No Rhinos for Canada

Where's the carrier?
London, ON
August 2021
This photo originally shared on Instagram

Canada is an awesome country on so many levels, but we more or less suck when it comes to equipping our armed forces.

To wit, the CF-18 Hornet fighter jets tasked with protecting our airspace are almost 40 years-old, and multiple federal governments have spent much of the past couple of decades fumbling the football around their eventual replacements.

Meanwhile the heroes who maintain and fly them continue to work miracles - largely involving the aviation equivalent of duct tape and twine - to keep them in the skies.

The most recent chapter of this saga has Boeing (again) on the wrong side of the ledger, as its F/A-18 Super Hornet was deemed to have not met the requirements of the program. This leaves Lockheed/Martin’s F-35A Lightning II and Saab’s JAS 39 Gripen E still in the mix.

Sorry, Canada, no Rhinos - like these two U.S. Navy E models - for you. If I were a betting person, I’d say the fix is in for the F-35, but my gut tells me the Gripen would make for a neat underdog choice with way better back-end economics.

Whatever we get, it needs to happen soon. Those Russian bombers knocking on our northern borders won’t be going away anytime soon.

No one ever said deterrence, national sovereignty, or keeping global bullies at bay would be easy or cheap.

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