Title Publication Date Department News type Teaser Minister Wilkinson participates in keel laying ceremony for Joint Support Ship 2

Sur le même sujet

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  10 mars 2020 | Local, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Coronavirus shaking up America’s defense industry

  By: Joe Gould and Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON ― The U.S. aerospace and defense sector is feeling the impact of the coronavirus, with companies limiting travel, defense trade events scuttled and contingency planning underway. As stocks fell sharply Monday on a combination of coronavirus fears and plunging oil prices, defense firms were girding for the worst and looking to the White House for guidance. The comments came days after spread of the coronavirus forced the weeklong closure of two F-35 related facilities in Italy and Japan―a sign the outbreak had begun to impact operations within the American defense industrial base. “The normal ways of doing business are definitely going to change,” said Aerospace Industries Association CEO Eric Fanning. “We're trying to get to the place where we're not reacting on a day-to-day basis to what's happening and getting in front of some of these things and maybe making some proactive decisions. But everyone is kind of looking to everyone else to take the lead on how to address this.” Lockheed, Raytheon and Honeywell were among dozens of companies that pulled out of last month's Singapore Air Show, which is typically the largest defense trade show in Asia―and SXSW, a show AIA participates in, was cancelled. The two offer a glimpse into how fears of corona virus could impact other defense trade shows and conferences. “It felt like a ghost town. It definitely was a strange experience,” Fanning said about the Singapore conference. While it's easy to overstate the importance of trade shows in cementing major deals, the deals announced at the shows are often worked out in advance, Fanning said. Still, the shows are still valuable for face-to-face networking between international defense officials and industry. As of Monday, the National Defense Industrial Association still planned to hold its Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Tampa, Fla., this May. Its 2020 Pacific Operational Science and Technology Conference in Honolulu was ongoing this week, with more than 700 attendees, a spokeswoman said. At least one major defense firm, Boeing, has limited its employees to “business-essential” travel, and it has been rescheduling some events, reducing face-to-face meetings in favor of virtual meetings, enabling telecommuting when possible. “These measures are temporary and aimed to prevent the spread of the virus, shorten its impact and ensure the health and safety of our employees as well as the general public," a Boeing spokesman said. The virus has infected more than 110,000 people worldwide, and Italy on Sunday followed China's lead in quarantining a big swath of its country in hopes of corralling the spread. That sparked more fears in the financial markets that quarantines would snarl supply chains for companies even more than they already have. While COVID-19's long term impacts on the defense aerospace industry may take time to manifest, they could be complicated by the uncertainty of the financial market and ongoing trade wars with China, according to Fanning and others. “Supply chains are global, they're inter-related, they're incredibly complex. Having real good situational awareness into them is difficult to begin with, then you add any instability on top of it, it gets harder. And this definitely is added to that,” Fanning said. The new coronavirus is now spreading on every continent except Antarctica and hurting consumer spending, industrial production, and travel. As COVID-19 spreads around the world, many investors feel helpless in trying to estimate how much it will hurt the economy and corporate profits, and the easiest response to such uncertainty may be to get out. After initially taking an optimistic view on the virus — hoping that it would remain mostly in China and cause just a short-term disruption — investors are realizing they likely woefully underestimated it. On Monday, the Dow Jones U.S. Aerospace & Defense Index was down 26 percent over the last month, lagging the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was down 18 percent. “Defense should do relatively better [than consumer sectors], but it's not gonna be immune,” said Byron Callan, a policy research expert at Capital Alpha Partners. “It's gonna catch a mild fever where, you know, there are gonna be other parts of the U.S. economy that are gonna be in a critical situation." “Buy-America” regulations and other controls mean the U.S. defense industry's supply chains may be less susceptible to disruption than some consumer sectors, where reliance on China-made components is more widespread―and few, if any supply chains are as globally linked as the F-35's, said U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Defense and Aerospace Export Council's president, Keith Webster. “I would say in the U.S. defense sector's supply chain is less vulnerable than maybe a product in the commercial sector, but we'll have to see,” Webster said. “If this continues across the F-35 partner nations, with their industrial sharing, one could see an impact.” On the flip side, China's weeks-long factory closures could eventually see parallels in the U.S., if the virus is not quickly contained. White collar employees may be able to telecommute, but if skilled laborers are forced to stay home, that could mean problems for the primes and their lower-tier suppliers. “Are there parallels to China in the U.S.? We don't know,” Webster said. “The first step is containment, and the next step is mitigation. China went into mitigation very quickly, which is keeping everybody home. We're just beginning to see that thought process here.” Short of factory closings, factory workers staying home for school closures or to care for sick relatives could trigger work slow downs, particularly at the lower tiers of the supply chain, especially the ones that rely on smaller pools of workers. Those companies could suffer too if they rely on the commercial side of the aerospace sector, which is expected to be harder hit, Callan said. “You can see the ramifications on the pace of work, but it's not like the airline industry or the cruise ship industry where all of a sudden none of your customers show up,” Callan said, adding: “There could be a cascading effect from some commercial aerospace. Again, it's at very, very small level, but it's still a factor.” The Associated Press and Aaron Mehta contributed to this report. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/03/09/coronavirus-shaking-up-americas-defense-industry/

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  29 juillet 2021 | Local, Aérospatial

  Stantec to design fighter jet infrastructure in Quebec, Alberta - Canadian Consulting Engineer

  The design-build project involves a partnership with EllisDon.

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  1 décembre 2020 | Local, Aérospatial

  Canadian defense minister talks fighter competition and geopolitics

  By: Aaron Mehta; DefenseNews.com 20 November 2020 WASHINGTON — When the Trudeau government took office in 2015, one of the first appointments was tapping Harjit Sajjan, a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan, as Canada's minister of national defense. Sajjan is now one of the lonest-serving ministers of defense in Canadian history. After an appearance at the Halifax International Security Forum, Sajjan talked with Defense News about the country's long-awaited fighter jet procurement, as well as the nation's future on the world stage. The interview has been edited for clarity and length. Regarding the fighter competition, the plan is to either downselect to two jets in 2021, or make a final decision in 2022. Where does that decision stand? How has the coronavirus pandemic impacted the timing and size of the program? I'm very happy with the progress of the selection for our next fighter. And it's gone to a very good stage where we actually have three companies. I don't know exactly — because the team there that does the analysis is independent — which direction they'll go, of downselecting or how that's going to happen. So we'll see how the progress moves ahead. I can turn to your direct question regarding COVID-19. We initially, obviously, just like anybody, had some minor delays because we had to shift a lot of the resources to the pandemic fight. But we were able to shift our people back into dealing with our procurement very quickly because, as you know, defense is an essential service, and making sure that those jobs continue was very important to us. So the delays were actually very minor. And all the updates that I've reviewed so far [shows] that things are actually progressing extremely well. So you don't see any delays for that program likely coming as a result of COVID-19 or anything else? Right now I'm confident that we'll be able to make up any time because the shift that we made. [We have some] very good people [who] are running these very large projects, so we needed to shift some of that talent to the COVID-19 fight initially, for good reason. But in a few months, we were able to shift those people back to this program. Canada's defense budget is set to significantly increase in the coming years based on the 2017 defense policy agreement. You've recently said this will still happen, but some experts said that given the economic impact of the last year and given post-pandemic priorities, the defense budget might end up either changing or taking a cut. How confident are you that the targets that have been set are going to be hit, budget wise? First of all, the security challenges that we face around the world don't change. And that's an important point for everybody to take note of, and it's something that we took note when we conducted our defense policy review. This is one of the reasons why, when we put this defense policy together, we wanted to have a thorough cost analysis done early on based on the capabilities that we felt that we needed, not only for the defense of Canada but to be good partners as part of this financial command at North American Aerospace Defense Command or the Five Eyes [intelligence-sharing alliance] and the work that we do at NATO. So we made a decision to fund the defense policy for the duration, which is 20 years. So there was a government-level decision to do this, to carve it out of the fiscal framework, and that should give assurance to people how seriously we took this from the beginning. We looked at any type of financial challenges that a nation might go through, but we also knew that we needed to maintain the defense funding because, as you know, in the past, defense policies have been put out, but the money has not been included, and they had to be agreed upon every single year. Based on that experience, I can understand some of the concerns that some of these experts actually have, but this is something that we looked at right from the beginning, and the reason why we made a government-level decision to fund the defense policy for the 20 years. So it can't be just a very quick decision to change the defense budget. But more importantly, one of the things — probably one of the most important things that we need to take a look at, especially as we deal with COVID-19 — is the economic downturn, [is that] the defense industry adds a significant amount of well-paying jobs. So it's very important to keep these investments moving because this is about maintaining well-paying jobs across the country and supply chain that we have, connected with our allies, especially with the U.S. You mentioned global challenges. Something that recently emerged is this idea of the “Quad” between India, Japan, the United States and Australia. Do you see Canada having a role in that, and would you want to join? I can see what that initiative — what it was trying to achieve. But let's keep in mind: We already had some good mechanisms where we were working with — so for example, with the United Nations Security Council resolutions on sanctions monitoring in North Korea, that was where nations came together from all the nations that participated in the Korean conflict, Korean War early on, where we decided to up our support for [monitoring.] We created Operation NEON in Canada to provide the direct support. In fact, one of our frigates just completed their work with monitoring, and we have a surveillance aircraft still in the region conducting that work. So the work that the Quad does — I think it's extremely important. I think we need to have a much wider conversation of not just looking at the Quad, but we need to look at how allies are going to come together to look at how do we support places like the Asia-Pacific region and our Association of Southeast Asian Nations partners in the Indo-Pacific region. So I think it's a good effort, but I think we need to look at even more thorough analysis and look at what are the things that nations can contribute. There's also talk about whether to expand Five Eyes, perhaps by formally including Japan. Is the idea of a formal Five Eyes expansion something you support? First of all, Five Eyes is probably one of the most trusted agreements that we have. It's not just: “You sign an agreement, and you're part of a trusted group.” There are some very strict measures that every nation needs to take in terms of the security architecture that's needed inside your country, how we communicate — that provides a framework. That framework also includes a set of laws about governance, as well. But it does not preclude us from working with other partners, and [partners] having greater cooperation with the Five Eyes. And if ever down the road there's an opportunity, I think that's something that's to be kept on the table. But I think Five Eyes allows us to be able to work with likeminded partners, like Japan, and we're already doing some great work as it is. We'll see where the discussion goes. It seems like you're saying you're happy to work with other nations, and already do that, but that Five Eyes requires such a strict legal measure that a formal expansion might not make sense. What I'm going to say here is that there's a lot of good work already being done. When you have an expansion, that alone would require a significant amount of effort toward that. But I think right now we need to take a look at how do we use our current mechanisms to create the effects we need. Because there is a concern right now, and we need to support our ASEAN partners in the Pacific. And so it's better to look at mechanisms that we have in place and work toward a larger relationship. You've made pointed comments about China and the challenge from Beijing. Where's the greatest challenge from China for Canada? The Arctic? The Pacific? Is it economic? It's not just one thing, or pick one over another. I would say overall, the unpredictable nature that China has created, that when you go outside the international rules-based order — that was set up for good reason after the Second World War, of creating predictability — it's the unpredictability that China has created that's giving us significant concerns. So everything from freedom of navigation to how finances are used in countries to bring in influence. About the most important, the biggest one for us, is when they have a disagreement [they will] arbitrarily detain citizens. So we have two citizens who are detained. Australia just, I believe, had an incident very similar to ours. These are some of the things that cause nations around the world to take a [concerned] look. So I wouldn't say it's just one. The Arctic, I'll be honest with you, it will always be a concern for Canada because our sovereignty is extremely important to us. We want to work within partnerships under international laws. We want to do this, but a pattern that's created in other areas has caused concern for us in Canada. There's a debate among foreign policy experts over whether Canada has been too passive. Does Canada need to take a more robust foreign and national security policy stance, or are you comfortable with where it is now? I would say our stance has been misunderstood, then. If you look at the last five years alone, when we formed the government and I became defense minister, we didn't have a consistent engagement in the Pacific. Now we do. We're officially part of Operation NEON, conducting sanctions monitoring; we obviously, because of COVID-19, weren't able to do this, but we've had ships in the Pacific conducting visits, doing exercises as well, or being part of Exercise RIMPAC. And also increasing our whole-of-government approach. We put a battlegroup into Latvia that we lead, [forces] in Ukraine, we actually increased our role there, increased our footprint with the coalition to fight ISIS [the Islamic State group]. And the list goes on. We've actually commanded the NATO training mission in Iraq for the last two years. So when you look at what we do, it is quite significant. But I think in terms of — you can look at it as passive or active. We have to take a look at what does each nation bring to the table. And I remember having a conversation with [U.S. Defense Secretary Jim] Mattis about this. It's about utilizing the skill set of your closest allies and how you work together in creating effects for our diplomats. And that's exactly what Canada has been doing: being a credible partner to convene conversations to be able to move toward peaceful resolutions to disagreements. I wouldn't say that we've actually had to step back in any way. In fact, if you look at the record of what we've actually done, not only we've talked about increasing our spending, we've actually increased our capabilities and contributions at the same time. Aaron Mehta is Deputy Editor and Senior Pentagon Correspondent for Defense News, covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Department of Defense and its international partners. https://www.defensenews.com/global/the-americas/2020/11/30/canadian-defense-minister-talks-fighter-competition-and-geopolitics/