There are times when I honestly believe that both services pretentend to be blissfully unaware of each other's existence.
Strategic thinking of any sort seems sometimes beyond our military's capacity
And I also get the hopefully mistaken impression that they like that way.
Things, as they often do here, spin out in all directions out of a small news item.
In particular, we have lots of Army and Air Force friends that see "nice boats" and suddenly, the CAF just has to have them. However, that is putting the cart before the horse.
Everything at the strategic level has to start with an objective assessment of the threats we can be confronted with, assigning a likelihood to each, then looking at the various ways available for dealing with each threat and then estimating if the combination of the likelihood with the resources required to face it based on the ways you looked at make it reasonable to cover off with peace time assigned forces or simply to plan for it as an expansion if and when the risk increases. From all that, you develop a force structure and materiel needs, which you then build up to and, subject to regular reassessments (every ten years, say, or ongoing to fine tune) that then lead to restructuring of the force.
Now, and I may be called a heretic by some here, but this type of very high level strategic work has to be done by the people that are primarily responsible for fighting the country's battles: the Army. Obviously, their work must be informed by the Navy and Air Force, but they must have the primary responsibility for determining what it is the CAF has to be able to perform to protect our territory and its people. Once the overall strategic frame is thus developed, it's fair to let the Navy and the Air Force develop it's own strategy to achieve that which has been put in their court by the overall strategy.
That is where, amongst others, my friend FJAG goes off half cocked: "We need to be able to defend out ports and harbours"; "We must be able to patrol our rivers and lakes"; "we have to be able to land a few soldiers on our coasts". "Here's a boat that can do that".
Why? Where does the need come from? Is it the job of the Army to patrol our cities? No. Watch out here: There are no repeat no
military threat to our harbours and various facilities. Terrorism is NOT a military threat. Thus, those are functions of the police and other security forces of Canada, not the military. Look at the examples of use of riverine forces above from Humphrey Boggart: they are US, but they are not in the US. They are for locations outside the US where the US is at war with someone. In other words: these forces are expeditionary.
If there was a war and a military threat arose, then, and only then, a military response would be needed. And this brings the fact that, while it may be unknown to many, we actually have long standing maritime plans for the wartime defense of our coasts and harbours. They rely in great part on reservists being called out and for a while in the 90's and early 2000, we brought them out into partial effect, mostly to bring them up to date and to test them. This was all done with reservists. I cannot mention more here, but if FJAG was to talk to his friend who served as CO of an MCDV, I am sure he would be able to fill him in some more.
And that is why I say that it's up to the Army to decide what capability it wants to be able to fulfill its strategic objectives and then ask the Navy and Air Force to provide the requirements to meet it.
I also suspect, that unbeknownst to most in the CAF, that strategic position exists and is updated from time to time.
en.wikipedia.org
www.navalnews.com
www.naval-technology.com
