Canadian Press July 23, 2006
Defence Department confident it can make dumped Danish drones fly
By Celeste Mackenzie
OTTAWA (CP) - The Department of National Defence wants to buy 10 used unarmed aerial drones that Denmark found problematic and mothballed last year.
Canada has a sorry history when it comes to buying used military equipment in Europe. The federal government bought leaky used British submarines, one of which caught fire while at sea.
But DND says it has carried out an inspection in Denmark and contracted an Ottawa firm to improve landing accuracy of the drones.
A spokesperson for the department described the opportunity to buy the Danish equipment as an exceptional one-time opportunity.
Pending negotiations, the department wouldn't say what it expects to pay for the French-made Sperwer drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Nor would it reveal the cost of getting them up to speed.
Spokesperson Krista Hannivan said the drones would be used for reconnaissance and training in Afghanistan, and training in Canada.
"A DND team is satisfied it will meet the needs of the Canadian Forces," Hannivan said.
UAVs are remotely controlled and are typically sent in advance of troops as scouts. One is currently being used by Canadian forces in Afghanistan.
Sam Wehbe, marketing analyst for Mist Mobility Integrated Systems Technology which is trying to improve UAV performance, said the main problem has been landing when it's windy.
Canada procured a first batch of Sperwers in 2003, but they were initially plagued by accidents.
One was severely damaged in 2004 when it crashed during training on a landing approach near Kabul. A DND accident report cited insufficient simulated training and difficult conditions at high altitude as contributing factors. In all, there were nine serious accidents and four UAVs were written off.
Jim Ferguson, a senior fellow at Calgary's Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, says Canada acted too fast in adopting the UAVs.
The success of the used drones, he said, will depend on terrain, altitude, the nature of missions, and well-trained personnel.
"We rushed into it initially, and there wasn't enough experience to handle them. But the technology is already more advanced now," Ferguson said. "The range of their role will certainly affect how useful they are."
Increased use of drones in Afghanistan and the Middle East in recent years has also led to improved performance, says John Pike, Director of GlobalSecurity.org, a U.S. military information website.
"Practice is everything, and while Osama bin Laden has been a lot of things, he's been good for drones because they've just been used so much because of him," Pike said.
The U.S. Defence Department's annual funding for UAV development rose from just over $3 billion in the 1990s to more than $12 billion for 2004 to 2009.
Indeed, Canada has improved UAV performance so much that the Danes wonder why the Defence Department has had such good results. Denmark says it was never able to get the UAVs, purchased in 2001, to work properly in test runs in that country.
"We didn't set up the service organization we should have, the firm we bought them from failed to set up the service we needed, and it was hard to get spare parts . . . we didn't want to spend good money after bad," said Anders Paakesen, a Danish military spokesperson.
Paakesen said the Danes spent about $75 million on the UAVs, but he wouldn't comment on the expected selling price, nor on what Denmark calculated it would have cost to get the drones to run properly.
Liberal defence critic Ujjal Dosanjh doesn't doubt the need for UAVs, but says they should not have been sole-sourced, and newer drones should have been considered.
"I know they are needed. Have they investigated whether or not we can get better technology and newer technology?" Dosanjh said, comparing the purchase to previous acquisitions of C-17 transport planes that were also sole-sourced by the Harper government.
© Copyright 2006, Canadian Press
