Dispatch from the Front Lines: Major Avoidance Office
On our "military procurement system." On more pipeline politics. And when some kinds in Nova Scotia schooled the teachers.
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And now, on with the dispatch.
It’s not that we don’t understand what our new Defence Investment Agency is supposed to do. The new federal apparatus, announced last week, is the latest in a series of efforts we’ve seen over the years to fix what literally everyone agrees is broken. Canada’s military procurement system is a notorious clusterfuddle. And we had another terrific example of this in the Ottawa Citizen just a few days ago.
You can read the whole article here, but the summary is basically this. In 2009, the Canadian Armed Forces identified the need for a new army vehicle. It was to be a successor vehicle to an existing system, the Coyote, that had proven insufficiently armoured for the modern battlefield. This ought to have been a pretty easy procurement — moving the Coyote’s specialized reconnaissance equipment onto one of the upgraded infantry fighting vehicle chassis we began producing after the war in Afghanistan. No wheels needed reinvention. Because of the relative ease of the proposal, only three years were assigned to go from the identification of need in 2009 until the first vehicle was to enter testing in 2012.
You can probably guess what happened next.