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armed forces

We are witnessing the future of war on the battlefields of Ukraine

Published

1 year ago

12 minute read

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Richard Shimooka

We would be wise to learn the lessons the Ukrainians have fought so hard to learn

Historically, certain wars have stimulated the development of future defence thinking. The 1905 Russo-Japanese War previewed many features of the Great War a decade later, including the lethality of machine guns and howitzers, as well as the ubiquity of trench warfare. The 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab Neighbours was particularly influential for present wars—the Arab combatants’ use of new anti-tank guided missiles challenged many existing doctrines. This is not to say that all groups absorb the lessons directly or effectively. Many of the great powers, including Russia (who fought in the 1905 war), failed to adopt the lessons laid bare in that conflict and suffered grievous casualties in the first years of World War I as a result.

Approaching two years since the invasion, the war in Ukraine has the potential to have an outside impact on the future of war for a variety of reasons. Its timing comes as a number of new technologies have emerged, many of which have come from the civilian space. These include the proliferation of drones, low-cost satellites, and high bandwidth networking—all of which to date have had major effects on the outcome of the war.1 Over the past two years, both sides have adapted their doctrine and capabilities to reflect a cycle of learning and adaptation which gives a clearer understanding of where these technologies are headed.

Some of these trends are a validation of overriding trends in warfare, particularly around the collection and use of data afforded by networked systems. This is evident in the maturation of the “reconnaissance-strike” complexes in Russian and Ukrainian doctrine. Essentially, this is a streamlining of the process of identifying and attacking targets with precision fire, usually from some form of artillery. The United States and NATO have been pursuing a roughly similar—but much more advanced and all-encompassing—concept known as “multi-domain operations.” There are several common denominators between both doctrines, including the effort to expand detection over wider areas, as well as hastening the decision-making process which can improve the lethality of any weapon system attached to it. While it may not be able to employ traditional airpower, the use of long-range artillery (including the recently provided ATACMS missile system) shows the effectiveness of this approach to war. It also allows for a greater economy of force—a critical consideration for Ukraine due to its disadvantageous economic and strategic situation facing a state three times its size.

A key feature of progress in this area is its organic nature. Since the start of direct hostilities in 2014, Ukraine has done well to build up some of these connective capabilities adapting civilian systems for military purposes, such as the Starlink satellite network and apps for mobile devices. A large portion are ground-up approaches, developed even by military units to suit their particular operational needs. This was part of the total war approach that the Ukrainian government has instituted, often leveraging their emerging tech industries to develop new capabilities to fight against the Russian Federation. Many allies have similar efforts, but too often focus remains on a very centralized, top-down approach, which has led to substandard outcomes. Some balance between the two poles is likely ideal.

Another major consideration is the revolutionary impact of drones on air warfare. Traditional manned airpower, like F-16, Mig-29s, and even attack helicopters, remain as relevant as ever in Ukraine. While no side possesses true air superiority, some localized control has been established for short periods, resulting in potentially decisive consequences. However, the war has followed the trend of other recent wars with low-cost, attritable drones playing an important role. While this has been evident in the strike-reconnaissance doctrine discussed above, the so-called kamikaze loitering drones, such as the Russian Lancet and armed first-person view commercial drones, have played an important role as well.

One important aspect is what is known as the “mass” of these capabilities—not individually, but as a collective system or swarm of multiple individual units that can be lost without a major degradation of their lethality. At present, the link between traditional and emerging airpower domains is fairly disjointed over the battlefield in Ukraine, perhaps due to lingering service parochialism. But once combined they will only multiply each other’s lethality.

There is, however, one question concerning this new frontier of airpower’s ultimate influence in the future. It hinges significantly on the efficacy of new anti-drone systems, like those being developed by the United States Army and NATO allies. These potentially may blunt or even remove the deadly threat these UAVs pose to modern ground forces. But as of now they are in their infancy and very few are present in Ukraine today. If they are unable to make a major impact, then the future of conflict will be radically different.

Over the past thirty years, Canada, the United States, and its allies have often been able to deploy troops abroad to many stabilization and peacekeeping missions, in part due to the relatively benign threat environment they were entering. There was confidence that deployed soldiers would not incur significant casualties, which would arouse domestic opposition to the missions themselves. If the lethality of these unmanned drone systems remains unchecked, then, considering their greater ubiquity, it may drastically constrain the ability of Western countries to intervene and assert their muscle abroad, even in low-risk environments.

Finally, and perhaps most critically, is the need for an adaptive defence industrial base (another word for military supply chains) with the capacity to meet a wide need for war. The Russian Federation, for example, faced wide-ranging and intrusive sanctions from the start of the conflict that precluded them from obtaining a number of key resources for their war effort, ranging from raw materials to advanced technology components. They have been able to weather these challenges due to a combination of factors: a deliberate effort to develop an autarkic industrial base that started after 2014, a less technologically advanced military, and sanctions-avoiding policies such as smuggling and diversifying their foreign supplier base to more reliable allies.

While Western allies are unlikely to face the same restrictions in a potential future conflict on the scale that Russia has, in some ways they have greater challenges. These countries rely on much more sophisticated military capabilities that have levels of complexity far in excess of Russian systems. The sheer diversity in all of the raw materials inputs and various subcomponent providers, as well as the networks to make them all work, means that they are actually much easier to disrupt. Shades of this were evident during the initial months of the COVID-19 epidemic when the production of civilian goods was affected by shortages and supply chain disruptions.

Furthermore, underinvestment in the defence industrial base has left the capacity to ramp up production in most areas perilously slow, even two years after the conflict started.

More effort must be spent on creating a much more resilient industrial base that has the capacity to ramp up production to meet the needs of modern war. This requires significant front-end investment by governments in capacity building as no private firm is willing to spend money in that fashion without any guarantee of a return. At the same time, building capacity must be targeted and appropriate to the actual needs of Canada and its allies—taking lessons from Ukraine without understanding their context would be a mistake. That war and its material demands are unique to it.2 Discerning the actual needs and developing accordingly should be done through careful analysis and wargaming, much like the recent Center for Strategic International Studies analysis on U.S. missile needs in a potential war against China has done.

In the end, a clear trend that seems to bind all of these areas is the need for adaptability and critical thinking. Warfare is fast becoming more lethal and decisive. Modern armies must be able to respond to those changes as quickly as they occur—or better yet, lead those changes against their adversaries. That, for one, cannot occur in an organization that is continually starved for funding like the Canadian Armed Forces is today.

But it may also require a radical reorganization and re-think of how defence policy, strategy, operations, and doctrine are developed and implemented—not to mention personnel and industrial policy. As the conflict in Ukraine has laid bare, bringing in the brightest minds and giving them greater leeway to develop responses is key, as is harnessing the potential and building the capacity of domestic industrial bases. These are essential and urgent lessons we must learn. They have been hard won by the sacrifices of the Ukrainian people for our benefit. It would be a shame to waste them.

Richard Shimooka is a Hub contributing writer and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute who writes on defence policy.

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armed forces

Judge dismisses Canadian military personnel’s lawsuit against COVID shot mandate

Published on November 20, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan rejected a lawsuit from more than 300 past and current members of the Canadian military who lost their jobs or were put on leave for not taking the experimental, dangerous COVID shots.

A Canadian federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed on behalf of some 330 past and current members of the nation’s military who lost their jobs or were placed on leave for refusing the experimental COVID shots, because she alleged that their lawsuit lacked “evidence” that the jabs were harmful.

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) members had sought some $1.3 million in damages from the government for having their charter rights violated due to the military’s 2021 COVID mandates, according to their lawsuit.

In a November 13 ruling, Edmonton-based Associate Judge Catherine Coughlan ruled in favor of the Trudeau government, and thus military’s COVID jab mandate, to strike down the case. Coughlan remarked that the plaintiffs’ case lacked “material facts” along with “evidence” and was filled with “vexatious language.”

READ: Canadian father files $35 million lawsuit against Pfizer over son’s jab-related death

“The only indications of bad faith are found when the pleadings baldly assert that, among other claims, Canada failed to carry out safety and efficacy testing for the vaccines, and that the Directives were premature and ‘promoted the fraudulent use of the biologics’,” she wrote, overlooking reports of thousands of injuries due to the shots in Canada alone.

As a result of the lawsuit being tossed, all plaintiffs are now on the hook to pay some $5,040 out of pocket in legal costs.

As reported by LifeSiteNews in June, documents obtained by LifeSiteNews show that the number of jab injuries in the CAF rose over 800 percent in 2021, with the most being credited to Moderna’s experimental COVID shot.

The CAF members’ lawsuit was filed in June of 2023 and overall sought some $1 million in damages, along with an extra $350,000 in general damages. The lawsuit also had a condition that there be a declaration made that mandating the COVID shots for military members was a violation of their charter rights.

READ: Israeli boy featured in COVID vaccine campaign dies of heart attack at age 8

Under the CAF’s mandate, hundreds of military members were fired, or one could say, purged for not getting the COVID shots. This is in addition to the thousands of public servants fired for not agreeing to take the COVID shots.

The CAF eventually ended its COVID mandate in October 2022, which was months after the federal mandate was lifted, but members are still “strongly encouraged” to take the experimental shot.

The federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that its federal COVID shot workplace mandate would be dropped in June 2022, as would the mandate requiring domestic travelers have the shot to board planes and trains.

In November of 2023, a CAF member who spoke to LifeSiteNews under the condition of anonymity observed that the military considers members who refuse the COVID jab “a piece of garbage.”

READ: COVID shots have 200-times higher risk of brain clots than other jabs: new report

In March, LifeSiteNews reported on large personnel losses causing the CAF to consider dropping its remaining requirements altogether.

Although Canada has a Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) program, active members of the CAF, as well as veterans, are not eligible for the civilian program. According to Christensen, this leaves many COVID jab-injured CAF members and veterans with no recourse other than Veterans Affairs Canada.

COVID shot mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of Trudeau’s federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects, such as heart diseases, stroke, and death, including in children.

The shots also have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies. As a result, many Catholics and other Christians refused to take them.

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armed forces

From Batoche to Kandahar: Canada’s Sacrifices for Peace

Published on November 11, 2024

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Gerry Bowler

There is a grave on a riverbank near Batoche, Saskatchewan. It contains the remains of a soldier from Ontario who died in 1885 under General Middleton during the last battle of the Northwest Rebellion. It has been tended for almost 150 years by the Métis families whose ancestors had fought against him. His name was Gunner William Phillips and he was 19 years old.

Up a dirt road in the Boshof District of Free State, South Africa is a memorial garden in which are buried the 34 bodies of Canadians killed at the Battle of Paardeberg in 1900. They fell driving a Boer kommando off the heights where they had been dug in and inflicting severe casualties on the British forces below.  Private Zachary Richard Edmond Lewis of the Royal Canadian Regiment lies there. He was the son of Millicent Lewis and was 27 years old.

On April 22, 1915 the German army launched its first poison gas attack on Allied trenches near Ypres, Belgium during the First World War. When French troops on their flanks broke and ran, the 1st Canadian Division stood fast amid the chlorine cloud and repelled their attackers, suffering 2,000 casualties in the process. On the grave of Private Arthur Ernest Williams of the 8th Battalion are the words “Remember, He Who Yields His Life is a Soldier and a Man.” Private Williams was 16 years old.

When the Japanese invaded Hong Kong in December 1941, Canadian troops from the Winnipeg Grenadiers were there to resist them. Among them was Sergeant-Major J.R. Osborn whose men were surrounded and subject to grenade attacks. Osborn caught several of these and flung them back but when one could not be retrieved in time he threw himself on the grenade as it exploded trying to save his men. His body was never found after the battle but his name is inscribed on a monument in Sai Wan Bay War Cemetery.

In the hills south of Algiers is Dely Ibrahim Cemetery. This is where they buried the body of RCAF Pilot Officer John Michael Quinlan after the crash of his Wellington bomber in March, 1944. He was a movie-star handsome student from Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and my father’s best friend in the squadron. I carry his family name as my middle name as does my little grand-daughter.

The Kandahar Cenotaph in the Afghanistan Memorial Hall at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa honours those Canadians who died fighting Islamic terrorists. 158 stones are bearing the faces of the soldiers who were repatriated from where they fell and now are buried in graves in their home communities across the country. One of those stones commemorates Warrant Officer Gaétan Joseph Francis Maxime Roberge of the Royal 22nd Regiment who is buried in a cemetery in Sudbury. He was 45 when he was killed by a bomb. He left behind a wife, an 11-year-old daughter and twin 6-year-old girls.

On November 11, we pause to remember the 118,000 Canadian men and women who died fighting, among others, Fenian invaders, Islamic jihadis in Sudan, the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm, Benito Mussolini, and Imperial Japan, Nazi SS Panzer regiments, Chinese and North Korean forces, ethnic warlords in the Balkans, and the Taliban. They died in North Atlantic convoys, in French trenches, in primitive field hospitals, on beaches in Normandy, in the air over England, on frozen hills in Korea, in jungle POW camps, on peace-keeping duty in Cyprus, in the Medak Pocket in Croatia, and in the mountain passes of Afghanistan. We also remember the hundreds of thousands more who returned home alive, but mutilated, shattered in body and mind, the families deprived of sons, fathers, and brothers, and the communities who lost teachers, hockey players, volunteers, pastors, nurses, and neighbours.

We remember them because in honouring their memory we honour the values on which Canada was built. They did not die to create a Canadian empire, acquire foreign territory or satisfy some ruler’s grandiosity; they fought and suffered to protect parliamentary democracy, freedom of expression and religion, a tolerant society, and the right to live in peace.

On November 11, let us be clear that the prosperity and tranquility enjoyed today by North Americans, Europeans, South Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Filipinos, etc., etc., were purchased with the blood of heavily-armed men in military uniform, many of them with maple leaf patches on their shoulders. A country which is contemptuous towards its duty to maintain its armed forces, where schools forbid personnel in service dress from attending remembrance assemblies lest their presence makes children and parents “feel unsafe,” or where Forces chaplains are instructed to avoid religious language or symbols in services commemorating our dead, is a nation lost to its memories and unlikely to have much of a future.

KILLED IN ACTION. BELOVED DAUGHTER OF ANGUS & MARY MAUD MACDONALD,

Nursing Sister Katherine MacDonald, Canadian Army Nursing Service, May 19th 1918

 

HE WOULD GIVE HIS DINNER TO A HUNGRY DOG AND GO WITHOUT HIMSELF.

Gunner Charles Douglas Moore, Canadian Anti-Aircraft Battery, September 19th 1917

 

BREAK, DAY OF GOD, SWEET DAY OF PEACE, AND BID THE SHOUT OF WARRIORS CEASE.

Sergeant Wellesley Seymour Taylor, 14th Battalion, May 1st 1916

 

Gerry Bowler, historian, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

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