Читать книгу What the Thunder Said - John Conrad - Страница 15

4 Wind Without Rain

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 were ideal because the lighter the warrior the less wear and tear on the war horse. The underappreciated truck could withstand all these organic ails. D.J. Goodspeed succinctly voiced the need for mechanization to realize the full potential of combat logistics first grasped in the fledgling motor transport units of the First World War:

This problem of maintaining the momentum of an attack was never entirely solved in the First World War, for the technological difficulties were too great. The key to its solution, of course, was the internal combustion engine, which made possible the mechanization of transport and support services.⁴⁰

During the Second World War, support units grew into full maturity in the respect that the truck for the most part eclipsed the horse as the primary logistics engine. Mechanization of the army was here to stay. The permanent logistics units of the Canadian Army post–First World War were not able to work on large formation (brigade and division level) training but they were able to address the technology gap. It has been said that the U.S. Civil War was the first railway war; the first major conflict where armies could be moved in huge volume over long distances with the assistance of the great iron beast. The most obvious limitation to rail of course is that it lies where it lies. Moving men and matériel is dictated by where the rail lines run. The truck had served notice of an even greater possibility in the First World War. It had demonstrated an ability to unshackle large armies from the inflexibility of fixed rail lines,⁴¹ a very good thing for us in Kandahar. In all of Afghanistan there are only 24 kilometres of rail and they are not in southern Afghanistan where the Canadians are. Without dedicated Canadian aviation, we too were forced to rely on the truck as our grandfathers had in the Second World War. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Canadian Corps in the First World War had far more mechanical truck units than other British corps. Unfortunately at the end of the war, only our soldiers came home. Most of the major equipment was left in France, and the small amount of major equipment that did make its way back to Canada was either worn out or obsolete by the early 1930s.

Lieutenant-Colonel Pat Hennessey, a Royal Canadian Army Service Corps officer (the transport corps of the army), had served extensively in and around the thunder of the First World War. He was the dominant army thinker who grasped that supporting units had to have the same level of mobility as the fighting units as well as the greatest possible speed to underwrite offensive flexibility. Hennessey proved to be a driving force for the mechanization of Canadian logistics units. Pat Hennessey is a shadowy figure in Canadian military history, a logistics leader who led from the front and held the confidence of his peers across the various combat arms of the army. Hennessey, from what remnants remain of him in our history, seemed to have been that rare blend of leadership, bravery, and intellectual acumen. He played a prominent role in the reorganization and modernization of the replenishment system between the wars.⁴² There is no doubt that he would have served Canadian logistics greatly after the Second World War if he had not been killed early in the war during the fall of Hong Kong. There have not been many Canadian logistics leaders like him since his death in 1941. Canada’s meagre defence budget could neither afford nor justify the purchase of mechanical logistics vehicles, however, this did not deter Hennessey. Like a watchful home owner keeping an eye on a neighbour’s expensive home renovation, he watched support developments in the United Kingdom. In this fashion Hennessey was able to harvest ideas that would enable Canadian logistics units to transition to machinery with less friction. He ensured that the technological strides being made in the British Army Service Corps were embedded in the Canadian counterpart (the Canadian Army Service Corps).⁴³ It is not always about how little money you have, imagination is a powerful aspect in remaining relevant. Creativity and imagination are Lieutenant-Colonel Hennessey’s great lessons and they are just as applicable today as they were during the Great Depression.

After years of observation, the Second World War provided the financial impetus to complete the mechanization of combat service support units in Canada’s army. The mechanization of the army led to the advent of new logistics corps. Up until 1944, mechanical repairs and recovery were handled inside the Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps, a matériel supply organization with roots in the ancient Royal Army Ordnance Corps of the British army. Believe it or not, the Royal Army Ordnance Corps was organized in the twelfth century to produce articles such as battering rams, slings, and catapults.⁴⁴ By 1944, the increased mechanical nature of fighting equipment made it necessary to create a dedicated group to specialize in the upkeep of this machinery. The Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (RCEME) have been with the Canadian Forces ever since performing a miracle a day in places like Juno, Korea, and Kandahar. They are the soldiers who can fix anything from torn canvas and metal through to the repair and battlefield recovery of every vehicle in the Canadian Forces.

Far removed from its complete reliance on imperial support in the Boer War, the Canadian Army in the Second World War once again fielded logistics units up to and including the corps level. It still took approximately 9,000 British support troops to furnish the army-level support for each of the five Canadian divisions fighting overseas. Unlike the birth of maintainers, the practice of replenishment remained more or less the same in terms of design. Aside from mechanization, the Canadian tactical replenishment systems and structures of the Second World War looked a great deal like those of 1918 and they performed magnificently both in the Italian and northwest European theatres. The Second World War in my mind lies at the summit of the brute logistics era — the days of piling the stocks and equipment high for operations. It marked a summit of sorts for Canadian logistics as well, as the conflict marked the last time, Canada would field such large logistics organizations.

The Korean War began on 25 June 1950.⁴⁵ The first United Nations (U.N.) collective effort resulted in a determined “police action” to restore South Korean sovereignty. Five years after the Second World War, the Canadian Army was at low ebb having only one brigade under arms.⁴⁶ The government’s immediate reaction was to announce the recruitment of a special brigade to be used overseas.⁴⁷ This contribution to the U.N. forces in Korea was the Canadian Army Special Force, which eventually consisted of the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade and a commensurate dollop of combat service support elements. These logistic assets were: 54 Transport Company, Royal Canadian Army Service Corps (RCASC); 25 Infantry Brigade Ordnance Company, Royal Canadian Ordnance Corps (RCOC); and 191 Infantry Workshop, RCEME. The logistics units sustained Canadian elements operating independently in Korea until the stand up of the Commonwealth Division in July 1951. Once the Commonwealth Division became a reality, 54 Transport Company became part of the Commonwealth Divisional Column along with two Royal Army Service Corps companies, 25 Brigade Ordnance Company was welded to its British counterparts to become the 1st Commonwealth Division Ordnance Field Park and 191 Infantry Workshop became integral to the 1st Commonwealth Division Recovery Company. In this capacity, the Canadian units provided splendid support.

Korea fascinates the logistician in me as it hinted at the shape of things to come. The Canadian Army was fresh out of the Second World War, an era of brute logistics where we had lots of Canadian soldiers under arms and tons of Canadian matériel. Support in Korea was fashioned out of a potluck “pooling” of the logistics resources of a number of different nations into a coalition or Commonwealth Division. Coalition operations inside a multinational division are dramatically different from operating inside a homogeneous Canadian one. Equipment and weapon compatibilities vary even between close allies, different ration preferences, different repair parts all pose challenges that make the job of sustaining the combat soldiers more difficult. It takes more time, patience, and more people to achieve the same tasks that a formation from the same country could achieve. More acutely, the unusual logistics requirements of different combat forces inside a coalition can be difficult to orchestrate. I can only imagine that the challenges that were tackled in working inside the Commonwealth Division were no different from the many we faced in Kandahar working as a Multinational Brigade inside an American-led division in Bagram. At the end of the day do we really want these headaches that coalition operations cause? Absolutely.

The farther the army marched from Korea, the rustier became its logistics doctrine. After 25 Canadian Infantry Brigade’s operations inside the Commonwealth Division in the Korean War, the Canadian Army moved permanently away from the division as a fundamental structure.⁴⁸ The Canadian Army polarized around the brigade group concept — an overbuilt brigade that was jam-packed with additional capability. 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 reduced the logistic component of the force from 1,500 to 150 simply by removing a zero from the established logistic unit number.⁵⁹