[Newsbot]

Title: Navy's gas pains
Category: Military
Posted By: Hyack
Date: 2008-06-09 10:18:44
Canadian

[bootlegga]

What?!? I thought Harper loved the CF...why isn't he giving them enough funding to train and patrol?

[Freakinoldguy]

81 Day's at sea. You gotta be kidding.

It's certainly a far cry from the 265 days away from home port training squadron did back in the 70's. Although that'd be about the amount of time 2 Squadron did during the same period.

How the hell are they planning on training and keeping people current if they aren't at sea?

Given the fuel bills, it would appear that the three remaining Tribals will soon become artificial reefs. I guess even running on their cruise engines it's still much more expensive when compared to the diesels in the CPF's.

[uwish]

it is no where near that bad. The problem with those stats they used is they took EVERY commissioned ship in the CF and then took the total hours and divided. It doesn't work that way.

Those 12 frigates, 2 destroyers are almost at sea constantly and are amoung the highest sea hour vessels of any nato fleet.

They are just skewing the numbers.

[bootlegga]

uwish uwish:

it is no where near that bad. The problem with those stats they used is they took EVERY commissioned ship in the CF and then took the total hours and divided. It doesn't work that way.

Those 12 frigates, 2 destroyers are almost at sea constantly and are amoung the highest sea hour vessels of any nato fleet.

They are just skewing the numbers.

Skewing the numbers? It specifically says;

$1:

The 34 vessels deployed on Canada's East and West coasts, on average, spent only 81 days at sea in 2007, according to documents obtained by Sun Media through the Access to Information Act.

Even the busiest ship was at sea for 179 days...freakinoldguy said he used to be away 265...that's 86 days (almost 3 months) less deployment than we used to under that evil commie Trudeau. And four other frigates spent only about 100 days at sea (a little over three months). That's a far cry from what it used to be.

And remember, this was based on a period of 2005 - 2007, so that over two years, not one.

To me, the most disturbing is that both the AORs were only at sea for about two months in a two year span. They are critical to maintaining our blue water capability and they spent only two months at sea?

This tells me recruiting and fuel should be top priorities. Either Mackay needs to get a real increase in defence spending (instead of the same $1 billion the Liberals were adding every year), or we need to slow down purchases to maintain our skills.

[uwish]

my biggest point here which you missed, is the Navy only has 34 vessels and almost one third are in dry dock!

Hard to be deployed when in dry dock no?

so they said ALL 34 vessels averaged 2754 days at sea a year. But there are only 20 to 23 are in service. The rest are in dry dock

hence that means if there are 23 vessels truly in service it is 119.7 days at sea for each on of them.

That is a pretty hefty deployment schedule basically 4 months a year. Then factor in that out of those 23 includes the coastal defence vessels (12 of them) which are primarily used by the Naval reserve.

what is more scary is we only have about 23 navy ships anywhere doing anything!