I would argue the opposite, that the Orca is too much of an unarmed trainer. A 57mm is probably overkill on a ship like that, but being at least fitted for but not with items like something larger than a .50 would be quite useful.
I’d like to see them be operated by the CCG for OP Caribe. Then it’s CCG working with USCG.
Hamina is a fully fledged missile boat with anti-ship missiles, light anti-aircraft missiles, a substantial main gun and a full suite of sensors/decoys. This kind of combatant is utterly useless for the Royal Canadian Navy and is a substantial waste of time, effort and money. The Orca's entire purpose is to act as economic training platforms for our personnel, we should be looking to have them be more effective in this role and not be turned into bootleg patrol craft and be removed from said duties. If the Orca's were actually capable of leaving coastal BC, this would have happened already.
Not particularly, given that such a vessel doesn't need those polar classes for its designated roles. One has to understand that the higher polar class that is integrated into a design, the more rigid of a traditional icebreaker it becomes. AOPS is able to operate abroad due to its lower ice rating and specific design requirements to do so, but fundamentally there is many tradeoffs required by heavy icebreakers that makes them only suited to those roles.
Arctic BMD Polar Icebreaker is an immensely silly and costly program that I hope the Govt would steer far away from, unless they've all fallen to the brain worms.
Fundamentally, the USCG and CCG are different organizations with different mandates. The constant comparisons aren't really useful or much appreciated by the CCG staff themselves. In order to do what the RCN does, you'd need some weird DFO/CCG/RCMP crewed hybrid vessel, which is an immense amount of work compared to what we're doing now.
I guess we'll have to wait and see if Carney's talk yesterday about expanding their mandate turns out to be something of substance or not.
I think if someone thinks that the CCG is about to be turned into some mirror of the USCG they'll going to be disappointed. Like others have alluded to perhaps more sensors and perhaps the ability to be armed in case of conflict but no 4th arm of the military. Although I would love for that to get out that he's considering turning them into just that, the unions would be in an uproar.
I remember numerous times there were calls for the Kingston Class to be transferred to the CG and never came to anything. The simple truth of the matter that AOPS like them or hate them play a significant part of our strategy in the Arctic and everything else we do. We need them and more than ever. Even if we were able to build the RCD and Corvettes we would still need the general low level capability they bring and as build times go decades before we'll ever get a significant amount of ships.
