Jerry J. Fortin

We have people on this board who would simply allow our citizens to die, an expendable piece of trash thats only purpose is to defend the nation. A citizen that says things like that has not legitimate point of view in my opinion relevant to this discussion.

He wants to avoid another Rwanda, good on him, so do I.

Only in Canada you say....the unwritten Canadian Constitution. So in essence most of the method of governing is been conducted in the absence of law. Yeah I can see how this is working out just fine! Lets see, we used to have the right to own property, now we don't. We never had a plan to govern ourselves and we placed our faith in the Crown, only to have the Crown and British Parliament reject our methods in 1931 as established in the Statute of Westminister where they washed their hands of responsibility for us, and now we retain both the Queen and the G.G. as the head of State anyway! It all makes sense to me now. The Canadian Unwritten Constitution, a lack of an act of Parliament whereby the Government of Canada can pretty much do as it pleases because there is no law against it.

By jove, you have it right!

I believe malicious intent is the name of the game.

Which is why the weaponization of space is prohibited by international treaty.

Never.

What of the comments that I just made that you are responding to? Were they in error? Or are you suggesting they are simply not valid because of your decided bias in the manner.

Okay I will admit a little poetic license in declaring the product to cost 10 bucks. Yet when you think about it, it isn't all that expensive.

Really? The Canadian Constitution is a joke! The Head of State is still the Queen, the Governor General is "Her" representative in Canada. The word Prime Minister is nowhere to be found that I can remember! We have bastardized that document six ways from Sunday on the authority of Parliament. That authority being bastardized by "Orders In Council" far too often for my liking. The entire mess is unbelievable.

A student of Reaganomics, oh joy. I heard Enron is hiring..........

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Publ...05/700oklkt.asp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment Hmmmmmmmmmm.....

Combat radius of about 550 kms, 3300 kms ferry range. You could use tanker support to get there and back, we do have two used Wardair Airbus 310's converted for that purpose. Now imagine getting attacked in Alert, do you really think you can load the Airbus and scramble the fighters to make any kind of direct flightline to Alert from both Cold Lake for the fighters and Trenton for the tankers? Having solved one problem, sufficient fuel to just get there, once you are there it would in fact be too late to do anything about it. Sort of like planning to close the gate once the horse has been seen leaving.

You are foolish to believe that the money now being spent will ever come back. It is gone dude. The only thing that remains is the debt. The fools in government don't even try to pay it off and the constant spending only adds to that total which requires billions of tax dollars just to make the interest payments on a principle that will never be repaid.

Nothing is safe from an attack from space. A ten dollar steel rod launched from near earth orbit can take out an M1 tank.

I am preaching to the damned! Let me put it this way, our armed forces could not defend Alert if the lives of the 70 personal up there depended on it. You can say what you want, but that is a fact. The north is undefended for all intents and purposes. It is people like you who supported the appeasement policy of England while staring into the eyes of Adolf.

Interesting thought, how do you feel about the North Koreans having a space platform?

So your plan is to spend money we don't have and hope that the economy grows and the dollar stays high. Not right bright, but a common mistake for many people. I can see spending money on accumulation of assets, in the case of nations that translates into infrastructure. That is not what we are currently doing to any great extent though. Much of the planned spending has a zero return on investment. Look at it this way, the feds are in fact spending money on infrastructure, but it will not be federally owned. The planned spending is for provinces and municipalities. There is no upside to the feds in this kind of thing, bad freaking plan dude.

Cheaper by far, and a most likely direction for the government to take. In fact most people would agree with you, but that will not fix the problem. Destroyers and frigates will not project force to any great extent at all, but then again the mission dictates the assets. In our current case the mission defines the deficits of our armed forces. Every time we send troops someplace we find out what we CAN'T do because of a lack of functional assets designed for force projection. What this really boils down to is determining what missions we should even consider accepting. To date we have done a rather poor job of that. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime, ever hear of that one. It applies here. We should not send troops into harms way with targets painted on their backs due to our primitive TOE. Aside from that, destroyers and frigates don't due to damned well in the arctic. We need a way to defend an incredible amount of area that is frozen over six months a year. That means aircraft at least, and it also means permanent land and sea bases. We have nothing to use to protect the north at the present time. The north is the focus, its a use it or lose it kinda deal dude.

How do those calculations of yours translate into the real world of shrinking GDP? The debt costs more and more to service. Now factor in a declining dollar, where does that take you?

Dude, its 3200 kms from Cold Lake to Alert. By the way the closest major Canadian city to Alert is Edmonton. Not exactly strike range in my view, at least not in terms of being able to defend Alert. The rubble would have frozen solid by the time you could there from Cold Lake.

I never considered the F35B, I was thinking of the A and C models. In Canada range is relevant, mind you there is not a significant difference from the A and C to the B models. With that in mind, perhaps this model would suffice. The QE class is a little slow and not nuclear powered, I see that as an issue. I really think we should be building a nuclear navy.

Dude you and I are simply going to have to disagree. The current system places far to much power with the PM. We lack a checks and balance system which detracts not adds to our democracy. The centralization of power and authority inside the PMO is a real problem. There are those that will say that the federal government has begun to transfer some power to the provincial governments, and they would be right to say so. Yet the provinces are not the equal partners in confederation that we were supposed to be, and as a matter of fact according to the constitution should still be.

It would be much wiser to consider the quality of the asset don't you think? The Americans make the best carriers in the world, they would be a good base model from which to build on. Given that we are already about 475 million into the JSF project, it would make sense to consider building them on license here.

There are ZERO bases in the north. Where do we need defense again?