Prime Minister Mark Carney recently walked a parked military glove while visiting Canadian and Allied troops in Latvia.
Everything was splashes and Polish, some covered in camouflage and wearing in the exhibition room, if not something threatening.
It was an impressive, apparently substantive exhibition, of combat power.
If I had only known what was probably needed to obtain those tanks, armored vehicles, obuses and other pieces of kit in the concrete vehicle park.
The Canadian battle group, the Core of the NATO Brigade in Latvia, has been suffering through a critical shortage, and in some cases paralyzing, of spare parts that have set aside the CBC News vehicles.
A recent internal session, a copy of which was obtained by CBC News, shows the rate of vehicles outside the road (Vor) for the Canadian contingent in the Baltic country has been “high” and even affected a recent training exercise.
The factors that force the army to park vehicles include “Canada’s supply chain problems, parts portfolio” and the new “compressed” training regime, which has seen troops complete its training of combined weapons in Latvia, instead of in Canada, said internal information.
Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking in Latvia on Tuesday, announced that Canada is extending its commitment to the tranquility of the operation for three more years. It is the largest abroad mission of the Canadian Armed Forces.
During a recent training at the brigade level, known as Streming Strike, which took place with other NATO allies this summer, the Canadian mechanized infantry company, Leopard Tank Squadron, the combat support units and the headquarters were considered ineffective (CBT IE) due to the rate out of the road, excessive information said.
The slide cover said that the affected equipment included armored vehicles lav 6 Light, Leopard 2A4 (the main battle tanks of approximately three decades), command and control vehicles and utilitarian vehicles, including trucks that tow how.
Due to the high rate of vehicles that were not available, “more than 150 personnel” were out of the battle (Lob) or could not participate in the training exercise. That represented more than 30 percent of Canadian staff involved in the drill, said the informative session.
The Canadian commander of the NATO Brigade acknowledged that there are problems with spare parts and used leopard tanks as an example.
“The spare parts contribute directly to the service capacity of the tanks that are here. Therefore, we have not completely square it,” said Colonel Kris Reeves.
He said that the Canadian contingent has the “priority of the pieces available in the Canadian system” and must be ready to fight at all times.
Reeves said he hopes that the problem will be resolved within a year, and that Defense Minister David McGuinty told him that “he is actively working on it.”
Supply system challenges
Part of the $ 9.3 billion in defense expenses announced this summer by the liberal government is intended to improve the stock of spare parts throughout the army.
During Lastonia’s visit last week, McGuinty acknowledged that they are trying to solve the problem as quickly as possible for the entire army.
“We went to look for the money needed to continue the necessary investments, and we are thinking about the question of how we buy the pieces, how we buy the necessary materials and how we continue quickly and together,” McGuinty said.
But it is not just about completing stock containers. The system itself needs a review.
The parts for the German manufactured leopard 2A4 come from Europe. But due to the military supply chain, those pieces must first go to Canada before being sent back to Europe for use in the brigade.
The absence of spare parts for the Leopard 2A4S has been a well -established and well -documented problem not only for Canada but for other allies that use the old fighting vehicle. It became an important, almost intractable problem, for Ukraine after the tanks donated by the allies broke or damaged in battle and the parties were almost impossible to find.
“This is not acceptable,” said retired Lieutenant and former Liberal Deputy Andrew Leslie.
Canadian troops have been deployed in Latvia for several years and the crisis in Eastern Europe was launched with the large -scale invasion of Ukraine in February of Russia in February 2022.
The European trip of Prime Minister Mark Carney ended after visiting Canadian troops in Latvia, where Canada leads an NATO mission. Carney announced that the presence of Canada’s NATO in Latvia will continue until 2029, with the aim of having a complete picture of 2,200 persistently deployed there at some point in 2026. But the researcher and professor of the Royal Military Military College, Christian Leuprecht.
“For now, for the sake of heaven, we should have discovered how to keep our troops in danger with the correct levels of equipment, with the correct levels of spare and ammunition, supplies,” said Leslie, former commander of the Canadian army.
Decades of sub -financing is partly guilty. But more recently, Leslie said that Trudeau’s plan to give more money to the military for the team, while forcing the defense department to cut elsewhere, the problem has exacerbated.
“You have to act together because it is not happening right now,” Leslie said.
Alan Williams, who was in charge of the purchasing branch of the Department of Defense in the early 2000s, also condemned the shortage and said there has been a lot of time to solve the problem.
He said that it has become customary in the department to reduce what is known as national acquisition financing, the pot of money that pays, among other things, inventories and replacement actions. During the impulse of the former conservative government to reduce the deficit within 2012-14, that line of the line received a huge blow and the liberals not completely restored.
The policy of buying equipment, but not reserving enough money for maintenance and repairs is a bad service for the public and troops, said Williams.
“It really bothers me, you know, because our boys deserve the best team properly maintained,” Williams said.
“Do not play. You don’t say that you are going to provide these things and then shorten them in money so they can’t deliver it. It is insulting and our boys and girls deserve much better.”
