I
In the absence of orders, act on the orders you should have received.
This blog came out of countless closed-door conversations with friends and colleagues in the Canadian Armed Forces. Most of us are junior millennials and came of age in the Global War on Terror. Most of us have spent a decade or more in uniform and never been in combat.
It’s a strange thing to be a professional who’s never done the job, at least not for real. As the Afghanistan generation promotes up or gets out, soldiers like me make up an increasing proportion of the working ranks. We’re an Army of professional LARPers who clutch to pearls of wisdom passed down from the ones who went before us and did the business. We clutch the pearls tight because we believe that lives - our’s and our soldiers’ - will depend on it.
The situation has changed. There’s war in Europe on a scale not seen in anyone’s professional lifetime. China’s ascendant like a scrawny kid who hit their growth spurt and decided that they’re done with everyone’s shit. We’re pivoting to the new reality of Large Scale Combat Operations, hybrid threats, and Pan-Domain Operations. Meanwhile the institution is falling apart around us.
When my generation went through battleschool the staff taught us what they knew because they knew that it worked. Now we’re the staff. We teach our students procedures that we’ve learned by rote, making photocopies of photocopies. In turn, we attend courses taught by field grade officers who have never executed the operations that they’re teaching us to plan. Secretly we wonder if they could.
We train to fight with capabilities we don’t have, supported by units that don’t exist. It feels like we’re Medieval peasants living in thatch huts next to Roman aquaducts, evidence of an elder society whose knowledge has been lost.
II
I used to be cool. At least, I think so. I thought I was cool at the time. I started my career in the ranks, stayed hungry and got the courses that young troops fight tooth and nail for - reconnaissance, parachuting, that sort of thing. I have the knee and back pain to prove it. I thought I knew a lot back then.
I didn’t know shit.
Now I’m on the Dark Side, a junior officer with increased awareness and diminished cartilage. I’m dedicated to my craft but it seems like the more I learn the less I know.
This blog is intended to be an account of things that I have learned while making it day-to-day as an Army backbencher. Let’s be clear: this blog is not instruction. I am a student in this profession. What I post here is an exercise in personal development - tsuyoku naritai. I hope that you will find the same value in these ideas that I have.
I intend to post updates on a semi-regular basis, subject to the constraints of my day job. Comments will be left open and dialogue is encouraged. If you want to be a part of the conversation, I only ask that you keep the following points in mind:
Online knowledge exchange is a gift economy, so bring something to the table. Even simple questions can add value by exposing the gaps in an argument.
Falsifying evidence is welcome. So is feedback.
“SHOT, over.”
Don't be so hard on yourself. Everything that military folk do is a grossly imperfect simulation of the real thing. Even the last real thing will bear little resemblance to the last real thing. We are all, to quote the immortal words of Mr. Springsteen, dancing in the dark.
"We train to fight with capabilities we don’t have, supported by units that don’t exist."
On my junior NCO course in the late 70s, we were assigned topics to teach to our fellow students ("mutuals"). One of my assigned topics was the organization of the infantry battalion in combat ... and the table of organization was 90% fiction in our case. We were an infantry "battalion" with not quite enough troops to fill out a company. Some of our equipment was Korean War-vintage (they still had a few Bren guns in the weapons lockup at my company armoury), and we even got some instruction on a 1950s "super bazooka" that I don't think had been in active service for at least 15 years. We were told all about the cool equipment we'd be getting soon ... like actual armoured personnel carriers to replace the slightly militarized Dodge pickup trucks we used for most purposes.
I'd fainly hoped that all that was an artifact of the first Trudeau government's noted aversion to spending money on military equipment, but it sounds like things really haven't improved much in all these years.