Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site utcsri.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsri!hogg From: hogg@utcsri.UUCP (John Hogg) Newsgroups: can.politics Subject: Re: Arming our Forces Message-ID: <1373@utcsri.UUCP> Date: Fri, 6-Sep-85 17:36:22 EDT Article-I.D.: utcsri.1373 Posted: Fri Sep 6 17:36:22 1985 Date-Received: Fri, 6-Sep-85 17:43:56 EDT References: <1371@utcsri.UUCP> <2043@mnetor.UUCP> Reply-To: hogg@utcsri.UUCP (John hogg) Distribution: can Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto Lines: 89 Summary: Chris Lewis has disagreed with my posting which, in essence, stated that we need a somewhat larger but much less sophisticated and perhaps even cheaper armed forces, equipped with very little offensive armament but able to detect intruders. As I am a good friend of Chris', I can state that his head is in a warm but dark place, reachable only by considerable contortion. We do not need to be able to take on the rest of the world in WW III, as he implies. First, his 1938 analogy is inaccurate in that we are threatened only by the Soviet Union, and they are held in check by a massively bloated American Big Stick. If the Americans were to adopt an isolationist policy (!) I would finance Chalk River in a big way. However, they can't and wouldn't if they could. Apart from the USSR, nobody is physically threatening us. (We will leave the perils of excessive friendliness out of the picture for now.) We have no territory equivalent to the Falklands, and statements about Iceland claiming Newfoundland or St. Pierre claiming PEI merely show how hard it is to come up with a realistic brush-war danger to this country. World War, yes. "Incident", yes. But small war? No. My last posting may have given the impression that I feel Canada should withdraw from NATO. I don't. However, nothing in the NATO Charter says that we must do our bit by putting an insignificant amount of cannon fodder in Europe, and in fact we could probably do more by keeping Soviet subs out of our arctic. The real best reason for keeping our troops over there (apart from giving my brother-in-law an exciting chance to see the world) is to be able to speak with more authority on a political level. And we could arguably do that more effectively by specializing in peace-keeping forces and having our hands clean as an "honest broker". To actually quote Chris' greatest misunderstanding, >How is a virtually unarmed PT boat going to be able to keep Soviet >warships out of our coastline limit? Or, how is one going to be able >to ENFORCE fishing rights (eg: Iceland and the UK's game of chicken). >Naval diplomacy is currently a game of chicken. With the occasional >"whoops, I ran over you" thrown in for variety. WE DON'T HAVE BE BE ABLE TO SLUG IT OUT TOE-TO-TOE WITH ANYBODY! If the Soviets send a frigate into our waters, we escort them out with an MTB. If they won't go (after government-to-government threats) we plink away at them with a 30mm popgun or even a torpedo. They won't let things go that far; they can't afford to. Shooting back in Canadian waters would be an act of war, and would not further the long-term interests of the USSR. Really. Think about it. What would be the end result for the Soviet Union if they were to sink a Canadian warship in our waters? This act would not take place in a vacuum. I will concede, by the way, that for arctic work we need something more sophisticated and thus more expensive. Probably a few diesel boats with icebreaker mother ships strategically located. The same thing is true for interceptor aircraft: we don't need exceptionally sophisticated fighters able to pull many G's, and with avionics capable of tracking and firing (in theory, anyway) at many targets simultaneously. We need aircraft with, as I said, LITTLE more fighting ability than a Lear Jet. Sufficient speed to intercept is so obvious as not to need mentioning. Sufficient numbers to do something worthwhile should be obvious too, but apparently isn't to generals and politicians the world over. High tech is far more appealing. >>If you believe in protracted non-nuclear global war and the Easter >>Bunny, you can argue that our sensors should remain intact for long enough >>to call Uncle down on whatever we find, but I'd be happy with totally >>defenceless units. > >Only if Uncle is accepting calls from us... Like it or no, the US is extremely interested in protecting us from "Soviet aggression", and will be regardless of what we do. At the other "Red, White and Blue Dawn" end of the fantasy scale - well, even if I believed in a US invasion of Canada along the lines of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, let me point out that the Afghan Army is on the side of the Bad Guys. It wouldn't have helped that country to have had flashier tanks or F-18s. What I wanted to argue in my original posting is that we should think about what our armed forces are supposed to do, and supply them with the equipment they need. In general, this means more than what they have. However, it can also be much cheaper than what they'd like. We don't need to fight foreign wars, and we don't need to win state-of-the-art ship-on-ship or plane-on-plane duels. We need to be able, in extremis, to take unanswered potshots at single ships or planes that won't listen to sweet reason. -- John Hogg Computer Systems Research Institute, UofT {allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsri!hogg