Those who believe the Canadian Forces need all the help they can get can take comfort.

A crack team of technicians, mechanics and machinists in northeast Calgary is helping to make sure our popguns keep popping and our big birds stay aloft.

On any given day, a semi-trailer will pull into Raytheon Canada’s 34,000-sq.-ft. Naval Support Centre hauling a 13,000-pound Phalanx weapon system, fresh from the Canadian fleet, for repairs.

For the last eight years, servicing these rapid-fire 20-millimetre gun systems has been standard practice for Raytheon’s Calgary-based services and support division, which just landed a $41.7-million federal contract to continue the relationship.

Shannon Oatway, Business Edge
Retired Canadian Forces major Eric Harrison is general manager of the Raytheon support division in Calgary that maintains the Phalanx weapon system, below.

“We pride ourselves on full-product support, in a cradle-to-the-grave sense. We do whatever it takes to keep these systems up and running for the duration of their lifetime,” explained general manager Eric Harrison, a retired Canadian Forces major who took over the Calgary office last February.

That means replacing corroded capacitors, resistors or integrated circuits after they have been battered by a round-the-clock assault of sea air and invasive salt water.

It also means a top-to-bottom assessment and overhaul, required for each of 21 weapons systems every five years.

The Calgary division supports the Canadian military in other ways, too. Within the last few weeks, Harrison’s people were contracted to supply night-vision systems, manufactured by a Raytheon operation in Dallas, to Canadian peacekeepers in Afghanistan.

An initial order of 50 such units has been shipped with several hundred more likely to follow. A Calgary-based depot will be set up for servicing and repairing the systems.

On another front, the services and support division, which runs a branch office in Cold Lake, fulfils other contracts to repair and overhaul radar equipment used by Canadian CF-18s, as well as to upgrade the aircraft’s weapons pylons and launchers.

Meanwhile, an electro-optic systems support depot routinely services the optical sensors which are standard equipment on the Canadian military’s fleet of light armoured vehicles.

In fact, with divisions based in Richmond, B.C., Ottawa and Waterloo, Ont., Bagotville, Que., and Shearwater, N.S., Raytheon Canada Ltd. has its fingers in several dozen pies: they’re into everything from air-traffic control support to electronic “free flow” highway tolling to a revolutionary system of “surface wave” radar technology, able to spot seagoing drug smugglers and submerged icebergs.

Raytheon Canada is a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Raytheon Company, an enormously diverse and far-flung enterprise known primarily for defence electronics and special mission aircraft. The parent company installs baggage security systems at U.S. airports and operates some of the world’s most complex radar systems.

An arm known as Raytheon Polar Services supports the U.S. National Science Council’s Antarctic programs and has played a key role in recent rescue efforts by Calgary-based Kenn Borek Air in the Antarctic.

But U.S. Raytheon, which recorded revenue of $16.8 billion last year (the U.S. government is its biggest customer), is most notorious for outfitting bombs and missiles such as the Patriot, Hawk and Tomahawk with the latest in seeing-eye guidance technology. As a spokesman told a Wilfrid Laurier University student newspaper this year, “we take dumb bombs and make them smart.”

But since the Canadian military is the service and support division’s primary client, the work done by Raytheon Canada’s 109 Calgary-based electrical engineers, technicians and mechanics has had no direct bearing on recent hostilities in Iraq, for example.

The Calgary operation represents the kinder, gentler side of defence contracting: providing support for a national military whose primary focus is the preservation of peace.

Canada’s Phalanx gun systems are equipped with advanced search and radar systems and are designed to provide “last-chance” defence against missiles that may have penetrated other lines of naval defence.

And when the big guns roll into Calgary for repairs, it can be tricky to zero in on the cause of the trouble.

“Their integrated circuits, resistors and capacitators are built on complex printed circuit boards, as many as 14 layers each,” explained the Calgary-born Harrison.

“If even one component fails, you have to troubleshoot down to the flawed one. It can take days.”

But relax. Harrison’s people don’t run live tests on the overgrown pea-shooters. “There’s really no need to do a live firing. We do run dummy rounds through the system; everything’s done short of firing the round,” he said.

“When tests are complete, we assume that if the ammunition’s OK, the gun will fire.”

It’s up to the navy to take it from there.