M/V Asterix will Not Operate in War Zones

By: Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — While the Royal Canadian Navy is chomping at the bit to start using the newest addition to its fleet, a senior officer says the MV Asterix has some limitations — notably that it can't sail into harm's way.

The Asterix's conversion from a civilian container ship to an interim naval resupply vessel is almost finished as weapons and other sensitive equipment are now being installed, said Commodore Craig Skjerpen, commander of Canada's Atlantic Fleet.

That work is expected to be finished in Halifax in March, at which point the vessel will undergo some final tests before heading to the Pacific to participate in a major, U.S.-led training exercise and then onward to the Asia-Pacific region.

The Asterix addresses a critical gap that emerged after the navy lost its previous resupply vessels in 2014, Skjerpen told The Canadian Press, and navy commanders plan to make heavy use of new ship in the coming years.

"If I wanted to draw an analogy of driving a car, we were always worried about where the next gas station was," he said of the impact of losing HMCS Protecteur and Preserver.

"So what this does is that where we're able to program Asterix, we can be less concerned about that. So we can go where we need to go."

But the Asterix isn't a true military vessel, Skjerpen said, which is why it won't be allowed to operate in dangerous environments.

That may not be an issue now, as the navy is not operating in any areas that be classified as overtly dangerous, but Skjerpen said: "All of our capabilities and everything we design and everything we need is about operating in that threat environment."

Two true military resupply vessels are scheduled to be built in Vancouver and will include more powerful self-defence systems than the Asterix as well as better communications equipment and overall survivability against attack.

"That's a pretty important part when you start talking about a military vessel and something you're going to operate in a threat environment," Skjerpen said in explaining why those Vancouver-built vessels, known as the Protecteur class, are still needed.

"We want to provide the best capability possible to protect our people throughout. And that's some of the bigger things that we're going to get with the Protecteur class that you're not going to get out of Asterix or vessels like that."

The two new Protecteur-class vessels will also be crewed entirely by navy personnel, unlike the Asterix. It will have about 45 navy sailors responsible for resupply operations, while the captain and 30 crew members charged with actually sailing the vessel are all civilians.

"The civilian master is responsible for the safety of the vessel at all times," Skjerpen said. "At any time, like if the visibility is too low or the seas are too high ... the civilian master always has the right to not do something."

But the two new resupply ships won't be ready for several years, meaning the Asterix, which was converted by Quebec-based Davie Shipbuilding, will be the navy's only resupply ship for the foreseeable future.

"It's a pretty big step forward from not having something to having that capability," Skjerpen said.

The previous Conservative government awarded Davie a $700-million contract for the Asterix conversion and a five-year lease in summer 2015, with a five-year option afterward, after the navy's ancient resupply ships were forced into retirement.

The project gained notoriety in January 2017 after Vice-Admiral Mark Norman was suspended and court documents showed the RCMP suspected him of leaking secret documents to Davie over fears the Liberal government would cancel the project.

Norman remains suspended, but he has not been charged with any crime and has denied any wrongdoing.

On Target: Expanded role in Iraq doesn’t make sense for Canada

By: Scott Taylor, The Chronicle Herald

Last Thursday Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan emerged from a NATO conference in Brussels and hinted that Canada would be willing to support the Alliance’s request for an expanded training role in Iraq.

Sajjan could offer no specifics on how many Canadian soldiers would be involved or what their role would be, but somehow he remains confident that this time around the training of the Iraqi Security Forces will be successful.

What makes Sajjan’s broad comments laughable is that we still do not know which faction in this complex conflict our soldiers will be training. We presently have a few hundred elite commandos sitting idle in Iraq because their training missions in support of both Kurdish militia and Iraqi government troops were suspended after these two groups began fighting each other.
There is also a handful of Canadian combat engineers in Iraq conducting training in regard to the clearing of booby traps and unexploded munitions.

However, in a bizarre move last June, the Trudeau Liberals promised to keep our military in Iraq until the summer of 2019. At the time this arbitrary mission extension was announced, Daesh (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) was already reduced to a handful of diehard zealots fighting in the rubble of Mosul.
As expected, the last of the Daesh evildoers were eliminated just a few weeks later, and equally predictable was the fact that the diverse factions of the U.S.-led, anti-Daesh coalition began to fight among themselves.

Now NATO wants to bring in more elite trainers to train more young Iraqi men how to fire weapons and drive tanks. With Canada having pledged our military support for another 18 months at least, the decision for Sajjan to join this new training mission was a no-brainer. We are there anyway, doing nothing until the summer of 2019, so why not?

However, for Sajjan to think this is a successful strategy is sheer folly.

Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. This is exactly what the West continues to do in conflict after conflict, with the same failed result of increased violence and instability instead of the desired end-state of a secure environment.

In Afghanistan in 2001, after the U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban, NATO members including Canada contributed troops to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). As the name implies, ISAF was to assist the Afghans in achieving a secure environment.

The plan from the outset was for NATO to train and equip a self-sufficient Afghan Security Force. Seventeen years later, the alliance has trained hundreds of thousands of young Afghan males how to kill, and poured in massive arsenals of weaponry in the name of security.

The result has been a steady increase in factional violence and a free-fall descent into violent anarchy. The proposed solution by NATO generals? More training and more weapons for Afghans.

In 2003, following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the decision was made by the administration of President George W. Bush to immediately disband all of Saddam’s security forces — army, police, border guards, the lot.

This resulted in months of absolute anarchy, looting and factional bloodletting. As the Iraqi insurgency grew around them, the Americans began recruiting, training and equipping a new Iraqi security force.

By the time President Barrack Obama withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, the Americans had trained and equipped hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers.

However, when Daesh spilled into Iraq from Syria in the summer of 2014, this U.S.-trained force collapsed like a cheap suitcase. The huge, U.S.-supplied arsenal of modern weapons and armoured vehicles were abandoned to Daesh with hardly a shot fired.

Now that Daesh has finally been defeated in Iraq, NATO’s answer is to train more Iraqis how to kill and to bring in more weapons. Sajjan agrees to send Canadians and he assures reporters that this time it will work.

By Einstein’s reckoning, our defence minister is completely insane. And he is not alone.