Name: Canadian navy exploring amphibious landing ship concepts
Uploaded: 2025-12-28T15:33:09.091Z
Duration: 2 min 30 s
Description: Canada is ramping up defence spending, and the Royal Canadian Navy is looking at how it can efficiently move equipment and personnel through the Arctic. The CBC’s Murray Brewster shares more on the plans.

Canada is ramping up defence spending, and the Royal Canadian Navy is looking at how it can efficiently move equipment and personnel through the Arctic. The CBC’s Murray Brewster shares more on the plans.

The Royal Canadian Navy is evaluating the feasibility of a Canadian-built, ice-capable amphibious landing ship as part of its future fleet planning. This concept aims to improve the military's ability to operate in the Arctic, especially during emergencies, and aligns with the federal government's increased defence spending and Arctic priorities.

Preliminary talks with Canadian shipyards suggest the project could leverage existing icebreaker and support ship technologies. While the navy believes such a vessel could also support humanitarian missions, further research is required before it can be formally proposed for inclusion in defence policy.

Canadian navy exploring amphibious landing ship concepts

The Royal Canadian Navy is looking ahead to the future of its fleet. One of the concepts being considered is a Canadian-built ice-capable landing ship to defend the Arctic. As CBC's Muir Brewster tells us, it is just one of the projects being imagined by military planners as the federal government pours over $81 billion into defence over the next few years. Prime Minister Mark Carney's government has made defending the Arctic a defence priority. The question vexing planners is how to operate over such vast distances, especially in an emergency. The commander of the Canadian Navy has an idea, an amphibious ship, one that does not require report. As we went through that analysis, we examined what would happen if we had a small community in distress in the high Arctic in February. How could we get capability there? We could certainly improvise an awful lot through the Air Force, through the Coast Guard, doing other things. But to sustain an operation up in the north, we sort of realized that some form of Arctic mobile base probably made a lot of sense, and that is effectively what an amphibious ship is. This is sort of what he's talking about. The USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship capable of carrying troops and vehicles and supplies over vast distances. A ship able to deposit those troops and equipment on any beach. Most of the world's navies, including more recently Australia and China, are headed in the same direction with their own amphibious ships. Topchi says Canada could build its own. Preliminary discussions have been held with two of the country's shipyards about the concept, and the feedback has been promising. Similarly, C-SPAN has examined what they're building and said they think that they could come up with some form of amphibious ship that would be built around the same hull form as the Coast Guard heavy icebreaker, but using a lot of the propulsion that they're putting into the joint support ship. So in other words, leveraging work that they're already doing to deliver a solution. The Navy believes such a ship could also be used for humanitarian relief in places outside of the Arctic. For example, during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Canadian Army had to fly all of its equipment over several weeks into the country because it had no ability to land its vehicles quickly through the destroyed port infrastructure. The Navy is nowhere near ready to make a formal pitch to the government to include this in the upcoming defense policy, saying more research is needed. It would, however, solve a decades-old transportation problem that the military has had, one that until now, it hasn't had the money to address. Murray Brewster, CBC News, Ottawa.

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