![]() ![]() ![]() As the Ukraine conflict has shown, crises can sneak up on you. These capabilities take so long to build that you need to spend money on them years before you need them. It’s good that Canada is spending some money on Northern defense. But they signaled flexibility, adding they would “continue to look at this policy going forward.” New air-to-air missiles, new F-35 fighter jets, upgraded Northern satellite surveillance, a mysterious new sensor network called Crossbow with “classified capabilities” and other upgrades will also be rolled out over time.įederal officials said they plan to continue Canada’s non-participation in the US missile defense program. It will be located in Southern Canada and will cover the northern part of the country at a cost of around $1 billion.Ī future phase called Polar Over-the-Horizon Radar will extend coverage over the Canadian Arctic islands and beyond. This will be the Arctic Over-the-Horizon Radar project. On the Canadian side of the border, government documents point out that the upgrade just announced will take some time: a “multi-decade time horizon” in military bureaucratese.įull details are to be released later, but Canadian defense officials told the Ottawa Citizen they hope to have the first new Canadian radar facilities operational by 2028. It is designed to discriminate between debris, decoys and incoming warheads. When operational next year, it and its massive computers will sense and track objects small and large at very long ranges. The radar station’s apartment building sized interlocking cube shapes would not look out of place in a science fiction movie. Last year, the Space Force Base at Clear, also near Fairbanks, finished building a state-of-the-art Long Range Discrimination Radar. Both the Obama and Trump administrations added new interceptor missiles to the Fort Greely missile-defense base near Fairbanks. And it’s getting a little tiring.”Īs the global geopolitical outlook has grown more worrying, the Americans have spent heavily on defensive systems in Alaska. Just last month Alaskan Senator Dan Sullivan said this: “”We still have NATO allies, Canada one, who just freeload. Our American allies are irked by what they see as Canada’s multi-decade underinvestment in northern defense, and its decision in 2005 not to participate in North American missile defense. The Canadian spending announcement also got some attention from the United States, our partner in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). In the meantime, China and Russia developed challenging new hypersonic and cruise missile technologies and North Korea entered the nuclear arms race. This system is now more than three decades old, a long time considering most people upgrade the electronics in their pockets every one or two years. Starting in the late 1980s, the DEW Line was replaced by the newer North Warning System. Until the year 1955, few human feet had trod those expanses … if modern bombers carrying modern bombs over the polar ice cap were to cross the Arctic circle at midnight, they could destroy virtually any Canadian or American city before dawn.” The vast desolate stretch of polar wasteland called the Arctic. Here’s how a 1957 film produced by the Western Electric Company’s Defense Projects Division put it: “This is the roof of the world. It was one of those epic nation-building projects beloved by 1950s documentary film-makers. In 1957, three Yukon DEW Line sites opened at Komakuk Beach, Stokes Point and Shingle Point. And constitutional lawyers pondered how Section 6.5 on Military Access in the Umbrella Final Agreement would make things play out differently this time for Yukon First Nations.īack in the 1950s during the construction of the original Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, the US and Canadian air forces did not spend a lot of time consulting indigenous peoples or involving them in economic opportunities.įive years after the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon, the US and Canadian governments launched what was at the time a bold and unprecedented effort to build a chain of more than 60 radar stations along the Arctic coast from Alaska to Greenland.Ī stunning 25,000 workers set out to build the roads, airfields, logistics centres and radar stations. Business people tried to figure out how much of that $38.6 billion will end up in the Yukon. Environmentalists googled the PCB clean-up operation around northern military radar sites in the 1990s. Last month’s announcement of federal plans to spend $38.6 billion over twenty years modernizing Canada’s air and space defenses attracted a lot of attention in the Yukon.įoreign policy wonks got out their globes to show that a nuclear missile flying from North Korea to Chicago would go right over Whitehorse. ![]()
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