Army Reserve Restructuring

[GK .Dundas]

Interesting aspects to mobilization.
A planning figure during the lead up to WW2 by the US military was that a modern economy could support approximately 10% of its workforce being mobilized. This factored in specifically to the allocation of basically PYs to the services and in the design of the force structures that the US built with which to prosecute the war.

For Canada in 2025 with a working population of about 26 million, that would equal about 4 million people.
The Cdn population of 18-25 is around 3.7 million.


In a different area;

The US Army in the 2005-2006 time frame had some difficulty in mobilizing its reserve formations specifically because key personnel and ranks were unavailable to the formations being mobilized due to them having volunteered for other Regular Army and Reserve augmentes roles. It was a chronic problem apparently.
The double hating of their personnel (similar to us) and allowing personnel to volunteer for individual augmentee tasks hindered

Some years back during a BBQ at somebody's home I raised this question with some Air Force type from 17 Wing.
Apparently that would never happen for ..well ......reasons .
I got the distinct impression that was a topic that NOBODY wanted brought up.
I think everybody was and I suspect a disturbing number of people in the service still honestly believes that War is something that doesn't happen to us.

 

[GK .Dundas]

Until the early to mid nineties the British used to have what they called the War Book. . Basically a set of Binders that literally listed all the the things you would have to to do in order to mobilize the Country for War.
Basically a checklist from.leagal steps , where to find certain items , people to notify etc.
They stopped updating and discontinued it sometime back
But at least they had it. I suspect that if you mentioned this to either a senior Canadian military officer or civil servant you'd get a blank look.

 

[Kilted]

The numbers for this don't really seem to add up. They are looking for 300,000 volunteers from the Federal Public Service, which according to AI is currently 358,000 with 40,000 layoffs coming. So that is basically everyone.

 

[Ostrozac]

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 put on hiatus. In WW2 we stopped building civilian automobiles and houses, but kept the NHL going. WW3 priorities may be different.

A flurry of random staff work including leaked think pieces like “let’s sign up everyone at Passport Canada because we know their names and that’ll quickly boost up the SuppRes numbers” and “tell GDLS that we want them to ramp up production capacity, and also that all their workers will be in Latvia when we will need that capacity”— that makes no sense.

 

[Halifax Tar]

I think we're going ya have a difficult time forcing mobilization on our current populace.

Especially the youth.

 

[Ostrozac]

I think we're going ya have a difficult time forcing mobilization on our current populace.

Especially the youth.

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.

 

[Halifax Tar]

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.

That's definitely no secret.