[CaptainCrunch]

Dear Canada;

Since our defense forces are so poorly run and in such a rambshackled condition that a invasion by Rwanda would probably succeed, I thought I would write this letter to tell you what I would do if I was put in charge of our military.

1) Forcibly retire half of our officers with a rank of Colonel and above. Reduce our general officers by 3/4's. Hell we don't even have 100,000 men in uniform, what do we need 50 generals for. We need maybe 15. One army, one navy, and one aiforce to form a general staff, and 4 for each service.

2) Fire over half of the civilians involved in running the armed forces and replace them with the remaining administrative officers. We don't need a bearocracy(sp?) to run a small military.

3) Remove ourselves from UN peacekeeping missions unless they are commanded by Canadians.
a) We don't have the manpower to do it
B) We don't have the proper equipment to do it
c) We don't have the logistics chain to support it
d) We don't have the transportation to do it
e) Everytime we put our troops under foreign command we get screwed over

3) Accelerate the replacement of our aging search and rescue helicopters and SeaKings with proper helicopters made to do the jobs that they are tasked to. Its apparent that the new helicopters weren't selected for the mission that they are needed, but out of political consideration

4) Scrap two of the four Iroquois Class destroyers, place them as battle group Command and Control ships one in each ocean. Use the money saved from the mothballing to improve thier anti-air, anti-sub, and area control capabilities

5) Start looking for a proper replacement for the aging and obsolete CF-18s, see what the American's and Russians have in Surplus. If we go to Mig 31's so be it, if we go to F15 strike eagles so be it

6) Force the British to take back our Upholder subs until they're ready to pay for them to be upgraded to a proper working condition.

7) A defense force consisting of mortors, SUVs and Dirtbikes is not the way to go, in this day and age of advanced reconaissance these guys would be chewed to pieces. Retire our Leopard I C2s and petition the Americans to sell us some of thier older M1 abrahams or the Russians to sell us some of thier T-72s

8) Scrap the Styker armoured vehicle purchase. Wheeled Vehicles as a main battle tank are a stupid concept., whoever thought it was a good idea should be fired, and the salary savings put towards a war memorial dedicated to those that lost thier lives serving a country lead by idiots.

9) Upgrade our airbourne reconaissance capability, see if the American's would lease us some E3 sentries

10) Increase our long ranged artillary forces, triple the number of tube artillary pieces that we currently have, also invest in long ranged missile systems.

11) Increase our ground based mobile antiair vehicles by three.

12) Recreate special warfare services as a seperate service, bring back the airbourne units.

13) Fire our current pacifistic defense minister since his only purpose in life is to abuse the military unless he needs them for a public photo op

14) Pass into Law that the Minister of Defense has to have served in Uniform at the rank of Colonel or above.

15) Create a oversight committee to control the defense budget

16) Adapt a french foreign legion model that everyone from cook to priest to accountant has to be able to pick up a rifle and fight competantly. Officers have to pass yearly combat leadership exercises.

Currently our military is rudderless and strong leadership and money is required to fix it. I'm not talking about throwing open the vaults and tossing money at the problem. However in the wake of Adscam, the gun registry and other money wasting scandals we know that the cash is there. But I guess our government has nothing to worry about until young men and woman get screwed over and murdered by our government