FJAG said:
I like flexibility, but some tasks are complex and need extensive training and practical experience while others can be logically grouped and studied together as a field. In most cases we don't gain enough experience in a broad area of skills or knowledge to become truly capable of switching back and forth between.
I agree that we should not be bound to the past. Hell, I'm one of those folks that actually think that Space Force was a good idea. I also firmly believe that tactical helicopters should not be part of the air force just because they fly (or for that matter that you need to be an officer to be a pilot) I don't believe that you first have to train as a rifleman to be a mortarman or anti-armour gunner or to be trained as a gun number to be a counter-mortar radar operator. The trouble is that if you want flexibility in a battalion then everyone should first train as a rifleman.
All that to say that past shibboleths should not govern how we go forward. But true flexibility is hard to achieve. What we should do is to see if there are existing fields that new capabilities naturally fit into, whether there are old fields that can either disappear or be converted to new usage.
To get back to the topic of this thread, we have 39 reserve field batteries (not to mention 18 reserve reconnaissance regiments and 49 reserve infantry battalions) with inadequate equipment that desperately needs replacing. There are numerous artillery centric capabilities that the CAF needs such as additional brigade level artillery (from light to armoured); above brigade level artillery (long range guns, rockets, missiles); air-defence; counter-battery acquisition (radars, ew based, etc); even coastal anti-ship defence to give everyone a specialty and a purpose in life. The issue for this thread is to replace the ubiquitous C3 training aid with the specialty equipment needed in order to build these capabilities and to create the appropriate organizational structure for both training and operational deployment.
Personally I see some of the new hunter-killer drone (air and ground) and long range anti-armour capabilities (including missiles and long range cannon and rocket delivered weapons) as a recce force function as they fall into the skill set of operating semi-independently in forward areas which already does.
Infantry for me is for the close-in fight (although a layered capability ranging from TOW to rifle and short range drones and cooperating with tanks, are in my mind part of that close-in fight)
So, yes. I tend to stay somewhat within stove pipes but don't stand against new trades/specialties being established. For example, an anti-armour specialty trade that could be posted both to recce squadrons or infantry battalions; or a drone operator trade that could form troops or platoons attached to armoured, artillery or infantry units (especially if drone gathered intelligence is to be collated, evaluated and, in part, actioned across all stove pipes)
The problem that you and I both see is the avarice for PYs that permeates the Reg F establishment. No one is about to give up one battalion in order to form an experimental battle group and thereafter a drone corps. Everyone wants a pyramid shaped career structure that leads to CDS or CAF CWO.
:cheers:
Took a moment to get back to you. I'm reminded of a conversation that I had years ago with a Fallschirmjaeger veteran under whom I worked years ago. The subject was the same but in a different context. Al was all about flexibility and wanted everybody in his plant to be able to do everybody else's job. Probably easy to understand given that his war saw him move from Crete to Russia to Italy and finally Belgium, getting picked up in the vicinity of Bastogne for a traffic offence (apparently he was redirecting traffic signs). Anyway....
We were arguing about the need for flexibility. At the time I was playing soldiers with the Calgary Highlanders and was all about the need for structure and pointed out that both amoebae and people had structures. I was all about the need for a skeleton to hang things from and firm instruction. Al believed in organic transfer of skills just by letting people live and work and do with people that can. Milk receivers became pasteurizers. Mortar men became machine gunners.
Later I came to appreciate Al's position.
I also began my love affair with slime-mold - a highly adaptive society that sometimes is highly structured and sometimes in as amorphous as an amoeba - as needs must.
Historically I found my parallel in the War of Austrian Succession and the concurrent and subsequent French and Indian Wars. One army, the British, was capable of holding two ideas in its mind simultaneously and fielded units that could fight alongside Frederick's Prussians in rank and file and also fight in loose formations in close country in the Americas. An army that incorporated Grenadier Guards along with Rangers and Highlanders. The army of both Cumberland and Howe, of woodentops and lightbobs - the army of Ligonier, Chevalier, Mascarene and Prevost.
In the Canadian context I would reference the Mounties - who started life as a rank and file organization of mounted rifles and morphed, and metastacized, into a policing force based on one and two man cells. As needs must.
Another old geezer that keeps poking his head up on this site from time to time keeps nattering on about Bell Curves and Normal Distributions. Pictorial descriptions of what populations look like normally.
Myself I tend more to see the world in Chi squared terms.
Normal is what happens when the world carries on naturally and there are no external influences. I like to think that we can influence the natural and shove the normal bell to create a world a little more to our liking. One that fits our needs a little better.
Chi Squared can be shoved a little so that it conforms to the well-known 80-20 rule. Define your 80-20 split as you wish it is not the same as the 50-50 split of the normal bell.
I would like to think that we could find a way to shoving our population into an 80-20 chi squared distribution. We may only achieve 75-25 or 85-15 but we can surely make the effort and achieve a suitable change.
What would my 80-20 army look like? Probably much like yours. But rather than cramming things into the fixed confines of silos, stove-pipes perhaps we can perceive the hat-badges as skeletal structures like bones, or re-bar. We add capabilities to the bare bones, strengthening them, allowing them to adapt new technologies, techniques, even if it means that they overlap in some places. And try to avoid gaps.
It is not an army of which the accountants would be enamoured because it allows, even encourages, inefficiencies. I mean, the government already supplies you a tank killing system. How many tank killing systems do you need? And why do you need something new?
80-20?
80% defined, structured, attached to the bare bones, the re-bar. 20% amorphous, undefined, experimental, loosely associated but still attached to the defined structure attached to the bare bones.
And yes we do agree that the Reg force's appetite for structured PYs in silos does it no favours.
