The Strategic Capability Investment Plan

In the era of threat-based planning, each of the three main components of the Canadian forces evaluated the threat it was likely to face in the event of war and then produced its desired list of capital acquisitions. [...] In the wake of the January 23, 2006 federal election, and the subsequent transition of power from the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin to the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, we can expect SCIP to be both updated and tied more closely to the policy goals of the new regime. [...] The product of more than a year’s work among the Department’s force planners and senior management, including the Deputy Minister, Chief of Defence Staff and the Minister of National Defence, the SCIP was heralded as providing “a new approach and new priorities for equipment acquisitions.”1 The objective of the SCIP is to establish a mechanism by which all of the equipment, infrastructure-construc [...] The most strategic defence planning document in the Department of National Defence is the prevailing defence policy document, currently the Defence Policy Statement of April 2005.3 Defence policy documents state the overall government defence policy, and also define in general terms what the Canadian Forces needs to be able to do. [...] The Strategic Overview, produced on an annual basis by the Policy Group’s Directorate of Strategic Analysis, provides perhaps the biggest of big picture views, from trends in great power relations, to the prospects for Arab-Israeli peace, to the nature of terrorism, the rise of China, and the likelihood of ethnic conflict.