FJAG
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With the advent of Advancing with Purpose - and built on Canada's Bosnia experiences - our structuring and equipment procurement turned very much to the systems needed to deploy a battle group. That's why the artillery turned to composite gun/STA batteries in Afghanistan. For back home, there were just enough systems of everything procured to facilitate training (at least as far as guns and STA was concerned because trucks, command posts etc were and continue to be a big problem).
There was a notion (I have a hard time calling it a realistic plan) to go as high as deploying a brigade but within the arty no one regiment had the equipment necessary to do that. It would have needed the efforts of at least two, probably all three, regiments to put out a Force 2013 Line of Operations 3 "Maximum Expeditionary (Non-Sustained - Single Roto) 3 gun battery option" of three six-gun batteries, an STA battery, and an air defence battery for a total of 1,106 gunners. There was also an optional LRPF battery contemplated in circumstances where appropriate. Things haven't changed much since then and that's roughly what an LSCO artillery regiment needs to look like these days in order to support a brigade.
But SSE put the battle group concept into formal outputs. One would have to aggregate several battle group tasks to form a rump brigade. In other words, up until the recent Ukraine situation Canada pretty much stayed with the AwP concepts.
SSE notwithstanding, we did have and do have doctrine for bigger things, just not the requisite people and equipment and some of the capabilities. For something like HIMARS, we do consider it a divisional asset, but it has uses outside of that. If we deploy a brigade, then HIMARS would be a slice of a division's support that Canada would control. The same with air defence - its a slice of the divisional asset that stays with our brigade. Both of those systems were part of our doctrine for 4 CMBG in the 70s to the 90s. We did acquire AD big time but, while MLRS was part of our 1 Cdn Div doctrine, it was never acquired.
On top of that both LRPF and GBAD now also have uses for much lower level deployments. American HIMARS was deployed in Kandahar while we had a battlegroup there and, on occasion, fired missions in support of Canadians where range or effects were an issue. While we didn't deploy air defence to Kandahar (except ASCC cells) I don't think we'd deploy a battlegroup anywhere these days, where there is a chance of hostilities, without some form of VLLAD (either ours or an ally's) for anti drone and anti-rocket work if nothing else.
The real issue is the scale that you see the army deploying on as the number of systems and their organizational configuration varies if on the one hand you are: 1) supporting deployed battle groups; or 2) are planning on deploying a whole brigade with a slice of divisional assets; or 3) want to be able to deploy a Canadian-led multinational division with a core of divisional assets supporting two or more Canadian brigades. To put things in perspective, Canadian artillery, as it stands, can do the 1) battlegroup but would be hard pressed to do a 2) brigade and incapable at all of the 3) div. Under the current capital projects' stated numbers (and with heavy ARes participation - which is the plan), it could support a 2) rotational sustained mech brigade and could also form a 3) non-sustained divisional artillery brigade.
