Posts Tagged ‘National Defence’

The single point of failure. This short phrase hides an idea powerful enough to make a special operations aviator professionally uncomfortable. The phrase makes them tense. It makes them speak of dangerous things. Up in the sky, there are few places to hide. And while commanders do their best to make plans resilient enough to avoid any single point of failure, it’s a rare plan that survives first contact with the enemy and recent military history shows that occasionally even the most elite forces can become undone. It takes just a single piece of bad luck—a dust storm that blinds and disorients, [...]

They don’t much like the James Bond characterization, these undercover Canadian soldiers. In fact, they reject it. But then you kind of expect that they would. If they were the kind of people to revel in the drama of covert operations, well, they probably wouldn’t be in the Canadian Special Operations Regiment (CSOR), discreetly deployed to Jamaica to help train a special operations unit of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF). Regardless, the cloak-and-dagger aspect can’t be ignored: a plain synopsis of what they do sounds like it’s lifted straight from a Hollywood script. If you’ve ever seen a movie where fit-looking westerners dash across [...]

What follows are brief snapshots from a week in the life of one small Canadian outpost in Afghanistan—Haji Beach—in April 2008. It is a story of roads closed and being built, of enemy ambushes and the confusion and daily frustrations for soldiers at the sharp end of a war that’s very hard to see clearly, even when you’re right in the middle of it. The Enemy is Real In a random grape field in Panjwai, Afghanistan, early last spring, two Canadian patrols linked up and hunkered down as the war revealed itself on every side. About a kilometre northwest, an enemy force attacked [...]