BeaverFever

With Republicans Like These, Who Needs Russian Propaganda? Some far-right members of Congress seem to be parroting Vladimir Putin’s talking points. That doesn’t mean anti-Ukraine conspiracy theories can’t be homegrown. Molly OlmsteadApril 20, 20245:50 AM Earlier this month, Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Puck News that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” Several days later, another Republican, Rep. Michael Turner of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he agreed. “Anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” Turner told CNN, are “directly coming from Russia.” It was a notable moment—and a telling one, as the House gets ready for a contentious vote on aid to Ukraine. The vote is being loudly protested by far-right politicians including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is pushing to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson from his role over the issue. It’s not the first time Republican lawmakers have accused their colleagues of essentially being Russian pawns. But as far-right rabble-rousers in the Republican Party have increasingly advocated against continued support of Ukraine—and even some mainstream Republicans no longer interpret Russian aggression as a ruthless threat to democracy and the international order—the most extreme lawmakers appear to be mirroring the Kremlin’s own propaganda. Last Monday, Greene told Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that Ukraine was waging a “war against Christianity” and Russians “seem to be protecting” the religion. The idea of Russia as a great (white) Christian nation has been percolating in right-wing thinking for more than a decade, despite Russia’s history of suppressing non-Orthodox Christianity and exerting power over the Russian Orthodox Church. But Greene didn’t limit herself to praising Russia’s religious nationalism on Bannon’s show: She cited, as fact, anti-Ukraine disinformation that “the Ukrainian government is attacking Christians” and “executing priests.” This prompted former Rep. Ken Buck, another Republican, to call Greene “Moscow Marjorie” on CNN. And indeed, this assertion does mirror Russia’s own talking points about Ukraine. (In actuality, the crimes Greene accused Ukraine of committing are crimes Russian forces have perpetrated.) But whether the Kremlin’s own talking points are being piped into the brains of right-wing American politicians—or just bear a striking similarity to the new isolationist rhetoric of the far right—is a matter of interesting debate. ….. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/ukraine-russia-congress-johnson-republicans-marjorie-greene-putin-propaganda.html

OMG did you just copy your post from the GOP/Putin thread and past it here? Trump and 60% of the GOP are Putin stooges and MAGA supporters are brainwashed cultists who will endorse anything Trump decrees on any given day no matter how bizarre or hypocritical or self contradictory. Why don’t you get a can of gas and a match and join your cultist brethren.

LMAO it’s obvious what you’re trying to do, simpleton. This thread is about the undeniable fact that the Republican party is now overrun by a faction that openly supports, aids and abets Putin, the number one enemy of America and the West. WE BOTH KNOW WHY YOU JUST SKIPPED RIGHT PAST IT WITHOUT COMMENT You are desperately trying to change the subject to…anything… I could easily argue with your revisionist gaslighting Iraq bullshit, about what did or didn’t happen ten years and 2 presidents ago during the unnecessary Republican-invented war which will forever be remembered as yet another disastrous GOP scandal. But since your real agenda is to change the subject from you Putin-supporting nut-jobs in Congress like MTG, Im not going to indulge you.

Yeah but your opinion is batshit. As I clearly stated GOP cranks are trying to help Putin conquer Ukraine by cutting off badly needed military aid. Putin gets his military aid from his allies China, Iran and North Korea, whom you seem to have no problem with, you must think they are the good guys.

1) We can debate the legitimate mistakes of the Obama administration as well as your selective self-serving history and your omissions. But more importantly NONE OF THAT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS THREAD OR THE GOP’S ACTIVE SUPPORT OF PUTIN BTW You guys can’t have it both ways, complaining that the Dems ate dangerous warmongers and at the same time they are weak “pillow biters”. Both cannot be true you have to pick a version of reality you believe in and stick with it.

Today Republican members of congress voted once again to help Putin conquer Ukraine by voting against badly needed aid 112-101 with one abstention. Led of course by Chief Putinista and walking punchline MTG, certified know-nothing and unhinged kook. Fortunately Democrats voted for the aid and it passed by a final margin of 311-112. They also voted to ban Chinese-controlled Tik Tok, something Trump was once outspokenly for until one of its billionaire investors paid him a private visit and now suddenly the idea is unthinkable to Republicans. All in all a nice day of losses for the Putin-China axis through its GOP proxies.

They already kneel and open their mouths to receive whatever foulness is presented to them, why not add OJ to the list?

A Trump supporter just SET HIMSELF ON FIRE to protest Trump’s Stormy Daniels trial. Literally every feature of a cult is found in Trumpism, from worship of a mythical all-powerful superman to literally killing yourself in horrible ways FOR HIM. But yeah let’s keep asking if Dems are a cult just because they refuse to agree with Far-right crackpot conspiracy theories that nobody outside of their ACTUAL cult believes

Meanwhile if a reporter interviewing Musk asks him a question he doesn’t like he bans them from X. Typical MAGA, screeching “freedom” while presiding over his fiefdom as a heavy-handed dictator.

Wow. That is lame. You went full Trumpet supporter with that one. What next you going to tell me that if I don’t unconditionally support Trump I love terrorists and hate freedom? That’s the level of argument you’ve sunk to here. You can do better. What should Isreal do today after decades of both sides doing everything wrong? Or what should have it done differently after Oct? Or from the start back in 1948? I assume the first one but it’s a tough question because the damage was done generations ago. Let’s start by stopping the slaughter of women and children and tossing Netanyahu and his coalition of militant extremist parties from office Once Israel has a rational moderate party ideologically willing to work towards a 2-state solution we can look for peace partners in Palestine and beyond amd take it from there

You are once again ignoring fact. srael has never once recognized Palestine’s right to exist and never once renounced occupation and settlement expansion. Also Israel purposely cultivated Hamas in Gaza to divide Palestinians Including dollars from Netanyahu’s government you cannot separate Israel’s aggression against Palestinians from Palestinian aggression against Israel I am not condoning Hamas or Oct 7 but it is unrealistic to expect that Palestinians should always turn the other cheek and simply find ways to cope under the oppression of Israeli hardliners, settlement expansion etc Yeah looks real peaceful there in Gaza. So what Russia isn’t waging war on Uzbekistan must mean they are peaceful. Israel is waging war on Palestinians and the decades of land-grabs, illegal settlements, stealing water, arbitrarily shutting off water, electricity, import/exports, aiding and abetting militant settler militias….that is all warfare. The war has never ended and has been going since before the bombing the King David hotel, it just takes different forms at different times. “The Palestinians” actually have diverse views and the secular Palestinian Authority unilaterally recognized Israel’s right to exist decades ago and still does….Israel is the one who refused to reciprocate That is a fact! Why don’t you take YOUR rose-colored glasses off and ask Netanyahu that same question since he deliberately isolated Palestinian Authority (who recognized Israel and participated in peace process) in order to cultivate and elevate Hamas (who called for Israel’s destruction)? Netanyahu foolishly believed he could divide the Palestinian people between these two groups and control them both. Also why don’t you ask how Palestinians could deal with Israel whose position is that Palestinians have no right to their own state and no right to be citizens of the Israeli state and therefore fated to be occupied people for all eternity, all while continuously building illegal settlements and carrying out all the other oppressive activities Ive mentioned several times already?

You are the one ignoring the facts of history that falsely insinuating that Israel has ever offered or been interested in peace or never engaged in terrorism of its own You ignore the facts that many of Israel’s founding fathers were also terrorists who slaughtered Arab civilians and bombed British soldiers and are now revered as national heroes. And of course once they formed a nation state Israel had the luxury of using military and paramilitary forces and occupation and oppression instead of terrorism but you make no reference these facts either Then you absurdly claim they had the option “to live in peace within the borders they have” which is something Putin might say about Ukraine. What you really mean is they could choose to live under oppression and occupation within the borders unilaterally dictated to it by Israel and in contravention of international law.

Continued… BIBI’S COUP In Israel’s November 2022 election, Netanyahu won back power. His coalition captured 64 of the Israeli parliament’s 120 seats, a landslide by recent standards. The key figures in the new government were Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of a nationalist religious party representing West Bank settlers, and Ben-Gvir. Working with the ultra-Orthodox parties, Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir devised a blueprint for an autocratic and theocratic Israel. The new cabinet’s guidelines, for example, declared that “the Jewish people have an exclusive, inalienable right to the entire Land of Israel”—denying outright any Palestinian claim to territory, even in Gaza. Smotrich became minister of finance and was put in charge of the West Bank, where he initiated a massive program to expand Jewish settlements. Ben-Gvir was named national security minister, in control of police and prisons. He used his power to encourage more Jews to visit the Temple Mount (al Aqsa). Between January and October of 2023, about 50,000 Jews toured it—more than in any other equivalent period on record. (In 2022, there were 35,000 Jewish visitors on the Mount.) Netanyahu’s radical new government stirred outrage among Israeli liberals and centrists. But even though humiliating Palestinians was central to their agenda, these critics continued to ignore the fate of the occupied territories and al Aqsa when denouncing the cabinet. Instead, they focused largely on Netanyahu’s judicial reforms. Announced in January 2023, these proposed laws would curb the independence of Israel’s Supreme Court—the custodian of civil and human rights in a country that lacks a formal constitution—and dismantle the legal advisory system that provides checks and balances on executive power. If they had been enacted, the bills would have made it much easier for Netanyahu and his partners to build an autocracy and might even have spared him from his corruption trial. The judicial reform bills were, without doubt, extraordinarily dangerous. They rightfully prompted an enormous wave of protests, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis demonstrating every week. But in confronting this coup, Netanyahu’s opponents again acted as if the occupation were an unrelated issue. Even though the laws were drafted partly to weaken whatever legal protection the Israeli Supreme Court would give Palestinians, demonstrators shied away from mentioning the occupation or the defunct peace process out of fear of being smeared as unpatriotic. In fact, the organizers worked to sideline Israel’s anti-occupation protesters to avoid having images of Palestinian flags appear in the demonstrations. This tactic succeeded, ensuring that the protest movement was not “tainted” by the Palestinian cause: Israeli Arabs, who make up around 20 percent of the country’s population, largely refrained from joining the demonstrations. But this made it harder for the movement to succeed. Given Israel’s demographics, center-left Jews need to partner with the country’s Arabs if they ever want to form a government. By delegitimizing Israeli Arabs’ concerns, the demonstrators played right into Netanyahu’s strategy. With the Arabs out, the battle over the judicial reforms proceeded as an intra-Jewish affair. Demonstrators adopted the blue and white Star of David flag, and many of their leaders and speakers were retired senior military officers. Protesters showed off their military credentials, reversing the decline in prestige that had shadowed the IDF since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Reservist pilots, who are crucial to the air force’s preparedness and combat power, threatened to withdraw from service if the laws were passed. In a show of institutional opposition, the IDF’s leaders rebuffed Netanyahu when he demanded that they discipline the reservists. That the IDF would break with the prime minister was not surprising. Throughout his long career, Netanyahu has frequently clashed with the military, and his strongest rivals have been retired generals who became politicians, such as Sharon, Rabin, and Barak—not to mention Benny Gantz, whom Netanyahu made part of his emergency war cabinet but may eventually challenge and succeed him as prime minister. Netanyahu has long rejected the generals’ vision of an Israel that is strong militarily but flexible diplomatically. … But military and intelligence incompetence, dismal as it was, cannot shield the prime minister from culpability—and not only because, as head of the government, Netanyahu bears ultimate responsibility for what happens in Israel. His reckless prewar policy of dividing Israelis made the country vulnerable, tempting Iran’s allies to strike at a riven society. Netanyahu’s humiliation of the Palestinians helped radicalism thrive. It is no accident that Hamas named its operation “al Aqsa flood” and portrayed the attacks as a way of protecting al Aqsa from a Jewish takeover. Protecting the holy Muslim site was seen as a reason to attack Israel and face the inevitably dire consequences of an IDF counterattack. The Israeli public has not absolved Netanyahu of responsibility for October 7. The prime minister’s party has plummeted in the polls, and his approval rating has tanked as well, although the government maintains a parliamentary majority. …

Not quite accurate. Israel did not end its occupation of West Bank or Gaza or its claim to those territories but instead recognized that PA and Hamas could police themselves inside of the open-air prisons Israel created for them. Israel continues to control all water, electricity, movement of people and goods etc into and out of those territories. And continues to build illegal settlements and turn a blind eye or even abet settler violence. And PA DID recognize Israel. Yeah well there are extremists who call for the compete elimination of Palestinians, many of whom are in the current Israeli government Extremists are on both sides and they need to be sidelined not used as an excuse to continue a forever war.

Similar statements have been said about one group or another throughout history, usually as an excuse to continue conflict. In what way are they more “ferociously war-like” than Israelis? refuses to accept the existence of Palestine yet you judge them differently. And ONCE AGAIN for the record, the Palestinian Authority unilaterally recognized Israel back in the 1990s, and continues to do so it is Israel who refuses to reciprocate.

The tragic Middle East miscalculation: Mistaking Netanyahu for Israel … The very understandable and necessary desire to provide security to the 10 million people of Israel after this century’s most grievous massacre of Jewish civilians led Mr. Biden to give succour, material support and political legitimacy to the not-very-legitimate leader of those 10 million people – a man who 86 per cent of Israelis hold responsible for the Oct. 7massacre. In other conflicts, the distinction between a country and its leader would be irrelevant. But as of Oct. 6, 2023, Mr. Netanyahu, and the coalition of extremist fringe parties he had assembled into a government, was Israel’s biggest problem. He is, as prominent Israelis have repeatedly warned, the worst possible person to be called on to respond to an atrocity. “In the years leading up to the attack, the country was fractured by Netanyahu’s effort to undermine its democratic institutions and turn it into a theocratic, nationalist autocracy,” Aluf Benn, editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, writes in an essay this week. Not only is Mr. Netanyahu not at all representative of Israel or its people (his party has rarely received more than 25 per cent of votes, and governs with even less popular parties), but he has used his office to undermine any prospects for long-term peace and security. As a consequence of those politics, Mr. Netanyahu has pursued a military response without apparent strategy or end game, one that has shown no concern for the excessive deaths of civilian families and aid workers or the prospect of further popularizing Hamas and other extremist groups. Mr. Netanyahu has “promised to ‘destroy Hamas,’ but beyond military force, he has no strategy for eliminating the group and no clear plan for what would replace it,” Mr. Benn writes. “He has refused to lay out a postwar vision or order.” Before Oct. 7, Mr. Netanyahu not only ignored and played down security threats at the Gaza border, but actively cultivated the violent religious-extremist movement Hamas in an effort to sideline the Palestinian Authority, which recognizes Israel. For years, Israelis have read news reports of Qatari cash being delivered with the help of Israeli agents to Hamas leaders at Mr. Netanyahu’s behest, a practice the Prime Minister defended in a 2019 address to his party’s parliamentary caucus: “Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to [Hamas] because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.” …. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/opinion/article-the-tragic-mideast-miscalculation-mistaking-netanyahu-for-israel/ Israel’s Self-Destruction Netanyahu, the Palestinians, and the Price of Neglect By Aluf Benn March/April 2024Published on February 7, 2024 …Having failed to stop the Hamas attack, the IDF has responded with overwhelming force, killing thousands of Palestinians and razing entire Gazan neighborhoods. But even as pilots drop bombs and commandos flush out Hamas’s tunnels, the Israeli government has not reckoned with the enmity that produced the attack—or what policies might prevent another. Its silence comes at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has refused to lay out a postwar vision or order. Netanyahu has promised to “destroy Hamas,” but beyond military force, he has no strategy for eliminating the group and no clear plan for what would replace it as the de facto government of postwar Gaza. His failure to strategize is no accident. Nor is it an act of political expediency designed to keep his right-wing coalition together. To live in peace, Israel will have to finally come to terms with the Palestinians, and that is something Netanyahu has opposed throughout his career. He has devoted his tenure as prime minister, the longest in Israeli history, to undermining and sidelining the Palestinian national movement. He has promised his people that they can prosper without peace. He has sold the country on the idea that it can continue to occupy Palestinian lands forever at little domestic or international cost. And even now, in the wake of October 7, he has not changed this message. The only thing Netanyahu has said Israel will do after the war is maintain a “security perimeter” around Gaza—a thinly veiled euphemism for long-term occupation, including a cordon along the border that will eat up a big chunk of scarce Palestinian land. …Back in office, Netanyahu offered Israelis a convenient alternative to the now discredited “land for peace” formula. Israel, he argued, could prosper as a Western-style country—and even reach out to the Arab world at large—while pushing aside the Palestinians. The key was to divide and conquer. In the West Bank, Netanyahu maintained security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, which became Israel’s de facto policing and social services subcontractor, and he encouraged Qatar to fund Gaza’s Hamas government. “Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state,” Netanyahu told his party’s parliamentary caucus in 2019. It is a statement that has come back to haunt him. …As he sidelined the Palestinian issue, Netanyahu also worked to remake Israel’s domestic society. After winning a surprise reelection in 2015, Netanyahu put together a right-wing coalition to revive his old dream of igniting a conservative revolution. Once again, the prime minister began railing against “the elites” and initiated a culture war against the erstwhile establishment, which he viewed as hostile to himself and too liberal for his supporters. In 2018, he won passage of a major, controversial law that defined Israel as “the Nation-State of the Jewish People” and declared that Jews had the “unique” right to “exercise self-determination” in its territory. It gave the country’s Jewish majority precedence and subordinated its non-Jewish people. …. For Netanyahu, still facing trial, the government’s collapse was exactly what he had been hoping for. As the country organized yet another election, he fortified his base of right-wingers, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and socially conservative Jews. To win back power, he reached out in particular to West Bank settlers, a demographic that still saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as its raison d’être. These religious Zionists remained committed to their dream of Judaizing the occupied territories and making them a formal part of Israel. They hoped that if given the opportunity, they could drive out the territories’ Palestinian population. They had failed to prevent an evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 when Ariel Sharon was prime minister, but in the years since, they had gradually captured key positions in the Israeli military, civil service, and media as members of the secular establishment shifted their focus to making money in the private sector. The extremists had two principal demands of Netanyahu. The first, and most obvious, was to further expand Jewish settlements. The second was to establish a stronger Jewish presence on the Temple Mount, the historic site of both the Jewish Temple and the Muslim mosque of al Aqsa in Jerusalem’s Old City. …. In May 2021, violence erupted again. This time, the main provocateur was Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician who has publicly celebrated Jewish terrorists. Ben-Gvir had opened a “parliamentary office” in a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem where Jewish settlers, using old property deeds, have pushed out some residents, and Palestinians held mass protests in response. After hundreds of demonstrators gathered at al Aqsa, Israeli police raided the mosque compound. As a result, fighting erupted between Arabs and Jews and quickly spread to ethnically mixed towns across Israel. Hamas used the raid as an excuse to target Jerusalem with rockets, which brought yet more violence in Israel and another round of Israeli reprisals in Gaza. Still, the fighting dissipated when Israel and Hamas reached a new cease-fire in shockingly quick order. Qatar kept up its payments, and Israel gave work permits to some Gazans to improve the strip’s economy and reduce the population’s desire for conflict. Hamas stood by when Israel hit an allied militia, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in the spring of 2023. The relative quiet along the border allowed the IDF to redeploy its forces and move most combat battalions to the West Bank, where they could protect settlers from terrorist attacks. On October 7, it became clear those redeployments were exactly what Sinwar wanted. … https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israels-netanyahu-self-destruction

1. Apparently Israel's current leadership doesn’t know how to handle terrorism, that’s the whole point 2. Debatable how you want to describe Hamas as state actor or not. Technically there’s no Palestinian state so what other label is there besides terrorist. Also terrorists can plan large operations (e.g. ISIS as one example) What’s your point anyway? 3. It’s pretty indiscriminate. Israeli soldiers shot dead half-naked escaped Israeli hostages who approached them hollering and waving a white flag. And of course a Canadian was among the aid workers recently killed by the IDF despite the NGO following all protocols including informing the IDF exactly of all necessary details and riding in clearly marked vehicles. 3. Not just according to Hamas, NGOs and media in Gaza have corroborated 4. Yes it can always get worse that’s the nature of terrorism if you think that once the last Hamas member is dead there will be no more terrorist attacks against Israel you are seriously fooling yourself 5. What makes it different is that the concept of crimes against humanity didn’t exist prior to WW2. And while the US famously protects US soldiers who commit war crimes with half-hearted investigations and prosecutions and slap-on-the-wrist punishments, no western democracy has never committed atrocities on this scale since WW2. Maybe the USA’s Rolling Thunder carpet bombing of Cambodia, which had the effect of giving rise to the ruthless and murderous Khmer Rouge regime comes close, but also provides an example of how these heavy handed campaigns targeting civilians strengthen and further deprave enemies rather than weaken them.

I’m going to clarify my statements a bit because in retrospect it was overly broad. Even if we were to fully outsource continental defence to USA to protect against outside threats, that CONTINENTAL defence and that is not the totality of Canada’s NATIONAL Defence. US-only continental defence will almost certainly be limited to threats affecting USA and its interests and not all threats to Canada are threats to USA. The Alaska panhandle stretches halfway down the BC coast because the lat time we had outsourced our sovereignty and foreign policy to a superpower, the UK decided it was in THEIR interest to cede the land to USA Canadian sovereignty is not in US interests and in fact US and other Great Powers dispute Canadian sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, claiming it to be international waters. Canada “needs” to defend Canadian territory and almost by definition it is not possible for this job to be fully outsourced to a foreign country. Canada doesn’t technically “need” to help defend North America from foreign attack and but failing to do the latter will make it extremely difficult to do the former.

New Zealand is a tiny country with a tiny population, period. I don’t know how their military stacks up relative to their population but they have 4 P-8 poseidon s for example Similar to Canada it’s not about if you are needed for defence but whether you’re contributing your fair share If not, there are political and economic consequences.

Canada “needs” to contribute to the defence of North America for political reasons Not because it’s necessary for our security but because the less we contribute to continental defence , the more USA dominates us. .

Yeah but NATO itself owns 17 E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft (crewed by personnel on secondment from member nations) and has already ordered 7 of the new E-7 Wedgetails. That’s aside from what individual NATO Members might own and be able to bring to bear. AWACS is one of the few military capabilities owned by NATO alliance itself rather than member nations. UK has 7 E-3s with 3 E-7s on order. France has 4 E-3s and 2 Carrier-based E2 Hawkeyes. Turkey has ordered 4 E-7s. Sweden Italy and Greece have AWACS on Bizjet platforms (numbering 6, 2, and 4 respectively) so assuming none are pending retirement that’s at least 52 AWACS available for Europe, not sure Canadian AWACS are needed.

Australia is geographically isolated far away from allies and close to a variety of undemocratic regimes including China. I get that with AWACS in the arctic we would be able to see much farther than even the future over the horizon radar could. But we have no place to base them at least not the E-7. The only thing that makes sense to me would be to base them out of Alaska as part of a NORAD-owned fleet, to which both countries contribute the way NATO owns an AWACS fleet. The Aussies may like the E-7s but apparently the USAF, the main purchaser of the fleet, made some major changes to the requirements for their specific order which has not entered production yet and there are apparently all kinds of contract disputes and engineering problems with Boeing, delaying the start of production. The E-7 and P-8 are the only aircraft still in production based on the B-737NG airframe and there’s only one production line in the world operating to fill orders for those aircraft. If Boeing isn’t able to start production on the USAF’s E-7 by the time it completes all of its other P-8 and E-7 orders they will have to shut down the production line and it will be extremely expensive if not impossible for USAF to get its desired E-7. So apparently they are really pushing others to buy P-8 or E-7 just to keep the production line open. I remain skeptical of Canada’s need for the 16 P-8s announced earlier this year especially with another 11 SkyGuardian drones also ordered for handling many related missions. One theory of mine is therefore that a pledge to buy AWACS could be a signal to appease Washington if E-7s are what are in mind.

Yeah not sure why we need our own. At least right now when we have so many other deficiencies to deal with.

Yeah it was too much to type but NATO has its own AWACS fleet and recently purchased the new E7s so it doesn’t make sense Canada would want its own AWACS for Europe. The only purpose that makes sense is Canadian Arctic but our facilities in the far north are sparse so not really conducive to housing B737s. Even though they said upgrading northern military infrastructure and facilities was also a priority it seems to me that permanently basing the aircraft there would be a much bigger endeavour….unless they’re only going to operate them out of Yellowknife and/or Iqaluit international airports. If the aircraft are to be based in the south where they’re not really useful, just for occasional trips north that seems like a waste. Maybe a GloalEye being somewhat smaller has better options for operations out of the FOLs in Rankin and Inuvik?

As for the other post/election procurement pledges, I note many of them simply pledge to “explore options” and still raise a lot of questions like what is target to actually have the equipment/vehicle delivered. Lots of room for things to change even if this update is an honest and sincere statement of current intentions Most surprising thing on the list was AWACS aircraft, and I had all kinds of thoughts of what could be behind that. We don’t even have enough personnel and resources for our existing capabilities much left high-end new ones, sort of feels like shopping for a Ferrari when you’re 6 months behind on rent for your basement studio apartment. The only 2 possible aircraft that come to mind are the Boeing-737NG based E7 Wedgetail and the Bombardier G6500-based Globaleye, meaning it’s the Maritime Patrol drama that we saw with the P8 all over again. Except thiss time the Bombardier aircraft actually exists. I can see cynical reasons for government wanting either aircraft. The USAF’s bespoke E7 procurement contract is FUBAR’D and the US is apparently pushing others to buy the P8 or E7 to keep that one specialty B737NG production line open in the meantime to avoid / diffuse costs. OTOH, Globaleye is Bombardier who is politically powerful and feels snubbed, and also is a smaller aircraft to operate from Northern locations.