Canada's tanks

[PrairieFella]

Hence my comment:

Return to infantry and cavalry tanks at your peril lol.

A lot of the assumptions I'm reading about the future of tanks seem to make the fundamental mistake that all wars going forward will look like Ukraine, which is foolish imo. Not every war will devolve into the Somme where fighting is mostly static which allows the drones to have their pick of targets, nevermind the inevitable counter to drones which are coming, be them lasers or advanced jammers

 

[KevinB]

Part of what makes the costs of CAF projects so high is the life-cycle costs of things like parts. We tend to look at the price per unit the way we look at a private car purchase.

This is all just me putting out a wishlist. The two regiments of tanks would be re-equipping two existing regiments that currently have people, facilities and vehicles. So there would be divestment of equipment to go along with this acquisition (something we can be bad at). In some cases those vehicles are already tanks. One big kicker would be the warehousing/maintenance of the regiment-worth of operational stock. That would be a significant cost. I would put them in Europe, including those actively crewed in Latvia.

I don’t think you would want to divest any of the LAV’s as the Infantry and Armoured Reserves are pretty vehicle deficient.


I’d love to see Canada have enough active tanks for 4 Regiments, and 2 Reg’ts worth of spares.

A 2 Armoured unit Armoured Bde for Europe that has a Tracked IFV Mech Bn and suppprtijg elements as well.

2 Mech Inf Bde’s with 1 Armoured unit and 2 Mech Infantry BN’s

Mix and match PRes/Reg mix as desired

 

[FJAG]

The two regiments of tanks would be crewed by existing crewmen who are currently sharing tanks out West or on other platforms out East. This would be converting three recce sqns into tank sqns. The infrastructure piece is real (I mentioned that above) as is the parts procurement piece (which I also mentioned above). Gagetown can certainly take a sqn (+) with existing infrastructure, but it would need more to have a full Regiment plus the School requirements.

If memory.serves me right, the RCD served in Gagetown as a tank regiment from 1959 to 1970, first with Sherman’s and the Centurions, before moving to Germany.

I was under impression at the time that Gagetown’s primary purpose was to prepare for Germany at the time.

Since we’re playing a bit of napkin force here, my vote is to go to 14-tank squadrons and stretch those 200 tanks (maybe another dozen or so for the school) into four regiments. A 44-tank regiment suits our current PY allocation a bit better and the fourth regiment can be forward deployed.