The Minister of Defense of Canada Anita Anand in a file photo taken in Singapore on June 12, 2022 CAROLINE CHIA / Reuters
The Canadian government will spend $ 4.9 billion over six years to help the United States improve NORAD’s continental defenses and deal with the growing threat of hypersonic missiles and advanced cruise missile technologies developed by Russia and China.
Defense Secretary Anita Anand announced the investment at Canadian Trenton base on Monday, offering a first glimpse of how Canada and the United States plan to modernize North American Aerospace Defense Command and replace its outdated Northern Warning System soon. This joint US-Canada radar system includes dozens of sites from the Yukon to Labrador, and its mission is to detect air threats, initially long-range bombers.
The Canadian government’s new commitment to defense comes just days before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau travels to the NATO summit in Madrid. Canada is under pressure from allies, particularly the United States, to increase its military spending to 2 percent of annual economic output.
Canadians have usually managed to leave it in cool weather to prevent intrusion. As military historian Charles Perry Stacey once said, “the generals protect the Canadian people throughout the year in January and February.”
But with climate change and advances in missile technology, Ms. Anand said Monday: “Canada cannot rely solely on its geography to protect us.”
She said Canada and the United States are building a new Northern Approach monitoring system that will eventually replace the Northern Warning System. This will include state-of-the-art technology called over-the-horizon radar, with a much wider detection range – up to thousands of kilometers.
The new setup will include “Arctic over-the-horizon radar” to provide radar coverage for early warning and threat tracking from the Canadian-US border to the Arctic Circle.
The second component will be the Polar Over-the-Horizon Radar system to provide the same coverage and tracking above and beyond the northernmost approaches to North America, including the Arctic archipelago of Canada.
The third part will be a new network called the Crossbow, which consists of sensors with what Ms Anand calls “classified opportunities” that will be located in northern Canada to provide another layer of detection.
The latest component will be a space-based surveillance system that uses satellites to gather intelligence and track threats, she told reporters.
Ms Anand did not provide a timetable for the implementation of these projects, and although she said the total bill for Canada would be $ 40 billion over 20 years, the Canadian government has not announced budget commitments of more than $ 4.9 billion.
The risk that Canada and the United States are considering is advances in missile technology in Russia and China, which can send non-nuclear warheads over much greater distances with much greater accuracy. These include hypersonic missiles, which move extremely fast and can dodge and weave in flight to avoid interception, as well as next-generation cruise missiles that can travel close to the ground.
Last fall, a senior US general warned a security forum in Halifax that China and Russia had overtaken the United States in developing hypersonic missiles – considered by some to be first-strike weapons. General David Thompson, deputy chief of space operations at the United States Space Forces, said the world had become a “much more complex place” with the advent of hypersonic missiles that could change course. This means that, unlike ballistic missiles, a target country cannot quickly predict where such missiles will land.
The aging Northern Warning System, which must detect incoming threats to North America, is unable to respond effectively to modern missile technology, experts warned.
Ms Anand said the Northern Warning System would remain active until the new technology package is introduced. She did not provide a timeline for this.
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