dmereifield wrote:Jensy wrote:Interesting Type 26/31 related paper from Canada's Parliamentary Budget Office (no clue what level of influence they have relative to our OBR):
In response to a request by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO), this report presents a costing analysis of building Canadian Surface Combatants (CSC) with the continuation of the Type 26, as well as the cost for two alternate designs: the FREMM and the Type 31e.
Canadian Parliamentary Budget Office Link to full PDF:
https://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/en/blog/news/ ... se-options
Are the Canadians going to pull out of the T26 route?
No, the DND has already responded to this report that they are NOT changing the design:
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-nat ... atant.html.
Note they are also sticking to their estimate of CAN$56-60 Billion, which includes all construction activities as well as studies, design, analysis and engineering support, system tests, trials and evaluations, new and modified infrastructure (jetties and facilities), ammunition, training, and project support personnel costs. Ammunition costs alone for a class of 15 ships that are designed to support SM-2, ESSM, Tomahawk, Sea Ceptor, NSM, 127mm and 30mm guns, will account for about CAN$3Billion of the total. Also, the cost to operate the ships for the first 5 years is normally included, so as to give the DND a good basis of actual operating costs before running an in-service support competition. In addition, the actual cost to
build the ships is estimated to be 50-60% of that total. So, comparing costs with other nations is tricky.
The problem with this report is it did not look at capability, just cost. That is stated quite clearly in the introduction to the report. The SOR for the CSC was heavily weighted in favour of ASW, which is kind of Canada's "thing", and neither the T31e nor the Constellation class can match T26 in that regard, just from the perspective of the hull and machinery design. The SOR was also heavily weighted towards future capability insertion. Constellation is big, but T26 is bigger, and the RCN wants a flexible design that can run for 30+ years. Just on those two requirements the T26 is the superior design. It also did not look at the cost of running and maintaining two separate classes of ship, which, for a small navy like the RCN, is a significant factor in favour of a single class. Finally, the PBO report included all taxes, which is ridiculous, as all taxes paid by DND to build the ship go back to government anyway. That represents somewhere around CAN$8Billion of the total cost estimate. It's really a ridiculous report, but unfortunately, it WILL muddy the waters for a time, and this does represent some risk to the program, despite the obvious merits of the T26. (I'm not even sure the T31e will even be equivalent to the current Halifax class, so adopting it would be a step backwards, in my opinion. So, realistically, from a capabilities perspective, this is a comparison between T26 and the Constellation class, and that narrows the price gap considerably.)
Here is a nice write-up describing some of the rationale behind the CSC:
https://www.cgai.ca/the_canadian_surfac ... nd_context