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We understand that this is not an exciting story. Canadians support their military, in the abstract, but rarely think about it. They trust that it will be there when they need it. But, through no fault of the men and women who serve our country, that trust may be misplaced. Our Armed Forces are desperate for new equipment and personnel, and 2014 may go down in history as the year that our Navy was finally pushed too far.

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The study also provides a useful benchmark for evaluating the Conservative government’s record on one of its most politically troublesome files as the country heads into an election.

Re-equipping the military — the lightning-rod F-35 fighter program, replacing the CH-124 Sea King helicopters, long-delayed navy supply ships — has been a persistent political headache for the Harper government.

While acknowledging successes like the purchase of C-17 heavy-lift and C-130J transport planes, the report found a small number of programs with the biggest price tags — fighters and warships — were the source of most of the problems.

And the researchers assign much of the blame to staffing cuts by both Liberal and Conservative governments in the acquisitions branch at National Defence, as well as new reporting requirements introduced by the Harper government.

The numbers are stark.

There were 9,000 staff dedicated to buying military equipment in the early 1990s; by 2004, over the course of successive Liberal budgets, that number had been slashed by more than half to about 4,200.