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Originally Posted by Lance69
Blame the whole Sea King bullshit on Chretien and his Liberals (And I'm a Liberal btw) who cost the Gov half a billion dollars to cancel the contract and took em ten damn years to get a new one!  |
Thanks for illustrating the point I was trying to make... the problem was less that of the SKs themselves and more of all the political bullshit swirling around them. That and the lack of funding.
I remember thinking at the time, "What a huge fucking waste of money. They could have rebuilt half the kings from the ground up with that cash, and had some left over for beer for the maintenance crews."
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I've done operations in the Sea Kings and in thier prime they were awesome! But thier prime was 20-30 years ago. You beat the hell out of any vehicle that long and it'll need replacement.
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I'm told that the north atlantic is particularly brutal (the salt gets into everything and rips it to shit). Where did you fly out of?
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But the blame lies on the apathy of the Canadian public towards the military. If it wasn't for polititians pandering for votes with greenpeace loving hippys we would not be putting our forces in unnessecary danger from our own equipment. The majority of people still believe in the "It won't happen to us" mentality. As much as I dissapprove of blind ignorant patriotism, I admire the American "Support our Troops" policy.
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I don't see apathy towards the millitary from the public viewpoint. Air shows, Tattoo and so forth are always well attended and enjoyed by all. There is certainly less bloodthirst, but that's because we, as a general rule, abhour senseless violence. We're all for
sensible violence, though.
There was a period of time (post somalia) where things definately took a turn for the worse though. Hard days for the forces.
And honestly, there may be an element of 'antiharperism' in there. Harper beats beats beats on the drum All. The. Time. Can't get him to shut up about it, which is part of the reason why he is so often associated with american attitudes and so many people think that anything harper suggests must be a bad thing.... and largely they'd be correct, but not all the time.
