Canada's military expansion, including into Asia-three articles

Posted June 8, 2012

Canada seeks Singapore hub to support U.S. military Asia ‘pivot’ toward China

By Mike Blanchfield, The Canadian Press, Friday, June 1, 2012

OTTAWA – Canada is seeking a deal with Singapore to establish a military staging post there as part of its effort to support the United States’ “pivot” toward Asia to counter a rising China. Defence Minister Peter MacKay revealed the plan in an exclusive interview Friday with The Canadian Press from Singapore, where he was attending a major security conference.U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is expected to give more details of the Pentagon’s renewed military focus on Asia during a major speech in Singapore on Saturday at the Shangri-La Dialogue. The Pentagon’s Asia tilt comes in response to China’s rising military spending.”This entire concept — the buzzword is the pivot to the Pacific — it’s a recognition of the regional power dynamics here that do affect us with China expanding and modernizing their military capabilities,” said MacKay. To that end, MacKay said Canada is looking at a cost-effective way of increasing its military footprint in the region.

MacKay said a military hub in Singapore would be similar to the arrangements it has reached with Kuwait and Jamaica, to give it military footholds in the Middle East and the Caribbean. “Everything that the United States does is off the charts in terms of their scale compared to everyone else. But other countries, including us, are looking at having a greater presence and ability to mobilize here in this region. That includes things like humanitarian relief.”

MacKay treaded carefully when discussing China’s military buildup because the Harper government is courting Beijing to boost two-way trade and Canadian energy exports from Alberta’s oilsands. He noted a delicate balance must be maintained between Canada’s new Asia-focused economic priorities and its security interests in the region, especially in light of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s second trip to China earlier this year and numerous ones by cabinet ministers.

“As that old joke goes about the 500-pound gorilla, you do it very carefully. China has a lot of heft. It’s a very fine line to walk. So we’re very cautious and judicious in how we deal with China,” MacKay explained. “Having said that, we continue to speak to them in a very honest way, including raising issues of human rights when we feel it’s appropriate.”

Since arriving in Singapore, MacKay said he’s detected significant concern over China’s robust military muscle flexing, including its growing sovereignty claims in the potentially resource-rich South China Sea. “In the hallways here what I’m hearing is there’s a lot of tension, it’s seen as provocative by countries here,” said MacKay. “Whenever there are resource implications, clearly that raises the stakes. There’s a need for rule of law.”

MacKay said he planned to expand on that theme during his own remarks to the gathering on Sunday.

China won’t be around to hear directly from Panetta, MacKay or anyone else because it isn’t sending anyone to the Singapore conference. But other Asian participants are eager to hear concrete indications from Panetta about the number of troops and equipment the U.S. is willing commit to the Asia-Pacific theatre. MacKay spoke with Panetta on Friday but got few specifics about what he plans to say in his speech on Saturday.

Canada’s delusions of military grandeur

Thomas Walkom, columnist, Toronto Star, June 9, 2012

Sometimes, it’s as if Stephen Harper’s Conservatives suffer from delusions of grandeur. How else to explain the decision by Canada’s apparently cash-strapped federal government to set up a network of military bases around the world? That’s usually something only countries with imperial pretensions, such as the U.S., France and Britain, do. And even the U.S. is pulling back these days.

As reported by my colleague Allan Woods, who broke this story, Ottawa claims its new bases will ultimately save taxpayers money. But that rationale only works if the government is planning to deploy soldiers on a regular basis to global hot spots. Are the Conservatives setting the stage for more Libyas and Afghanistans?

At one level, they are. As historian and defence expert Jack Granatstein notes, the Harper government has quietly shifted Canada’s military posture from one focused on protecting North America (with a dose of United Nations peacekeeping thrown in) to one in which Canadian soldiers play an active fighting role in faraway places.

The decision to wage war in Afghanistan for more than a decade is the most obvious element of this new strategy. But the purchase of new, massive C-17 transport planes — and the plan to buy F-35 jets — also fit into the Conservative government’s new, if unarticulated, global military focus.

The short-range, one-engine F-35s may not be that useful in the Canadian Arctic. But their radar-avoiding stealth capacity would do well in a Middle Eastern war against, say, Iran.

Granatstein, incidentally, supports the Conservatives’ more robust military strategy and thinks that, in theory, the idea of securing global bases makes sense. But he is baffled by Ottawa’s decision to build seven forward military bases — in areas ranging from Africa to Singapore to the Caribbean to Kuwait — at a time when it is trimming defence spending. “We don’t have enough equipment to stock seven bases,” he says. “What would you put in them? Boxes of Corn Flakes?”

David Bercuson, director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, is also puzzled by the government’s move. “If they’re just talking about renting an airfield to lock up some stuff and have a few people looking after it, it makes sense,” he says. “But if it’s something more elaborate, like Camp Mirage (a former Canadian base in Dubai set up to support the Afghan war), I’d have to question it.”

Bercuson argues that a base in the Caribbean would be reasonable because at least Canada operates there occasionally. He says a Canadian base in Singapore could support U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to confront China more boldly in the Pacific. But bases in East and West Africa? That decision confuses him. “We haven’t paid attention to Africa since 2000.”

And Kuwait? Given that Canada is pulling its troops from Afghanistan, a Middle Eastern base doesn’t make obvious sense, he says — unless Canada is interested in helping the U.S. and Israel in a war with Iran.

Steven Staples, a military analyst and head of Ottawa’s Rideau Institute, calls the entire idea a waste of money. “The notion that we’re going to have permanent bases around the world is over the top. I don’t understand the rationale for parking a bunch of equipment in Singapore in case we might need it some time. That’s why we bought C-17s in the first place — so we could move troops and material quickly.”

My analysis is darker. I fear the government is deliberate in its madness. I think it is setting up foreign military bases because it fully expects to have Canadian troops fight alongside the U.S. or NATO in more Afghanistan-style wars. I think it has learned nothing from the past 10 years.