{"id":35877,"date":"2016-09-25T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-09-25T05:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35877"},"modified":"2018-06-16T12:49:24","modified_gmt":"2018-06-16T16:49:24","slug":"qotd-canadas-potemkin-village-tactics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/09\/25\/qotd-canadas-potemkin-village-tactics\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Canada’s “Potemkin village” tactics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of us, in another forum, were discussing why UN peacekeeping seems to go so very wrong, so very often ~ not always, I hasten to add, just usually ~ and I quipped, with just a wee bit of hyperbole<\/a>, that \u201cSimple human decency says that a country like Canada should have dropped a light brigade into South Sudan and destroyed the South Sudanese Army in a short, brutal campaign of exemplary speed and violence \u2026 should have if we could have, but, of course, the Canadian Army is a fat, overstaffed, poorly managed corporal\u2019s guard, that cannot deploy any brigade anywhere because we don\u2019t have any nearly fully staffed brigades and even if we did they don\u2019t have enough logistical \u201clift,\u201d so they are useless once they have marched more than 15 km out of the camp gate \u2026 unless a country with a real army (you know, one with trucks and people a to drive them) decides to support and sustain us.<\/strong>\u201c<\/p>\n

Sadly no one, not even officers who have, fairly recently, commanded brigades in the regular army, challenged my assertion that the Canadian Army has been hollowed out until, now, it is a sort of military Potemkin village<\/em><\/strong> in which bits and pieces are deployed and redeployed to create the (entirely false) impression that we, Canadians, are getting a real army for the $20 billion or so that we spend, year after year after year, on out national defences.<\/p>\n

The process began, in earnest, in about 1970, when, in response to quite draconian cuts imposed by Pierre Trudeau (but not, it has been suggested, as deep as he wished) the Canadian Forces began to try to \u201cmake do\u201d with a \u201cpint sized\u201d brigade in Germany ~ when a full sized (6,500\u00b1 soldiers) one was need by promising (and practising) to augment it with \u201cfly-over\u201d troops from Canada who were trained and equipped and could move, fairly quickly on to \u201cpre-positioned\u201d equipment \u2026 if it was properly maintained. It worked well enough, in a peacetime\/training situation, except for the fact that we, eventually (early 1980s), understood that we could not sustain a brigade in Germany with \u201cfly overs\u201d when we needed the same troops to \u201cfly over\u201d to Norway to keep another promise, made to try to placate our allies about our deep defence cuts, and by the late 1980s the Norway task (promise) was quietly shelved (broken) about twenty years after it was started, and after a quite disastrous \u201ctest\u201d (Exercise BRAVE LION) proved to civilian planners and military commanders alike that the Canadian Army (which was much larger than it is today) simply did not have the where-with-all (especially the logistical \u201ctail\u201d) needed to sustain \u201cfly over\u201d missions to Europe. But the damage was done \u2026 in twenty years, almost a generation, the Army, especially, had gotten used to \u201cfaking\u201d its combat effectiveness with Potemkin village<\/em> tactics.<\/p>\n

Ted Campbell, “A Canadian Potemkin Village”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View<\/em><\/a>, 2016-09-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of us, in another forum, were discussing why UN peacekeeping seems to go so very wrong, so very often ~ not always, I hasten to add, just usually ~ and I quipped, with just a wee bit of hyperbole, that \u201cSimple human decency says that a country like Canada should have dropped a light […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,5,53],"tags":[263,31,220,511,1211],"class_list":["post-35877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-history","category-military","category-politics","tag-1970s","tag-army","tag-nato","tag-pierretrudeau","tag-potemkinvillage"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9kF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35878,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35877\/revisions\/35878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}