Does anyone have
any idea of what the final bill for CVF + F-35 will be?
The Liberals have promised to cancel the Conservative purchase of F-35 jets, which is expected to cost $44 billion over the jets’ four-decade life cycle. “We will immediately launch an open and transparent competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft,” the platform says, specifying that the F-35’s “stealth first-strike capability” is not needed to defend Canada.
Who knows. That's why there's accountants involved, so as to make it hard to pin that number down...
Big Business and Tax
It's interesting to compare the costs against companies like Apple and Google.
Apple have hundreds of billions of profit stashed away, apparently in Irish bank accounts. If Apple were to repatriate that money to the USA they'd have to pay 40% (I think that's right) tax on it, and Uncle Sam could expect to get at least high tens of $billions out of that. That's going to be a fairly large proportion of the F35 costs right there.
With Apple not repatriating that money and by not paying that tax, the country goes without, and the American tax payer has to stump up the cash instead.
One wonders just how socially useful a company like Apple is to the USA. They pay their shareholder premiums by borrowing money, a debt that they can then use to offset whatever their remaining tax liability is.
[Just for the record, we can't blame these companies for maximising shareholder value whilst remaining within the law. They're practically obliged to do so by company law! If they're not socially useful to the USA, that's at least partly the USA's own fault.]
Underfunding
Personally I think that Western military procurement has been showing the signs of underfunding for many decades. Buying multirole this, that and the next thing is what happens when the bean counters insist on a project delivering more "value for money". There's been all sorts of projects (radars, ships, aircraft obviously) that have been way too expensive simply because of the drive for something multirole.
Ship radars in particular annoy me; a bigger ship is very cheap to buy and would have plenty of room for all the single role radars in the world. Yet there's a burning passion for smaller ships with multurole radars that are exceedingly expensive to develop and build! You can see the difference in philosophy between the West and Russia - they have big ships festooned with antennae of all sorts.
The real problem is that the bean counters don't want the certainty of future retired veterans pension liabilities on their books. Buying a single role aircraft is a whole lot cheaper than most people think, but the perception is that it takes as much manpower to run it as a multi role aircraft. What the bean counters really want is less manpower, which inevitably translates into fewer aircraft which then have to be multi-role to get the job
s done.
Real Politic
I've yet to meet a bean counter who thinks about program costs in relation to the costs of engaging in or, worse still, losing a war. As we here in Britain know, WWII was cripplingly expensive. There's no firm conclusion to be drawn from debating whether WWII might never have happened had Britain been more seriously tooled up in the 1930s. Given a much higher level of pre-war tooling up it could have been a lot shorter with a lot less loss of life. Something along the lines of spending a penny, saving a pound/dollar. However even with that lurking in our shared histories no accountant ever seems to acknowledge that a major war is still possible today and would be devastatingly expensive, and it's not really in our control as to whether it happens or not. Cutting back on defence is always a long term gamble for a short term gain.
F117
I like the example of the F117; single role, surprisingly cheap to develop considering it's radical design and era (1970s), middling unit cost, never a very large fleet so relatively OK manpower-wise. It made a very significant military contribution at one of those rare moments in history where that really mattered. Yet it would never have been built at all had anyone been insisting that it were also capable of air intercept.