Moonbox

August I thought you were smarter than that. If each police officer were simply paid $50,000 each to work for a weekend, I'd be similarly upset. The math I'm sure doesn't work out that way, however. While I'm sure they were paid well to come, a huge amount of the cost of security during the summit was logistical.

Oh you. I always love reading your posts. Herr Bonghit. That's hilarious

Reread what you wrote. The "other reasons" are why we decided to purchase the F-35. 5That's not why we're buying them. By the time the F-18 is replaced in Canada it will be a 40 year old design. 2nd and 3rd rate powers have usually been equipped with comparable Russian fighters themselves anyways. Mig-29's and Su-27's are proliferated throughout the 3rd world, and are comparable to the F-16 and F-15 respectively. That's not exactly garbage hardware and if Canada were to enter a conflict against one of these powers the F-18 wouldn't really be at a huge technical advantage against them. Take this premise another 10-20 years further and countries like Iran etc will be flying BETTER fighters than what we're flying. I don't really think you have any idea what you're talking about. Why are we even talking about the Americans? If we claim the majority of the arctic I doubt they'd be upset about it. NAFTA ensures they have access to all those resources at a fair price already. Hell it'll be American owned subsidiaries that exploit the resources anyways. They've flown their Bear bombers right up to the border of our airspace. Having worthwhile planes to patrol it acts as a deterrent. Unsurprisingly, you still don't get it, and a good many other things aside from that . Nobody is going to invade us because big daddy USA is our closest neighbour. Having said that, it's not exactly fair or responsible to expect them to foot the bill for their own protection and for ours at the same time. Canada should be responsible for upholding its share of NORAD (in fact it is obligated to as far as I know) and we can't do that properly with 50+ year old hardware. You'd probably be happy if we were still flying patrol missions over Canadian airspace in Voodoos wouldn't you???

They were granted special powers by the McGuinty government for the summit. Civil liability claims will be negligible and the courts will see that they were reasonably acting to prevent and contain what was essentially a small riot.

You're right that's true but the F-22 doesn't really fit in with any of those profiles I don't think does it?

The carrier is the only way the US can reliably project it's air power abroad. One of the reasons the F-22 was cancelled was because in the event that it went to war with anyone against whom the F-22 would be required (ie China or Russia), any allied airfields that could launch the F-22 would be bombarded to death by missiles. A carrier group, on the other hand, moves and is escorted, and therefore is much easier to defend. Basically the USAF felt that the F-22 could potentially be neutralized before it was of any use.

The F-22 costs enormously more per flight to maintain and requires tens of thousands of dollars worth of repainting and repairs after EVERY flight. Aside from that, it has no carrier variant and even the US military doesn't think it's worth building any more of them.

Gee I'm glad I'm not your friend. I'd know that you'd never have my back.

The F-22 is significantly more expensive to build and purchase and prohibitively more expensive to operate and maintain. The radar absorbing paint it uses wears off after every flight and it costs retarded amounts of money to repaint.

You can be hesitant all you want. The fact is that this plane is going to pretty much be the biggest fighter purchase in US history and THEIR record since the mid 70's has been pretty damn strong in that category. The F-14, F-15, F-16 and F-18 were all fantastic planes and did everything they were supposed to and more. Considering the last 35 years has almost always shown the US to be ahead of the curve in virtually all aspects of military technology, I'm willing to put my faith in their expertise instead of yours. Given that we don't have a military industrial complex of our own, we kind of have to take the leavings of other countries. Canada's military procurement problems have been purely political. Our government doesn't plan ahead nor is it willing to invest good money in it, so we're left with crap and hand me downs.

HAHAHAHAHA! I don't doubt you haven't seen the Ministry of Defence's analysis of their fighter requirements. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, just that they probably don't disclose all of the plane's specs to armchair generals on internet forums. Your 'knowledge' of the project appears to be nil. Let's go with what we DO know though. We DO know that the USAF considers the F-35 4x more effective than current 4th generation fighters. There isn't another plane out there that boasts that sort of capability that would be available to the Canadian market. You could say the same about virtually any piece of military equipment. The equipment acts as a deterrent and it's better to have it and give yourself some measure of safety and self-reliance than need it and not have it. How many dead soldiers could have been saved in Afghanistan if we'd had heavy-lift helicopters and properly equipped tanks? The US discovered in Vietnam what the cost was of not having the right equipment for the job.

The concept of quality vs quantity seems to be escaping you. The fact that a DEVELOPING nation with over a billion people is pumping out lots of engineers is irrelevant to the field of aerospace technology. It takes the brightest and best of the best to be on the cutting edge of warplane technology, and thus far India has not shown itself to be even in the same DECADE as the USA in that respect. Okay well answer me this then: Canada is paying about $138M/unit for a fighter that the company is going to be producing for about $89M/unit (based on production of about 1700 units) or according to Lockheed perhaps even 20% less than that. We're not getting the R&D for free.

Bloodyminded you don't get it. Give us examples of what you're talking about and, item by item, I'm sure we could outline the HUGE differences between them and the frothing rabid clerics calling for general violence against everyone and anyone that doesn't share their beliefs.

With over a billion people living there the need for engineers is enormous and it stands to reason that they'd do everything they could to train and educate them. It really doesn't matter how many engineers they have anyways as the most compelling argument you can make is that India does not have a 5th generation fighter and there's a reason for that.

Haha yeah fortunately our government is not decided by who people DIDN'T vote for.

They have 3 times the USA's population, thus it stands to reason that they'd come up with 3 times the number of engineers. If their per capita income is $3000, all that means is it's probably a heck of a lot cheaper to train them there than it is here. As I mentioned before, however, the top talent is being sucked away from India to North America and Europe anyways. The research costs are factored into the price of the plane genius. Anyone buying an American, European or Russian fighter is paying for the whole shebang -- research, materials, labour AND mark up. As far as I know it's state of the art and it's being manufactured solely in the USA. It's not an 'inferior' model in so much as it's a scaled-down and more efficiently designed aircraft. The F-22 was an over-engineered plane that cost tens of thousands worth of maintainance after every flight. The US military is designing and asking for 6th generation fighters as we speak. They're already designing man and unmanned replacements for the carrier-based F-18e for 2025-2030.

This is a really funny statistic. Did you know that India's population is around 3 times the size of the USAs, and nearly twice as high as the EU's? They're hiring cheaper Indian engineers. That speaks only of their lower wage expectations, not the quality of their engineering. If India or China had the expertise and knowledge their American or European counterparts had, they'd be building F-35's themselves. The fact that the Indians are coming to North America to work is rather telling as well. There's brain drain going on. We're taking their better engineers.

I'm not particularly pleased about it, but it would be interesting to find out what other leaders spent. As far as I can tell from the quote, he didn't say that. I'm almost certain he didn't say that and you confused the language. He said that as a PM it becomes a much bigger part of the picture than when you're in opposition. That's all. To be fair, he was never ever going to win the woman vote with his stance on abortion. You don't get the woman vote by bible-thumping. As for Quebec, he lost their vote on the funding of arts programs...ARTS PROGRAMS. I think that speaks much louder of the incompetence of the average Quebec voter than it does of the PM. To finish, I'm not defending him. He's not a great PM, but other than the spending I find your reasons for disliking him a little contentious.

They're still waaay behind the west though

While I'm neither an engineer nor a military man, I highly doubt we'll see the F-35 going for $60M each fully equipped. Either way, the fact that it's expected to be 4x as effective as current fighters and be stealthy I'd say we're going to be looking at reasonable costs.

I would looove a reference on that. The F-15 has a $30M price tag and the F-18E has one for $60M. I'm really not sure where a $35M price comes from....

From "what you can tell" is pretty limited technical expertise. Let's talk about what we 'know' though. First, the Ruskies/Indians are significantly behind in stealth, avionics and electronics/ECM technology. Second, they are significantly behind in terms of industrial and economical capacity and third, they're barely in the prototype stage. Any full production estimates pegging the plane before 2020 is pretty optimistic. Why would we trust what has generally been our continent's biggest strategic rival/enemy to provide us with weapons? Would it not make sense to trust our allies and neighbours (who've been technologically pre-eminent for decades) to provide us with the same equipment they've been using? I think so.

Bingo. Russia has been behind in technology for decades now and we don't have the same common interests as we do with the US. Add to that the fact that we share a continent with our neighbours ot the south and you have a pretty compelling set of reasons why we don't buy equipment from the Ruskies.

Yeah you would be. Capitalism is so evil.