# War and Security: The Cost of Conflict, U of C Calgary



## 3rd Herd (10 Feb 2007)

Where does a year go?

The annual paper symposium sponsored by the Center for Military and Strategic Studies is on the 2nd and 3rd of March at the Rozsa Center. A list of keynote speakers, presenters and topics can be found at: 

http://homepages.ucalgary.ca/~cmgainer/SMSS/Historic/conference9.htm

I stand corrected not all info has been posted yet.


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## 3rd Herd (20 Feb 2007)

Info posted. Several presenters are covering issues which are/have been discussed at length  on the site. I have two particular targets lined up.:gunner:


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## 3rd Herd (6 Mar 2007)

Last year I was asked to critique the conference but due to circumstances never got around to completing it. This year however I am making time time for several reasons. If you have one of these conferences in your area make the time to go. This year at the U of C version several major successes were found. A very nice representation from the CF was there both on the presenter submission side and in the audience. For those of you gunners, Col. Mike Capstick gave a regimental TOT on a Young Liberal from Queens University whose paper had difficulties in the real world of Afghanistan. Next the representation from south of the boarder was particularly impressive, as was the range of topics. Many were based on a combination of practical experience and recent academic study. 

Personally, I found "Too Few to Fight: The German Army Force Maintenance 1943" by Gregory Liedtke(RMC, PhD cand.) extremely interesting. Greg in addition to being well read on this subject delved into an area we have been discussing off and on on this site, how history is researched. A particularly memorable quote was "the Germans have 11 different ways of determine unit strength, so depending on methodology used there is possibility of a wide range in strength." We also had a couple of break discusions on authors in this genre and the difficulties in this area of academic research. "The Philippine War(1899): Lessons in Insurgency" by Fraser Fowler was the second  portion of this panel and was interesting in the area of small wars and forgotten conflicts. Again very interesting to myself both in academic preparation and presentation. In both the aforementioned presenters the Q and A session following presentation was what a conference of this sort provides. No curve ball questions but an interesting exploration. The top panel presenter of this conference was in my mind "Network Centric Warfare" by Andrew Sullivan. I learned something, the presenter was clear, concise,  using the right amount of multi media and language us analog types could understand and follow. I got lost during the Q and A of this presenter as the digital types in the crowd started exchanging "mega bursts".

The down side of these presentations is that you have to deal with the unprepared. The conference poster features a soldier standing behind a LMG. Could not have been more precise, if some of the young academics cannot get there "poop in order" they may make excellent LMG/HMG gunners as they have figured out controlled burst rate of fire. There is nothing worse than um, um, um,um ,ah over and over again. It was easy to distinguish who had taken the time to prepare and those there for the "social networking" that followed each evening. The icing on the cake was the exposing of two posers, one from south of the boarder and one home grown. All in all Kudos to the SMSS for a job well done.


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