The politics of military procurement: the F-35 purchasing process in Canada and <i>Australia</i> Compared

ABSTRACTThe willingness of defence departments to select the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) for their fifth-generation multirole fighter has frequently been analyzed as stemming from the close historical connections allies such as Japan or Canada have with the United States. However, such an approach glosses over or ignores the operation of military procurement processes which are more idiosyncratic and subject to many pushes and pulls from different actors and directions. This article compares the experiences of Australia and Canada in procuring the JSF. Both countries are British Commonwealth members, with a long history of supporting western, and in particular, US alliances. But while Australia has secured its F-35 procurement and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) has already received its F-35s, Canada has only recently overcome a lengthy F-35 procurement battle that remains mired in controversy and will not deliver to the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) an aircraft for several years yet. This comparative case study between Australian and Canadian defence priorities offers a new explanation for this disparity of procurement success based on the need to both create and maintain alignment between government strategic defence policy and military service doctrine if major platform purchasing decisions are to survive.KEYWORDS: Military procurementF-35 JSFstrategic studiesCanadaAustralia Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The F-35A is the Conventional Take-off and Landing model, the F-35B is a STOVL (Short Take-off and Vertical Landing) version, and the F-35C is the carrier-based version.2. One RAF F-35B crashed during takeoff from the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth in November 2021, reducing the number to 47.3. Meanwhile, however, Canada kept contributing its Tier-3 funding share to the program. There were various reasons for this: on the one hand, continued participation would allow the country to purchase F-35s at a discounted rate if this was ever chosen and – probably more relevant – the overall contribution was less than half the value of the contracts Canadian companies had received over time (Chapman Citation2019, 215).4. This was especially as the 2017 Strong, Secure, Engaged strategic policy paper (Department of National Defence 2017) called for the acquisition of 88 CF-18s to replace its fleet of jet fighters and as the RCAF moved to acquire second-hand F-18 Super Hornets from Australia to bridge the RCAF's needs. However, those planes are themselves aging and prone to a variety of issues, not least of which has been the need to integrate new radars into older airframes.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlexander HowlettDr. Howlett published the Development of British Naval Aviation, 1914–1918, in 2021 with Routledge. He has contributed articles and papers to international conferences in military and naval history and has been the editor of the Canadian War Studies Association since 2014. Twitter: @Suetonius_Andrea Riccardo MigoneAndrea Migone is Assistant Professor at Ryerson University. He has worked both in academia and with public services in the areas of public policy, procurement, and public administration since completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University in 2006. He has over 40 publications in the field of public policy and procurement in a variety of Canadian and international journals and chapters in academic presses.Andrea Migone is one of the initial members of the Canadian Public Policy Network and was one of the founding editors of the journal World Political Science Review. Twitter: @Andrea_MigoneMichael HowlettMichael Howlett, FRSC is Burnaby Mountain Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in public policy analysis, political economy, public procurement, and resource and environmental policy. He has edited or co-edited three dozen books and has published over 300 refereed and reviewed journal articles and book chapters. Professor Howlett taught at Queen's University (1986–1988) and the University of Victoria (1988–1989) before coming to SFU. He was Visiting Professor (2009–2010) and Yong Pung How Chair Professor (2013–2017) at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, Visiting Professor at the Universita degli studi di Cagliari (2012), Visiting Research Fellow at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2018) and Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen (2020). Twitter: @howlettm

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