What the Thunder Said. John Conrad
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 the defence, he suddenly turned left and sent the large Canadian formation rumbling noiselessly south. Currie did not inform his chief of logistics, General Farmar, about the move until 29 July 1918, giving the logistics staff approximately 24 hours of planning before the Corps had to start moving.5
The coming offensive down at Amiens was defined by a tight secrecy at all levels of preparation. The presence of Canadians, who had come to be used as shock troops inside the British Expeditionary Force, would easily telegraph a coming offensive to the Germans. Transportation and movement planning were mightily tested because of this requirement for absolute secrecy. In the course of compressed preparation time, the subordinate divisional logistics staffs were left with a mere five days of advance notice. By 1 August 1918, when the Canadians began to move down to the Amiens sector for the coming fight, there remained only six days to extend the logistics conduit from Boulogne. Furthermore, the Corps would need to move and prepare for battle in an unfamiliar sector under complicated conditions. It was assigned only two main supply routes — the Amiens-Roye road and the Amiens-Villers Bretonneux. These two roads could only be used at night, as recorded in the Canadian War Diaries: “The Division is now in the first stage of a concentration march preparatory to assembling in battle positions. Surprise is to be the essence of the operation and therefore, all movement is to be restricted to the cover of darkness ... transport is to be parked under trees and troops not to be allowed to move about ...”6
To complicate matters, the Canadian sector in Amiens had been a French sector, bereft of the compatible logistics pieces to sustain a British formation.7 This placement in a new, non-British sector meant that the logistics chain would have to haul from refilling points farther afield. There was no end to the administrative challenges in the preparatory actions for the Canadian Corps, but when the balloon went up at H hour on 8 August 1918, by God, the Canadians made it rain.
The accomplishments of the Canadian Corps throughout the Hundred Days campaign were plentiful. High among the list of achievements was a logistics proficiency that was the envy of the British Army in France.
When you enter Normandy Hall, the breeding ground of leadership at the Canadian Army’s superb Command and Staff College in Kingston, the first thing that strikes the eye is an ancient oak ship’s rudder mounted on the wall. A tiny brass plate next to the oak explains that it was recovered during the construction of Normandy Hall in 1953. As the story goes, the rudder belonged to a French warship that had been ransacked and burned during the ballsy raid on Fort Frontenac by Lieutenant-Colonel Bradstreet in July 1758. Bradstreet had launched the raid on the Fort Frontenac from Oswego, New York, with 2,737 men. It was a clever strategic move that knocked out the logistics base of the French, sending reverberating shock waves all the way down the Ohio Valley. The account of the raid conjures up a number of heroic images and vistas of audacity and triumph. For a combat logistician, this vignette brings other thoughts to mind.
July in Kingston is oppressively hot and muggy. This probably reduced Bradstreet’s requirement for canvas, firewood, and baggage, but water, ammunition, and rations would be