Manning the Army's Afstan mission

What the Chief of the Land Staff faces:

...it is Leslie's job to find soldiers for each six-month rotation of the approximately 2,500 troops bound for Afghanistan.

"It gets more difficult as time goes on, not to send the same people back," says [executive director of the Conference of Defence Associations, retired colonel Alain] Pellerin.

At most, the army has a pool of 9,000 to 10,000 full-time soldiers as well as several thousand part-time reserves to draw from to staff Afghanistan.

The army is responsible for a minimum of 2,200 of the 2,500 that staff each rotation, says Pellerin.

Compounding the challenge is the fact the rate of soldiers leaving the army has risen to 12 per cent from eight per cent.

But Leslie must do more than find warm bodies to ship to Afghanistan with a rifle. He must build a contingent of soldiers that can shoot to kill, deliver aid, and negotiate the cultural divide of that country.

"It's small unit warfare. You've got the young officers and the senior NCOs that have to deal with the population and have to deal with issues that go much further than military issues," says Pellerin.

In Leslie, the soldiers on the ground have a leader who sets a good example on that front.

As he has risen through the ranks, Leslie has amassed degrees from Canadian universities as well as from the Harvard Business School, and was working on his PhD at Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont.

His military training has included a range of specialized instruction from tactics, combat intelligence to hand-to-hand combat.

After his 2003 stint as deputy commander of NATO forces in Kabul, he was awarded the Meritorious Service Cross...