better results.56 On Rendez-Vous 89 a crude construct for divisional support was finally achieved. Only at this high-water mark of divisional logistics application were the warts of an old doctrine becoming noticeable to us. Divisional doctrine had become like a favourite tailored suit a person cherishes after an extreme diet. The jacket hangs in your closet familiar, cherished, and comfortable but it is no longer close to fitting. We finally saw that divisional doctrine did not fit Canada’s logistic needs. Time and resources had moved well beyond being able to replicate a complete division logistic architecture. By Rendez Vous 92, the last of the RVs in 1992, the Divisional Support Group structure was abandoned. I was a wide-eyed transport platoon commander on RV 92 serving inside 1 Service Battalion and I had no notion at the time that this big exercise turned the page on nearly 70 years of logistics practices. I could not possibly know that for the next dozen years we would drift in a sea of angst, not knowing what shape our corps should take. The net effect of the RV exercises had been to polish the rust off an antiquated doctrine only to realize that the practices of 1918 and 1944 were no longer relevant to the Canadian field force. How then should we live? Three weeks of sustaining combat in Helmand Province in Afghanistan have convinced me that smaller, combat capable logistics units should be our goal. We do not need to worry about enormous division sized logistics units. Small and mean is in.
The departure of the division should have sparked an intellectual emergency for Canadian logisticians. Almost every word written about logistics practices in Canada since 1918 has been written with the divisional structure in mind. In terms of the volumes of Canadian logistic doctrine, leaving the division behind meant there was no effective higher order logistics doctrine. The resulting vacuum in logistics thought was never fully grasped nor effectively addressed. It seems that many conditions have facilitated the stagnation of military logistics thinking in Canada. First the Canadian Army is small and when you are small to start off with, some combat functions are always going to dine last on tight resources. Combine this with the fact that it has been a long time since logistics has mattered to the extent that it does in combat. Fighting in far away places where you need medical evacuation and you can actually run out of diesel has a way of increasing interest in neglected corners. Perhaps this is why there has been a tangible disdain for matters logistic in the Canadian Army since the end of the last shooting war in Korea. The army has not been greatly interested in improving logistics support to the combat arms because it has not really been in the line of work where logistics was a life and death necessity. The focus of army leadership was on protecting the combat arms in a long series of budget cuts. This tribal, cap-badge approach created a fascination with structure and inherent cost savings where logistics development and innovation were concerned.
Senior army leaders during the Cold War emphasized the protection of combat arms units over all other functions. In fact, tribal interests were so acute that they were rampant inside the combat arms themselves. Douglas Bland observed, “the army resisted attempts to change infantry units into anti-tank units in the mid-1960s because that might have advanced artillery interests over their own.”57 Bland illustrates the pecking order succinctly:
On another level, all the European based formations ... were fatally weak in logistic support. Yet throughout the history of commitment in Europe general officers resisted successfully most attempts to add logistics units to their organizations because that would have detracted from combat establishments.58
In addition to this protectionist approach was a poor opinion of logistics among the combat arms senior leadership. The low regard commanders held for logistics is nowhere more prominently displayed than General Dextraze’s cavalier handling of the logistics part of the Canadian commitment to Norway:
The same reaction occurred in the CAST commitment [Canadian Air/Sea Transportable Force] designed for deployment to Norway. In 1976 the CDS, Dextraze, arbitrarily reduced the logistic component of the force from 1,500 to 150 simply by removing a zero from the established logistic unit number.59
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