Opting out of F-35 purchase would be 'three ways from Sunday stupid,' says retired major general
U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra created the diplomatic equivalent to a sonic boom recently by stating that if Canada doesn’t go ahead with the purchase of 88 F-35 fighter jets, that will mean the United States would have to buy more of the advanced fighter aircraft for its own air force, and fly them more often into Canadian airspace to address threats approaching the U.S.
Hoekstra warned that if Canada doesn’t buy the F-35s, there would be consequences for North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the Canada-United States military partnership that tracks inbound threats and can scramble armed jets — Canadian or American depending on who’s closer — to intercept them. That’s what happened in the 2023 case of a Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across Alaska, Western Canada and the continental United States, before it was eventually shot down b y the U.S. Air Force off the coast of South Carolina.
Canada opting out of the F-35 purchase would be “three ways from Sunday stupid,” said retired Major-Gen. Scott Clancy.
Adversaries, including Russia and China, have the technology to hit targets anywhere in North America, according to Andrea Charron, director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies, and a political science professor at the University of Manitoba.
“The threat complexity has increased to include advanced long-range cruise missiles, a range of uncrewed aerial systems threats, hypersonic weapons, intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as the potential for fractional orbital bombardment systems that can reach North America in minutes, depending on their launch sites, which can be based on land, in the air, undersea or on the water,” Charron wrote in a recent analysis. “Most could be fitted with conventional or nuclear weapons.”
National Post spoke with Charron, Clancy and retired Colonel Al Stephenson about NORAD and Canada’s deal to purchase F-35s from the United States.
What’s in place to defend against threats?
“NORAD is the bi-national agreement between Canada and the United States that guarantees air security,” said Clancy, who was director of operations for NORAD in Colorado Springs until 2021.
What are NORAD’s specific tasks?
“It has been operating for 67 plus years. It has three missions: aerospace warning, maritime warning and aerospace defence,” Charron said.
“NORAD is responsible for warning of any air threats, be they ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, (Russian) bear bombers, you name it. And then it has a variety of options to deter or defeat these air threats.”
How does that work?
“The first thing you do is let them know that we see you,” Charron said. “And then sometimes we will scramble the jets and try and contact them by radio, especially if this is a civilian aircraft in a weird spot.”
How would fighter jets turn aggressors around?
“Sometimes they use flares or maneuvers to push the aircraft out of any sort of territorial airspace,” Charron said. “Especially when it comes to the Russians, it’s quite orchestrated and they’re used to this. While we’re seeing more Russian sorties, we’re not necessarily seeing a change in the behaviour.”
Who’s in charge of NORAD?
The commander of NORAD is an American four-star general. “But whenever he’s not there, it’s a Canadian three-star that’s in charge of the entire enterprise,” Clancy said.
What is NORAD defending us from?
The worry used to be that Russian bombers could fly over the pole and drop gravity-fed bombs, Clancy said. That evolved to cruise missiles, but, with their limited range, those still had to come off bomber aircraft approaching North America’s coastline.
“Now, cruise missile systems can stand off thousands of kilometres, so those bomber aircraft don’t have to approach right in to the coastline,” Clancy said.
Do we have surveillance in place to warn us of that type of attack?
The radar systems Canada installed in the mid-1980s are “specifically catered to find aircraft, not cruise missiles,” Clancy said. “Finding an aircraft is like looking for a house on a street. Looking for a cruise missile is looking for a piece of grass on that lawn.”
Has the NORAD system worked well for us?
“Yes,” said Stephenson, a former CF-18 pilot. “A flash of a missile launch will occur, and you’ve only got minutes before an intercontinental ballistic missile will hit its target. So, this assessment allows very quick decision making to say, ‘It’s not coming our way,’ or ‘It’s not in a known threat location.’”
Will the new Arctic over-the-horizon radar Canada is buying from BAE Systems Australia help in that regard?
“That system will provide persistent surveillance in Canada’s Arctic region,” Stephenson said. “It will give us earlier warning. The key to deterrence is knowing when the threat is on its way. And the threat now is coming not just from airplanes, but it’s coming from ground-based missile systems, space launched systems, and sub-surface systems.”
When an attack comes from space, it hits at five times the speed of sound, Stephenson said. “It becomes much more difficult to intercept something at that speed. So, knowing where things are and preemptively taking them out is the best way to defend yourself.”
But the surveillance equipment on order, “can still only cover very targeted areas,” Clancy said. “You can’t defend the entire continent. That’s the problem. Not with aircraft. And even if you could see the cruise missiles, you’d have to see all of them. The hundreds that they could launch on a wave, you just wouldn’t be able to defend against them. Not up North. You’d have to defend specific locales, and you’d need missile and sensor target acquisition systems to be able to do that.”
What would fighter jets be used for in that scenario?
“I would put combat air patrols up if I knew Russian bombers were approaching their shot boxes,” Clancy said. “My ability to interdict those aircraft before they launch is almost negligible. But I can probably shoot them down either on the way in there or the way out. And that’s what I’d be using my fighter aircraft, the F-35 for.”
Why shoot them down on the way out?
“If you think this is going to be the first strike and not the only strike, those bombers are going to go back, they’re going to re-plan and then they’re coming back again,” Clancy said. “We tend to think about this as nuclear war, but it’s not. If 400-700 conventional cruise missiles went off around North America destroying key infrastructure, key command-and-control, key electrical energy production enterprises, and decimated those systems for a decade, what would we do?”
Is the F-35 the only aircraft that meets Canada’s needs?
“It beat the crap out of the Gripen, the only other aircraft that was on the short list,” Clancy said.
Canada “absolutely” needs to buy F-35s, which are 5th-generation multirole stealth fighter jets, Clancy said.
“The future fight is in the Gen-5 realm. It has to do with survivability in the battle space. It has to do with defeating low radar cross section aircraft and missiles.”
On the one hand, buying F35s would make us “instantly interoperable with the United States,” Charron said.
“But it also means that we are highly dependent on them for things like parts and supply chains. So that could be problematic if the relationship with the U.S. continues to be this fractious. The Gripen is not as advanced an airframe, and so then there are concerns that we are going to be outpaced by adversaries that much more quickly.”
Hoekstra seemed quite laissez faire last month on Canada’s decision to pause the F-35 purchase. What’s changed since then?
“The only thing that’s changed in the last week or two is Davos and the reaction from Donald Trump to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos,” Clancy said.
“They feel their hegemony in North America slipping away because their biggest trading partner, who they thought was someone they could puppet, is just kind of sitting there saying, ‘No.’”
How did Hoekstra’s comments about sending U.S. air force F-35s into Canadian airspace fly here?
“It’s backfired badly,” Charron said. “When a bully tells you to do something in this kind of environment, the tendency is to say, ‘Hell no, we’re not going to do that.’ So, if his goal was to motivate us to definitely confirm our choice of the F-35, he’s now given the government and Canadians pause because we’re a sovereign state and don’t like to be told what to do.”
How should North America be defended?
“The best way to defeat the primary threats against North America have nothing to do with fighter aircraft,” Clancy said. “Integrated air and missile defence — the best example of it is the Iron Dome and the Arrow — the layered systems that are over in Israel that responded to the Iranian attacks almost a year ago now. They are primarily missile-based sensors. What you do is you layer some aircraft over the areas where you have gaps in that missile defence piece.”
Would that protect all of North America?
“In Canada, you can’t layer a missile defence over the entire nation,” Clancy said. “Nor can you in the United States. It’s impossible to defend the continent. But you can defend specific locations.”
How does the Golden Dome proposed by Trump play into all this?
The theory is that it will provide a future integrated air and missile defence shield, Charron said. “It’s kept very, very secret. Certainly the NORAD commander is envisioning three domes because you cannot have one exquisite system to deal with the variety of flight paths that might come at us.”
Trump hopes the $175 billion system will be up and running in three years. He’s invited Canada to join the Golden Dome for free as the 51st US state, or else pay US$61 billion. But if it’s really only there to protect the continental U.S., and potentially Alaska, would we need more defences to protect Canadian assets?
“Regardless of whether we’re in or out, we’re still going to have national point defence systems because we have critical infrastructure and military infrastructure that we may want to protect that wouldn’t be within the scope of what the Golden Dome is trying to protect against,” Charron said.
“The trick is, and what the Golden Dome is proposing, is we integrate all these systems so they’re not one-off standalones. They’re integrated so that, for example, if the variety of threats coming at us changes, we can react automatically.”
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