Don't be so hard on yourself. Everything that military folk do is a grossly imperfect simulation of the real thing. Even the last real thing will bear little resemblance to the last real thing. We are all, to quote the immortal words of Mr. Springsteen, dancing in the dark.
There's solace in learning from those who went before us. We're not worse off then our predecessors in 1913 or 1938. Given easy access to PD/PME material, it's possible for peacetime soldiers to be better prepared than ever before. Nevertheless, when the time comes our learning curve will be steep.
"We train to fight with capabilities we don’t have, supported by units that don’t exist."
On my junior NCO course in the late 70s, we were assigned topics to teach to our fellow students ("mutuals"). One of my assigned topics was the organization of the infantry battalion in combat ... and the table of organization was 90% fiction in our case. We were an infantry "battalion" with not quite enough troops to fill out a company. Some of our equipment was Korean War-vintage (they still had a few Bren guns in the weapons lockup at my company armoury), and we even got some instruction on a 1950s "super bazooka" that I don't think had been in active service for at least 15 years. We were told all about the cool equipment we'd be getting soon ... like actual armoured personnel carriers to replace the slightly militarized Dodge pickup trucks we used for most purposes.
I'd fainly hoped that all that was an artifact of the first Trudeau government's noted aversion to spending money on military equipment, but it sounds like things really haven't improved much in all these years.
Well, the slightly miitarized Dodge pickups got replaced with slightly militarized Chevy pickups around 2004 or so, so there's that. If I'm not being cynical, there isn't much incentive for any government to splash cash on the CAF outside of specific capabilities like SOF, SAR, and our contribution to NORAD (which we've recently committed to upgrading at significant expense).
"Exercises too often featured 'bang, bang, you're dead' play-acting, with flags representing machine guns. By the late 1930's, 'clank-clank, I'm a tank' was the refrain in cavalry regiments, which at least had rid themselves of their horses. Militia units had no tanks or armoured cars, almost no anti-aircraft guns, and weaknesses in all types of their artillery... A General Staff appraisal in 1931 stated the obvious: 'The fighting power of existing units is steadily deteriorating, through increasing obsolescence in the arms, ammunition, and equipment now available.'"
One thing we couldn't complain about in the militia in the 1970s was the pay ... a few years before I joined, the pay got boosted significantly, so that four weeknights and one or two weekends added up to a for-the-time nice chunk of spending money. And then, in 77 or 78, DND cut back on allowed (paid) training nights for ORs and cut off the officers completely, so that in a weird throwback to Victorian militia days, our officers not only weren't being paid, but actually had to chip in as they could (and most of our junior officers were as poor as the ORs) to keep the regimental activities going. I don't remember the details exactly, but I think ORs were limited to two paid parades per month and there was effectively zero budget for live ammunition or blanks for training ... we went a few months yelling "Bang!" out in the boonies.
Don't be so hard on yourself. Everything that military folk do is a grossly imperfect simulation of the real thing. Even the last real thing will bear little resemblance to the last real thing. We are all, to quote the immortal words of Mr. Springsteen, dancing in the dark.
There's solace in learning from those who went before us. We're not worse off then our predecessors in 1913 or 1938. Given easy access to PD/PME material, it's possible for peacetime soldiers to be better prepared than ever before. Nevertheless, when the time comes our learning curve will be steep.
"We train to fight with capabilities we don’t have, supported by units that don’t exist."
On my junior NCO course in the late 70s, we were assigned topics to teach to our fellow students ("mutuals"). One of my assigned topics was the organization of the infantry battalion in combat ... and the table of organization was 90% fiction in our case. We were an infantry "battalion" with not quite enough troops to fill out a company. Some of our equipment was Korean War-vintage (they still had a few Bren guns in the weapons lockup at my company armoury), and we even got some instruction on a 1950s "super bazooka" that I don't think had been in active service for at least 15 years. We were told all about the cool equipment we'd be getting soon ... like actual armoured personnel carriers to replace the slightly militarized Dodge pickup trucks we used for most purposes.
I'd fainly hoped that all that was an artifact of the first Trudeau government's noted aversion to spending money on military equipment, but it sounds like things really haven't improved much in all these years.
Well, the slightly miitarized Dodge pickups got replaced with slightly militarized Chevy pickups around 2004 or so, so there's that. If I'm not being cynical, there isn't much incentive for any government to splash cash on the CAF outside of specific capabilities like SOF, SAR, and our contribution to NORAD (which we've recently committed to upgrading at significant expense).
"Exercises too often featured 'bang, bang, you're dead' play-acting, with flags representing machine guns. By the late 1930's, 'clank-clank, I'm a tank' was the refrain in cavalry regiments, which at least had rid themselves of their horses. Militia units had no tanks or armoured cars, almost no anti-aircraft guns, and weaknesses in all types of their artillery... A General Staff appraisal in 1931 stated the obvious: 'The fighting power of existing units is steadily deteriorating, through increasing obsolescence in the arms, ammunition, and equipment now available.'"
Granatstein, Canada's Army, 2nd Ed.
One thing we couldn't complain about in the militia in the 1970s was the pay ... a few years before I joined, the pay got boosted significantly, so that four weeknights and one or two weekends added up to a for-the-time nice chunk of spending money. And then, in 77 or 78, DND cut back on allowed (paid) training nights for ORs and cut off the officers completely, so that in a weird throwback to Victorian militia days, our officers not only weren't being paid, but actually had to chip in as they could (and most of our junior officers were as poor as the ORs) to keep the regimental activities going. I don't remember the details exactly, but I think ORs were limited to two paid parades per month and there was effectively zero budget for live ammunition or blanks for training ... we went a few months yelling "Bang!" out in the boonies.