I would imagine that makes you more nimble out in the field. Able to pivot and not be reliant on orders from above to make decisions.

Yes, that’s a huge part of why, and it’s something we put a lot of emphasis on. Canadian soldiers aren’t taught to be machines. If the plan doesn’t fit the tactical reality on the ground, you adapt as needed. Officers are taught to trust the people under them to make the right call in the moment and not need to run every decision up the chain. Everyone trains to do the job above them. Everyone is expected to not only understand their role in the mission, but the broader context too; why are we doing this, what are we trying to achieve, what are the most important outcomes, etc.

So, in another comment in this thread I talked about how Canada is one of the best in the world at counterinsurgency because we’re experts at asymmetric warfare (since we usually have to fight like insurgents in order to be effective). But probably the most important lesson we’ve learned, even as a country that’s really good at this, is that there is basically a hard limit on how effective counterinsurgency can ever be from a military standpoint.

Basically, you cannot militarily suppress an insurgency. Military can play a role sometimes, but ultimately the only way to deal with an insurgent population is to remove their motivation. You have to get them to not want to fight. This lesson is actually better seen in Northern Ireland. It was diplomacy that ended the Troubles (for now), not military force.

The Romans figured this out two millenia ago. That’s why they made such a point of offering citizenship to peoples of conquered nations, and constantly expanded the definition of “Roman” to include those citizens. They knew that the key to absorbing new territory successfully was to make those people want to be Roman in their hearts.

To end a Canadian insurgency successfully, the Americans would have to figure out how to make the entirety of Canada happier being American. And unless they’re about to institute protections for women and minorities, abortion rights, public healthcare, a stronger federal minimum wage, gun safety laws, marginally better consumer and worker protections, and a few other things besides, I don’t think they’ve got any real hope of doing that within the next fifty years.

This, by the way, is exactly why our government should not be throwing any of those things by the wayside in our rush to “strengthen” Canada. The core of a nation’s strength is how much the people of that nation believe in it. And that belief comes from seeing how your life is better for being a part of that society. We need to focus on our Canadian identity, and building up those things that strengthen and protect the people of Canada. Businesses and billionaires don’t fight to protect a country; people do.

“This totally amazing new product that everyone will definitely want might turn into a total failure if everyone doesn’t actually want it. Clearly, this is your fault for not wanting it hard enough, and not our fault for shoving a totally unwanted product down everyone’s throats.”

As someone with an inside line on how the CAF operates, I want to note that none of this is new. Canada has studied asymmetric warfare for as long as Canada has studied warfare. Our forces always train around the assumption that their enemy will have superior numbers and equipment, and they learn how to systematically dismantle a superior opponent. Even when we had to reconfigure a lot of our doctrine for Afghanistan, because we found ourselves on the “superior” side of the asymmetric equation, we were able to adapt very quickly because we knew what to expect from our enemy, and we never stopped looking at everything the Taliban threw at us and thinking “How can we use this?”

Canada’s military has a reputation - in Canada, at any rate - for being slow to adapt, but the reality is that what we have is a slow procurement process. We’re not good at getting new equipment into the field quickly, at least on a large scale. But we are very, very good at getting new strategies and tactics into play quickly. None of this is reactive; we don’t wait until bad shit goes down before figuring this stuff out. We’re constantly looking at what’s happening out in the world and paying attention to how our tactics need to evolve to keep up. We’ve been learning a LOT from Ukraine, and we’ve been developing tactics and strategies that both mirror and build on everything the Ukranians are doing. This is basically a lot of what our soldiers do with their time.

When you study Canadian and US doctrines side by side you really see this difference. Americans always assume they’ll have access to resources like supporting fires, air support, long range weapon systems and so on. They always assume that in a firefight they’ll have superior numbers and firepower. Canadians assume that we won’t have those things, and then figure out strategies and tactics that allow you to be effective anyway. And the US are very hidebound in how they think about training and doctrine. They make changes from the top down, across their entire force. Canadians, on the other hand, institute doctrinal change from the bottom up. We give individual units freedom to experiment, develop new ideas, test things, and filter up what works. Literally, there are budgets set aside for “Fucking around”, more or less. Money that commanders can use to test new theories of combat. When you look at stuff like drone warfare and wonder what we’re doing about that, the answer is “Everything.” If there’s a crazy idea out there, there are at least three platoons in the CAF fucking around with that crazy idea to see if it’s worthwhile.

There’s nothing good about the idea of having to fight the US. Everything about this scenario sucks as much as it is possible for anything to suck. But the CAF have basically been preparing for a fight exactly like this for its entire existence. We’ve almost always been the underdog, and we’ve always punched far, far above our weight in spite of that.

History is littered with the graves of people who thought that Canadians wouldn’t do something “uncool.” And lets face it, poisoning water reservoirs and trashing the electrical grid are also going to hurt children.

I’m not advocating for any of this. I’m just predicting the inevitable if the US wants to take it that far.

America is also a conglomeration of 50 different states, with different climates, cultures, and accents. Not hard to just claim to be from Minnesota or something like that. Your average Texan won’t know the difference.

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Basically, yes. Military theorists have been talking about this for a while. The lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq really demonstrated that it takes a remarkably small percentage of population being actively willing to fight against you in order to make it functionally impossible to pacify a region.

And the thing about Afghanistan and Iraq is that neither of them shared one of the world’s longest land borders with the US. Trying to defeat an insurgency that can, whenever the fuck they want, strike at any part of your country, would be functionally impossible. That’s really the one part of We Stand on Guard that Brian K Vaughan got wrong. The real insurgents would be riding their pickups down to Austin and blowing up hospitals and schools.

After the war, Wotjek was moved to a zoo in Edinburgh. Several members of his former company moved there with him and visited regularly. There’s a statue to him now.