Canadian soldiers who joined a major Arctic warfare exercise in Alaska last winter were often unprepared and at times badly equipped for the cold they faced, according to internal Department of National Defence evaluations obtained by CBC News, and a separate American assessment found that U.S. units fared little better.
More than 400 members of the 3rd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, took part in Exercise Global Response in February, folded into a much larger U.S. Army brigade at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center north of Fairbanks, in temperatures that drop below 30 degrees below zero Celsius. The findings carry weight because the Carney government has committed the military to an almost year-round presence in the Far North.
“Throughout their stay in the waiting area the Coy consistently demonstrated a lack of preparations needed to live in Arctic conditions,” said one undated Canadian evaluation, using the shorthand for company. It faulted a recent initiative letting the regiment buy off-the-shelf civilian gear to supplement military kit: “This was evident when observing soldiers attempting to remedy issues with a Coleman stove and lanterns or watching them attempt to set up a 10-man tent.” Among some units, the report found a “lack of emphasis on basic winter soldiering skills.”
Lt. Col. Aaron Corey, the battalion commander, disputed that. His troops spent a year training for winter conditions before deploying, he said, and “every soldier to go up on that exercise had to be a cold weather operator qualified.” Leaders received cold-weather training and Arctic operations advisers were “sprinkled into the battalion,” part of an effort to return to “a level of winter warfare, or Arctic warfare, that we haven’t seen in a few years.”
As many as 30 soldiers suffered some level of frostbite, a figure the Ottawa Citizen reported earlier; even so, the battalion captured its training objectives. Colonel Corey said the real lesson was to slow down. “We had the enemy and the weather, which was a greater enemy in most cases,” he said. Troops needed warming cycles, the gear they carried was heavier, and more energy went into fighting through “the muskeg or up the mountains.”
The evaluators found gaps beyond the infantry. The medics believed they were only standing by for real casualties rather than taking part in the training scenario, one review prepared for the health services branch said, and on three occasions some were seen making long calls on personal phones, giving away their positions to the enemy. The medical team received a four-hour seminar on Arctic medicine rather than a five-day U.S.-led course at the Arctic medicine simulation center. Chief Warrant Officer Robert McSpadden, the regimental sergeant major, called the medics outstanding, particularly on the frostbite cases, and said he could not speak to the training decisions.
Technology kept failing in the cold. Drone batteries drained so fast that some aircraft had only 10 minutes of flying time, and communications broke down because of the absence of satellites that far north.
The American units had parallel troubles, according to the separate U.S. assessment, prepared by the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies and published online. It pointed to a lack of snow-clearing equipment and a shortage of fuel to keep engines running so they would not freeze.
Retired Col. Pierre Leblanc, who held command posts in the Far North in the late 1990s, said it has been nearly a generation since Canadian soldiers operated there in large numbers, and many skills will have to be relearned. “It’s a different world,” he said. During his tenure, a repair crew sent for a few hours’ work at a North Warning System radar site ended up stuck there for 21 days. Today’s satellite-tethered military needs a back-to-basics streak in a place where technology cannot be trusted, he said. “If you rely too much on it, you’re going to very quickly have a problem. Have to be able to work with very, very basic systems.”
Canada once had those skills in depth, said Rob Huebert, an Arctic defense expert at the University of Calgary. In February 1950, more than 5,000 Canadian and American troops tested how combined forces could move, fight and sustain themselves along the Alaska Highway in Exercise Sweetbriar, and the Canadian Airborne Regiment was practicing parachute assaults at Coral Harbour and Inuvik into the 1970s. Mr. Huebert credited the Carney government’s defense spending for more winter exercises but said they remain small-scale: “You can’t just simply say, we know how to do this with small units and we can magically do it with big units.”
Mr. Huebert saved his sharpest words for Walt Natynczyk, a retired general and former chief of the Defence Staff, who once quipped that if the Russians invaded Canada’s Arctic, the first thing he would do is launch a search-and-rescue operation. “The Russians know how to fight in the North,” Mr. Huebert said. “We would be much better off if General Natynczyk, at that time, had actually said there are growing signs that the Russians are not the friends that we thought they were.”