Recent content by Ostrozac

I saw some surprises in the document — the return of long range missiles to the army was one. I remember the Long Range Precision Rocket System project (also known as CANSCUD) which seemed well and truly dead, but it’s made a comeback. Airborne Early Warning was another surprise. The cost...

In some cases the trend was actually in the other direction. Several provinces had their own police forces but adopted the RCMP as a cost savings measure, as contract policing was subsidized by the federal government. BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan followed this model. Newfoundland went halfway...

Oddly enough, even though the French Revolution and the reign of terror are iconic and well-remembered, it wasn’t actually the end of monarchy in France. Aside from the well-publicized Emperor Napoleon and his somewhat less well-known nephew Napoleon III, even the Bourbons managed a bit of a...

I served with some veterans of those pre-1970 battalions. According to them, they weren’t very cohesive between Regular and Reserve — the regular Black Watch thought of itself as the regular regiment of the Maritimes, the militia Black Watch was strongly Anglophone Montreal. In some ways, the...

I’m fine with that, adopt the C8 as the PDW for those who need something smaller than a rifle (or whatever replaces the C8, is SARP II still an ongoing project?) What I’m not fine with is delivering no real pistol training, but giving pistols to people when they arrive in theatre — that’s the...

Oddly enough, the trend is for units to own infrastructure and share equipment — while it probably should be the other way around. It makes sense for units to focus their maintenance money and time on the stewardship of the gear they will take overseas — sharing tents, vehicles, radios and...

It’s not really the brigade that’s the problem (although in my opinion Petawawa’s infrastructure was never really upgraded enough when 1RCR moved from London). The bigger issue is that Special Operations units train a lot. Petawawa might not currently have enough manoeuvre and range space to...

Not nuclear, the Meaford proposal is pumped-storage hydroelectric. https://sustainablebiz.ca/meaford-pumped-hydro-project-key-to-tc-energys-transition

That really depends on the base. Some bases are regarded by the local powers that be to be more valuable used for other things, or are even considered a nuisance. The closure of St Hubert was robustly supported by local Montreal-area politicians, as it was felt that the redevelopment would be of...

From a philosophy of ‘the army cares about what it inspects’ — the Canadian Army doesn’t really care that much about the physical fitness of their reservists — what they really care about is their dental fitness, because troops DAG red on their fangs faster than you can say saltwater taffy. So...

The primary argument for retention of the wounded in non-deployable positions kind of falls apart when the Canadian public service still knows how to hire while the CAF has, as an institution, forgotten how to recruit. And one of the historically healthiest MOSIDs in the CAF (Infantry Soldier)...

Also anecdotal — I heard the urban legend of a Regular Force Captain posted to the GTA on RSS who openly lived in his office in the armoury for the duration of the posting. That’s certainly a creative way to beat the cost of living crisis.

Yeah, but the Indian Navy have retired their Sea Harriers and now operate Mig-29 in the Russian/Chinese style STOBAR configuration. They no longer have a need for a jump jet carrier. If they do decide to base the successor to the Vikrant-Class carriers on the QE-Class, they’ll want to build it...

On the subject of HMS Prince of Wales being potentially up for sale, not to disparage the always reliable folks at the Daily Mail, but who the hell would want to buy it? There isn’t much overlap between countries that are interested in jump jets, don’t already build their own carriers, and have...

Class C is normally service on an operation — there are sometimes reasons that a scheduled vacation doesn’t actually happen during an operation — from a ship being diverted to conduct an unforecasted task, to the airhead being closed all the way to the member becoming a casualty. Does the...