The Missing Support Fleet

While caught in big plans, we tend to forget the smallest among us.

On February 10th, Pierre Polilievre, leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, stood at a podium outside Iqaluit Airport to announce the first part of his Arctic strategy. It marked the first time that defence had been brought up fully in an election setting with promises of a new bases, expanding the 1st Patrol Group of the Canadian Rangers, and most consequently of all new Icebreakers.

Two new Icebreakers in fact, complementing the two Polar-class vessels already in the works. These new Icebreakers though would not be for the Coast Guard, whom since the 1960s has been the home for Canada's Icebreaking fleet, instead, these vessels would be destined for the Royal Canadian Navy.

It was a shock to many. There has been a long history of Navy Icebreakers proposals, from the Brock report in the sixties to the early years of the AOPV, which originally called for an armed, Polar-class III vessel to patrol the Canadian Arctic. That concept lasted about as long as one would expect before being scaled-back the current AOPV as we know them.

This announcement though fell into a common category, a vague, grand promise during an election season from people with only a vague understanding of the challenges and needs of CAF and the navy. It's a common theme we have struggled with since Kingsmill, and will likely continue until the last star burns out of the sky.

Then, on March 25th, Prime Minister of Canada and leader of the Liberal Party Mark Carney stood at a similar podium at Irving Shipyards in Halifax to unveil his first look at his own defence policy.

Imagine the surprise as he stood there and promised his own Navy Icebreakers. While no numbers were given, the promise of new Heavy Icebreakers for the navy mirrored his rival Polilievre well.

So, we have the two major parties, both current vying for a majority government, commiting to a new set of Navy Icebreakers, another major capital project to add to a growing list of demands for what has become the navies biggest recapitalization since the Second World War.

As it currently stands, the navy has a lot of plans. We have fifteen new destroyers, up to twelve submarines, a potential Corvette program, and now Icebreakers? If I wasn't as intuned, I would brush this kind of development off as something you would find in the old Canadian Power series.

Yet, among the grand plans and hot debate over what kind of Icebreakers the navy would want, we have to take note of a missing piece to the puzzle, something that has been gently brushed to the side and told it was no longer needed.

A Growing List of Tasks

It's a common fact that I love the AOPS.

I am perhaps their biggest online defender, despite the hate, the early issues, and the slander. They, to me, are the perfect vessel for what we require up North, modular, flexible, with a whole world's of potential.

The six vessels that make up the Dewolfe-Class have kept themselves busy, so busy that you often forget that they are, primarily, Arctic vessels. Now that isnt to say they can't take other tasks, nor should they be limited.

OP CARRIBE, a trip to Antarctica, hosts of exercises. The AOPV manage to be kept busy, while still finding time for trips up North, although not nearly as much as many would seem to like.

Their ability to hold containerized payloads has also seen them used as testbeds for various capabilities, including towed arrays for ASW, Submarine Rescue equipment, and in the future, RMDS and Unmanned systems like Cellula Robotics Guardian AUV.

Indeed, the AOPV are slowly, though surely coming into their own. Yet it is those things it does well, that potential, that puts them in the spotlight among a fleet that is aging and soon set to dwindle in numbers over the next decade.

The looming writing off of the Kingston-class is coming faster and faster everyday, and soon, they will be gone. The little workhorses, whom performed far more than anyone could have asked of them.

The Kingston have been a backbone, beyond the Littoral patrolling minesweeper they were envisioned as when the MCDV project was first stood up.

Yet the Kingston as we know them are to be retired with no true replacement, their original tasks overtaken by other systems and automation.

Their original replacement, as part of the OPV project has evolved into the Canadian Multi-Mission Corvette, a vessel envisioned to one day be a true second-line combatant to complement the River-class destroyers.

Instead the tasks of the Kingston shall fall onto the small number of AOPV in service. They will be tasked, not only to fulfill their role as Arctic Patrol ships, but now take the mantle of fulfilling a host of growing secondary tasks that has been filled by these cheap, smaller vessels.

Add on a Halifax-class that is struggling to stay afloat, bouncing around various states of condition and expected to keep sailing for another decade. Even as the River enter service, the tasks of the Kingston will not be filled by them.

It's a lot of strain and demand to put on vessels that are not only significantly larger than the Kingston, but also significantly more expensive to operate on fulfilling tasks like OP CARRIBE, where while they may be very valuable assets, might not be optimal in lieu of smaller vessels that can easily fill the same role just as efficiently.

On that note it also can't be understated that the more we put on the AOPV, the more we take it away from it's Arctic taskings, and the more we expect of these six vessels to do almost every secondary task, the more we create gaps in our continental defence.

Six AOPS not only for Arctic Patrol, but MCM, Submarine Support, Seabed Warfare, things like OP CARRIBE… How can we expect these vessels to remain in service for the next quarter-century with all this strain?

We don't talk about these vulnerabilities a lot, but as it stands Canada is severely vulnerable to adversaries and foreign actors ability to leverage asymmetric methods to limit our ability to respond abroad and severely harm Canada's strategic infrastructure.

It was only a little over a month ago that one of the subsea cables connecting Newfoundland and Nova Scotia was cut, with us lucky enough to have a vessel available to do the repair work.

We've seen at least eleven incidents with cables being cut in the Baltic Sea since 2023, with little being able to be done to prevent these incidents from continuing in the near term.

If not available, we could have been in a situation of waiting on a commercial vessel, which could have stretched the timeline to months, to be available to hoist and perform the proper repairs to restore function.

The global network of subsea cables is a critical piece of information infrastructure, pictured here along with a closer look at Canada's own cable network

These aren't cases of an adversary needing to cut hundreds of cables either. We're talking about two or three cables used to transfer vital information, the backbone of the global internet chain from Canada across the Atlantic and Pacific.

Losing these cables is the equivalent of putting out a candle in the middle of a dark forest, potentially limiting our ability to share important dataand informstion with our European and Pacific allies in the event of conflict.

This is just one task, one potential ares where we expect the AOPV to take the mantle in securing. Can we expect the AOPV to be able to properly be equipped and prepared to handle these kinds of tasks that require urgency?

It's a lot to put on them, far more than we should be expecting them to, but it points to a larger issue we have, a sustained bottleneck that keeps coming up time and time again.

CMMC and the Do-Everything model

Of course, depending on who you ask about this topic, you might get two different answers:

• These kinds of vessels are easy to acquire in conflict if we need them

• We don't need these vessels due to Automation/modularity/some other buzzword

Sometimes you'll get both these answers back to back, along with some mention about the River-classes mission bay. I like the mission bay though, so I won't speak down on it.

This sort of mindset is fairly prevalent. You can build cheap OPV at almost any yard you can name, quickly and cheaply depending on how bare you wish. These vessels are easy to build if you truly need them.

Except when they aren't, or outside of conflict, where our infrastructure could easily be targeted, taking valuable, expensive resources out of their tasks to go respond.

It feels almost throw away, to push the issue to the side and forget about it with a dismissive wave of the hand until it becomes to big an issue to ignore outright.

On the other end of the spectrum we have CMMC, the project originally designed to fill this gap but has now grown into what can be described as a Frankencorvette.

I REALLY don't want to go through Vigilance again, I don't. I have four pieces on it now? I won't waste time talking about her again, you can find it elsewhere on here a plenty.

Vigilance, as a concept, is something that gains a lot of it's love and desire from the promise of being able to both be a combatant and fill the role the Kingston played.

Vigilance is whatever you want it to be. It can be a Corvette, a missile boat, do coastal patrol, MCM, fix your truck, babysit your kids, whatever you feel like in an OPV sized vessel and under 50 person crew.

Everyone is happy, it fixes these issues great by being able to switch between roles, or providing a common hull to build off of, and we move on in life. Right?

O don't want to be overly sarcastic, I really don't but I've spoken on why I don't trust Vigilance or it's promises. Yet I haven't talked about how Vigilance presents another issue, a continued need to do everything.

The growing trend to rely on common hulls to fill multiple, sometimes conflicting roles is something that has been haunting us forever. It is a common trend in modern naval development. We aren't the only ones.

Yet the promises of things like autonomous systems and containerized payloads that will make a majority of vessel types obsolete, able to be done with a singular hull utilizing an open architecture design presents an alluring but often time overly promised option.

This is the same issue with Vigilance as the AOPV. Could it do MCM? Absolutely, likely quite well if properly setup. Could it protect and intervene in the case of subsea sabotage? Sure, thiughbthe design isnt optimized for it and would be limited. Could it provide Submarine support? In limited amounts, but again the design is very much not prepared to do that.

See you can fit as many modules as you wish, but you still can't get over design limitations, and no matter how you try and fix it, no design is tailored to fit both a cheap, expendable support vessel while having the capabilities to do things like Submarine support.

No matter how much you try, Vigilance will be able to do all of those things to a degree, but not enough, nor to the levels we need available. It just isnt there.

We'll once again have a vessel trying to do everything, though at least we might have the numbers to make it work better than the AOPV, but there will still be gaps there.

And it's understandable why it's so desirable. Ships are expensive and need people to crew them, two things we struggle, and will continue to struggle with for the foreseeable future.

Yet if you want twelve submarines you should naturally have a vessel, a proper one capable of supporting them. If you need to worry about your subsea infrastructure, you'll need a vessel able to monitor, intervene and perform the necessary repairs not in days, or weeks, but hours.

We can't get around this. I wish we could, I really do, but you can't have a vessel do all of these, have a Kingston sized crew, and be a combatant. It runs into the same issues, not enough for everything.

We need to stop looking at the hulls, and start asking about the capabilities we need. We need to inevitably accept that if we want to be able to do these tasks that we can't be relying on vessels designed to do everything at any time we need.

So what do we do?

I won't sit here and play armchair general about what vessels to pick and which designs fit best. I do think we have options, depending on what we're looking at.

Obviously, any Navy Polar Icebreakers need to be written off the list. These assets are expensive, require massive crews, and will provide little overall benefit to anyone. If you want more Polars, take it to thr Coast Guard.

Ideally, we need to also ask what we want CMMC to be. Many people peg Vigilance at twelve vessels, but if we desire them as a combatant, than treat them as such. I can't see twelve myself, maybe eight?

We obviously need a proper Submarine Support Vessel, especislly if we truely want twelve submarines, along with something like RFA Proteus that can be optimized for Seabed Warfare.

Could this role be filled by the same vessel? Maybe. I have certainly been told by many they could.

Perhaps something like Davies MRNSV concept? A modified civilian hull with a large workdeck, expansive internal workspace, moon pool, and the ability to dynamically position itself could be an ideal subsea support vessel for both roles.

On a smaller side, a vessel like Damen MRAV3600 or the larger OOSV could also provide a complement to the larger MRNSV.

I especially like the MRAV concept as a cheaper Kingston-style replacement vessel. It can be crewed with under 20 people, has some very nice features, and has over 500m² of open workspace.

Even the smaller MRAV-1600 would be a nice, small complement to a larger vessel, a true Kingston replacement in all but name.

Either design can fulfill the roles we need, while being for more optimal than relying on just the Vigilance, or similar designs. They can easily take a lot of the secondary tasks that it and the AOPV could be expected to undertake.

I am open to this, and would love to hear what more people believe. I think this is a fairly open area where numerous mixes and concepts have potential, although obviously that comes down to what exactly we expect these vessels to do.

There is a gap, a noticeable one not just in what we lose with the Kingston, but other areas where the current AOPV and CMMC can't be optimally used compared to a dedicated vessel.

Yet so long as funds, people, and infrastructure are an issue, we will have natural bottlenecks that limit out ability to operate the dedicated classes we need to properly protect our over 200,000km coastline and beyond.

If you want a navy to protect our continent, start by cutting out the vanity projects and election slogans, and start getting back to to the basics.