Canada's Mechanized Infantry: The Evolution of a Combat Arm, 1920–2012
By Peter Kasurak - October 15, 2021
Reading Time: 4 min
Canada’s Mechanized Infantry explores the largely ignored development of the infantry in the Canadian Army after the First World War and exposes the intellectual and cultural barriers it faced as it introduced armoured vehicles and vehicle-mounted weapons. Peter Kasurak demonstrates how Canadian forces, building on British Army experiments from the 1920s, implemented successful infantry vehicles and doctrine to ultimately further their military goals during the Second World War. These advancements were abandoned in the postwar period, however, even as the army quickly developed mechanized infantry in response to the possibility of a nuclear war in Europe. Progress was slowed by a top-down culture and an unwillingness to abandon conventional thinking on the primacy of foot infantry and regimental organization. Post-Afghanistan, the army has yet to resolve these central issues.
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Canada's Mechanized Infantry: The Evolution of a Combat Arm
From the conclusion:
"The Canadian Army’s experience in developing and fielding mechanized infantry from the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century was apparently a success. It had – albeit with some difficulty – established institutions that generated doctrine for both mechanized warfare and nuclear mechanized warfare. The army’s doctrine kept pace with that of Britain and the United States, its major allies, and was occasionally superior to that of the two Great Powers. The Canadian Army had quickly converted its infantry brigade group in Europe to a mechanized brigade group armed with tactical nuclear weapons and furnished with an integrated logistic battalion to provide support. In comparison with NATO allies, 4 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group had performed well. When the Cold War ended, Canadian mechanized infantry transitioned to wheeled vehicles, ostensibly with few problems, and was able to deply to a number of stability operations and to the war in Afghanistan. The performance of both tropps and vehicles in deployment was good.
Yet if one looks beneath the surface of these achievements, evidence of significant problems emerges. The army faced a set of complex problems in developing mechanized infantry. TO begin with, it had to determine what mechanization was for. Was it to transport heavy equipment? To transport soldiers? To protect them? To provide them with additional firepower? Or to do all or some of these things together? Once these questions were answered, the more mundane tasks of designing or acquiring equipment and training troops needed to be accomplished. All of this was made more difficult because the major impetus for complete mechanization was nuclear warfare, which complicated tactics and could be practiced only in games and exercise of varying degrees of reality. In fact, the Canadian Army has had difficulty in answering basic questions about mechanization and, at key times, has gotten the wrong answer. The reason lies in the institution itself.”
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