And the Lord Strathcona Horse and their Coyote recce vehicles were much appreciated by the Brits with whom they were deployed in Kosovo and the Yanks in Afghanistan.
But it would be nice if they were to be deployed with camo that is relevant to the terrain in which they will be operating.
And the frigates are OK, except that they have to embark superannuated Sea King choppers and the new ones will not start to embark for another 4 years, after Sikorsky redesigns the chosen chopper and refits the frigates' chopper pads for the new birds.
We nickel and dime our military to death but occasionally we do something right.
And our people serve professionally and well in spite of the politicians.
But it has ever been thus. My grandfather was gassed at Vimy. He told me about the Ross rifle that was issued to the Canadians. It was a wonderful hunting rifle but totally unsuited to combat operations and it was ditched by the Canadians as soon as they could lay their hands on British Lee Enfield rifles. The purchase of the Ross was the old boy network looking after its own instead of the soldiers.
Then there were the Canadian new construction corvettes that were sent to sea with telephone poles where the guns ough to be until a Brit dockyard could equip them with guns.
We don't really deserve out soldiers.
Thank you for your replies.
Clive, there is a good book out there called "Misfire." This website (Amazon) gives a pretty good description of it.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684193590/qid=1103041804/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/104-0418311-6896764?v=glance&s=books
"Military historian Hallahan describes how, from the Revolutionary War to the present, the U.S. Army has resisted adopting appropriate and much-needed small arms. This unhappy situation is typified in his account of President Lincoln's struggle to introduce the breech-loading rifle into the Union Army despite the obstructionist tactics of his powerful chief of ordnance. The most interesting chapters deal with three armorers of genius and their campaigns to convince the Army to adopt their inventions: Hiram Maxim and his mechanically operated machine gun, John Browning and his gas-operated small arms and John Garand and his semiautomatic M1 rifle (which General Patton called the greatest battle implement ever devised)"
I continue to hope and pray that time will bring better leadership to you folks in Canada. You folks have a great country with a loser government!