Ottawa Citizen September 27, 2007
By Colin Kenny
Canadians are surely divided about whether we should have combat troops in Afghanistan. But there is no evidence that Canadians are divided about whether those troops should be provided with every reasonable bit of equipment that will help bring them home alive.
Which is why I was astounded to see a letter to the editor in the Citizen (Sept. 4) under the name of Peter MacKay, Minister of National Defence, ridiculing my suggestion that we send Griffon helicopters to Afghanistan to help prevent our young soldiers from getting blown to bits by roadside bombs.
When I made this suggestion in an interview with CanWest defence writer David Pugilese, I made it clear that the Griffons are not the ideal solution to the predicament that Canadians are the only forces operating in hot areas without their own helicopter support. The ideal helicopters would be medium-to-heavy lift Chinooks, which can carry three times the number of soldiers and/or ammunition and equipment as the Griffons.
But Canada doesn’t have any Chinooks. The current government is committed to ordering them, but for whatever reason no contract seems to have been signed yet and if the normal delivery process is followed they won’t be available until 2012. Given that Canada’s commitment to keep fighting in Kandahar ends in 2009 that isn’t very comforting to the troops risking their lives on exploding roads every day.
Canada did have the bigger Chinook helicopters at one point, but we sold them to the Dutch in the early 1990s as a cost-cutting measure. Whoever wrote Mr. MacKay’s letter blames the Liberals for that: “Senator Colin Kenny really should be asking why he and his Liberal colleagues chose not to equip the Canadian Forces with appropriate equipment.”
Strange that the writer would say that when I have been so adamantly bipartisan about defence issues since I became Chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence – my “Liberal colleagues” don’t always like me being honest about the fact that both Liberals and Conservatives have failed Canadians when it comes to military readiness. Doubly strange that the writer would blame the Liberals when Canada’s Chinooks were sold off under the government of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who I don’t recall ever seeing at Liberal caucus.
The letter goes on to say how unfortunate it is that I don’t know my “facts” – apparently, it says, I don’t understand that what is needed in Afghanistan is “a medium-left helicopter to carry a sufficient number of personnel.”
What is a “suffient” number of personnel? The armed Canadian vehicles that are getting blown up so regularly with Canadians inside them usually carry 10 soldiers, including the driver.
A Griffon helicopter can carry two pilots, a flight engineer and 10 soldiers. A Chinook helicopter can carry between 33 and 50 soldiers, depending on its configuration. Yes, anybody would rather have the Chinook. But who in their right mind wouldn’t opt for a Griffon if it could get soldiers from Point A to Point B without being blown to pieces? If you need to move 30 soldiers, send three Griffons.
Yes, on paper the Canadian Forces have access to “shared” NATO aircraft that include Chinooks. But there aren’t enough helicopters in Kandahar region to meet every country’s needs. In reality, the country that owns the helicopters usually gets first dibs.
Canada has a fleet of 85 Griffon helicopters performing a variety of thoughtful little tasks in Canada. None of these tasks have anything like the urgency attached to them than saving lives in Afghanistan would.
And it isn’t just a question of moving troops. During the day Griffons could provide intelligence and surveillance. In addition to providing information about Taliban troop movements, they could keep an eye on the roads to see if bombs are being planted.
At night, the Griffon can be fitted with a Forward Looking Infrared System (FLIR) that would provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability. If push came to shove, their infrared capacity would allow them to join night attacks.
I don’t make these things up. I cherish facts, so I go after them with a lot more energy than whoever wrote the minister’s letter seems to be able to muster. I talk to active members of the Canadian Forces, recently retired members of the Canadian Forces, informed academics – anybody who will give me the real goods, rather than government bafflegab. And the truth about the Griffons is that they could be useful in saving lives in Afghanistan.
The final line of the minister’s letter says that I “should not unfairly malign the Canadian Forces through innuendo.” Malign them? I’m trying to save some of them. If I want to malign anybody, it will be a government that only seems to be willing to listen to people of its own political stripe, and then apparently not too carefully, because I know Conservatives who were as shaken by this letter as I was.
Our troops need more than bumper stickers. They need the best, non-partisan support we can give them. A war zone isn’t the place for cheap politics.
Senator Colin Kenny can be reached via email at kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca