By Vincent J. Curtis
In May, 2002, I submitted an article to the Army Doctrine and Training Bulletin entitled “From Here to There: Phase IV mobilization and the New Army Strategy.” I don’t know if it was ever published, but this 6050 word opus covered the problems of mobilization through its four phases in light of the-then recently released “New Army Strategy” and before our major Afghanistan deployment. (of course, the NAS and full mobilization were completely incompatible.) It looks like the Army is once again reviewing plans to raise armed forces through at least a phase III mobilization. To save time, and to provide old insights, below are the first few paragraphs of that 2002 paper.
The army exists to destroy Canada’s enemies. In natural order of priority, the army is expected to defend from external threat the national territory of Canada, then North America, then the territory of its treaty allies such as NATO. The army may be called upon by the Canadian government to make war upon a foreign country not contemplated under the previous three heads, as we are now doing in Afghanistan. The army may also be called upon to contribute forces in support of United Nations operations, or undertake a range of customary domestic operations. These latter uses of the army are decidedly of a second tier priority to that of the defense of Canada and of her interests against a direct external threat. An army, in the first instance, is an instrument for war fighting, and all the other subsidiary capabilities of an army stem from that.
Phase IV mobilization refers to the level of mobilization at which the entire country is roused for war. A War Emergency is declared, the militia is called out, freedoms are restricted, and Canadian industry is turned over to war production. It represents the maximum level of effort the country can exert in self-defense. Twice in our history, in World Wars I and II, Canada stood on this footing.
The role of the Regular army in peacetime is not to fight a war. The Regular army provides for the immediate defense requirements of Canada and the day-to-day deterrence against attack of Canada’s interests. It makes the plans, conducts the training, and develops the doctrine of the army for its primary and secondary missions. It serves as the basis for an operational commitment, but the capability of the Regular army and the scope of its overseas missions are strictly limited by the defense budget. The Regular army, as presently constituted, would never be called upon to fight in a major war, for it is too small to fight and its soldiers too well trained to waste in battle. At best it could engage in strictly limited conflicts with a low risk of casualties.
The New Army Strategy is a plan of change that moves the Regular Force in the direction opposite to full mobilization. Armour and artillery are going to be reduced in readiness. Certain combat capabilities such as pioneers and mortar platoon are going to be stripped out of a doctrinal battalion. The capabilities of the brigade group are going to be modularized into company-sized bodies so that a deployed unit or sub-unit can be more easily task tailored. The organizational structure of a task tailored unit may not resemble that of a conventional battalion at all; and losing pioneer and mortar platoons, the battalion is less of a combined arms team than it was.
The aim of the New Army Strategy is to create, in the Regular Force, a model army that is “more agile and lethal, tactically decisive and medium weight”. None of these properties are absolute, they are relative, and depend upon the enemy and terrain. For that reason, the Regular Force is expected to become “capable of continuous adaptation and task tailoring across the spectrum of conflict.” This flexibility will be achieved by the Regular Force becoming “knowledge-based and command-centric.”
The reason for these changes boils down to money: too much deployment, too little budget, and an urgent need to modernize. Part of the purpose of the New Army Strategy is to maximize deployable manpower for operations other than war. Another part is to prepare the Regular Force, within our limited budget, to accept niche roles within a larger allied structure for combat like operations, and to maximize our combat power through the use of the new technologies.
The New Army Strategy is founded on the belief that until the government radically changes its policy on defense funding, the days of full, mechanized brigade operations by Canada are over. Indeed, supporters of the New Army Strategy have argued that those days are over for everyone. The United States Army and Air Force are now so technologically superior that they have made the army of every potential enemy of ours obsolete. Nobody can stand in the field against an American armoured division supported by American air power. Our potential enemies, it is argued, will not in the foreseeable future attempt to employ mechanized forces to impose their will against Canadian interests but will instead employ the techniques of asymmetric warfare, cyberwarfare, and terrorism to forward their aims. Our enemies of the future may not even be governments. Mechanized brigade groups are not able to shield us from these kinds of threats and these kinds of enemies. In any event, Canada is quite unlikely to go it alone against an external threat; and with our spare defense budget and at a Phase II mobilization level, the New Army Strategy will enable the Regular Force at least to participate somewhere in a U.S. or U.N. led force.
