is the well-planned, logical offspring of a fertile imagination harnessed early to the demands of the tactical plan. At its worst, logistics is a crudely rendered afterthought stapled to a military disaster.
The Canadian brand of military logistics or combat service support grew up, from Confederation forward, with a young army that recognized its worth and absolute necessity. Canadian soldiers insisted upon homegrown logistics; they demanded their own. Logistics was once a valued component inside our field force, a necessary partner in the Canadian manner of fighting. It was initially homespun and somewhat crudely strung together to support the large militia operation in Western Canada in 1885. Logistics was purchased from Great Britain in South Africa, in 1900, during the Boer War — the first war to showcase Canadian troops beyond our borders. During the Boer War, Canadian troops longed for their own dedicated logistics support. They grew to resent the “country cousin” treatment they received from the British army logistics system. By the time Europe plunged into the First World War, Canada had its own logistics units. In many ways the last segment of that war witnessed the zenith of Canadian Army logistics achievement — to the point where Canadian logistics units were the envy of the Allied Forces in France. The senior leadership in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and its superb Canadian component, the Canadian Corps, was able to overcome a contemporary institutional bias that encouraged commanders to remain aloof from the logistics and administrative staffs.4 The attention afforded logistics in 1916 by Field Marshal Haig, the commander of the BEF, and Lieutenant-General Byng, Haig’s subordinate and the commander of the Canadian Corps, was instrumental in overcoming the challenges of the new, industrialized battlefield and attaining offensive success in late summer 1918. In the Second World War, Canada again maintained logistics systems up to and including sophisticated corps level units. The Canadian Army, in keeping with its allies, had gone to great lengths to mechanize support units, ensuring that replenishment and repairs could be organized and provided quickly to its fighting divisions in Italy and northwest Europe. Finally, the Korean War saw small Canadian logistics units achieve great results serving inside a Commonwealth division in direct support to 25 Canadian Infantry Brigade. But for a variety of reasons, consideration for matters logistic in the tiny Canadian Army between the Korean War (1950–53) and a series of gut-wrenching convoy assaults north of Pashmul, Afghanistan, in 2006 has been negligible.
Years of disinterest in logistics training and development in the lean years after the Korean War and particularly after dramatic reorganization of logistics as part of unification in 1968 have left Canada’s army with only one true logistics asset — the men and women in the various trades who make up the rank and file. The proud corps histories of the various logistics services were wiped away under unification of the three services. Combat logistics soldiers no longer enjoy even the soothing balm that a regimental family affords. Regiments like the storied Van Doos, the Royal Canadian Regiment, and the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry have these families and regimental associations and their members draw strength from them. Logistics soldiers are just not considered this way. Why not? Our soldiers possess a marked resourcefulness and a warrior ethos that is alarmingly incongruous with the valued bureaucratic principles of the Canadian Forces Logistics Branch. The combat logistics soldiers offer a capability well suited to the contemporary battlefield that is far out of proportion to the level of investment and interest demonstrated by the wider leadership of Canadian Forces. This lack of interest makes the Canadian Forces brittle as a fighting institution. Decades of cultural disinterest in combat logistics put my NSE in a precarious tactical position supporting Task Force Orion on a new sort of battlefield in 2006. Only the efforts of 300 remarkable Canadian soldiers carried the day.
An NSE convoy passes a group of Afghans as it shunts supplies north. Outside the complex congestion of Kandahar the threat to a convoy seemed to diminish. However, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are often used in rural areas.
Inside the Canadian Forces and the army in particular there are strict and ancient pecking orders. In the army context, the holy triumvirate of the combat arms are at the top of a robust cap-badge hierarchy. The combat arms comprise the infantry, artillery, and armoured corps. The combat engineers come in next, having been granted combat arms status in 1993. Combat support arms like the intelligence and the signals corps are found on the next level down in the hierarchy, less prestigious than the combat arms but markedly ahead of the steerage class logistics soldier. At the base of this entire heap are the men and women of logistics services, what we call in military parlance the combat service support (CSS) professions. These soldiers are the medics, suppliers, transporters, mechanics, to cite a few — soldiers like mine. The elite of our military are indeed our combat arms units. This is the way it should always be. After all, you would not need logistics if there was no infantry section holding a ridge line somewhere on the lonely battlefield. At the same time, however, military logistics in the Canadian Forces is viewed as something less than merely non-elite. Military logistics in Canada is viewed with near disdain.
In 2006 what turned this hierarchical pyramid on its ear was the nature of the fight in Kandahar Province. Karl von Clausewitz, the esteemed German author and pre-eminent thinker on the subject of warfare, postulated that at the centre of war is fighting. On this new sort of battlefield all soldiers, regardless of rank, stature, or cap badge, have to be prepared to fight. Indeed mundane logistics convoys are among the most dangerous missions undertaken by Canadian men and women overseas. There are lessons to be shared from the Kandahar style of battlefield. The biggest of these from my perspective is that logistics has to become part of combat operations when there are no such words as front and rear anymore. The line between the combat arms and combat logistics soldiers on the modern battlefield has become blurred.
The battlefield upon which we find ourselves is dramatically altered from the ones understood by our grandfathers. The thunder of combat can erupt at anytime from any direction. An attack can occur in a city, town or open sandy road. In many respects the difficulty in moving matériel on the battlefield today is completely different from the logistics challenges that confronted General Byng, during what Canadian Army historian C.P. Stacey called Canada’s “Hundred Days” of 1918, or what Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery dealt with in Normandy in 1944. What is clear above all else is that in the complex landscape of the contemporary operating environment, logistics must weigh more prominently in the army’s thinking than it has over the past 40 years.
Canadian mortars stand ready for use at an artillery manoeuvre area (AMA). On average, routine resupply was conducted three to four times a week to sustain this gun position in northern Kandahar Province. The superb artillery support furnished by the new Canadian guns has re-established indirect fire as the queen of battle. Artillery was a lifesaver for Canadian and Afghan National Security Forces operating in RC South.
On this new sort of battlefield, plied by Canadian convoys, on any given day you may not get to where you are going and there is no guarantee that you will make it back to where you came from. Anywhere along the line between departure and destination you must be prepared to fight for your life. But despite this paramount reality the logistics community is still not as highly regarded as other parts of the army. The hierarchical cap-badge pyramid of the Canadian Army is alive and well here at home. Generations of officers have grown up with a healthy disinterest for logistics and there is no clear signal, even against the realities of Kandahar, that this cultural malaise will dissolve any time soon.
It was not always this way.
General Arthur Currie, the brilliant commander of the Canadian Corps, deliberately created a logistics crisis before the move to Amiens from the Ypres Salient on 1 August 1918. Like a quarterback looking to his right to freeze
