Defense Minister Anita Anand announces $ 4.9 billion investment to help improve North American air defenses at the Trenton Canadian Forces base in Trenton, Ontario, on June 20, 2022. Lars Hagberg / The Canadian Press
The Canadian government has pledged $ 4.9 billion over six years to help improve North American air defenses by addressing the growing threat posed by hypersonic missiles and advanced cruise missile technology developed by Russia and China.
The money is part of a modest boost to military spending announced in the April budget. Ottawa does not say exactly how quickly these funds will be deployed, or whether Canada will continue to increase its defense spending to meet the minimum thresholds agreed by NATO members.
Defense Secretary Anita Anand on Monday announced the investment at the Canadian Forces base in Trenton, offering a first look at how Canada and the United States plan to modernize the North American Aerospace Defense Command and replace the its Northern Alert System, which will soon be obsolete. This aging radar configuration in the United States and Canada includes dozens of locations from the Yukon to Labrador. Its job is to detect airborne threats, originally long-range bombers and ICBM.
The risk that Canada and the United States take into account is the advances in missile technology in Russia and China that can send non-nuclear warheads at much greater distances with much greater accuracy than older missile types. These new threats include hypersonic missiles, which travel extremely fast and can dodge and weave in flight to avoid interception, as well as next-generation cruise missiles that can travel close to the ground.
Defense experts told The Globe and Mail that the spending commitment, nine days before a NATO summit in Madrid, appears to be an effort to make it look like Canada is spending more money on the military. . Canada has been pressured by the Allies, the United States in particular, to increase its military spending to reach the NATO target level for each of its members: the equivalent of 2 percent of annual economic output. . Canada’s current defense spending is 1.33 per cent.
Mrs. Anand said Canada and the United States are building a new “Northern Approaches” surveillance system that will eventually replace the Northern Alert System. This will include cutting-edge technology called radar on the horizon, which has a much wider detection range, up to thousands of miles away.
“As autocratic regimes threaten the rule-based order that has protected us for decades, and as our competitors develop new technologies such as hypersonic weapons and advanced cruise missiles, there is an urgent need to modernize NORAD’s capabilities.” said Mrs. Going to reporters.
He said the new surveillance and monitoring system would push NORAD’s line of sight further north so that Canada and the United States could better respond to “fast-moving” threats, such as hypersonics. Until then, the current northern alert system provides a “limited threat warning,” said Lt. Gen. Alain Pelletier, deputy commander of NORAD.
The new configuration will have several components, according to Ms. Anand. “Arctic Over-the-Horizon Radar” will provide early warning radar coverage and threat tracking from the Canadian-U.S. border to the Arctic Circle.
The second component will be a “Polar Radar Above the Horizon” system to provide the same coverage and tracking beyond the northernmost approaches in North America, including the Arctic archipelago of Canada.
A third piece will be a new network called Crossbow, which will consist of sensors with which Ms. Anand called them “classified capabilities.” They will be located in northern Canada, where they will provide another layer of detection.
One final component will be a space surveillance system, which will use satellites to gather information and track threats, he told reporters.
Ms Anand said the northern warning system would remain active until the new technology package was implemented. It did not provide a breakdown of how the $ 4.9 billion would be spent and did not provide an estimate of when the new surveillance equipment would be up and running. He said Canada will spend a total of $ 40 billion over 20 years to modernize NORAD according to the plan announced Monday. (However, the government did not make it clear whether this figure takes into account the effects of inflation).
General David Thompson, deputy chief of space operations for the United States Space Force, warned a Halifax security forum last fall that China and Russia had overtaken the United States in the development of hypersonic missiles. consider weapons that could be used preventively. He said the new weapons have made the world a “much more complicated place”.
Experts have warned lawmakers that the aging Northern Warning System is unable to respond effectively to modern missile technology.
Andrea Charron, director of the Center for Defense and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, said it was important for Canada to be “thinking and working on the joint defense of North America.”
But, he added, he believes Monday’s announcement was aimed primarily at Canada’s NATO allies.
“There’s incredible pressure for Canada to spend more on defense, so they can go to NATO and say,‘ Look, we’re spending more, ’” Professor Charron said. “At least they’ll go to the table with something.”
Canada is still far from NATO’s 2% spending target. The federal government is expected to spend an additional $ 13 billion to $ 18 billion a year above what it now spends to reach that threshold, according to estimates by the parliamentary budget officer.
When asked when Ottawa would reach its 2 percent commitment, Ms. Anand noted Canada’s “upward trajectory” in defense spending, including increases since 2017 under the federal Strong Secure and Engagement policy, and a $ 8 billion increase in federal April. budget.
With $ 4.9 billion for NORAD, he said, “our defense spending is now on an even steeper upward trajectory.” However, that $ 4.9 billion is part of the $ 8 billion announced in the budget.
But Ms Anand declined to provide a precise defense spending target or explicitly promised that Canada would reach the 2 per cent threshold.
David Cohen, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, said last month that the $ 8 billion increase in the federal budget was disappointing. During the same month, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska called Canada a freeloader for failing to meet the 2 percent threshold. But on Monday, the U.S. embassy issued a statement welcoming the increase in Canada’s NORAD spending.
Professor Charron said the new radar and surveillance projects would take “years and years” to build. He added that he had no idea whether Canada had obtained the consent of indigenous groups to locate the technology on their lands.
He recommended that Canada and the US end the cost-sharing negotiations related to the NORAD upgrades before any change of government in Ottawa or Washington. Former President Donald Trump is expected to be the Republican candidate in the next presidential election. He has often criticized Canada for not spending enough on defense.
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