after I left the Navy a piece of timely advice for a young logistics officer bent on survival: “Lieutenant Conrad, if you want to keep your job, remember to always say yes quickly and no slowly.”
Remarkably, this little bit of field savvy worked wonders for me when I was a junior officer. Logistics is not hard in the academic sense of the word, but it is hard in the volume of detail, synchronicity, preparation, and planning that is essential for success. All logistics problems, whether they occur in a corporate enterprise or on the battlefield, boil down to a few timeless truths. They can be overcome either by directing more time or more resources to the challenge. This is the great secret of the successful logistician; ridiculously simple in its nakedness. Unfortunately things so well expressed are difficult to tease into reality. Time and quantity were never our friends in Kandahar. Unlike the Somme, lines of communication could take advantage neither of a large seaport like Boulogne to pile up massive quantities of goods nor a sprawling inland railway to ferry matériel forward quickly.38 Rather, our logistics needs had to be clinically prioritized through a narrow air bridge between KAF and Camp Mirage on the Arabian Peninsula. The capacity of the air bridge was dictated by the payload of the remarkable C-130 Hercules aircraft and its ability to carry desperately needed matériel and munitions into Afghanistan.39 Though the Hercules has marvellous capabilities, a reliance upon aircraft only for resupply is a hard limitation to have when fighting in remote lands. There could be no brute logistics stockpiling on KAF as our Second World War predecessors created in Normandy. One can appreciate how intensely interested we were in quantity; how much of any given matériel we had on hand; and how quickly it evaporated during combat operations.
After the First World War, Canada’s citizen army returned to its peacetime posture and units disbanded as the country demobilized. A small permanent force (what we call today the regular component of the Canadian Forces) remained standing as a cadre of military professionals. Typical of a cadre-based army, training between the world wars was focused on small-unit exercises. Not much money was available for defence expenditure between the big wars of the twentieth century. Evolutionary change, particularly mechanization, became the driving force behind logistics advances for armies all over the globe. The incremental changes to logistics units in Canada since 1918 can really be divided into two broad camps: technological innovation and the pure requirement to generate forces for operations.
It is easy to overlook the enormous impact the truck has had on modern armies. One of the easiest ways to satisfy an equation where more time and resources are needed was to mechanize logistics units. In so doing, support units could shorten the amount of time it took to do a task and be able to provide more trips. If truth be told, a combat unit can never have too many trucks supporting it. Even with qualitative and quantitative advantages, the Canadian divisional logistics staffs in the First World War found that their magnificent corps was still short of transport. Canadian Corps staff planners had glimpsed in 1917 the unquenchable thirst of the industrialized battlefield for motorized lift. A horse is capable of only so much work in a given day and susceptible to bowed tendons, broken limbs, loss of life ... and weight loss. As farmers well know, a horse will consume as much as 20 percent of its body weight in fodder every day. It is easy to understand why a horse operating in the Canadian division supply columns of the First World War would struggle to keep its weight up. I remember being mightily impressed in 1994 when I toured the Little Big Horn battlefield with my family. A scrawny General Custer recreator gave us a briefing on fodder and how it was key to mission success on the frontier of the Old West, because adequate supplies kept the horses fit enough to get the job done. Imagine, if you will, having to carry the moral pressures of leading your troops and defeating the enemy, while worrying about something as earthy and minute as your horse evaporating underneath you? Tough, wiry cavalry men like the diminutive Custer were ideal because the lighter the warrior the less wear and tear on the war horse. The underappreciated truck could withstand all these organic ails. D.J. Goodspeed succinctly voiced the need for mechanization to realize the full potential of combat logistics first grasped in the fledgling motor transport units of the First World War:
This problem of maintaining the momentum of an attack was never entirely solved in the First World War, for the technological difficulties were too great. The key to its solution, of course, was the internal combustion engine, which made possible the mechanization of transport and support services.40
During the Second World War, support units grew into full maturity in the respect that the truck for the most part eclipsed the horse as the primary logistics engine. Mechanization of the army was here to stay. The permanent logistics units of the Canadian Army post–First World War were not able to work on large formation (brigade and division level) training but they were able to address the technology gap. It has been said that the U.S. Civil War was the first railway war; the first major conflict where armies could be moved in huge volume over long distances with the assistance of the great iron beast. The most obvious limitation to rail of course is that it lies where it lies. Moving men and matériel is dictated by where the rail lines run. The truck had served notice of an even greater possibility in the First World War. It had demonstrated an ability to unshackle large armies from the inflexibility of fixed rail lines,41 a very good thing for us in Kandahar. In all of Afghanistan there are only 24 kilometres of rail and they are not in southern Afghanistan where the Canadians are. Without dedicated Canadian aviation, we too were forced to rely on the truck as our grandfathers had in the Second World War. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Canadian Corps in the First World War had far more mechanical truck units than other British corps. Unfortunately at the end of the war, only our soldiers came home. Most of the major equipment was left in France, and the small amount of major equipment that did make its way back to Canada was either worn out or obsolete by the early 1930s.
Lieutenant-Colonel Pat Hennessey, a Royal Canadian Army Service Corps officer (the transport corps of the army), had served extensively in and around the thunder of the First World War. He was the dominant army thinker who grasped that supporting units had to have the same level of mobility as the fighting units as well as the greatest possible speed to underwrite offensive flexibility. Hennessey proved to be a driving force for the mechanization of Canadian logistics units. Pat Hennessey is a shadowy figure in Canadian military history, a logistics leader who led from the front and held the confidence of his peers across the various combat arms of the army. Hennessey, from what remnants remain of him in our history, seemed to have been that rare blend of leadership, bravery, and intellectual acumen. He played a prominent role in the reorganization and modernization of the replenishment system between the wars.42 There is no doubt that he would have served Canadian logistics greatly after the Second World War if he had not been killed early in the war during the fall of Hong Kong. There have not been many Canadian logistics leaders like him since his death in 1941. Canada’s meagre defence budget could neither afford nor justify the purchase of mechanical logistics vehicles, however, this did not deter Hennessey. Like a watchful home owner keeping an eye on a neighbour’s expensive home renovation, he watched support developments in the United Kingdom. In this fashion Hennessey was able to harvest ideas that would enable Canadian logistics units to transition to machinery with less friction. He ensured that the technological strides being made in the British Army Service Corps were embedded in the Canadian counterpart (the Canadian Army Service Corps).43 It is not always about how little money you have, imagination is a powerful aspect in remaining relevant. Creativity and imagination are Lieutenant-Colonel Hennessey’s great lessons and they are just as applicable today as they were during the Great Depression.
After years of observation, the Second World War provided the financial impetus to complete the mechanization of combat service support units in Canada’s army. The mechanization of the army led to the advent of new logistics corps. Up until 1944, mechanical repairs and recovery were handled inside the Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps, a matériel supply organization with roots in the ancient Royal Army Ordnance Corps of the British army. Believe it or not, the Royal Army Ordnance Corps was organized in the twelfth century to produce articles such as battering rams, slings, and catapults.44 By 1944, the increased mechanical nature of fighting equipment made it necessary to create a dedicated
