{"id":37427,"date":"2018-11-11T01:00:05","date_gmt":"2018-11-11T06:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37427"},"modified":"2018-10-22T09:20:21","modified_gmt":"2018-10-22T13:20:21","slug":"qotd-chateau-generals-and-the-modern-canadian-army","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/11\/11\/qotd-chateau-generals-and-the-modern-canadian-army\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: “Chateau” generals and the modern Canadian Army"},"content":{"rendered":"

… the great British strategist, one of the \u201cfathers\u201d of modern armoured-mechanized-mobile warfare, Major General JFC \u201cBoney\u201d Fuller, wrote in the mid 1930s called Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure: A Study of the Personal Factor in Command<\/em>. In it Fuller was harshly critical of what he saw as an old, fat (quite literally) and out of touch military command structure that was intent on fighting the last war, or even the one before that, and was unable to innovate or accept change. Too many generals, he suggested, were physically and mentally unfit for the stresses of modern war, they could not \u201crough it\u201d with soldiers and actually needed to be in nice warm chateaux behind the lines while soldiers and colonels fought in the mud. This is related to something that the brilliant British soldier-scholar Field Marshal Lord Wavell said in his comments on \u201cgeneralship:\u201d commanders need to be \u201crobust \u2026 able to withstand the shocks of war.\u201d Fuller, especially, went to great lengths, and back two thousand plus years in history, to say that wars and military leadership require physical and mental vigour and that young people, often very young people can master both war and leadership. I suspect that both Fuller and Wavell would look at our modern Canadian Army, especially at our seasoned, experienced and relatively old sergeant section and tank commanders and so, \u201cNo, no, no! You\u2019re wasting all that good training and experience at too low a level. Section commanders need only half that much training; those sergeants should be doing more and more important things.\u201d<\/p>\n

I believe that we, the Canadian public, need and deserve a more efficient and cost effective Army, and one way to make it so is to lower the ranks of junior leaders: tank and rifle section and tank troop and rifle platoon commanders. It should be harder but quicker for young soldiers to achieve the ranks of lance corporal, corporal and master corporal and command a tank or a rifle section ~ but the corporals and master corporals should be paid more. Junior officers should spend longer in the ranks of second lieutenant and lieutenant, and be paid more, while they are given the opportunities to master the basics of their profession. If you have first rate platoon commanders you\u2019ll get good generals without too much trouble \u2026 if you don\u2019t have a plentiful supply of really good tank troop and rifle platoon commanders then good generals will only appear now and again, by happy accident.<\/p>\n

Ted Campbell, “The foundation (2)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View<\/em><\/a>, 2017-02-21.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… the great British strategist, one of the \u201cfathers\u201d of modern armoured-mechanized-mobile warfare, Major General JFC \u201cBoney\u201d Fuller, wrote in the mid 1930s called Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure: A Study of the Personal Factor in Command. In it Fuller was harshly critical of what he saw as an old, fat (quite literally) and […]<\/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":[6,7,5,41,246],"tags":[31,448,572],"class_list":["post-37427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","category-ww1","tag-army","tag-canadianforces","tag-leadership"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9JF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37427","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=37427"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45423,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37427\/revisions\/45423"}],"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=37427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}