[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

Because of Canada's relatively little future expenses in military investment, Canada as a nation is in a terrific position to do an overhaul on most of the aspects of the military.

Directives should be 1) Improving the viability and presence of coastline defense. Force projection from a coastal naval stand point should be the number 1 project for Canada's new emerging military strength. You can't build enough boats.

That always brings up the question of what kind of boats. Canada has the makings of a nice middle power nation with 13 frigates, 4 submarines and multiple coastal defense ships. The problem is that they're facing an incredible navy from the South that can project power in thousand mile bubbles, and the Soviet Navy which has begun a rebuild is very powerful in its own right. It can't project power in the same way as the American's, but it can outgun and outrange anything that Canada can deploy. don't forget that the Russians also have formidable Naval Aviation assets made up of heavy fast bombers that carry extremely long range missiles.

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

heavy funding of smaller, more specialized fighting forces. Highly skilled/trained, terrain specific fighting forces are already the leading edge weapon on the battlefield. Time to do away with just about all aspects of the foregone 'theatre of operations' style land combat training/investment.

I don't believe in this unless you're willing to integrate your specialized military with another nation to cover your shortfalls. We've also seen how how the rapidly shifting face of war destroys a countries ability to specialize. I think we've gotten too enamoured with the last two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which weren't as much wars as an excercise in fighting a non regular army. But the next war could be another Bosnia where you're fighting a theatre of operations where the enemy has access to heavy armour, tactical helicopters etc.

We saw that the American's still required theatre of operation style tactics at the start of the Iraq war, it was when they got into the insurgency that you saw what happened when you have a specialized military.



[QUOTE=Flash Walken;32863053) Heavy, medium and tactical insertion aircraft are needed for all branches of the military. Canada should take a lead role in the development and deployment of force projection aircraft that will allow the decisive deployment of the aforementioned primary terrain combat forces into and out of action.[/quote]

I'm confused by this, when you talk about force projection aircraft, are you talking about transports? Escorts? Ground Attack Fighters? Are youp talking about bringing in Spectre gunships?

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

The military of the future is predicated upon many small moving parts that can be quickly re-organized into a variety of combat and non combat orientations.

I agree to an extent, thats why you need to have access to most of the components so that you can build specialized battlegroups. Which to me means that you need to have access to light and heavy armour, artillary, tactical aircraft etc.