What the Thunder Said. John Conrad
The Canadian brigade groups were a compromise of sorts between a lean brigade that resides inside the framework of a division and a full up division itself. They were called brigade groups because they had some of the essential medical, combat support, and logistics pieces necessary for fighting stapled to them. By the late 1950s, many began to detect fissures in the logistics architecture supporting the brigades. The biggest problem was one of coordination among the various units supporting the brigade group.
The service battalion, a logistics unit born and raised in Canada, was the clever answer to the departure of the Canadian division. The various logistics units that had served Canadian divisions so well in three wars had become a knotted, uncoordinated ball in the brigade rear area. The issue prompted Major-General Geoff Walsh, the General Officer Commanding Western Area, to tinker with his logistics assets. He swept all these uncoordinated support pieces into one large logistics unit. General Walsh proposed the Logistics Battalion trials of the early 1960s in Wainwright, Alberta as the means with which to forge a more effective combat service support structure.49 The trials, which entailed the pooling of the distinct support arms into a logistics battalion, became Walsh’s “pet project.”50 Like General Byng fine-tuning logistics in the Canadian Corps in 1917, Canadian logistics was once more to profit from undivided command attention. The Logistics Battalion was formed twice during the Western Area concentrations in 1960 and 1961. The success of the Walsh trials was startling. The new battalion almost immediately proved to be much greater than the sum of its parts.51 The perfect tool for the job at hand. Not only did the logistics battalions give the brigade a focal point for all its sustainment needs, but it also simplified the coordination of the rear area security and damage control, a perpetual burr under the saddle of Cold War Canadian brigadiers. Before the Logistics Battalion, the brigade headquarters had to deal with each supporting unit in turn. Clumsy and time consuming. In the new model, direction to one large unit would effectively control the entire family of logistics services and give coherent steerage to the challenging rear area.
The logistic battalion trials led directly to the defence minister’s announcement of a more concrete experiment, the standing Experimental Service Battalion in Gagetown, New Brunswick: “During 1963, the army will test a new supply concept ... It is designed to provide more efficient support and greater flexibility to fighting units in the widely dispersed and mobile battlefield envisioned in nuclear war.”52 The experimental battalion confirmed the positive observations made in Wainwright. The unit’s functionality was brilliantly summed up by the Gagetown newspaper in 1963: “You’d walk up and down a lot of main streets in this country to find all of the services and commodities provided by the new [Service] Battalion.”53 Eventually, “experimental” was dropped from the name and the unit became 3 Service Battalion. In 1968 four additional regular force service battalions were added to the Canadian Army order of battle on a basis of one for each of the brigade groups. The structural regrouping of logistics companies into a service battalion represented a significant advance. Here was a crystalline example of foresight, thought, and experimentation. It was the first time since the First World War that reorganization on this scale was introduced in Canadian Army logistics. Regrettably, it was the also the last time that any meaningful command attention was paid to Canadian logistics. The logistics battalion trials and the establishment of the new service battalions were the last true examples of logistics transformation in the Canadian Army.
Despite the innovative installation of the new service battalions, it took a decade of major divisional exercises known as the “Rendez-Vous” series for the army to realize that the division, as a fundamental formation was gone. Having perceived a training gap, the army planned a divisional exercise for the summer of 1981 in Gagetown, New Brunswick. This exercise was called Rendez-Vous 81 and it brought together the three Canadian-based brigades to form the Force Mobile Command Division in the largest Canadian exercise since the Second World War.54 Today the Post Exercise Report of Rendez-Vous (RV) 81 lies dust-coated in the Directorate of History and Heritage. It has some haunting words for logistics leaders. Essentially, the review of the exercise found that the current army combat service support system such as it existed in 1981 was “extremely suspect.”55
The logistics concept for this historic RV 81 exercise hammered out a makeshift combat service support system however only bits and pieces of divisional logistic doctrine were used. Over the course of three successive RV exercises in 1985, 1987, and 1989, the old support doctrine was eventually recreated with somewhat better results.56 On Rendez-Vous 89 a crude construct for divisional support was finally achieved. Only at this high-water mark of divisional logistics application were the warts of an old doctrine becoming noticeable to us. Divisional doctrine had become like a favourite tailored suit a person cherishes after an extreme diet. The jacket hangs in your closet familiar, cherished, and comfortable but it is no longer close to fitting. We finally saw that divisional doctrine did not fit Canada’s logistic needs. Time and resources had moved well beyond being able to replicate a complete division logistic architecture. By Rendez Vous 92, the last of the RVs in 1992, the Divisional Support Group structure was abandoned. I was a wide-eyed transport platoon commander on RV 92 serving inside 1 Service Battalion and I had no notion at the time that this big exercise turned the page on nearly 70 years of logistics practices. I could not possibly know that for the next dozen years we would drift in a sea of angst, not knowing what shape our corps should take. The net effect of the RV exercises had been to polish the rust off an antiquated doctrine only to realize that the practices of 1918 and 1944 were no longer relevant to the Canadian field force. How then should we live? Three weeks of sustaining combat in Helmand Province in Afghanistan have convinced me that smaller, combat capable logistics units should be our goal. We do not need to worry about enormous division sized logistics units. Small and mean is in.
The departure of the division should have sparked an intellectual emergency for Canadian logisticians. Almost every word written about logistics practices in Canada since 1918 has been written with the divisional structure in mind. In terms of the volumes of Canadian logistic doctrine, leaving the division behind meant there was no effective higher order logistics doctrine. The resulting vacuum in logistics thought was never fully grasped nor effectively addressed. It seems that many conditions have facilitated the stagnation of military logistics thinking in Canada. First the Canadian Army is small and when you are small to start off with, some combat functions are always going to dine last on tight resources. Combine this with the fact that it has been a long time since logistics has mattered to the extent that it does in combat. Fighting in far away places where you need medical evacuation and you can actually run out of diesel has a way of increasing interest in neglected corners. Perhaps this is why there has been a tangible disdain for matters logistic in the Canadian Army since the end of the last shooting war in Korea. The army has not been greatly interested in improving logistics support to the combat arms because it has not really been in the line of work where logistics was a life and death necessity. The focus of army leadership was on protecting the combat arms in a long series of budget cuts. This tribal, cap-badge approach created a fascination with structure and inherent cost savings where logistics development and innovation were concerned.
Senior army leaders during the Cold War emphasized the protection of combat arms units over all other functions. In fact, tribal interests were so acute that they were rampant inside the combat arms themselves. Douglas Bland observed, “the army resisted attempts to change infantry units into anti-tank units in the mid-1960s because that might have advanced artillery interests over their own.”57 Bland illustrates the pecking order succinctly:
On another level, all the European based formations ... were fatally weak in logistic support. Yet throughout the history of commitment in Europe general officers resisted successfully most attempts to add logistics units to their organizations because that would have detracted from combat establishments.58
In addition to this protectionist approach was a poor opinion of logistics among the combat arms senior leadership. The low regard commanders held for logistics is nowhere more prominently displayed than General Dextraze’s cavalier handling of the logistics part of the Canadian commitment to Norway:
The same reaction occurred in the CAST commitment [Canadian Air/Sea Transportable Force] designed for deployment to Norway. In 1976 the CDS, Dextraze, arbitrarily