle
