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I saw Hyena Road last night and thought it was a good movie, if a bit imperfect at times. Too often "roger that" was being said by a lot of the characters, and I was beginning to wonder - is this a movie about Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, or American ones? Even the discipline seemed a...

I've always felt that the MGS turret system was really an orphan product that General Dynamics couldn't find a home for, and so they stuck it on a LAV hull in an attempt to create something that was marketable just because it was different. From a crew safety/survivability standpoint, the turret...

I did not know that the MGS fires the M900 round. Thanks for setting me straight on this.

George Wallace writes: The government of the day wanted the MGS regardless of the Armoured Corps' advice because they wanted a vehicle that could operate like a tank on the cheap, which was the main driver behind their desire to get Canada out of the tank business for good. But you know the...

My understanding of the situation, and I could be wrong here, is that the MGS uses the M68 105mm gun which has been modified to use lower-powered ammunition. This was done in an effort to compensate for the relatively high centre of gravity of the MGS and the vehicle's narrow stance. A L7 main...

I seem to remember that the US also offered us about 400 used M60A3 tanks for a dirt-cheap price too. I think that deal was shut down by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl saying to Trudeau "No tanks, no trade." So Trudeau relented, and agreed to restore some tanks in Germany, and to sweeten the...

It looks more like a means of supporting a heavy airlift function, since the focus appears to be on getting airfield engineering units to any place in the world they need to go, quickly and efficiently. The fact that this initiative is being situated at CFB Bagotville and on the heels of an...

I just saw the finalist designs, and I can't say I like any of them, because they don't speak to me in a way that tells me in one second what New Zealand is all about. In my mind, a country's flag should tell non-native people what the country is like. The Canadian flag, for instance...

The French-issue version will have two forward speeds, and 16 reverse.  :nana:

You've just incisively described why we need to get the politicians out of the military procurement process. Let the military decide what it needs and determine how it will be obtained. The only thing the politicians should be allowed to do is decide how big the annual defence budget will be...

The author of the Macleans article has a point. A valid one. A major, First World, industrialized country like Canada should not have an effectively non-functional navy like it does now. I am still gobsmacked by the fact that it took us twenty years to get the used subs we bought from the UK to...

Interesting. And to think that I once thought that the St. Laurent class of ships were derived from the design of the Leander class, not the other way around. I mean, it seemed to me to be a reasonable way to think considering that much of what the Canadian military acquired in terms of military...

Actually, the Ford F350 is the platform on which the Irish Army commissioned Ricardo to develop a special forces strike vehicle, so the F350 would probably fit the MilCOTS bill rather nicely. Plus, there are a number of civilian security companies that use the F350 as a platform for their...

I was listening to CBC Radio News on the way home from work tonight and heard that Mack Trucks were just awarded the contract to supply the balance of trucks required under the MSVS programme. The trucks will be built in Quebec and in service by 2017 - 2018.

Most of the reportage that supposedly passes for journalism these days is abysmal. Part of the reason for this is a lot of news websites have basically become nothing more than content farms and aggregators, where the writers are paid diddly-squat for what they do, unlike the old days where real...

I tend to see these paranoid conspiracy theories as an outgrowth of the myth of American exceptionalism - as in, 'we are so special, so exceptional, that the UN would conspire to take us down'.  The UN can barely manage low-intensity peacekeeping missions as it is, so the idea that they could...

The only defence budget I personally support is one that provides for, and maintains general combat capability for the CF. Peacekeeping is all very well and good when there is a peace to keep, and the warring factions are willing to cooperate. But if you organize the military around peacekeeping...

Interesting, looks a bit like the BAe Hawk trainers the CF are using. Something like this might be a good purchase for the CF - a trainer and light-strike aircraft all in one. A squadron or two of these could prove useful in the sense that they could carry out ground strike missions while...

Have to echo this sentiment. I have a cousin whose RA started out as 'minor' and progressively got worse. A few years ago, she went on a new medication because the old one just wasn't cutting it anymore, which is a sign that her RA progressed. The medication she now takes works very well, but...