Not Your Grandfather's Staff College

Caption

Front gate to Fort Frontenac, Kingston, Ontario

Surrounded by limestone walls, on the shores of Lake Ontario, the Canadian Army Command and Staff College (CACSC) is a beautiful spot to come to work. Outside, the dominant features are the views of the Royal Military College of Canada and myriad cannons, howitzers, and mortars from conflicts gone by; notably, the last cannon deposited here was used during the Korean War. It is at once an atmosphere that is beautiful, powerful, and nostalgic. But it is not enough for these weapons to be incidental reminders of our past; history needs to be harnessed, inspiring continued growth and development.

The CACSC is a critical element of the Canadian Army’s education and training system, training junior officers, and occasionally NCMs, for positions of ever greater responsibility within our Army. Sometime in the past, a bright spark created the moniker “Foxhole U” denoting that this is where professional soldiers received advanced education and training in their craft. But we need to change. We need to move beyond the overly nostalgic idea that one can come to the hallowed halls here, undertake their training, and then go back to the field force as a professional. We need to redefine what the College is, and how it is used. This website aims to do just that.

There are lots of different military professional military education (PME) websites; most are not Canadian. Thus there is a real, and pressing, need for a Canadian Army voice in this growing community that addresses the reality of our context and our culture. We are not American, British, French, or Australian. Therefore we need a venue, our own venue, which allows our scholars and practitioners to express their thoughts on how to be a professional officer or NCO in the Canadian context. But this is just one of our needs.

We must move beyond the intellectual nostalgia that exists, and spark a new intellectual curiosity in our profession. We need to move beyond the archaic idea that professional study is the sole domain of the officer; we need to expand our methodologies and approaches to include our non-commissioned members, who have real contributions to make to our evolution as a whole. We need to promote and encourage dialogue, discourse, and debate on what it is to soldier in the post-Afghanistan era that we now serve in. We also need to move beyond the strict limitations of our own history without abandoning historical mindedness, and understand how history itself not so much confines us as it guides us in solving the problems of today and tomorrow. These are the goals that Line of Sight has been set to achieve.

Time is of the essence for every modern soldier. Therefore, it is our aim to facilitate the Informal PME (IPME), and Structured/Guided Self-Development (SGSD) of our people. The focus here is deliberately put on the junior officers and NCOs of the Canadian Army, in the belief that we can create an inviting, exciting, and worthy self-sustaining cycle where junior officers and NCOs who are exposed to well-run, well-led unit IMPE and SGSD, will in turn continue to educate and train their people in similar fashion. Good units and command teams are already doing this, without the benefit of a full suite of tools that might enable them. We are here to help. We also want to hear from outsiders, whose ideas, thoughts, and opinions, can all assist in our ongoing professional development. Notably, we really want to hear from the practitioners – those doing the business now, and those that did it in the past. This is not an academic website as much as it is a practitioner’s forum, where the needs of the contemporary operating environment can be immediately addressed and supported.

The fact that you are here, checking out this website, is one of the things that we want. Take the time to explore it, see what is available, and what is applicable to you. Think of your future and what might be useful as you move forward. Looking beyond that, engage dynamically with the material – read the articles and watch the videos that are here; think on the topics and look at them critically. Subsequently, use them to create your own material and share it with us. The form that these tools can take is limitless. Obviously, we are happy to receive written material, but we will consider publishing whatever media or tool you send to us; consider making your own web videos or presentations.

We are particularly interested in a couple of different areas. First, we are actively seeking new ideas – these can be questions that you believe need to be considered, and/or solutions to problems you are seeing. Second, send us your observations, insights, and lessons that you have either learned or re-learned. We want to get material from the field force in particular. Ideally, your “lessons” are coming from validation and repeated application, and are similarly usable by your fellow practitioners. Contribution to the broader community helps everyone succeed in their mission.

Last, we are interested in your informed opinions. Knowledgable comments on the tools that are available, why you think they are helpful, or why and how they need to be improved are of great value to this site. Comment on the thoughts of your fellow practitioners, why they might not be appropriate to all contexts, or how they facilitated broader application than might have been originally envisioned. We need to hear from numerous diverse experiences and backgrounds that inform our profession if we are to advance as an army; your voice is important.

What Line of Sight gives you as practitioners is more than anything a venue, where the content gets shaped by you. Being digital, it will be timelier than traditional forums and scholarly journals. It is by, and for, practitioners, at all rank levels, but also with room for commentary by others from beyond the Canadian Army – our joint services, other government departments, military allies and other partners, academia and the public - allied partners where divergent and differing perspectives can be harnessed to make all of us better.

As a result of our collective efforts, certain material will only be available to you here. Right now this includes things like The Canadian Staff Officer’s Handbook, Canadian Army war gaming rules and scenarios that can be applied to unit or schoolhouse activities, advice on establishing unit level IPME and SGSD plans, different guides and instructions, and Canadian Virtual Staff Rides (VSRs). The list is going to continue to grow, and you should check back frequently.

Line of Sight is your site; it is not a glorified book club only to be used by one section of our profession. It is intended to be used by all units and formations who are shaping the development of their junior officers and NCOs, with a heavy emphasis on promoting discussion and discourse internal to the Canadian Army. This is our profession, and we all have a role and responsibility to play in shaping the continued evolution of it and its culture. We need to be anticipating the future, with all of its myriad challenges, and aggressively working to prepare ourselves for it. Line of Sight provides the digital space to do that.

Your contributions are vital to shaping how this site, our profession, and our army, evolve. We need to update the cannons at Fort Frontenac and become far more than “your grand-father’s staff college.” Send us your thoughts.