Suddenly there is money
Enjoy your social and public services getting worse for an arm race
Enjoy your social and public services getting worse for an [arms] race
No. We tax. If we hated healthcare, elder care, and schools, we’d’ve elected a conservative.
What’s amazing to me is that regular Canadians are agreeing with this bizarre US policy of trying to get their “allied” countries’ to spend more on their militaries.
First, that’s ludicrous because the US is the empire, (when they’re not doing the plundering themselves) they garner the vast majority of the benefit of stability and an absence of piracy. Of course they, who reap the benefit, should have to pay the cost. Or don’t, you know, I’m not even convinced that Russia or China have the intention or wherewithal to start invading other countries via the arctic. Maybe they want to claim territory that doesn’t currently belong to anyone, I don’t know. But like…I don’t think either of them is interested in marching an army into Whitehorse.
Second, what are we gonna do to increase spending? Could it be that we’ll be paying US companies for these weapons? When the gun merchant says “buy guns or else” I don’t think it’s very insightful to do mental gymnastics to justify why “maybe it really would be better for us.”
Don’t get me wrong, there may be good things too, especially if we focus on domestic manufacturers, and on weapons of defense and resistance (i.e. large quantities of small arms to make occupation by anyone difficult - like the Finns!).
Instead I’m sure we’re gonna see us buying overpriced U.S. military hardware that will only really be useful helping the US do imperialism (fancy jets and the like).
Ahh, the budget correction after decades of poor funding.
It’s gonna be large, for we’ve let it get really bad.
170 vehicles. That’s about 5.8 million dollars per vehicle. That’s a bit steep isn’t it?
It’s not that steep for the low-volume high-margin equipment built by the military industrial complex. The whole point is to produce a relatively small amount of expensive products with minimal capital investment, not to take advantage of economies of scale to produce large amounts of equipment efficiently. The former is much more efficient at converting taxpayer dollars to private profits.
Comparing this arctic vehicle program to China’s second-most modern tank isn’t exactly comparing apples-to-apples, but it’s nevertheless instructive. An Arctic vehicle is going to be more expensive than a comparable vehicle not designed for Arctic use since it needs a lot of special equipment to operate in cold temperatures for a long time, but it’s still basically just a metal box with tracks and an engine. A modern tank is a very heavy steel/advanced composite box with a larger engine, tracks, a cannon, and a bunch of other advanced equipment like thermal scopes, radar, lasers, and so on. More materials total, more moving parts, more low-tolerance parts, more high-tech parts.
Even still, the Chinese Type 99 tank costs 2.5 million USD (3.4 million CAD), $2.4 million less per unit than these $5.8m unarmed Arctic vehicles. You might think that a tank should cost more than what’s functionally an advanced truck for use in extreme enironments, or that they should at least be the same price, but not so fast! The Type 99 is made by Norinco, a large state-owned company that produces huge amounts of equipment. They take in $82 billion per year but only make 1.7 billion in profit. I don’t know who will be making these arctic vehicles, but one possibility is Lockeed Martin. They have a comparable revenue of $75 billion, but they make a net profit of $5 billion. This means that Lockheed Martin is three times as efficient at turning taxpayer dollars into profits as Norinco, hence proving the superiority of our system of free enterprise compared to asiatic communism.
The whole point is to produce a relatively small amount of expensive products with minimal capital investment, not to take advantage of economies of scale to produce large amounts of equipment efficiently.
Lacking your psychic powers, we’re going to need a citation showing that’s “the whole point”.
Milton Friedman said it most succinctly in Capitalism and Freedom (1962): “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” He argued in short that a corporation’s sole responsibility is to increase shareholder value, and this argument is the foundation of modern business practives.
If a defence contractor were to produce affordable (i.e. low margin) products, they would be shirking their holy duty to the shareholders, the money would be invested elsewhere, and they would go out of business. China can get away with doing it since they just have a state-owned company do it cheaply, but that’s authoritarian (bad). We, being principled democratic states, can only buy what the free market has to sell.
When was the last time you bought an armoured arctic capable vehicle?
… And the staff to maintain it?
With that kind of attitude any price is unassailable. Edit: why not 6.8 million per vehicle, why not 15.8 million per vehicle, did you ever buy one?
Look, that 1 billion is being taken away from my public services and climate change adaptation programs. At the very least, I get to demand my tax dollars are not being wasted the way the Estadounidenses throw money down the military industrial complex money pit.
Removed by mod
Rough morning? Pipe down bud.
EDIT: Like if you hadn’t written in such a rude and abrasive way, I might have responded with something like: yes we need an update, no we shouldn’t do it in a dumb way. We are notoriously bad at using military budgets, so we should not be accepting anything at any price, we should be doing it in ways that create investment in our industrial base and create economies of scale to benefit the civilian economy. But, when I’m being told to “stfu you fuck you have no field experience”, I’m going to respond in kind. So pipe the fuck down.
so we should not be accepting anything at any price
That’s a bad take.
These should be amphibious, and capable of operating 72hrs without resupply, capable of ambulance fitout…
There’s obvious utility, and our existing vehicles are 40 years old
Did I debate the need of any of that capability? Like, I literally wrote “yes we need an update”. The point is “we should not be accepting anything at any price”. I can’t understand how that simple common sense statement is a “bad take”. The point of military procurement, or of any procurement really, is to maximize utility while minimizing cost. Ukraine has already shown us that the drone revolution means that modern wars are now back to being wars of attrition. And in wars of attrition, cost is a strategic resource.
I don’t think you have an idea of what civilian economy we could invest in that would match the utility of these.
Maybe you should start learning Russian then.
What a lazy, stereotypical response.
Ok, then how much should they cost?
Ok, then how much should they cost?
I bet they have experts to figure that out.
I’d be willing to bet they already did figure it out, based on requirements.
I bet it’s a little more complex than we can imagine.
Ой, извини, я больше не заинтересован в общении с тобой.
Well hooray for that.
The way prices are going up on literally everything these days, i imagine it’s not terribly out of line. The fuck do i know about such things though, lol
The cost to build an ambulance in Ontario is something like a quarter million, so you could start there and look up costs on other similar vehicles
