Time is running out for Canada and the West to rearm sufficiently to deter Chinese and Russian aggression. If we don’t, then the conditions that could motivate those countries to engage in large-scale international warfare could occur within the next three to five years.
This stunning comment was dropped almost as an aside by Brigadier-General (BGen) Brendan Cook, the Royal Canadian Air Force’s Director General, Air and Space Force Development. He was updating the RCAF’s expensive portfolio of air and space projects — including those associated with NORAD modernization — at the Space Canada Horizons conference today.
Having provided a thorough rundown of the RCAF’s many update projects, BGen Cook then observed that, “we need to have all this in place as fast as possible, if I had my druthers. We know that right now the peak threat to the world is about between 2028 and 2030, based on all the analysis of academics; those in intelligence and the like. [But] trying to get as much of this in place between 2028 and 2030 is a massive challenge, because we are already late for most of these things.”
The notion that the world might go to war in the next three-to-five years landed like a brick on many in the room. The startled members of the audience included this SpaceQ reporter, who has been covering defence for a decade and has never heard a Canadian Armed Forces general explicitly state such a stark deadline in public before. This is why this reporter subsequently asked BGen Cook the following question: “You mentioned the timeline of 2028 to 2030. What precisely are you concerned about happening in that timeline?”
To his credit, BGen Cook was frank and direct in his response. “Well, there’s a couple things that are critical in that timeline,” he said. “First, it’s the expressed intent of China to actually reunite [with] Taiwan by having the capability to do so as early as 2027 and to have it completed by 2030. They haven’t said they’ll do it by force, but that’s the expressed intent of China — and they’ve said that. So that’s the first part. The second part is, if we look at the conflict that’s unfolding in Ukraine, even if we were to have peace as of today — which everybody wants, everybody wants this conflict to end — Russia’s entire economy is effectively a war economy. They’re already producing more munitions every month than the rest of the West can produce mostly in a year: It’s that level of buildup. So if they were to get peace today, two to three years from now, they [Russia] would have sufficient military capacity to dominate Europe.
In delivering this stark assessment, BGen Cook wasn’t trying to be dramatic. He was just making the point that Canada and the West need to get very serious, very soon, about rearming — not to engage China and Russia in combat, but rather to deter such wars from happening. “We need to have that in our minds,” he told the Horizons audience. “Our role is to make sure that we have the right capabilities in place. Then everybody can allow cooler heads to prevail, so we do not get into that situation. It’s about deterrence.”
