Recent content by Ostrozac

That doesn’t seem to match the actual reality of NATO — Luxembourg and Iceland were founding members, and both were utterly incapable of standing in isolation. No, NATO was, first and foremost, a collective organization presenting a united front, first against the Soviets, then against the...

It’s almost certainly the most expensive part, in terms of replacement cost. The recent Quebec City Armoury project cost was $104 million. There are 185 Army Reserve units. I haven’t been able to find an exact number of how many armouries we have — some units have multiple armouries and some...

The model of the courageous charismatic natural leader, who makes the decisions, supported by a trained educated staff, who actually understand the details, can work on occasion, but it breaks down when paired with an intricate model of high-level working groups and decision boards that tends to...

If we’re going to have somewhere between 1/3 and 1/5 of the fighting army deployed to Latvia for the long haul, then we’ve got to make troops want multiple tours, the way they craved time in Lahr and Baden. There has to be some way to make tax free service in Eastern Europe, with no one shooting...

AAR of the Canadian MQ-9 still isn’t a given. While air-to-air refuelling of Reapers has been done experimentally, by the US, it’s not (yet) a fully operational capability. Shows promise, though.

And sometimes that battalion was actually called a Commando from the Canadian Airborne Regiment. We have a rich tradition of unusual naming conventions — some of which make little sense. Even today, the term ‘Group’ is being used for formations in the joint world — but it isn’t an indication...

There is — the Australians (among other nations) use the C-27 Spartan in that role.

Canada absolutely doesn’t need another regular infantry capbadge to be activated unless maybe if the new Light Infantry Formation/Regiment/Brigade-that-isn’t-a-Brigade decides that light Infantryman needs to be a separate MOSID from Infantryman 00010. But that’s probably not in the cards...

A crackdown on bilingualism seems very odd, unless it’s a ploy to attract resources to boost up second language training capacity that has been gutted over the years. Of course, that’s what Accommodation 2020 was supposed to do to modernize single and married quarters (spoiler alert — very few...

I just did a ten second search of a single gun shop in Quebec that shows more than 20 SKS rifles currently in stock and for sale. Which does suggest that the Quebec firearms registry doesn’t have good comms with the RCMP.

To be entirely pedantic, UK Phantoms have also integrated and operated from the Nimitz-class. The Nimitz-class has been in service since the 70’s, dating all the way back to when the Royal Navy was still in the tail hook game.

There are urban legends about more recent cases. Word was that as part of the late Cold War reorg of 1 Div (which was abandoned upon the collapse of the Warsaw Pact) they started to build a skeleton of what was intended to be the Divisional Recce Regiment (a 5th Reg Force Armour regiment) and...

To be fair, we also had a fairly hard time mobilizing the population in both world wars — we were slow out of the gate both times, and we did have two full-on conscription crises.

Having a whole of nation mobilization plan, sitting on the shelf, with regular updates, makes perfect sense. It should include everything from legal advice on conscription and internment to estimates of which civilian industrial sectors are vital to the war effort and which can be expected to be...

If that’s what you’re looking for, you can already get all of that as a civil servant. What’s the extra incentive to put on a uniform? And quite possibly a metaphorical uniform, as we don’t even budget for uniforms for our current Supplementary Reservists, Maybe it’s as simple as that one week a...