South Korea put political weight behind its bold, high-stakes bid to sell submarines to Canada on Thursday as Prime Minister Mark Carney got a look at one of the country’s new boats and toured the shipyard that would do the construction.
South Korea Prime Minister Kim Min-seok accompanied Carney during the visit to the Hanwha Ocean Ltd. facility in Geoje, 96 kilometres from Gyeongju, where the Asia Pacific Cooperation (APEC) summit is being held. Earlier in the day, Carney also met with South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae Myung.
Hanwha Ocean and its partner Hyundai Heavy Industries have been fairly aggressive in pitching the KSS-III (Batch 2) submarine to Canada, delivering an unsolicited, detailed proposal to the federal government last winter — just ahead of the last election.
The submarine Carney got to see was only recently launched and built for the South Korean navy. Yet, in a bold marketing move, it flew a Canadian flag from its mast, while a second boat under construction nearby had Korean and Canadian banners draped across it.
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About time, Canada! Just think of all the glorious war fighting opportunities that the country has been missing out on for its entire history as a result of not spending a hundred billion dollars on a big fleet of attack submarines before now.
Considering we have the longest coastline in the world (151,019 miles, 243,042 kms) we should have at least a few subs to monitor it.
The point of submarines is to sneak up on enemy ships and destroy them. That’s not something Canada has an urgent need to be doing. There are more cost-effective ways to defend the country. But it’s not about being cost-effective, it’s about spending as much money as possible — on building up someone else’s military-industrial complex, since they’re too impatient to build up Canada’s capacity to the point where that kind of hardware could be built here — in order to be able to look “strong” like people are clamouring for.
A sub has more than the single purpose you mentioned. You can’t just hand-wave away their most critical role: intelligence gathering.
If it was about spending as much money as possible we wouldn’t be buying from South Korea as they manufacture vessels faster, and cheaper, than other countries. If we built these at home they’d probably cost 5x as much, we’d get them 10 years late, and they’d be riddled with issues.
I’m trying to see your point. Do you want us to increase our shipbuilding capacity to build these in Canada, or do you not want subs at all?
Do you want the government to give all of this money to our local shipbuilding industry so that they can continue to gouge taxpayers? They can’t even provide our military with the equipment they won bids for without inflating costs and timelines by an exorbitant amount, and that’s not even for subs which are significantly more complicated than something like a supply or patrol ship. At least Davies shipyard was able to provide the CAF with a supply ship within reason, but others, like Irving, are a giant money pit.
It’s a giant money pit either way. Somehow pulling off a miraculous recovery for the Canadian ship-building industry is simply the one thing I can think of that could potentially be used to justify the enormous expense compared to other, better ways of spending that much money. No subs at all sounds fine to me. For intel-gathering purposes of the type so-far mentioned, patrolling around the coastline of Canada watching for the incoming invasion fleet or whatever, there isn’t a whole lot of advantage in trying to do it from a well-armed underwater platform and we’re already spending absurd amounts of money on brand new surface vessels.
I hate funding war but I’m not naive to think we’re not going to need to build up our forces in our uncertain times, especially with the chaotic unreliable ally we have South.
The fuck do you think Canada is going to do to the US Navy with a second rate sub fleet.
You want assurances against the US military you better start sucking Chinese dick or joining the EU and forcing a unified EU command now because no one else is going to be more than a speed bump before you enter the insurgency phase.
Absolutely no country can withstand the full might of the US military. I’m not talking about going head to head with the US. I’m just saying if something happens by another country we cannot rely on the US for support.
We’ve been in like, a whole bunch of wars.
Did you not know we had a military?
It’s probably for defending the north. Russia and Canada have been disputing those borders for a long time, and with global warming opening access to more natural resources, it’s about to get spicy.
So a few Samsung submarines are going to make a difference against the two largest military powers in the world.
These toys are funded by killing Canadians with healthcare and social support cuts. Anyone who thinks this is seriously about defense is a fucking idiot.
Okay well hard to have a conversation with someone who says anyone who disagrees is a “fucking idiot,” but here I go anyway.
Never said I agreed with buying those submarines, specifically. But we have real, ongoing threats in a big ass watery zone that’s about to get more watery where, yes, a few submarines would make a massive difference. One submarine is capable of monitoring hundreds of kilometers of ocean at a time, and an attack submarine is capable of moving quickly to engage — which is exactly what we need in the north.
Currently, we use NORAD and ancient F-18’s that have been frankenstein’d with modern technology they were never built for. I could say a whole lot more about Canada’s bullshit selling out our aviation industry to the states, but that’s another issue.
Point is, Russia has been testing our northern borders for decades, often, and they are demonstrably imperialist. How do I know? I lived on the base where we scrambled our jets to greet them. Where we already spend a fuck ton of money keeping those antiques in the air.
I’m absolutely with you on healthcare spending. There’s a lot of shit about the budget I don’t like.
At the same time we need to be monitoring and protecting a zone where Russia will have submarines if they don’t already, and we don’t currently have the technology to engage them.
More Canadians would die if we had American healthcare once we become the 51st state. Funding the military might not stop it but it might delay it.