Old Sweat said:
I don't know if Edward will recall this, but back in the early seventies we were going through a really hard time. The rest of the federal government was enjoying expanding budgets, lots of growth and promotions and a wage gap had opened between the public service and the forces. Someone was quoted, and I can't recall if it was speculation, punditry or authoritative, as stating that the defence cuts were designed to make any attempt to rebuild the forces so prohibitively expensive that no government could afford to do so, while still maintaining the welfare state. Ultimately the forces would shrivel up and disappear.
I recall that very well; I was posted to DLR back then ... the cuts, which began in earnest in 1969 and were "sanctified" in the subsequent Defence White Paper, were,
I believe, designed to disarm Canada.
I'm serious.
I have been told on what I think is very good authority that in 1968 Trudeau actually told his cabinet that he wanted to disarm Canada, withdraw from NATO and NORAD and offer us as the "model state" of the future. I was told that it was only when his closest advisors told him that he would split the Liberal Party and, for sure, lose a subsequent vote of confidence in the House that we got the the 1969 decision to cut our NATO commitment in half and make deep, indeed savage cuts to national defence.
At first we were told that there could be no tanks in Canada ~ none. Then, after the famous walk in the garden with the German Chancellor we were told that we could have new tanks in Germany and a few, enough for a training squadron, in Gagetown, but none in Canadian brigades; and that was the origin of the "tank trainer," the Mowag
Piranah which became the
Cougar (6 wheels and a 76mm gun) and then the
Grizzly (8 wheels) and, eventually, was the base for the
LAVIII when GMDD took on the project.
Those were tough times ... JayDex* came and spoke to us in the Staff College ~ his remarks were "privileged," of course (and I guess still are) ~ but we listened as a tired man told us about fighting a losing bureaucratic-political battle against an implacable foe ~ and "foe" is, I think, the right word to use when we discuss PET and the Canadian Forces.
The point about inflation is really important ... it wasn't just fuel. Aerospace and high tech weapon systems costs were "inflating" at far above the general rate of inflation in the economy ~ and we were seeing punishingly high inflation rates in the '70s and '80s ~ and we w were, literally, being "priced out of the market" in some areas.
< war story> [:-[ I remember taking my makeshift but, by our standards, very modern and even sophisticated Army Tactical Trunk Communications System to MGen Herb Pitts for approval ... he was committed to getting it passed and was really, really pleased when I told him that almost all of it was "in stock" and it was only a very few dozen small, automatic, digital multi-line switches (that the US Marines had in stock but hadn't figured out how to use) that were needed and they were available at "fire sale" prices (only tens of thousands of dollars each), including a multi-year stock of spare parts. He asked me three times if I was sure about the costs ... he had come into the briefing expecting me to be asking for tens of millions of new dollars which would have to come from somewhere else in the Army's capital programme; I needed nothing that had not already been approved for a project that, on my tech staff advice, had been cancelled because it didn't actually do much of anything that was needed.
< war story ends > :surrender:
Anyway, those were, indeed, "hard times."
_____
* General Jacques Dextraze, Chief of the Defence Staff for the youngsters ~ those under 70.
