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Originally Posted by hiiii
Wow, quite impressive. Canada is quite involved in the military operations that it takes part in, contrary to what I had thought. Considering this, then, I think that Canada should not need that many F-35s if Canada can achieve what it has done in the past. A force of no more than 100 F-35s should be sufficient to meet the needs of Canada if Canada is not constantly at war like the US.
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We really do need a new White Paper to tell us what we need to do and how we are going to do about it. Thus far, we've ping-pong between two extremes. I really don't know about the birdbrains and the boat people and what kind of headaches and heartaches they went through but I do know they moaned just as much as the bellycrawlers.
During the Cold War, we've kept the 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group in CFB Lahrs Germany to be re-enforced by 1st Canadian Division within 30 days through REFORGER.
Since the end of the Cold War, we've disbanded 4Bde and supposedly brought our people home. We've dillywhacked between 2 and 4 Battle Groups in Yugoslavia instead. We're keeping a BG there now.
Our biggest problem is sustainment. People are going on way too many deployments in too short of a time. Thus, we were devising deployment scenarios that would solve the sustainment problem. The solution we came up with was the Combat Team Entry Force, a re-enforced company designed to go in first to do the dirty work before Peacekeeping Forces come into theatre.
Then Kosovo happenned and NATO demanded two BGs, essentially a reduced Bde.
11 Sept came and we've found that the BG was still the only answer we've got. 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group did us proud though 2 PPCLI BG still holds the bragging rights for fighting the largest battle since the Korean War in Croatia.
Before the Little Guy from Shag-me-again shafted the CF committement, we were prepared to offer CENTCOM a reduced bde based upon units from 2Bde, ie the Royal Canadian Dragoons and the 3rd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment though we would have stripped the other 2 bdes to make this committement. The British Army was prepared to offer another BG to flush us out to a full bde. 2Bde would be attached to the Commonwealth Division.
Instead, we went back to the Afghanistan with the ISAF in two rotations of BG strength.
We really need to know what we want to do.