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The Canadian military has embarked on a wide-ranging plan to turn its reserve soldiers into focused units trained and equipped to respond to a nightmarish array of domestic threats, including terrorist “dirty bomb” attacks, biological agent containment, Arctic catastrophes and natural disasters.
The creation of seven units within each region of the country — including unusual all-terrain vehicle (ATV) squadrons and perimeter security teams to cordon areas of potential devastation — prepares reserve soldiers for operations on the “domestic front” while freeing regular force soldiers to concentrate on foreign battlefields.
“There is a recognition, certainly within the military and we have heard the government say, that domestic security is the number one priority. A number of these conclusions come from the post-9/11 world we live in,” said Brigadier-General Jean Collin, commander of the army in Ontario, during an exclusive interview with the National Post.
“The reality is an army needs to train, an army needs to equip itself and an army needs to be ready.”
The remodelling of the reserves will see the development of specialist units in four of the military’s regional divisions — Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario and the West. The units will include perimeter security teams prepared to cordon off an area if there was an atomic detonation, nuclear accident or similar source of wide contamination and “Arctic response” groups that are trained and equipped to live and operate in the far north.
The changes highlight both a renewed focus on domestic security and the increased role of reservists.
They are part-time volunteer soldiers augmenting the ranks of full-time soldiers, who are referred to as the “regular” forces. The place of reserves in the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan was shown yesterday when one of three soldiers killed by a roadside bomb was a reservist from Ontario.
“Some of the stuff we are now asking the reservists to do is because we need them; because the regular force simply does not have sufficient people, sufficient resources, to do it on their own,” said Brig.-Gen. Collin.
“And the reservists have certainly demonstrated that they have the capability to do all this and more.”
Brig.-Gen. Collin, who has served in Bosnia and Afghanistan, has also been a special advisor to the Chief of the Defence Staff on homeland security issues. The military divides operations into two broad divisions: away missions, such as the action in Afghanistan, called “expeditionary operations,” and home missions, such as helping with floods in Winnipeg, called “domestic operations.”
“The lead — the main contributor — for expeditionary operation is the regular force. They form the core for expeditionary operations and are augmented by reservists,” Brig.-Gen. Collin said. “What we have now said is that for domestic operations, the core will actually be provided by the reserve force, augmented by the regular force. The reserves take a dominant role in domestic operations in the future, once they are properly equipped and trained to do so.”
