As Rough As It May Seem,It's Still Steady As You Go...
Huh! You've got to be kidding me on this one.. seriously.
OTTAWA (CP) — Canada's new Arctic patrol ships will likely
lack sonar capability, forcing them to use other methods to
detect submarine threats in northern waters, a project official
said Wednesday.
"They will not have the ability to detect submarines," Capt.
Ron Lloyd, a senior navy planner, said in an interview with
The Canadian Press. Both the operation and even the
installation of sonar equipment on the new warships may
prove to be impractical, he said.
"You're talking about ship that's going to run up onto ice
and all of the noise that ice makes and still be able to detect
submarines," said Lloyd, who is the former commander of
the frigate HMCS Charlottetown.
"From our perspective we have not examined that as a
potential (capability) for this platform."
The warships, announced with fanfare this summer, are a
pillar in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's plan to defend the
Arctic against intruders and environmental damage.
The navy is in the early stages of identifying the design and
equipment for the ships, which are expected to cost $7.4 billion
to build and maintain over their 25-year lifespan.
The Defence Department hasn't settled on how many ships it
will build, and the first one isn't expected to be delivered until 2013.
Earlier this year a leaked draft copy of the Conservative defence
strategy called for six ships, but the formal announcement in July
said there could be as many as eight, vessels that would also patrol
the country's Atlantic and Pacific coastlines.
Defence expert Dan Middlemiss said the purpose of the Arctic ships
was to make sure "we know what's going on in our backyard."
Leaving out sonar would be acceptable as long as "you've got
something else that does that job for you," he said.
In the last election, the Tories' defence platform promised a network
of underwater listening posts in the Arctic. But the leaked defence
strategy said only that the military would "investigate options" to
develop such a system.
American and Russian nuclear-powered submarines, the only type
of boats capable of sustained operations under the ice, have been
known to lurk in Canada's Arctic.
The last incident occurred in 2005 when a U.S. submarine took a
short cut to the North Pole, not notifying Ottawa until after the fact.
In the 1980s Washington had agreed to warn Canada about such
incursions.
Helicopters, which are slated to deploy with the new ships as
needed, could also fulfill an anti-submarine role depending on
the weather, said Middlemiss, a professor at Dalhousie University's
Centre for Foreign Policy Studies.
Hunting nuclear-powered submarines is something that's usually
best left to other submarines, navy experts say.
Lloyd said the big advantage of the new patrol ships is that it gives
the navy the ability to operate in all of the country's oceans, pending
conditions, for the first time in many years.
Since the Conservatives have put so much emphasis on defending the
Arctic, Middlemiss said, Canadians will be expecting concrete surveill-
ance measures.
"There are real military reasons for taking care of our own backyard a
bit better and more convincingly than we've tried to do," he said in an
interview from Halifax.
In the past, Canada has experimented with underwater listening devices
and even planned to buy $100 million worth of them in the late 1980s,
but all of the proposals were dropped mostly because of the cost.
The patrol ship program is a step down from the Conservative election
promise to build three armed, heavy icebreaking ships.
Once operational, the patrol ships will free frigates and destroyers from
routine surveillance patrols and allow for more overseas deployments to
trouble spots such as the Persian Gulf.
Posts
