When eBay is your supply chain, things can get real
For quite some time, the Royal Canadian Navy has been up on blocks. With Defense Forces spending at all-time lows, and overseas commitments in Afghanistan and elsewhere consisting of CF-18 Hornet deployments and ground force contingents, cash just isn’t readily available to the Navy. This is sad as in 1945 it was the world’s third largest, only trailing the USN and RN in size.
The fleet’s largest vessels, the Protecteur-class replenishment oilers: Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) Protecteur (AOR 509) and HMCS Preserver (AOR 510), when commissioned in the 1960s were very forward thinking ships. They were the largest Canadian ships ever to fly the maple leaf, some 20 percent bigger even than HMCS Bonaventure (CVL 22), the country’s Majestic-class aircraft carrier.
Some 565-feet long and 25,000-tons in displacement, these seagoing beans-bullets-and-butter haulers could both extend the range of Canada’s surface ships and, if needed, conduct long-range overseas deployments on their own.
Equipped with a trio of massive Sea King ASW helicopters, Blowpipe manpads, a pair of CIWS for point defense, and a half-dozen .50 cals, these ships could fight submarines, defend themselves and embark a platoon of commandos if needed for sea control if needed.
Weight and space were reserved for 3″/50 guns, 40mmm Bofors and Mk. 29 Sea Sparrows, though only the former two were ever installed and then only briefly. (Don’t laugh at the armament, these ships were designed in the late 1950s)
A starboard bow view of the Canadian replenishment oiler HMCS PROVIDER (AOR 508) underway during Exercise RIMPAC ’86. Click to big up.
Still, these ships were Canada’s first line warships to some degree, being deployed to the Persian Gulf, East Timor, Haiti and other hot spots. Occasionally they did this in conjunction with Canadian frigates and destroyers, but not all the time.
However, pushing 50 years old, they are now a wreck, literally. Provider was decommissioned 24 June 1998 and scrapped in Turkey in 2002. Protector, gutted by fire, was paid off on 14 May of this year.
Now it seems, one of the reasons to not keep Provider in service any longer was a 2014 report that the ship’s technicians could not find enough spare parts on the internet and eBay to keep her running, as the companies who built many of her sub-components and machinery had long since gone out of business.
Replacement ships, 2-3 vessels of the Queenston-class are still in the design phase and aren’t expected to join the fleet for up to 8 more years.
Oh, Canada.