[fred22]

Hi there,
I have been following this thread with a good deal of interest. Lots of good points made and i would like to add a few.
1.)reserves are wicked bang for the buck when aduquately funded for equipment and training. they provide a lot of boots on the ground for one third the cost of regulars. most countries have large reserves and small amounts of long service regulars. We of course have it ass backwards. I believe the reserves got the shitty end of the stick uin the locust years as regs fought to maintain some semblance of a military. the result is what we have. the reserves need a fixed term of enlistment and money then they could be what they should.
2.) Too many officers period paticularily of general rank.
3.) Women cannot hack the combat arms physically period. Small numbers for a political staement just decrease the efficency of an all ready too small army.
4.) peacekeeping had worn our army down and taken dollars from what should be it's main role warfighting.
4.) NDHQ should be turned into a wallmart.
5.) DND needs less civvy employeees. Cooks at the sharp end should be wearing a uniform and be capable of laying down the ladle and picking up a rifle not be a potential source of hostages or civvy casualities.
6.) Units should be drawing up operation plans for battle not business plans to save money. They are not Generla Motors and this sort of biz think is counterproductive to the mindset which involves killing our enemies in great bleeding batches not selling widgets.
7.) Buy some goddamn heavy lift choppers and put army pilots in them so they don't get the shitty end of the budget stick as the zoomies try to fund other operations.
8.) Buys some tanks or get ready to get your ass kicked if we ever have to fight an advanced opponet.
9.) Fund large unit exercise with lots of live ammo. This will build up a skill set we so desperately need if we are to have an army.
10.) If possible creat an air cav style elite battalion within the regiments. Keeps the keeners in house, provides needed tactical mobilty and would be great for low intensity conflict.
10.) Stop wasting money on the bilingual bullshit. An armoured officer should be able to fight his tank not learn a language which he will rarely use. If they take the time to learn it great give them a box of smarties or something.
11.) new people should be sharp end only. Clerical positions should be earned after spending some time in the field carring a rifle,driving a tank,feeding a canon or building a bridge. In other words you are here to fight or fuck off.This would make the logistical chain a whole lot harder to attack as the deuce and half driver spent eight years carrying a rifle before he sat in the deuce and a half.
Cheers
Fred

[SprCForr]

Good one Fred. The guys in the LIB's would love point 10. Your point about the "purple" trades has some merit. There is some movement towards that idea with the Land Enviroment Qualification, it is at a very basic level. At least take a page from the Marine Corps and turn everyone into a rifleman. I didn't say infantryman.

Cheers.

[Booger]

Can't argue with what you say Fred. You pretty well hit the nail right on the head.

I like the part about the Reserves. Make them more accountable. Fixed term of service. Training exercises. More money. They sign up and take the King's shilling then they earn it. You are told you are going to "Wherever" No argument. You are gone, just like the American Reserves.

Legislation should be put into place that these men would not lose their civillian jobs while gone on a tour.

More benefits for those who do go on tour. A little incentive would be something like the GI Bill. Education and benefits.

[SprCForr]

Booger Booger:

...Legislation should be put into place that these men would not lose their civillian jobs while gone on a tour... A little incentive would be something like the GI Bill. Education and benefits.

Those two points alone would be very welcome and would greatly assist in attracting recruits. Tell every higher education facility that accepts government money that upon a fixed period of service they will admit these men, occupancy concerns not withstanding, to what ever discipline they choose, provided they meet the academic requirements.

Hmmm, I wonder how many gynecologists we'd end up with?

[fred22]

Thanks guys. I think a few other things as well.)
1. Combat arms soldier should do basic with the regiment not some generic bullshit. They should advance within the regiment. Battalions within the regiment should exhange the mounted role with the light fighter role and the airmobile role. The brits do this and it seems a good system for sparking interest and building skills.
2. During basic the usual horshit should go on but on advanced course fuck the shoe shining learn tactics. Save the screaming for basic. Seargents and Master corporals should j]know the chickenhit and should be learing real skill.
3.) Officers for the combat arms should serve one four year term as an NCM.
4.) All man managemengement course should be scrapped and leadership courses should be reinforced. One does not mange men in a sextion attack he leads them. A man does does not manage a breach he leads it.
5.) bring back bayonet training not just as skill but to foster aggresiveness amongst your crunchies.
As a philosophical note the idea now is to fight an information based war. That is to say apply force more selectively and more effectively thus needing less men and wepaons. This is a nice idea as long as your foe is unsophisticated and small in numnbers. If your enemy can jam radios and shoot down your RPV's then uses traditional heavy weapons you are fucked. We should retain some traditional heavy weapons based formations with selfpropelled heavy artillery and tanks who if necessary will not force a 105 down some cave mouth but will destroy an entire grid square.
Cheers
Fred

[USAdude]

lol u guys make a big deal about a 13 billion military budget lol. ours is 360 billion

[SprCForr]

There's a valuable contribution to the discussion if I ever saw one. Damn drive-by's.

[kerfuffled]

USAdude USAdude:

lol u guys make a big deal about a 13 billion military budget lol. ours is 360 billion

Ya hahaha,whats even funnier is how you have failed to note that your country has 300 million+ people(not counting the mexicans invading from the south) and our country has 32 million. Also you have failed to notice the fact that your country is in the middle of 2 wars and is ramping up to a couple more, and we are just NOT. Also factor in the fact that a whole frickin boatload of people HATE your country enough to crash airliners into New York and Washington and the fact that there doesn't seem to be anyone like that who has it in for Canada, except maybe for Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter. HA,HA,HA.Ya thats fuckin funny
360 Billion indeed. It wasn't enough to make sure your HUMVEE's were up armoured BEFROE they got to Iraq, it wasn't enough to make sure that all your guys had Body Armour.WOOPS! Sorry guys!.
my frickin ass of

[Scape]

Unrestricted warfare
There is the Chinese battle plan. It requires a total spectrum dominance approach to warfare including social, economic and technological aspects of engaging and conquering on the battlefield.

"Going to War with the Army You Have"

$1:

The American military simply lacks the tools it needs to fight the guerrillas, just as in the 1970s the Big Three automakers lacked the production system needed to produced fuel-efficient automobiles, and the French army lacked the technology it needed to defeat German tanks in 1940. In response, military leaders are doing exactly what their organizational forbears did: They continue to develop theories about how to win the war "with the army they have." This backward logic leads inevitably to imagining an enemy that might be far more susceptible to defeat with the tools at hand; that is, an opponent with long supply lines (from Syria, for example) and a command-and-control leadership (Zarqawi and his Saddamist allies, for example) capable of being "decapitated." This portrait of the enemy then justifies a military strategy that seeks, above all, to kill or capture the theorized leaders. Such tactics almost always fail (even when leaders are captured); and in the process of failing, only alienates further the Iraqi population, producing an ever larger, more resourceful enemy.

We must learn as a nation from these mistakes and adapt to the changing environment. The reserves adds flexibility to the solution and not just a ready reserve. We need the sharp end of the sword troops but not all are necessarily fighting in a conventional sense. There will be a need for computer literate, economically focused yet decentralized training that will allow for a maximum of latitude with a minimal of expense to react to a myriad of threats both foreign and domestic and should be able to handle not only conventional threats but natural ones as well.

[dgthe3]

yes, a small and well trained group of soldiers is what is needed to fight unconventional warfare. Large divisions of hundreds of tanks are useless against an enemy that can simply drop bombs on them from buildings or trees. Modern tanks are hightly engineered, high tech armoured computers, but they are still easily turned into 70 tonnes of scrap metal. The army of the future will need to be quick, flexibly, and well trained in public relations. The US has yet to shift it's forientation towards this. Canada on the other hand will be much better suited to meeting the changing demands of future combat.

[fred22]

Actually large divisions of hundreds of tanks are quite useful. They allow you to stomp the guts out of another guys military and take his country. Small highly trained groups of men are just so much grease for tank treads. A modern mbt is imopervious to handheld weapons from the frontal aspect and damn near so from the sides and rear. The US has lost one M1 Abrams to handheld in the Iraq war with literally thousands of tanks involved and hundreds of RPG 7 rounds fired at them from trees buildings and the odd outhouse as well. Modern MBTs are not easily turned into scrap metal. They can in any weather day or nioght soplit your head at 2000 plus meters with a self sharpening depleted uranium dart as big as a gorilla's arm. With their sensor suite they can detect and mow down infantry at incredible distances. In short a well led tank troop is fucking murder on wheels. When accompanied by well trained infanrty, suppoeted by engineers and arty they will hammer the shit out of a spec ops outfits or guerrllas. In a drawn out guerrila struggle no military equipment is the solotuion but in a real war tanks are the lion of the battlefield period.
Our troops are flexible but underequipped for anything but small deployments accompanied by our allies. if we were required to fight an amrour heavy enemy they would give a good account of themselves but die in large numbers. If you think that sort of war is impossible sell me a clone of your crystal ball. Canda will only be suited to exhasting PR missions umless we ramop up the numbers and money.

[Scape]

Since the battle of Kursk where has there been mass formations of tanks deployed? It's not that tanks are not effective but rather they are obsolescent.

Let's go back further. In WWI battleships were considered the kings of the navel battlefield for exactly the same reasons your citing the tanks are superior now but they aren't the kings anymore are they? The battle of Jutland was where they reached their zenith of power and after that they were eclipsed by the advent of air power and carriers in WWII. One bomber was all it took to fatally cripple the Bismarck. The brute force doctrine was beaten by maneuverability and firepower and so to will the tank. The only nation to use the tank effectively since WWII has been Israel. They use a combination of tanks, infantry, close air attack helicopter support and D-9 Bulldozers. If those tanks lost the support of air and infantry they would not last long in a FIBUA.

Wars with tanks require long supply lines and no nation can afford the levels of logistics required to plausably deploy mass formations of armor except for the USA, the People's Liberation Army and the former Soviet Union. So they are forced to use other, more cost effective measures such as air power or WMD.

Now since Canada is not into WMD and air power is expensive to maintain and not as useful as a cruiser or a sub for a nation with three wet boarders we then must specialize in other fields such as Combat engineers.By definition, combat engineering is primarily concerned with meeting mobility, counter-mobility and survivability requirements of the maneuverer forces and is most often carried out in the combat zone. As a secondary role, combat engineers are also called upon to fight as infantry when the need arises. The beaver is the national animal of Canada what would be a more suited role for the primary role of our military? Now there will still be tanks, planes, ships and troops but I believe the best role for Canada's military to play would be the role of the industrious engineers who can show the world what real nation building is all about. Tools such as the ROWPU would bring more to stabilize crisis situations and restore control and command of areas that tanks simply can not.

[dgthe3]

Tanks are good for psychological effect and against other tanks, and it does appear that Canada does have WMD stockp piles (see the thread about it). In general though, yes tanks are going the way of the Battleship.

[Scape]

Yes, chemical weapons the poor mans nuclear bomb, but do you think we would actually use them in the field of battle? How about developing a nuclear weapons program while we are at it?

[SprCForr]

"Since the battle of Kursk where has there been mass formations of tanks deployed? It's not that tanks are not effective but rather they are obsolescent. "

Liberation of Kuwait in '91. Current Iraqi boondoogle. To name a couple. That said, certainly the days of "Kursk like" numbers are gone. The modern tank is far more capable (and not to say way more expensive) than the old panzers ever were. BTW, tanks do not get employed by themselves in a FISH environment and therefore won't happen unless you're looking to throw them away.

So what has made the modern tank obsolete? RPG's? Nope. Skirts and reactive armor is now considered low tech and effectively counter them. Chobham armour is incredibly resistant. What's next? Anti-tank mines? Today's MBTs are designed to withstand the blast and protect the crews, so you'll end up with a pissed off tank crew that can't move (M-kill), but will kill everything it see's. Simple recovery and replacement of the running gear sends the tank back into action. If the minefield is covered by direct fire (along with observation, which it should or else it is ineffective) The moment any returning direct fire is detected, the covering force or over watch immediately engages. You might, depending on the type of tank, lose maybe a couple. This is not un-planned for and unanticipated. Aircraft? Good for nailing them in a static postion as demonstrated in GW1, nobody is dumb enough to do that again. That reinforced the concept of a proper combined arms grouping equipped with air defense. As well your airforce has to provide cover for your operations. Attack hel? Countered again by the air defense systems present in a combined arms team grouping as well as any fighter aircraft in orbit.

This can go on, but I think I made the point. Tanks are not in fact obsolete. They continue to dominate the terrain and are crucial to success in combat against any formally organized and equipped army.

The idea of sappers taking over the main role of the army? I like it. We always said the other arms would eventually see it our way. They could save themselves the trouble and just give in now!