Armour from The Armorer

John Donovan, our longest-suffering ally south of the border (from back before the days when I'd even thought of creating The Torch), has put up a series of posts that touch upon Canadian use of armour in southern Afghanistan. He's got some lovely pictures to look at (tank pr0n!).

But I found his discussion with Dr. Sean Maloney to be of particular interest, even though it's less about Mechanical Land Leviathans of Death, and more about the "dynamic tension" (as John puts it) between those who rock the boat, and those who captain the boat.

Commenter Paul said:

During the Vietnam War War of Glorious Liberation, the U.S. Air Force came up with the concept of Project CHECO -- Contemporary Historical Evaluation of Combat Operations. They assigned teams of historians to work with the Air Force combat units in Southeast Asia, and tasked them to prepare historical monographs identifying what worked and what didn't work.

Of course, such historical honesty made them extremely unpopular with promotion-seeking commanders, and the program withered fairly quickly.

I've read some of Sean's work - and I can't believe he hasn't fallen afoul of Canada's politically correct senior leadership. Either he's got one heckuva powerful mentor - or there's still enough ingrained honesty in the Canadian Defence Establishment to allow him to do his job despite his candor. Good on you, Sean! Keep up the good work and let the chips fall where they may!

To which Sean responded:

Thanx, Paul:

Oh yeah, I've run afoul all right. Challenging the whole Lester B. Pearson-Canada-invented -UN peacekeeping orthodoxy using their own records to explain what was really going on during the Cold War; demonstrating how nucs were GOOD for Canada-and we liked having them despite what two generations of historians had been telling everybody else....that kind of thing. Now its our phony, dangerous, and wasteful foreign aid policy that's next on my list.... But that's in my spare time. Because of the amount of knowledge I have built up on Afghanistan over the years, I am morally obligated to assist with the lessons learned process and continuity process, especially when our soldiers' lives are at stake in that incredibly lethal place. I also believe in putting my ass on the line to in order to understand the operational environment so I can constantly improve my knowledge and thus do my job better, and not sit at home in my safe office and pass judgments from afar. Some people don't like that for some reason, BF'EITCTAJ.

Cheers!

-Sean

Personally, I'd suggest that the orthodoxy isn't as orthodox in the CF anymore. Oh, don't get me wrong: you'll still have a pile of sacred cows that can't be touched by just anybody. But the irreverence of Hillier's influence is still being felt. It had a profound effect on the culture of the CF.

The trick will be to see if that culture continues to evolve in the right direction, or if the Hillier years were just a blip...