The 3P’s (press, politicians, and public) keep telling Canadians that the next fighter needs to be able to land on dispersed runways. In 100+ years of the Royal Canadian Air Force, that has never once been operational doctrine in Canada. Yet the 3P’s are convinced our jets need to land on Canadian Arctic highways, as if Canada’s north is Scandinavia or Europe, where dispersed highway operations are a real, purpose-built capability.
We’ve talked ourselves into this idea: landing a fighter jet at 250 km/h on roads narrower than the jet’s own wingspan, where we can’t even guarantee touching down on the centreline. But here we are. 250 km/h, a 32-foot-wide road, and a stretch far enough from our forward operating bases (FOBs) in the north — 50, maybe 100 kilometres from Inuvik, Iqaluit, Goose Bay, or Churchill, Manitoba. On roads that don’t exist yet, we’re going to land, refuel, rearm, and launch our NORAD fighters.
Fuel
Now let’s move the gear needed to make that happen.
We have POL (petroleum, oil, lubricants) storage at the forward operating bases. But 100 kilometres away, on our new “dispersed highway runway,” what do we have?
Assume we’re refuelling multiple pairs of fighters as they rotate through. NORAD calculates that we would need 20 fighters to provide 24/7 CAP (combat air patrol) to protect any of our major cities, plus 4 aerial refuelling tankers. In the Far North, let’s assume we use 5 pairs of 2 jets for our CAPs — 10 jets to support the operation dispersed from the FOBs. Our tankers will have to fly in and out of our region, aerial refueling themselves with other strategic tankers.
An F-35A holds 18,000 lbs of fuel. A large military-grade fuel truck carries roughly 5,000 gallons — about 35,000 lbs of fuel. If each jet needs roughly 12,000 lbs of fuel on landing (no Commanding Officer would let his jets get low enough on fuel that they cannot hold or be able to divert), that’s about 3 jets per fuel truck. For 10 jets overall, we need multiple trucks — and once emptied, those trucks have to drive 100 kilometres back to the FOB to refill, then back again.
Not great, but doable.
Re-arming
Now re-arming. We’d have left Cold Lake and Bagotville — our main operating bases (MOBs) — with each CF-35 armed with six AIM-120 AMRAAMs in the internal weapons bays (long range) and two AIM-9Xs (short range) missiles on the outboard wing stations. Each AIM-120 weighs almost 400 lbs and costs roughly $1.5 million USD ($2 million CAD). An AIM-9X costs about $400K USD ($550K CAD) and weighs about 200 lbs.
With 10 jets, and assuming each must be fully rearmed every time in a real shooting war, that’s 60 missiles needed just to keep the fight going — otherwise the adversary exhausts our war stock on Day One and we lose the war. 60 missiles at roughly $2 million CAD each is $120 million in AMRAAMs alone, not counting the AIM-9s on the outboard stations. In an Arctic shooting war, it’s safe to assume we’d be firing AMRAAMs rather than short-range AIM-9s.
Where do those $120 million in missiles come from? Presumably stocked at the main operating bases, the missiles would be flown north to resupply the dispersed sites — either landing a C-130 or C-17 on the same narrow highway strip or delivering to the FOB for onward road transport. But if fighters can’t operate off the long FOB runways, how would we fly large military transports out of those same airfields? Setting that contradiction aside, assume we truck 60 missiles 100 kilometres over bad dirt roads to the highway runway instead. If there’s any disruption to that transport link, can we still defend Canada?
Loading a 400-lb missile onto a fighter isn’t done by hand, either — it requires a specialized tractor-like loader to raise the missile to the weapon station. So those loaders need to be trucked out to the highway site too. The AIM-9Xs, by contrast, can be lifted and loaded by a couple of people onto the wing stations.
Precision Approaches
Landing on a road, not a runway, means we still need precision approach aids. In this case, a tactical ILS (instrument landing system) to guide the jets down accurately enough to hit that one stretch of road — plus communications to talk to our fighters and to the NORAD command managing them. All of that has to be set up and installed for dispersed operations to work.
So: fuel trucks, missile loaders, $120 million in munitions, and communications and navigation equipment, all trucked from the FOB to the dispersed highway site. That’s a lot of driving and material movement.
Could We Pre-Position Instead?
Could we reposition fuel, loading equipment, missiles, and communications gear permanently, to avoid the drive? Yes — as they do in Scandinavia, where shorter distances make decentralized weapons and fuel storage sites, protected by military security, practical. We could build similar dispersed logistics hubs here rather than centralizing everything at the FOB: facilities to store the $120 million in AMRAAMs and the fuel trucks needed for dispersed ops, guarded by a full-time military security presence, 365 days a year, so the capability is ready when needed.
That means personnel living 100 kilometres from the FOB, full-time, needing support. So how many extra maintenance and support staff do we need to fund a permanent dispersed site? Where does the extra $120 million for missiles come from, when our war stocks are already thin? Where do the people live who refuel, repair, and arm the jets? We’d need to build a small village — housing, schools, recreation, medical support — just to sustain it.
Land at 250 km/h on a 32 ft wide highway strip? Sure. Who forgot to account for the gas, the missiles, the people — and who pays for all of it?
Why Disperse At All?
The RCAF bought strategic aerial refuelling tankers specifically to keep our fighters aloft on station, protecting the continent for extended periods. That’s the real alternative to dispersed basing: the CF-35 already carries two and a half times as much internal fuel as the Gripen, so it simply doesn’t need to land as often. The Gripen can carry more fuel externally, but only by giving up weapon stations — six AMRAAMs on the CF-35 versus four missiles on the Gripen’s wing stations (I know this because Saab gave me a Gripen E model that shows the load-out). For the Gripen, it’s fuel or missiles; it can’t have both.
If a jet does need to land, dispersed highway operations become the fallback — but as shown above, that “fallback” comes with a logistics bill nobody in the 3P’s conversation has ever accounted for.
So, here’s the real question: why would we need dispersed highway runways in the first place? Why can’t we stay aloft for hours using aerial refuelling from our strategic tankers, protecting Canada, instead of landing constantly for more gas? And what would it actually cost to plan, survey, engineer, and build new highway runways in the Far North? Anyone who has looked at construction in that environment knows “difficult and costly” is a gross understatement. If we don’t have the funds to build them, why are the 3P’s even talking about it?
And if Canada selects a mixed fighter fleet on the assumption it can operate off highway runways, when does construction start, and when will these sites actually be ready to support fighter operations?
Central Europe and Scandinavia don’t have logistics trains anywhere near as long as our Far North. Impossible? No. Worth the spend? Never.
Logistics is the hardest part of this whole idea which ultimately makes the idea of fighters flying off dispersed highway runways in Canada such an absurd idea. However, it has made for good marketing nonetheless to a crowd which is so stunningly unaware of the impracticality of it all.
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