I n Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, there’s a scene where one of Mendy Melendez’s boys follows Philip Marlowe out of a bar. There might have been trouble, Marlowe says, “if this enormous man hadn’t got out of an enormous car” and thrown the kid one-handed against the wall. “What was that?” Marlowe asks the bruised gangster. “Big Willie Magoon. A policeman. He thinks he’s tough.”
Canada's armed forces, facing a familiar combination of a declining budget and aging fleets, have a third problem: a lack of public and political confidence in the nation's acquisition process after a series of failures and embarrassments, including a 28-year effort to replace naval Sea King helicopters that has already seen one program canceled, and a second one started that is now running at least four years late. The acquisition of four trouble-plagued ex-Royal Navy submarines has been another public problem.
Whatever you think of the outcome of South Korea's F-X Phase 3 fighter selection—now leaning toward the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—you cannot deny that it is a mess. The government first created a new agency to manage its defense procurements, set clear selection criteria for 60 new fighters and told the Defense Acquisition Program Administration to git 'er done. DAPA picked the F-15SE, a decision that the government speedily set aside.
