How Harper’s botched procurement crippled the F-35

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http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/08/20/how-harpers-botched-procurement-crippled-the-f-35/



How Harper’s botched procurement crippled the F-35
By Jonathan Manthorpe | Aug 20, 2014 8:58 pm

Canada will not be alone in being raked over the coals for its low military spending when 150 heads of state and government ministers meet at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Cardiff early next month.

Canada’s military expenditure last year, according to the World Bank, was only one per cent of gross domestic product, half the two per cent NATO target. But among the 28 NATO members, only the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece and Estonia have hit the target consistently.

But Canada’s military spending will loom large because the fate of Washington’s problem-plagued F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme — at $1.5 trillion the most expensive U.S. military procurement programme ever — has become a token of the unwillingness of the NATO allies to march in step.

And among the NATO and allied governments having second thoughts about buying this all-purpose, “fifth generation” warplane, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to shelve the purchase of 65 F-35s — after a damning auditor-general’s report on the government’s misleading representation of the costs — is being seen as a fulcrum moment.