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As NATO war planes pounded Yugoslavia this past spring, Canadian military brass secretly worried that its F-18 Hornet jet fighters would run out of bombs.
"The CF-18s have been using laser-guided bombs in its Yugoslavia operation. Stock levels became a major concern as stocks were being depleted," says an internal Canadian Forces memo, released under Access to Information.
It took government officials almost a month after the start of bombing on March 24 to order a fresh supply of the GBU-12 laser-guided precision bombs, the CF-18's most potent weapon, the documents show.
"This was a long and painful process," one Canadian air commander wrote in a May communique to Defence Department brass in Ottawa.
"In the future, follow on sales should be processed much quicker." The documents show how Defence officials scrambled to restock Canada's arsenal of precision-guided bombs. The air war lasted 78 days until a negotiated settlement led to the withdrawal in early June of Serb military forces from Kosovo.
While the U.S. supplied the vast majority of the 800 NATO war planes based in Aviano, Italy, Canada's 18 jet fighters flew 10 per cent of all NATO air strikes. Canada flew 678 sorties, 558 of which were bomb strikes.
It was the first time Canada used the expensive GBU-12s -- laser-guided bombs that cost $25,000 each -- in mass quantities. The cost of Canada's participation in the air campaign has been assessed at just over $26 million.
And as they watched the bombs falling on Belgrade, Defence officials fretted about the long-term effect on Canada's cash-strapped military.
"In this case, the combination of high unit cost and high usage will affect the whole procurement plan for this year," one senior officer said in a handwritten May memo.
The Defence Department, reeling from more than a decade of budget cuts, is now in the middle of a massive program review to find savings so it can sustain peacekeeping missions and replace rusting equipment.
Many critics say Defence could save money if it cut some of the bureaucracy at its national headquarters. One prominent defence analyst recently described the military's procurement process as "a multi-faceted, multi-layered spectator sport, which is very politicized and very time consuming."
The purchase of the laser-guided bombs seems to fit that description.
On March 22 -- two days before the start of the NATO bombing -- a discussion paper by an Air Force major raised the bomb supply issue and recommended "we should look at an acquisition program to replace these stocks."
It would take until April 20 before Defence Minister Art Eggleton signed off on the purchase on an unspecified number of bombs. (The military censored portions of the documents citing security concerns; the exact number of bombs owned by Canada is a closely guarded military secret).
However, in that intervening month, military officials metaphorically sweated bullets over whether they would run out of bombs.
In an April 13 briefing note written for Brig.-Gen. Ray Henault, the deputy chief of defence staff, senior officers wrote that "almost the whole CF (Canadian Forces) inventory" of bombs had been shipped to Italy on March 30.
"With the current possible rate of sorties, it is possible that we will run out of (deleted) as early as (deleted) but more realistically during the (deleted) using a conservative average of (deleted) per day," said a censored version of the memo to Brig.-Gen. Henault.
The memo said officials were still awaiting a response for permission to buy more bombs. "This could place us in a difficult situation for timely resupply of weapons."
By mid-April, the procurement problems were ironed out. The documents indicate an unspecified number of bombs were bought. The price and the seller were also deleted from the documents.