The Canadian army is about to embark on a wholesale restructuring against the growing demands of troops and teams abroad and at home, says the main soldier of the country.
A military modernization team is currently studying the problem in the context of a shortage of up to 5,000 soldiers, Lieutenant General. Mike Wright told CBC News in a recent interview at the NATO training center in Adazi, Latvia.
“The army we have now is not the army we need for the future,” Wright said when asked if he was satisfied with the equipment of the troops in the deterrence mission of the Western Military Alliance in Eastern Europe.
He made his comments in a context of threats from the president of the United States, Donald Trump, to Annexar Canada through the economic force.
Several major Canadian commanders have recently faced questions about how long the country could resist if relations with Washington deteriorated even more and the United States chose a military option.
Lieutenant General. Mike Wright, speaking with Murray Brewster of CBC News while in the NATO training center in Latvia, says that the ‘army we have now is not the army we need for the future’.
Wright did not comment, apart from saying that ties with the US army have remained unchanged and strong despite political rhetoric.
“I’m not even imagining the unimaginable,” he said.
The Army faces a series of challenges, both abroad and in the country, and Canada has fought to form teams by force in Latvia, including modern weapons against the tank, air defense systems and counter-Drone technology. It currently has 47 capital projects on the march.
The absence of this team has been a great gap for soldiers, whose work is to defend Latvia, an NATO member, if Russia directs her military care to the Baltic region.
Some of the teams, considered critical of the light in the way Russia and Ukraine have developed, is still reaching the brigade more than a year after being declared an urgent operational requirement. Other existing equipment, such as Leopard 2A4 tanks, face a well -documented shortage of spare parts.
The past fall, the satellite images analyzed by Estonia Media pointed out that several bases on the Russian side of the border, which had been emptied of troops and equipment after the large -scale invasion of Ukraine, now show signs of life and vehicles, including tanks and long -range artillery.
“Am I happy with how we are prepared here? The answer is yes, but in reality we need to reach the point of what we have here in Latvia, we can feel that for the entire Canadian army,” Wright said. “So I’m really focused on that.”
The Canadian army currently has three main regular force infantry regiments, a series of tanks and artillery units, as well as 185 reserve units located in 86 cities throughout the country.
The modernization team, Wright said, is looking at everything and consulting with allies on how they have reviewed their armies to face modern threats that have emerged in the Ukraine War, including the use of drones loaded with explosives.
The defense policy of the liberal government promises, among other things, to buy the ballistic missiles of surface to the surface of the army and modern artillery, perhaps based on rockets, capacities that Canadian soldiers have not used.
The Minister of Defense, Bill Blair, also recently announced that the military would acquire what is known as mereousary ammunition, the types of drones became infamous online and were destroying Russian and Ukrainian armored vehicles.
“I really want to see what we need to do to focus on the war struggle, the lethality within the army and to provide the effects to NATO or any other place we need to be,” Wright said. “We are going to see everything in terms of how we are structured, from the top of the Army headquarters to the level of the unit.”
Wright did not want to presuppose how the review will be seen, but said he did not want to cut units.
Calls to reorganize the army have also come from outside the army. With the increasingly deployed soldiers in national operations, a committee from the House of the Commons studied whether to display soldiers to combat forest fires and other disasters is an appropriate use of resources.
Both deploying in Latvia and responding to national emergencies have extended the increasingly thin army.
In some cases, Wright said, the absence of equipment, personnel and structures has forced Canada to the awkward position of not fulfilling an objective established by NATO, namely, the ability to display a division headquarters in the field in the short term.
“There are capacities that NATO has assigned us, which we currently do not have the ability to meet,” he said. “We have the headquarters of the division in Canada, but those divisions are, frankly, of administrative and regional base.”
Despite Wright’s trust in force equipment in Latvia, there are still holes.
Of the three main urgent teams, originally ordered at the end of 2023, two are still waiting for delivery.
A modern anti -tank weapons system of $ 32.2 million, known as the Missile Anti “X” (Paxm), which would be supposed to arrive last summer, has not arrived and defense officials say that it is still under evaluation “and delivery cannot be confirmed until the test is finished.”
It is scheduled for a new air defense system to arrive, this spring, said Colonel Cédric Espualault, the commander of the Canadian Brigade in Latvia.
The counter-rone system is operational, he added. The past fall, the army in Latvia also received a series of light tactical vehicles, a small carrier of troops with out of the road, and radar systems of average portable range.
However, the army is still struggling with a shortage of spare parts for the 15 Leopard 2A4 tanks united to the brigade.
“We are working to find their solutions,” said Espualault, who added that the spare parts, which are manufactured in Europe, must be sent to Canada before they go back to the brigade in Latvia. “However, the army is now aware of the problem, and we are looking for options to rationalize that process and bring the pieces directly here.”
