Canada has a small, some would say Tiny, Armed Forces.
Around 70,000 Army Navy and Air forces personnel. We have 6 Dozen obsolete Tanks 6 Dozen F18's scheduled to be upgraded to Super Hornets, instead of F35's. A bunch of Helicopters from the 50's. Scheduled to be upgraded but the new ones don't work. 8-12 Frigates and 3-4 Subs that leak. We have a few transport planes some old Herc's and maybe some newer replacements. A few Dozen LAV 25's.
Given our small Armed Forces I suggest changing how things are done. Instead of wasting money on Planes we are not going to use or Tanks that are useless we should scrap and replace both with Drones. Each Super Hornet costs the same as 12 Drones, 3 Ground or Mobile command units and 12 Satellite Drone Links. Training crews and 'pilots' is much less and a variety of drones and placements can do everything the new planes will do and do better. 12 Drones can be the Predator Raptor Drones, plus some of the others, add in a dozen Global hawks (expensive) for air superiority. Predator Raptors would be used for ground attack and we use F18's for search and rescue, My cousin died crashing into a mountain searching for a lost fishing boat in a storm. A Drone could do the same thing maybe even better.
Deploying 6 F18's two years ago bombing ISIS cost us half a billion. Doing the same with 8 Predator Drones would cost 20% of that. Moving the planes and Deploying them would be faster with Drones as well.
Now I would use our Air Force to fly Transport Planes for Moving LAV's and Mobile Drone Operations. Canada would need to buy and Fly New better bigger transports.
As For tanks, we should deploy the Helicopter Drones. Much more useful than a Leopard 1. Did we ever get Leopard 2's? Better against Armour and much harder to hit. Cheaper safer and easier to upgrade. Helicopter Drones can also be deployed on our Frigates. I won't tell you how old our Army Helicopters are. Biggest guns they mount are twin mini guns, carry 50 seconds of ammo and have no armour. Again a drone is much better.
5/600 Drones are cheaper, would let Canada live up to our NATO commitments, add in new Air Transports and Deploy a larger LAV fleet. Cheaper Better more and much more effective. Likely keep Trump happy too.
