Punching Above Our Weight
Army Transformation is an exciting and fast moving opportunity
that will touch every soldier and civilian in
the Land Force team. It is a change that will see the implementation
of the Army Vision and Army Strategy, and the development of an
immensely capable Land Force component of the Canadian Forces.
Army Transformation will lead to a land force of which Canadians
can be fiercely proud (they already have pride in it - we want
them to have more) and one which is visibly relevant to them and
to our country. The transformed Land Force will be credible with
our friends and allies and capable of being overwhelmingly successful,
no matter the mission given it, while reducing the risk to those
soldiers actually executing the operation.
Army Transformation flows directly from the Army Strategy issued
last year and is a long and well thought-out process. It sets out
how we will build sustainable combat forces by bringing in new
capabilities, updating some legacy capabilities and using others "as
is", while merging them all as a "system of systems" to
give a value greater than the sum of the individual parts. Transformation
is our means of implementing our Strategy. Soldiers will see concrete
evidence that we are moving forward - with 2006-10-12ive change.
Some parts of Army Transformation, such as the Whole Fleet Management
System, are driven by the need to manage our resources better in
order to be able to do all the individual and collective training
necessary while continuing to conduct operations. The most important
force driving transformation though, is the changing nature of
the very real threats to stability throughout the world, to Canada
itself and to any land component units deployed on missions. What
was, in previous years, described as the asymmetric threat - terrorism,
suicide bombers, riots, explosive devices, well-armed militias
- has now simply become the threat, and, unfortunately, probable.
That threat is located mainly where the population is, that is
where the bulk of the people live in failed and some developing
states. The previously used term of "conventional" threat,
that of an attack by another country with military forces, through
massed infantry and tanks on land, supported by air and naval units,
has now become the asymmetric threat and exceptionally unlikely.
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| Unmanned aerial vehicles,
such as the Sperwer shown here, will form part of ISTAR,
giving Canadian soldiers information dominance on the battlefield. |
Thus, those attempting to de-stabilize different parts of the
world, stop us in the execution of given missions or actually attempting
to harm us during the execution of those missions, have to be dealt
with by new and more flexible capabilities then did the old conventional
threat. Those threats will have to be dealt with where they will
be most common - amongst populations in developing, or failed,
states that need our help.
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