The artillery park, and its depth, is only valuable if it has an operational output. I don’t hate the idea of 105s, L118 or no, because I can see value in it as a towed gun for light use, with reserve Bty’s ideally. But having guns for the sake of guns is silly.
Here's the arc of my revision for "Unsustainable at any Price". Canada needs two armies: an Army for Today and an Army for Tomorrow (Not "of" but "for"). The BLUF is that the Army for Today is primarily RegF and volunteer reservists equipped and trained to do the things we do now - every day. There is very little need for armour or artillery in that force with the exception of the elements we decide we need in Latvia for direct deterrence.
The Army for Tomorrow is the expansion army for when we have to muck in because we no longer have a choice to whimp out and stay home and which we need for indirect deterrence. It's mostly a ResF army with a strong RegF leadership core BUT, it's organized, equipped and trained to do the high end stuff because Rumsfeld was right - you go to war with what you have not what you wish you had. And if that includes TAPVs and old TLAVs and Bisons, 30-year old Leo 2A4s, MSVS MILCOTS and even C3 howitzers than that's what it will be with the realization we're going to take a whupping.
We've been ignoring the Army for Tomorrow for many decades on the hope that we'll never need it. If history teaches us anything it's that "hope is not a COA". At some point the army is going to need to take its head out of it's ass and come to the realization that it needs to deal with it and come up with a doctrine that allows the Army for Tomorrow to be built, slowly and rationally into a viable deterrent force.
I have trained up a functioning gun crew out of SYEP recruits in 5 days. It's actually not hard to man the guns. The harder part is the FOO and gun techs. So if you have the guns and the ammo stocks, you can increase the size of your artillery very quickly.
You don't have to tell me how easy it is. I'm the young gunner who joined in August and that November, before I even had a recruit course much less a gun number's course, was made the number 3 on a C1 howitzer in Shilo, recording and laying the gun for bearing with my instruction running from 0500 to 0900 the first morning and my first live round leaving the muzzle shortly thereafter. Most of us in the battery had spent the winter and spring on Saturday mornings doing dry deployments on the CNE grounds and at Cherry beach so that we could shoot at Meaford that spring and do a summer concentration before our recruit course. It wasn't rocket science. Back in 2006, the conversion course from 105mm to M777 was five days dry, three days live which drilled in the essentials.
The big point that we gloss over is that in order to do that you need the equipment.
A Bty for TF ORION had no M777s for predeployment training until hat eight day conversion course in December 2005. That's is all they had before predeployment leave and getting on the plane to Afghanistan in February. E Bty for TF 3-06 had two guns that they had to share between two troops for training and which also had to be used by the tech team that was developing and installing the digital gun management systems. D Bty for TF 1-07 had to field six guns in Afghanistan but for the majority of their predeployment training only had two, at most, available.
Training can be done in short times if you have some people with a modicum of training but most importantly, you have to have the equipment or forget about it. I won't even bore you with the story of fielding Sperwer, ARTHUR, miniUAVs and LCMRs... and don't get me started about how we got all the gear and training to turn our fledgling FACs into highly capable JTACs. Almost all of these are stories of institutional lethargy saved by highly talented and dedicated people in the field (and DLR) making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
Once again: Rumsfeld is right.
When I was a young pup in 7th Tor RCA, we had a working 25 pdr in the gun park and unofficially "played" around with it. In a pinch I could operate one but the 105mm M2A21 was my first operational gun. Additional fun fact - I'm one of the few people left in the world who knows how to use an arty board for calculating firing data and how to "tune" and use a 42 set as a radio. Also, I did my combat team commanders' course using Centurions.
