We Need Guns... Lots of Guns

The defence policies of the current government are really starting to bother me. Talking about re-naming JTF-2, Canada's Special Forces unit, to the 1st SS Regiment was one thing. Now they've gone and done something really crazy. Defence Minister O'Connor, with a big proud grin on his face, announced yesterday that Canada was purchasing several M-777 mobile 150mm howitzers from the British. That must sound like a bunch of gobbly gook to most, so I'll explain exactly what the Harper government is preparing to buy from the British: big guns.

Currently, the biggest "gun" Canada has for its artillery units are 105mm howitzers- long-barrelled cannons that fire huge high-explosive shells long distances, blowing up buildings or huge swathes of people in one blast. The 150mm howitzer will have a much better range and the shells it will fire have a much more explosive yield as the cannon can fire larger shells. The bigger the bomb, the more explosives you can cram into it.

The problem with this is that we don't need bigger bombs or bigger guns. 105mm howitzers are, indeed, out-dated weapons. But, from a modern military perspective, artillery is a largely out-dated concept as well. Gone are the days when armies assembled in huge formations on tabletop battlefields to blow the snot out of one another. "Gentleman's warfare" is a thing that passed at the end of the Korean War. The insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan have been informed by the successes of guerrilla warfare against the archaic militaries of the superpowers. The Vietnamese beat the Americans because they presented no real target for the US war machine to strike, instead spreading out their forces and engaging in hit-and-run attacks. The Taliban beat the Soviet Union through the same means.

An artillery piece, by its nature, is created with the intention to devastate an enemy position. As the infantry move up and engage the enemy in fortified positions, they call for artillery support. The cannons, kilometres away from the fighting, then rain hot death on the enemy bunker. But the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan do not have fortified positions. They do not have bunkers. And they do not have strong enough numbers to warrant the cost of the shells fired from the howitzer to kill them. They are not a standing army that occupies territory. They are, as the Harper government fails to understand, an insurgency that never stays in one place and requires a new way of thinking from the tactics of WWII.

Whose fault is it that these big guns were bought when the Department of National Defence could have bought equipment much more appropriate for the troops on the ground? Probably the officer corps within the Canadian Forces. There is still a very strong Cold War mentality within the officers of the prior generation, I found during my time in uniform. They were trained to fight an ultranationalist regime that could have seized power in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. When you've been raised with a certain set of preconceptions about how to do something, it's hard to learn a new way of doing it. But they're going to need to realize very quickly here that the Taliban are not Russians or Germans. They are not going to be so polite as to set their troops in nice rows for their howitzer shells to knock them down. What they are going to do, however, is use the addition of this mobile artillery to our arsenal as propaganda against the Coalition Forces. A way to get the local populace to turn against your occupation and back the insurgency is to make it easier for the insurgents to dehumanize you in the minds of the people. With the Canadian Army increasingly hiding away in armoured behemoths and touting city-destroying cannons, it will be very easy to paint the picture of Canada as conqueror.