What the Thunder Said. John Conrad
of logistics doubt in the mind of the fighting echelon. Like old hockey linemates who, through familiarity and respect, can take their level of play to a higher level, affiliation or a sense of team enabled the Canadian Corps to generate combat power with finesse. Ian McCulloch juxtaposes the advantages of Canadian affiliation against the more modular British concept as follows:
The homogeneity of the Canadian divisions “was a great advantage ... they always operated together under a corps commander and staff whom they could trust and whose methods and abilities they knew and understood. In contrast, British divisions moved about from one corps to another, and sometimes suffered from misunderstandings arising from different ... administrative practices in the different corps ...”36
With sound affiliation a fighting force can survive with fewer questions or requests for clarification stemming from unfamiliarity with technique. The result is that preparation times are compressed and the physical act of resupply is conducted more effectively between units that know and trust each other implicitly.
CANADA’S HUNDRED DAYS
The Canadian Corps in the “war to end all wars” was a highly prized formation in the BEF. The ferocity of the Canadian Corps in combat and its sterling logistics capability made its soldiers an obvious choice for repeated use as shock troops in the last stanza of the war — the Hundred Days. The Hundred Days comprised the rich operational period of 8 August to 11 November 1918. It was only during this last stanza of the First World War that logistics, like all other aspects of combat power, endured the weight of modern warfare. Offensive success has to be underwritten by logistics mobility. The Canadian Corps’ sophisticated mobility was demonstrated both in its movement in contact with the enemy as well as its large-scale administrative movements (away from enemy contact) across war-torn France. The corps was passed between British armies during the Hundred Days like a prized carpenter’s tool with the intent of breaking key nodes in the German defences. John English observed: “Time and again, the Canadian Corps was used to crack some of the toughest and most vital points of the German defence, thereby creating the conditions and opportunities that allowed the Allied Armies to drive the German war machine to the point of collapse.”37
There are many parallels between what our great-grandfathers were able to achieve in the Canadian Corps and what we have set in motion in Kandahar. Canadian equipment, from the LAV III fighting vehicle to the brand new Nyala mine-proof truck is the envy of every other nation in southern Afghanistan. Even with the aging aftermarket-armoured logistics trucks we used, we developed a quick reputation for getting the job done. It was a refreshed reputation reminiscent of the pristine motor transport companies of the 1918 Canadian Corps. In everything we did in the National Support Element we sought to augment this legacy of a Canadian “can-do” attitude.
Today it is rare indeed to find leaders in the Canadian Army who understand the sustainment capacity of their commands. How much diesel fuel does their formation carry; how much more can be amassed in a given period? This is not to suggest that the commander must know every last little detail about logistics. He or she must however know the limitations of his or her force and where the edges of possibility lie. If a military commanders lack understanding of logistics capacity, they will never know when they are taking risks, when they are pushing too hard or not hard enough. None of these scenarios are acceptable. It is difficult to dispute that Canada’s “pocket” army was part of the cutting edge of combat logistics innovation in 1918. Through the long years of Canadian military logistics experience from the Red River Rebellion and the war in South Africa to the Armistice in 1918, Canada had built a valued logistics capacity into its army — to the point where it became the envy of other Commonwealth armies and a defining characteristic in the Canadian manner of fighting. Logistics was understood by and important to Canadian commanders.
The unavoidable question remains, “What happened?”
The battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters long before the shooting begins.
— Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
Logistics is not hard. Although most Canadian Army logisticians hate admitting it, the so-called “dark art” of providing combat service support is not even a distant cousin to rocket science. I remember being told on one of my first technical logistics courses after I left the Navy a piece of timely advice for a young logistics officer bent on survival: “Lieutenant Conrad, if you want to keep your job, remember to always say yes quickly and no slowly.”
Remarkably, this little bit of field savvy worked wonders for me when I was a junior officer. Logistics is not hard in the academic sense of the word, but it is hard in the volume of detail, synchronicity, preparation, and planning that is essential for success. All logistics problems, whether they occur in a corporate enterprise or on the battlefield, boil down to a few timeless truths. They can be overcome either by directing more time or more resources to the challenge. This is the great secret of the successful logistician; ridiculously simple in its nakedness. Unfortunately things so well expressed are difficult to tease into reality. Time and quantity were never our friends in Kandahar. Unlike the Somme, lines of communication could take advantage neither of a large seaport like Boulogne to pile up massive quantities of goods nor a sprawling inland railway to ferry matériel forward quickly.38 Rather, our logistics needs had to be clinically prioritized through a narrow air bridge between KAF and Camp Mirage on the Arabian Peninsula. The capacity of the air bridge was dictated by the payload of the remarkable C-130 Hercules aircraft and its ability to carry desperately needed matériel and munitions into Afghanistan.39 Though the Hercules has marvellous capabilities, a reliance upon aircraft only for resupply is a hard limitation to have when fighting in remote lands. There could be no brute logistics stockpiling on KAF as our Second World War predecessors created in Normandy. One can appreciate how intensely interested we were in quantity; how much of any given matériel we had on hand; and how quickly it evaporated during combat operations.
After the First World War, Canada’s citizen army returned to its peacetime posture and units disbanded as the country demobilized. A small permanent force (what we call today the regular component of the Canadian Forces) remained standing as a cadre of military professionals. Typical of a cadre-based army, training between the world wars was focused on small-unit exercises. Not much money was available for defence expenditure between the big wars of the twentieth century. Evolutionary change, particularly mechanization, became the driving force behind logistics advances for armies all over the globe. The incremental changes to logistics units in Canada since 1918 can really be divided into two broad camps: technological innovation and the pure requirement to generate forces for operations.
It is easy to overlook the enormous impact the truck has had on modern armies. One of the easiest ways to satisfy an equation where more time and resources are needed was to mechanize logistics units. In so doing, support units could shorten the amount of time it took to do a task and be able to provide more trips. If truth be told, a combat unit can never have too many trucks supporting it. Even with qualitative and quantitative advantages, the Canadian divisional logistics staffs in the First World War found that their magnificent corps was still short of transport. Canadian Corps staff planners had glimpsed in 1917 the unquenchable thirst of the industrialized battlefield for motorized lift. A horse is capable of only so much work in a given day and susceptible to bowed tendons, broken limbs, loss of life ... and weight loss. As farmers well know, a horse will consume as much as 20 percent of its body weight in fodder every day. It is easy to understand why a horse operating in the Canadian division supply columns of the First World War would struggle to keep its weight up. I remember being mightily impressed in 1994 when I toured the Little Big Horn battlefield with my family. A scrawny General Custer recreator gave us a briefing on fodder and how it was key to mission success on the frontier of the Old West, because adequate supplies kept the horses fit enough to get the job done. Imagine, if you will, having to carry the moral pressures of leading your troops and defeating the enemy, while worrying about something as earthy and minute as your horse evaporating underneath you? Tough, wiry cavalry men like the diminutive Custer