Canadian Military/Defence procurement process (Mega Thread)

[Good2Golf]

Several Western (and a couple of Eastern) democracies have tried to "fix" defence procurement but, it seems to me, that we must accept that the process is inherently political. (It's been that way, in our (British based) tradition since, at the very least, 1560 ot 70ish when Elizabeth I and her Lord Treasurer (William Cecil, Lord Burghley) took very direct control of the navy and its dockyards.)

It seems to me that the process can be both political and efficient.

Military requirements must be properly developed and presented. That means, first, that there must be a reference, a "baseline" capability statement ~ the (political) government's responsibility ~ against which deficiencies can be identified and requirements stated.

The government, the bureaucracy, must agree on the the requirements ~ and an independent "challenge" function is not a bad idea ~ and then, equally as importantly, agree on the price.

The "price" may have two components:

    1. The "fair market price" which must be agreed my bureaucrats and come from the defence budget; and

    2. The surcharges that politicians might want to "buy Canadian," etc ~ this should not be a charge against the defence budget.

The final decision on what to buy and how much to pay is 100% political. Admirals and generals get to say what they need (to meet the government's stated objectives) and want (to be flexible, etc) but they do not get to decide: cabinet does for a variety of reasons, some blatantly political and partisan.

One suggestion is to split PWGSC. "Common" use procurement should remain a core function of PWGSC but "special to service" items for DND and very high value projects should be managed by a reborn Department of Munitions and Supply (you can call it whatever you want) which would answer to a separate minister and deputy, disconnected from both DND and PWGSC. It is still "government procurement," with all the current implications, but a separate, powerful, big spending ministry might be more efficient and effective.

:nod:

DND indeed gets a lot of grief for "Defence" procurement, but few acknowledge that DND actually has little control in the contractual terms and conditions and implementation of any purchase above $25,000 currently -- contracting authority is out of DND's hands and rests with Public Works and Government Services, heavily influenced by Industry Canada where value propositions (VPs) and industrial and technological benefits (ITBs) constrain implementation possibilities. The VPs and ITBs are where industrial, and arguably political and regional factors outpace the operational requirement by several tactical bounds.

COTS, or the "Holy Grail" of MOTS, while expediting the procurement process significantly, aligns to the specifics of an operational requirement in relatively few cases.  The C-17 and C-130J were good examples of MOTS that aligned with Canada's operational requirements for strategic and tactical airlift, because the manner that the RCAF conducts those conditions mirrors almost identically the manner in which other Western air forces conduct those missions.  Thus an RCAF rounded instead of a USAF rounded and that is really about it for Canada-specific 'modifications.'

The author may have gotten a little caught up in some of the initial elements of concern noted in the Auditor General's Fall 2010 report on helicopters and I believe gets some of the Chinook’s timelines cross-linked; splicing initial intended timelines into the final Government-approved schedules. 

Although DND initiated the Medium to Heavy-Lift Helicopter (MHLH) project in the fall of 2005, the project was not given official Government approval by the Treasury Board (TB) to enter into definition phase until June 2006.  Within TB's preliminary project approval (PPA) was approval of DND's High-Level Mandatory Requirements (HLMRs).  One of the HLMRs required that the first aircraft had to be delivered no later than 36 months after contract award (MACA), and the final aircraft of the fleet to be delivered no later than 60 MACA (five years). 

Although DND and PWGSC noted their intent to the Treasury Board to try and expedite the contract award for the Fall 2006 or Winter 2007 period, Government of Canada major capital project regulations (for all Depts, not just DND) require Departments to be granted final approval (then termed Effective Project Approval -EPA), which follows PPA, before they can enter the Implementation Phase.  Only with EPA granted can PWGSC then legally sign contracts.  Thus, DND and PWGSC, while intending to receive such approvals to permit a Fall 2006 or Winter 2007 contract award, were still subject to Governmental final approval by Treasury Board, EPA, which was granted in June 2009.  A contract with Boeing was signed one month later in July 2009. 

So the 2008 date for initial delivery was only used during initial pre-approval planning, and only when PWGSC was authorized by TB to enter into contract with Boeing and did so in July of 2009, did the legal/programmatic requirement to deliver first aircraft by July 2012 and the final aircraft by July 2014 take effect.  The first aircraft was accepted by DND in June of 2012 (35 months after contract, or one month before the limit) and aircraft 147301 remained with Boeing to be flown by RCAF and Boeing test pilots to finalize the aircraft's type certification.  The last aircraft was delivered to the RCAF in June 2014, 59 months after contract award, one month before the TB-approved limit of 60 months.


:2c:

G2G

 

[Lumber]

Only with EPA granted can PWGSC then legally sign contracts.  Thus, DND and PWGSC, while intending to receive such approvals to permit a Fall 2006 or Winter 2007 contract award, were still subject to Governmental final approval by Treasury Board, EPA, which was granted in June 2009.  A contract with Boeing was signed one month later in July 2009. 

I was actually able to follow your entire post clearly in my head which makes me both happy at my ability to understand governent procurement but scared in that I fear I may one day end up working in some form of it.

Anyways...

I have a question for you. Why did it take until June of 2009 (almost 3 years) to get EPA?

Cheers

 

[dapaterson]

Keep in mind that the Trerasury Board is a board made up of members of the government.  Elections shut down the Board.  Government priorities heavily influence the agenda of the Board.  Departmental priorities have much less sway at the Board.

Internal processes to DND mean that approvals take roughly six months - that's the time it takes to confirm the costs have been identified in a reasonable manner, to confirm that the "ask" is clearly articulated, to get approval by the sponsor, the VCDS, the CFO, the CDS, the DM and the minister.  Certainly, sometimes those timelines can be compressed in the case of urgent matters - but most of the senior leadership want to take the time to read and understand when they are signing recommendations to spend bilions of dollars.  And then the documentation goes to the staff of the Board who review it in detail, ask more questions, and ultimately present it to the Board with recommendations.

So: MHLH got preliminary approval in 2006; at that point they began much of the heavy lifting (no pun intended) and analysis and review and planning.  That takes time - even when engaging in concurrent activity where possible.  Less than three years to plan a large undertaking is not an unheard of length of time - particularly when there are always other competing priorities both within the military and within the government.  And remember that the last six months of that was getting the final plan approved inside DND and then by TB.

One of the downfalls of many DND projects is someone deciding that they will try an end-run around the rules and processes.  Those rarely turn out well, and often result in even longer delays, once they go back to redo things they deliberately or accidentally skipped over the first time.  (Or, in other words, before you can effectively break the rules and outsmart the system, you need to know the rules and understand how the system works).

 

[Good2Golf]

I was actually able to follow your entire post clearly in my head which makes me both happy at my ability to understand governent procurement but scared in that I fear I may one day end up working in some form of it.

Anyways...

I have a question for you. Why did it take until June of 2009 (almost 3 years) to get EPA?

Cheers

I would say amongst other things, triage of procurement staff effort and the Government's own approval process (not just DNDs), primarily to rapidly procure an interim capability to move soldiers and supporters away from IED-laden routes and into the air, to wit the CH-147D foreign military sales procurement tailored specifically for the relatively rather small area of operations that was AFG.  There are only so many personnel to go around, and while the refinement of the capability to meet the SOR was being carried out, the Manley Report was released and re-prioritized staff effort for the immediate operational requirement.

What many people thought was asking for 'gold-plated cup holders' didn't align with Government's own expectations of how the long-term solution would have to operate, including operation over long, inhospitable distances with minimal logistical and technical support.  Unlike, for example, the American Army that operates in areas where there is relatively little distance separating support bases in the continental US, Canada is a stark contrast.  Go up North to Alert, one says?  Sure, same distance as Toronto to Vancouver...oh, you have Iqaluit (same distance as Winnipeg from Toront) and Resolute Bay (Edmonton, from Toronto), before you get there.  Thus the end-state aircraft needed longer range.  What needed to be coordinated was not to make new designs, but adapt already-certified capabilities (double-sized fuel tanks, etc...) and some pre-designed, but unproduced capabilities (solid-state electrical distribution) and make sure that they were all supportable for the long term...20, 30, 40 years.  Did the project team get it 100% right?  No, as the Auditor General noted in her Fall 2010 report, but even in her report, she noted continual improvement during the evolution of the project, so DND was working in earnest to improve. 

Since receipt of the full fleet, the CH-147F has travelled across the country and self-deployed successfully up to the North (Alert, NU and Iqaluit, NU amongst other locations) for two years in a row.  Interestingly, the 'Canadianizations' that many questioned have been critical to this success, and have in fact been of enough worth to merit inclusion in other nation's Chinook fleets (for which Canada sees returned benefit through OEM support credits for other users that equip their Chinooks with Canadian sub-systems).  Of particular note reinforcing the worth of the modifications/integrations that Canada required is the US Army's own Special Operations Aviation task force procuring new mission-specialized MH-47G Block 2 aircraft based not on previous versions of US SOA MH-47s, but on Canada's variant of the Chinook. US Army to acquire enhanced MH-47G Block 2 Chinooks
Photo Credit: Janes Publiscations

...and the Canadian variant that preceded the MH-47G Bk 2:

Photo Credit: Boeing

As a tax payer, do I see the additional time it took to get things right as being time fairly well-spent?  Yes.  Does it looks like this will be a usable capability for several decades?  Looks to be.  Could it have been done faster?  Perhaps, but, as dapaterson notes, there is a lot more to getting a project approved than picking from a menu and saying, "There, I'll have [X] of those, please." 

:2c:

Regards
G2G

 

[MarkOttawa]

Latest from Dave Perry. Senior Analyst, Canadian Global Affairs Institute:

2015 Status Report on Major Defence Equipment Procurements
...
Executive Summary

Federal elections may be good for democracy, but the campaigns — particularly the lengthy one recently held in Canada — can be crippling for plans to better arm our military. Just before the election was called, there were public signs of important progress being made in what has long been a frustratingly slow and bureaucratically complex procurement process. But then the campaign left the Department of National Defence and other federal departments unable to secure approvals from either a defence minister or the Treasury Board, until the election ended and the new prime minister appointed the current cabinet.

There had already been upheaval prior to that: In the first seven months of 2015, the three senior leaders at the Canadian Forces and the Defence Department (including the minister) had been replaced, along with many other people critical to the procurement process. In addition, there had been changes in the Public Works Department and the Defence Procurement Strategy Secretariat.

Frustrating and disappointing delays have long been a matter of course in Canada’s defence procurement process. In 2014/15, the number of ministerial or Treasury Board approvals to allow projects to proceed was half of that in 2009/10. Yet the demand for approvals has not abated.

In addition to the turnover of key figures involved in the procurement and approval process, delays have come from a number of major steps added to the process, making an already lengthy and complex system even more so. To be sure, these steps were added in the pursuit of improved financial management and project management, with the aim of addressing longstanding problems. But it will take years to see if those objectives have been realized.

An irony here is that the budget for military procurement has increased. Between 2004 and 2009, the Defence Department’s procurement budget nearly doubled. But the funding was never matched by the capacity to manage it. In 2003, the Material Group had a ratio of 2,600 staff for every $1 billion in procurement funds. By 2009, ratio had become 1,800 staff for every $1 billion in procurement funds. Since then, the ratio has only gotten substantially worse.

New systems now require extensive analysis to determine if a more intensive Treasury Board review is required. A recently created panel designed to provide a “third-party challenge function” on requirements for major procurements has created some confusion among officials as to what documentation they should be producing to support procurement initiatives. And the panel’s terms of reference are extensive, ranging from evaluating a project’s alignment with government policy and the level of its fit with allies’ capabilities, to the role of Canadian suppliers and the anticipated support concept.

Still, there are some indications that changes enacted in 2014 to the procurement process may eventually help mitigate delays in the future. There are continual improvements being made to the way the Defence Department conducts project costing as well as how the Treasury Board Secretariat evaluates the costs, which will help improve the compatibility between estimates and newly introduced frameworks. New methods of better prioritizing projects have also been introduced. And there are plans underway intended to reduce the time involved in the department’s internal approval processes. For now, however, these attempts at improvement have been focused on the lower-dollar-figure approvals done by the minister. It remains to be seen if, first, they work, and secondly, if they can then be used to facilitate Treasury Board approvals, as well...
http://www.cgai.ca/2015_status_report_on_major_defence_equipment_procurements#executive

Rest follows.  CP story here:

Politics
Defence ministry turnover, marathon election hamper military purchasing: report
Murray Brewster
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/defence-ministry-turnover-and-marathon-election-hamper-military-purchasing/article28016184/

That first word sums up the problem with media reporting on Canadian defence--they treat it as all politics without going into the substance very much.

Mark
Ottawa

 

[Good2Golf]

Good articles. :nod:

:2c:

G2G

 

[Kirkhill]

Lighter side irrelevance -

You've heard of sharks with freaking lasers -

Here's the 3 Div version

 

[Kirkhill]

In its complaint to the tribunal, Raytheon alleges that the evaluation of the equipment was “arbitrary and imprecise.”

It noted that the soldiers at Garrison Petawawa who performed the evaluation “lacked the necessary expertise,” that they based their evaluation on undisclosed criteria, and that the government failed to follow the stated process.

Raytheon complaining about an award to Rheinmetall after 2 CMBG conducted field trials.....

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/alberta-company-alleges-harper-government-unfairly-awarded-7-million-defence-contract-to-quebec-firm

This is actually a very serious problem.  It arises from the belief that all attributes can be anticipated and quantified.  This makes the lives of accountants and modern engineers very simple.  The engineers are given a number that they can target as a solution - just as they learned to do in exams.  And the accountants can use the same numbers to verify compliance.

On the other hand, as too many of us know, a system's compliance does not guarantee a functional, useable system - often, precisely because something fundamental was overlooked in the original design brief - one of Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns.

The procurement process can't be about facilitating bureaucrats lives by making it easier for them to work with vendors.  It can't be about supplying vendors with profits.  It can't be about supplying jobs.

It has to be about supplying useable kit in a timely fashion at a reasonable price. 

Full stop.

And the problem is not limited to the military.  It is endemic in the engineering world. 

 

[MilEME09]

We have been saying it here for years and it looks like it's finally happening.
http://www.embassynews.ca/news/2016/01/13/defence-minister-military-review-to-be-completed-by-end-of-2016/48092/?mlc=1038&muid=19523

Defence minister: Military review to be completed by end of 2016

Published: Wednesday, 01/13/2016 12:00 am EST

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan says he plans to complete a thorough defence policy review by the end of 2016—and the public will be asked to participate.  In an interview with Embassy Jan. 12, Mr. Sajjan confirmed that Department of National Defence officials are already identifying how the review, or Defence White Paper, will be conducted.

Public consultation will be involved and foreign allies will be consulted, he said. The review is expected to set a road map for the next 10 to 20 years.

“I want to make sure that we get the 'How' part. It’s so important,” he said. “If we don’t get that right then the quality’s not going to be there at the end.”

Arctic sovereignty, NORAD prioritized

As the raison d’être for the Canadian Armed Forces is debated once again, Mr. Sajjan said there are elements of Canadian defence policy that he assumes will be prioritized. The safety of Canadians will always be the “number one priority,” he said, while continental defence, Arctic sovereignty and Canada’s responsibilities within the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will stay constant.

Even so, he said defence policy needs to be placed “in a wider context that suits the needs of the vision that our government is setting." The Liberal government, in its early days, has talked up a return to multilateralism and a greater focus on diplomacy.

Working with foreign allies is “critical,” Mr. Sajjan said. The minister has connected with his counterparts from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and France, as well as other NATO allies.

British, Australian lessons

“The British just did a defence review," he said, referring to the Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015 released by the Cameron government on Nov. 23. "Australia is about to release theirs, and especially it’s important for us to be able to learn from those lessons."

He said he recently spoke with UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon in London. “It is helping me to shape how Canada can look at doing [the defence review],” he said, noting the UK had used an interactive website to get public input.

“I’ve got some really key ideas that Fallon provided, and I’m looking forward to reading the Australian review when it comes out as well,” Mr. Sajjan said.

The minister said the credibility and relevancy of the review was important. “We can do a white paper of everything on the wishlist, but if you don’t have the budget to support it it really doesn’t matter.”

Defence officials declared the previous Harper government's military wishlist, the Canada First Defence Strategy, unaffordable in 2011, but no updated document was ever released.

'Very focused' on procurement

Sitting in his office at National Defence headquarters—where staffers said reporters hadn't been seen in the past few years under the previous government—Mr. Sajjan told Embassy that procurement is being looked at in “extreme detail."

“Does it have the right number of people, the right type of expertise to be able to make it more efficient,” he posited.

A recent report from the Canadian Global Affairs Institute’s David Perry had warned that cutbacks to DND’s materiel department were causing major slowdowns to the process.

“To have an agile force we need to support it as well. Certain areas we do need to increase,” Mr. Sajjan said. Procurement is "definitely one of them."

Though hesitant to look back at the previous government’s record, he acknowledged a belaboured procurement process.

He is “dismayed” at the capability gap in the Canadian Navy, he said, “because we didn’t get the procurement process right.” So he is “very focused” on making sure that procurement becomes more efficient.

“We’re going through a process that’s going to be more transparent, so that it’s done in a manner that gives confidence to the Canadian public,” Mr. Sajjan said.

He would not confirm, however, whether the Statement of Requirements for new defence procurements would be released publicly. In 2013, DND quietly decided to no longer post these key technical documents on its website, which allowed the public to see the military’s requirements for crucial new planes, ships, and vehicles.

With the ubiquitous F-35 fighter jet program, shafted by the Liberals to replace the CF-18s in favour of an open competition, Mr. Sajjan said “the last thing I want to see with our fighters is what we have with our Navy right now: the gap in our capabilities.”

When it comes to figuring out how Canada's National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy should move forward—including narrowing down exactly which ships are needed and how many—the defence policy review will help to provide “a lot more clarity.”

'Consistent and predictable' funding

Asked about the transformation recommendations of fellow MP and retired general Andrew Leslie, whose controversial report recommended ways to improve the department’s efficiency, Mr. Sajjan noted there could be redundancies in some areas within the department. The defence review will identify these, he said.

Another thing the review will determine, he said, is the future for Canada’s reserve force. The previous government had committed to an accelerated expansion from 24,000 to 30,000 members.

“With the defence review it will allow us to look at what the capability and the role of the reserves will be for the future,” Mr. Sajjan said. “In some areas, as much as we want to grow, the population can’t support that growth.”

Ultimately, funding will play a big role in how the department will evolve. The Liberals committed to maintaining the current defence budget escalator—a three per cent increase to the budget annually, as of the 2015 federal budget.

The minister wouldn’t specify whether the government is thinking of increasing funding any more than that, but he said it’s his goal to make sure funding is “consistent and predictable” to better plan for the future.

“And as the economy improves, we can look at adjusting things as well,” he added.

 

[GnyHwy]

Procurement simplified in 7 easy steps.

1. Identify what the CF requires.
2. Convince treasury board that this is a priority.
3. Assure public works you are procuring fairly.
4. Settle contract with suppliers.
5. Deliver requirement with training.
6. Convince CF that this is what they required in the first place.
7. Sustain requirement for indefinite period.

Too ******* easy! What's the hold up?

 

[dapaterson]

You left out

a. Satisfy the regimental mafias that one is not getting something the others are not
b. Post directors and managers willy nilly in, out and in-between projects, so there's a constant learning curve
c. Never learn from past mistakes, but double down on them
d. Overlook the fact that TBS hires very, very intelligent people who are much better at knowledge management and know what we promised and failed to deliver in the past
e. Assume away all the problems because, when they hit, see point b. above
f. Buy shiny without a well defined requirement
g. Pretend that there will be no incremental operating costs, and no incremental personnel demands

 

[PuckChaser]

b. Post directors and managers willy nilly in, out and in-between projects, so there's a constant learning curve

That would help cull the Col and LCol ranks if they're told they're posted to a new project office, they VR because they'll be stuck there for 10 years.

 

[MilEME09]

I'm reading a report this morning(Ottawa citizen) that the government is moving to increase DND's in house purchase limit to $5 million, which would reportly cover 91% of DND's procurement, with the goal of freeing up PSPC for the bigger projects. Good move by the government? sounds like it would make DND's life easier

 

[PuckChaser]

Significantly easier. Random audits to ensure compliance with procurement rules to justify the switch. There's no reason why PWGSC (or whatever they are now) needs to be involved in a purchase of a stores shelving purchase of $35k. Low hanging fruit and does nothing but cause delays.

 

[jollyjacktar]

Oh god yes.  It will make things so much easier and faster.  Then we can do what we're here for, support the ships (in our case).  Can't wait for it to come.

 

[MilEME09]

Andrew Coyne: Canada's glorious bipartisan tradition of messing up military procurement

That was a cracker of a column my Postmedia colleague, Michael Den Tandt, unloaded the other day, taking the Harper government to task for its “disjointed, underfunded, poorly understood [and] chronically secretive” defence policy.

For all the prime minister’s tough talk about the growing list of strategic and security threats to the democracies — Russia, Iran, ISIS and beyond — there is, he noted, a widening gap between Canada’s professed readiness to “do its part” and our actual ability to do so. Indeed, so bad is the “rust-out” that “unless there are dramatic changes soon, it’s fair to ask whether Canada will even be able to field a capable military in a few years’ time.”

Others have offered the same criticism, usually with reference to recent cuts in spending on national defence. The specific complaint of underfunding strikes me as overstated. Defence spending rose more than 50% over the first seven years of the Harper government, from $15-billion in 2006 to $23-billion in 2013. If it has since been cut back somewhat, it remains higher, both as a percentage of program spending and as a share of GDP, than it was when they took office.

The more telling critique, it seems to me, has less to do with how much the government is spending on defence than how it is spending it — notably the enduring fiasco of military procurement.

It does beggar belief, for example, that we are still considering purchasing the F-35 fighter jet — there are reports, denied by the government, that it has quietly agreed to buy four of the jets next year, perhaps as a sort of amuse-bouche for the original order of 65 — given what a monumental bust it has turned out to be. Chosen without competition, to specifications that were written after it had been selected, the much-delayed “fifth generation” aircraft has been buried in mounting costs and growing doubts about its strategic purpose or even basic flight worthiness.

All this is quite apart from the comic opera surrounding the government’s public costing of the plane, in which it gave out an initial figure that would later prove to have understated the true cost by a factor of five, then refused to provide Parliament with the supporting documentation. Only after it had been safely re-elected was it discovered that it had maintained two sets of books, one with something closer to the correct number and one for public consumption, along the way stonewalling and deceiving the Parliamentary Budget Officer and smearing the Auditor General for backing him up.
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So: worst procurement effort ever, right? No, that honour must remain with the still uncompleted attempt, four decades after it was begun, to replace the Sea King helicopters, now in their 52nd year in service. You remember: first the Mulroney government signed a contract to purchase 50 EH-101 military helicopters from a European manufacturer; then the Chretien government cancelled it, allegedly because it was too expensive, only to have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation; then it decided, a decade later, to purchase the Sikorsky Cyclone instead, only to find that it did not work as advertised. The military historian Aaron Plamondon says this is quite possibly “the most poorly executed military procurement ever undertaken — anywhere.”

But those are just the highlights. There has also been the bungled purchase of four Victoria-class submarines from the United Kingdom, the delays in obtaining new fixed-wing search and rescue aircraft, on and on and on — and looming as the next big procurement mess, the $35-billion (actually more like $110-billion, when operating and maintenance costs are included) National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy, already mired in the same sorts of delays, dubious costing and sole-source contracting controversies as the F-35.

What this long history of incompetence and waste should remind us is that messing up military procurement is a glorious bipartisan tradition. Plenty of factors are at work — political interference, DND empire-building, the endless susceptibility of all concerned to the contractors’ tales of high-tech wizardry — but the most consistent is the tendency of governments of whatever party to treat procurement as an economic development program, making so-called “industrial and regional benefits” the focus rather than simply getting the best equipment at the lowest price.

Not only does the resulting laundry list of local-sourcing requirements add materially to the end price but promises of job creation and technology “spin-offs” become yet another means by which defence contractors dress up military mutton as lamb for the benefit of gullible ministers and bureaucrats.

This is bad defence policy, but it’s even worse economy policy. When a government agrees to pay more than the competitive price for something, military hardware or anything else, it is effectively subsidizing the higher-cost provider. That isn’t just at the cost of the taxpayer, or foreign competitors. It’s at the expense of other domestic industries, outside the defence sector, from whom subsidy diverts scarce capital and labour.

Yet, incredibly, last year’s defence procurement strategy paper re-committed the government to the same failed approach, this time marked up with a lot of giddy verbiage about identifying Key Industrial Capabilities and “moving up the value chain.” To the extent this means anything, it means more costs, more lobbying, more pork-barreling — and less hardware for our forces in the field.

With our military needs on the rise and our budgets constrained, it would seem more important than ever that we get the most bang for the buck out of every dollar of defence spending. Dare I suggest a different approach, based on a radical new idea — that military procurement should be about military procurement?

Postmedia News

 

[Kirkhill]

Plenty of factors are at work — political interference, DND empire-building, the endless susceptibility of all concerned to the contractors’ tales of high-tech wizardry — but the most consistent is the tendency of governments of whatever party to treat procurement as an economic development program, making so-called “industrial and regional benefits” the focus rather than simply getting the best equipment at the lowest price.

He forgot one.  It is not just DND that engages in empire-building.  Public Works and Government Services Canada - Public Services and Procurement Canada can't escape blame either.  I get the sense that the DND bureaucrats end up wearing a lot of Public Services egg.

 

[Cloud Cover]

Did Andrew Coyne write that or ERC?

 

[Kirkhill]

Keep in mind that Andrew Coyne's beef with Harper was that PM Harper was not enough like Canadian Taxpayers Federation Harper.

Why he thought the Liberals would be better escapes me.

 

[MilEME09]

Did Andrew Coyne write that or ERC?

Didn't you know Andrew Coyne is ERC's Pen name?