By C.P. Champion, Ph.D., F.R.C.G.S.
Dr. Champion gave his remarks to the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve Force Academic Symposium (October 24-25, 2025) on Saturday, October 25 which, felicitously, was St. Crispin's Day.
Reservists Training in Petawawa, on a weekend in 2023.
IT SEEMS FAIR TO observe that each time the military has deployed, the Canadian Forces have been unprepared. The “ready” force has been unready, unable to undertake operations by itself. And that is as true today as at any time since the South African War, when there was no professional force. To an extent that is easily forgotten, the CAF depends on reserves and in particular the Army Reserve with its broad national footprint and (latent) capacity for social mobilization and recruitment. In the future we will likely see the same dependence.
Canadians who advocated for mobilization planning 30 years ago are surprised that it is being discussed again. However also in view – again – are restructuring, “operationalizing” “integrating” and “optimizing,” modernizing the “total force,” “Too many units,” overhead, the need for “more robust outputs” (but without inputs) and so on. We have been here before. And there is every reason to believe that the problems that have dogged us in the past will recur in the future.
My book Relentless Struggle was about the politics of restructuring. I wrote it after working in the Minister’s Office in 2015. Jason Kenney’s main worry was casualties on Operations and they did occur. His mandate from the Prime Minister was, in large part, media management in an election year. It was difficult. But in spite of great pressure, the short-term focus did not block long-term thinking. Thanks to stakeholder input, staff work, and the Minister’s commitment to it, we did get a Cabinet Memo through to expand the Primary Reserve. It was the first time in 20 years.
When Prime Minister Harper lost the 2015 election, CDS Jonathan Vance continued to implement the policy, much to our surprise. Trained strength in the ARes had declined to 13,944. With a damning 2016 Report from the Auditor General of Canada in hand, LGen Paul Wynnyk, CCA then VCDS, consulted senior retired reservists, and in 2016 the CAF launched Strengthening the Army Reserve (StAR), which empowered ARes units to recruit, train, and retain with full-time summer employment (FTSE) and the incentive of earning tuition and engaging in good activity, with real regular force support.
LGen Wynnyk took recruiting away from CMP, suspended the Strategic Intake Plan, and ordered the medics to expedite screening. He thus enabled the Army to take advantage of lingering public support and the ceremonial high of “Canada 150” and royal visits. In 2018 the army signed up 7,247 soldiers for FTSE.
Recruiting did not double but it could have. Wynnyk took on 4,226 new reservists in 2019 compared to the previous five-year average of 2,509. PRes trained strength was approaching 15,000 by the end of 2019.
StAR marked the Army’s first real effort at supporting the reserves. But much of the support was withdrawn after LGen Wynnyk retired. The trained effective establishment as of September 30 this year was 12,530.
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The author (at right) training on a Saturday morning, 2023.
ESPECIALLY HELPFUL TO THE Minister’s Office in 2015 was the lobby group Reserves 2000, recently rebranded as Reserves 2050. It was a direct result of their work that the Prime Minister lent his personal support to expanding the PRes. That was a rare occurrence of buy-in at the highest level.
I would like to thank some of the people behind Reserves 2000, and they are serious people with great responsibilities, for being here yesterday: Steve Letwin, Fred Mannix is in the room again today, Don Cranston is online. Thank you.
Over the years Reserves 2000 worked closely with CDS’s and Ministers, especially David Collenette, Art Eggleton, and Jason Kenney. Some dismissed the group as nostalgic retirees who wanted to “go back” to the Militia of 1939 or 1914. The majority of senior Regular officers, GOFO, whom I interviewed assured me there would never be mobilization.
In a 2013 report, “Canada’s Citizen Soldiers,” ex-Defence Minister David Pratt said mobilization “should simply be abandoned” as there would be no need in the “foreseeable future.” And he said “planning for a large Reserve Army as part of a program of national mobilization is a quixotic exercise.”
Similarly Peter Kasurak, author of two books about the army, dismissed mobilization planning as radical and misguided. “The main Militia pressure group” he wrote in A National Force, had a “radical” agenda whose “premise” was that the white paper adopted mobilization “as a national goal.” He said they were “mentally trapped in the 1940s ‘to which they were attempting to return.’” This was not based on research. But we heard similar putdowns today -- references to "rugby clubs," "Potemkin units," etc. which reflect a narrow Regular perspective (even when uttered by full-time Reservists) and these are seen throughout my book.
What the record actually shows is that Reserves 2000 insisted that the future is not foreseeable and mobilization planning has nothing to do with nostalgia. Rather it is “an expression of the maturity, self-confidence, resolve and responsibility of a nation,” as they wrote in 1999. “It provides a framework for a unified national effort … unity of purpose and unity of aim.”
Today we are learning the hard way. “Ukraine offers a cautionary tale … directly applicable to NATO countries,” write two authors from the Netherlands and Finland, in a recent U.S. Army War College paper. With the invasion, Ukraine’s “professional army perish[ed] on the front lines [and] with their loss, the training establishment also largely vanished.”
Without a large partially-trained Reserve within a CAF-wide plan, in a crisis you are forced, like Ukraine, to conscript from the “eligible civilian population with no previous military training.” As Peter Dawson wrote in 1989, “Contingency planning must therefore include plans for mobilization” based on partially-trained units. This was recognized in the mid-1930s when Canada rejected “a large standing force” and therefore “A large Militia capable of further expansion was an effective solution.”
Today, the Primary Reserve is positioned by its geographic spread, demographics, civilian networks, and latent power of attraction, to provide the framework for scalable mobilization. Col Renee Kidson showed in her presentation yesterday that the Australians are thinking through what “scalability” of a “latent” capacity means. It’s curious, then, that the entire issue of Canadian Military Journal, Fall 2024, was dedicated to the Reserve Force, but the words “mobilization” and “scalable” did not appear.
I am aware of few Canadian studies of lessons learned. Col Hoyt’s is a beginning. U.S. military literature is full of such studies. Maj. Todor Dossev’s 2021 Master’s thesis on Canadian “paradigms” was written for the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He observed “gaps in institutional knowledge” and found, “Surprisingly, none of the literature dealt with the Canadian decision to provide … an Infantry Brigade as the appropriate response to Korea,” for example. He concluded, “the CAF in general — and the Army specifically — seem poorly prepared to mobilize.”
The Inflection document says “the Army we have is not the Army we need” and calls for “a fundamental shift.” We are moving to a new structure.
But I wonder if we are getting some of this stuff backwards, forging ahead with restructuring again, before we have a plan? Shouldn’t the mobilization plan be created first – all of the stages from 1 to 4 scalably thought through and laid out – and then derive the structure from the plan?
The last time I spoke to DG Mobilization, a few weeks ago, they were still staffing up. Why are we restructuring first?
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The author on a weekend "Mech Famil' Exercise, Petawawa, 2022
RESERVES 2000 WAS FORMED in the mid-1990s to bring unity and professionalism to a disparate Militia lobby. What precipitated the crisis was a 1993 report for the Land Force Commander that recommended cutting Army Reserve units in half. There were “too many units” led by too many light colonels and not enough riflemen. Leaks from the report provoked a significant backlash. Mobilizing a national network of retired members and civilian supporters, Reserves 2000’s media outreach was extensive and catapulted them right into the Minister’s office and eventually the PMO.
Reserves 2000 began lobbying the government not to allow the army to cut units with no wider plan. Instead they urged the army to try something new: supporting Reserve units. The main thrust was that if the Army would plan and train for Stage 4, then the Force would be scalably ready for anything less – as Col Kidson said “at and below” national mobilization.
In so doing Reserves 2000 was in line with the 1994 White Paper. They convinced the Minister, Collenette, to create the Special Commission on Restructuring the Reserves: former Chief Justice Brian Dickson, LGen Charles Belzile (Ret.), and Prof. Jack Granatstein.
Recommendation 4 of their 1995 report urged that “A national mobilization plan be drafted and put in place with all dispatch.”
It wasn’t.
For the next 20 years Reserves 2000 lobbied the CAF to implement “ready ‘no-cost’ mobilization plans.” They believed it could be done by the right Colonel and a few Majors.
What has been mentioned today were only basic outlines, in the 1990s.
Reserves 2000 urged the CAF “to recognize the natural and proper role of the Reserves as the basis for mobilization in a stage four crisis.” Units would no longer be cut because the need would be recognized to grow their establishments and support them with staff, training, and equipment.
Stage 2 would be a Mobile Contingency Force, based on a brigade group, an independent battalion and theatre logistics group, totalling 13,000 pers, which could sustain itself in combat for 120 days. Notably, this would entail a very large pool of replacement personnel. Based on that need, Reserves 2000 proposed the Militia be increased to 45,000 peacetime strength. There would need to be more Reserve units on the ORBAT, not fewer.
However the Land Force, instead of increasing recruitment and training and building the strategic reserve, continued to drain away trained Reserve members as augmentees. In a strange continuation of Sir Sam Hughes’ 1914 “ad hoc plan,” the Land Force “stripped the Militia of many of its best soldiers.” As T.C. Willett put it very bluntly in 1990, and again in 1998, the practice was “bleeding Militia units virtually to death,” by filling Regular Force billets with class-B’s.
Next the army brought forward the sweeping Land Force Reserve Restructure (LFRR).
Dated 10 April 1999, Land Force Command moved to cut reserve units by one-third, mostly combat arms, without conducting a review of the army as a whole. In an apparent effort to ape the Abrams Doctrine for integrated readiness, they proposed to lodge Combat Service Support in Canada’s Militia units.
Units were told that if they fell below an arbitrary threshold they could be cut or grouped. Land Force planners consulted in-house reservists but they did not go outside the chain of command for advice. They soon found out – and the plan was withdrawn in haste.
To fill this gap in comprehensive planning, Reserves 2000 got BGen Ernie Beno, BGen Jim Hanson, and LCol John Selkirk, all retired, to develop a four-volume document titled “Canada’s Army of the Future — a New Concept.”
They had BGen Christopher Kirby (ret.), former Commandant of the Army Staff College, critique it before publication in 1999. Beno and Hanson were both former Directing Staff at the Canadian Forces College.
The title “Canada’s Army of the Future” emphasized that Reserves 2000 was looking ahead.
The concept was a flexible mobilization plan with Reserve roles and tasks at each stage; formation of an Army Corps at Stage 3 on paper. All told it would be about 190,000 personnel: 16,000 officers and 174,000 other ranks.
Peacetime trained Militia (ARes) strength would be increased to 45,000 over five years, the expanded structure “created and staffed in skeleton form.” Not only would reserve units not be cut or grouped, but “new units must be founded and tasked to perform new functions where presently no capability exists.”
Importantly, success would require a “separate and distinct [Reserve] chain of command to provide accountability, especially in budgeting.” They suggested a Reserve Division with its own MGen and protected base funding so the Class-A training budget could not be repeatedly garnished to cover CAF planning failures.
Reserves 2000’s impact seemed quite marked. Minister Eggleton announced that the “raison d’etre” of the Militia was mobilization first, augmentation second. In 2002, the CDS stated: “Within the Army, the Reserves (Militia) provide the framework for mobilization, the Army’s connection with Canadians, and augmentation.” In 2003 the Government accepted Commissioner John Fraser’s recommendation to “Prepare a national mobilization plan as the basis for restructuring” and thereby “assure reservists they have a role beyond augmentation for current operations.”
But once again, direction from above was not implemented. Senior officers told me they would love to have done mobilization planning but the Government did not provide the resources.
Whatever the reason, it all aligns with a “think small” tendency – scrambling to sustain an expeditionary force – what the Inflection describes aptly as “contribution warfare,” to the neglect of building the future force. That part they have right. But I would suggest they are wrong about the way they got there.
What LCol P.P.J. Lessard wrote in the Army Doctrine and Training Bulletin in 2002 remains true: “No regular force combat arms unit can currently deploy without sizeable reserve reinforcements.” Almost twenty-five years later, the Regular Force still cannot force generate its own people, or bayonets.
And yet somehow the Reserve Force is still to blame. On the one hand LCol Sébastien Campagna writes, “The role of the Reserve units cannot be limited to augmenting Regular Force units.” But on the other hand the solution offered is, “It must get rid of its mass mobilization structure.”
Presumably DG Mobilization will have something to say about that and I look forward to it!
Much of the published literature from the Army puts the blame on the Reserves. For example they are not sufficiently “operational.” One 2024 article “highlighted the difficulties of successful integration” in the Managed Readiness System “generating sets of operationally ready personnel at short notice.” Another said “meaningful improvements to the Army Reserve” could “better enable augmentation and integration.” (Canadian Army Journal, 2021). Planners want “integrated force generation,” “full time capability through part-time service,” or in the current Inflection, “force generating tactical augmentation and operational reinforcement for expeditionary operations.” Col Haynes says the ARes is “incapable of most short term tasks.”
To put it bluntly, much of this is barking up the wrong tree. By definition, most Reserves are not ready forces until they are mobilized for stage 3. Reservists do not exist for short-term operational outputs. They are a strategic reserve to provide long-term depth and resilience after the ready forces are in the fight or are casualties. If Reservists are integrated anywhere, it is in their home community, civilian workplace, church, political party, and sports club, where they have unique access and potential to expand by personal networks when required.
The Inflection’s reference to “numerous force generation models being trialled over the course of the last few decades” is incorrect. From the 1990s to 2015, the CAF rejected all proposals from Reserve SME’s, with the sole exception of the expansion policy of LGen Wynnyk, which was starting to work in 2018-19 but was cut off by lockdowns and, naturally, dropped as soon as a new VCDS and CCA were posted in.
(And the posting system by the way is the Achilles’ heel of the CAF, as exemplified even by the Inflection plan: I am told that almost everyone who made that plan and wrote it up has already been posted elsewhere…)
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The author (at left) training with the NDHQ Small Arms Team, Connaught Ranges, on a Saturday, 2022.
CULTURE CHANGE IN THE CAF is certainly required but I would submit that the shift we need is to a Mobilization Culture, with the Reserves as a central pillar. With World War III imminent or underway, this should be done not by 2040 as the Inflection says, but by 2026.
Geography and demography argue for a large footprint of 200 Army Reserve units and 100,000 reservists, because we are a nation of regions spread thin across 5,000 km, with hundreds of towns and cities, colleges and universities, trades schools, high schools, etc. where I wager most students and apprentices have never even heard of part-time service. That is why we must have a high number of units spread out far and wide. I think sometimes the Army is afraid of its own shadow.
Reserve units are the CAF’s living connection to society. We should be utilizing that organic relationship with geography and history much more to bridge the civil-military divide. Many Canadians have never even thought about the super-military power of the Reserve Force: its importance and potential over and above military utility; far more important than operational outputs du jour. The Reserves are not merely a military body. They are a massively underused civilian nation-building social capital, civic engagement, and citizenship resource which would underpin what Major Hoyt today called “social mobilization.”
Of course the Army Reserve is part of the army, but it should be the larger part and a transformative presence in politics and civil society with a public profile and networks of connections and political influence that could be, if properly used, quite beneficial to the CAF. The military currently has limited ability to inform and influence decision-making; there is the Canadian Military Journal. There is a GOFO liaison in PCO. Much more extensive and powerful is the existing Reserve system — but only if experienced, savvy, and principled Honorary Colonels are appointed. That resource has been undermined in recent years by the appointment of celebrities, persons with little experience or understanding of the Class-A reserve world (which is precisely what is required to do the job well), and persons with the confidence to go around the chain of command when necessary, as they are perfectly entitled to do. (Decision-making is seldom improved by “yes men.”) However there remains the latent potential to provide communications and educational contact, for example, with Members of Parliament and Senators and their staff.
We are reminded how mistaken was MGen Dan Loomis when he said in 1976 that in the Total Force, “The distinction between Regular and Militia would disappear.” Of course the distinction did not disappear because they are apples and oranges. The Regular Force is the full-time elite embodiment of the profession of arms, separated from civil society by nature, necessity, training, and vocation. Reservists are part-timers; high achieving civilians with commitments that are more important; with limited time but with the voluntary enthusiasm for the avocation that, with study and training, produces good officers and soldiers.
Instead of seeing the Reserves as an unreliable fast source of mini-regulars, the CAF must rediscover the concept of a Reserve as such, the “strategic reserves they were originally intended to be,” as Maj. Gen. Lewis Irwin, then Commandant of the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk and the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, put it in 2022.
While you will, of course, find recruits today who want a fulltime career as professionals, you could inspire tens of thousands more who would be interested in part-time if you provide training, mentoring, and a realistic second career track. There is a lot of focus this weekend on structure when what we need is recruiting, training, and retaining. Col. Hunt mentioned the Regular Force would be doing less training of Reservists. It’s funny that the one thing the Army does not want to do is train its own Reserve.
I fear that we may be heading back down the road of tinkering with structure as in the past.
The CAF has the opportunity to shift to a mobilization culture. Anything less, despite the best of intentions and restructuring, will truly lead us back to the past.