Interview by David Pugliese
Earlier this year Esprit de Corps magazine interviewed Canadian Army commander Lt.-Gen. Wayne Eyre about his views on the state of the land force, its procurement needs and where he sees the service moving in the future.
Eyre assumed the position of Commander of the Canadian Army in August 2019. He has served in a variety of command and staff appointments including command of 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, 2 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, 3rd Canadian Division and Joint Task Force West, Deputy Commanding General – Operations for XVIII (US) Airborne Corps, and as Commander Military Personnel Command. He was also the first non-American Deputy Commander of United Nations Command, the multinational force supporting the Republic of Korea since 1950. The Canadian Army is the largest element of the Canadian Armed Forces, consisting of 23,000 full-time soldiers in the Regular Force; 19,000 part-time soldiers in the Reserve Force; 5,300 Canadian Rangers who serve in sparsely settled northern, coastal and isolated areas of Canada; and 3,300 civilian employees who support the Army.
The following interview has been edited for length:
Esprit de Corps: What direction do you plan for the Canadian Army in the future?
Eyre: The world is going to be a dangerous place so the demands being placed on the Army aren’t going to go down. If anything it will increase. I think we have a confluence of stressors happening on the global stage. You have the resurgence of great power competition. That’s always dangerous. You’ve got global climate change as well as an acceleration in technological change. You’ve got changes in demographics and the rise of populism. So all of these are creating stressors in the security environment. We can’t really forecast what the future is going to bring other than it will be pretty dangerous and uncertain. But I don’t see the role of land power diminishing. That’s the philosophy I’ve been sharing. It’s really underpinning where I want to take the Army. I’m calling it the Army modernization strategy.
I want to carry on with a number of initiatives my predecessors put in place, really integrate them, tie them together and provide some priority. Right now one of our biggest limiting factors is one of resources and the most important one is people who can execute the change. That is where the prioritization comes in.
Esprit de Corps: What areas will be prioritized?
Eyre: In our modernization we’re going to look at a number of things. We’re going to look at readiness. So how do we get forces ready for operations? How do we increase the overall availability of forces? How do we train our forces? How do we bring in modern training techniques that really reflect some of the cutting edge learning procedures and systems out there?
The second piece is the Reserves. We are going to continue to strengthen the Army Reserves, continue to reinforce them and make sure they will be really able to provide operational capability to the Army as a whole?
The other areas are people, targeted investments, and concepts and capabilities. So do we need to take a look at how we’re selecting people for different positions?
The targeted investment piece examines what capital investments should we put our efforts into. Concepts and capabilities is to look at the question of how we fight in this new environment. How does the Army maneuver in the space of just below the level of violent conflict? We also need to take a look at our force structure to make sure we have that right. Then we will look at what capabilities we need to flesh out in terms of being able to operate in areas like the Arctic because I believe that is going to be of increasing importance for the Army.
Esprit de Corps: What’s your current assessment of the Army’s capabilities for the Arctic?
Eyre: We have five challenges in this area. How do we get ourselves up there? How do we sustain ourselves? How do we move when we are there? How do we survive? And the final challenge is how do we fight? So where are we in all of this? Well, we have a ways to go. We’re not going to be able to get up there by ourselves so we need to work with the Air Force on that. In terms of tactical mobility we’re working on that. One of the equipment projects we have on the books is our Domestic Arctic Mobility Enhancement program, which is really a Bv-206 replacement. The survive piece concerns me. It’s really about the longer term survive and sustain up there. Our infrastructure density in the Arctic is very very low. What happens if we have to respond to something that is in between infrastructure nodes? These are the nuts we need to crack. The basic soldier skills are relatively easy. That’s stuff we have continued to focus on and at the soldier level I think we’re okay. It’s the higher-level concepts that support everything around that which need a lot of work.
Esprit de Corps: Are there technologies that you are focused on or where you want industry to focus on to better support the Army?
Eyre: We want to harvest ideas from industry. For instance, how would be get a land force up to an area that has no infrastructure? This is maybe where we refocus our parachute capability, much as it was the same as in the 1950s and 1960s. So our ability to rapidly get boots on the ground in the Arctic could be by parachute. So these are the types of ideas we are exploring.
Esprit de Corps: Are there particular areas of interest when it comes to procurement for the Army?
Eyre: As part of the modernization strategy I want to lay out project by project and by priority. We are going to be a LAV-based Army for the next two decades. So the question now is how do we protect these LAVs? My top priority is our C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) projects. How do we ensure they can take advantage of the huge amount of data that is out there and connect them to be able to operate in this modern environment.
The second priority I would say would be ground-based air defence. We see the evolving threat from drones, from rockets, and other forms of indirect fire. We have to be able to protect ourselves. We need to look at Joint Fires Modernization. That’s somewhat tied to the C4ISR piece so we have to look at how we tap into the joint fires available, not only from the Air Force but from our coalition allies. We need to ensure we are interoperable and able to access the range of capabilities that are available.
Another priority is figuring out how we sustain ourselves. So this is where trucks come in, and projects such as the Logistics Vehicle Modernization, as well as some of combat support capabilities such as modernizing our bridge and gap capability. There’s probably another 15 or so projects that would be just below this list I just gave you.
Esprit de Corps: Many of these projects are farther out in terms of when they are expected to materialize. Can you advance some of these procurement programs?
Eyre: We are pushing these ones as fast as we can and as fast as the investment portfolio allows for. These ones definitely have my attention.
Esprit de Corps: Have you made any decisions on the requirements for ground-based air defence? For instance, will the system be outfitted on a LAV chassis?
Eyre: We haven’t got that far into it. We know there will be a number of components that will be key, particularly the fire direction centre that can tap into all of the different sensors out there. That would gather information from not just our own sensors but joint and allied ones as well. Such a centre would also tap into other shooters. Conceivably one of our radars could pick up a target and that information goes through the fire direction centre and is connected to a navy asset which then fires a navy missile. That’s where we really want to go. We want to have the brains of this piece right. That’s where the C4ISR piece comes in. The network that will be so
important.
Esprit de Corps: Can you provide examples of where you want to go with C4ISR?
Eyre: Interoperability is a huge piece. So as part of the Australia-Canada-Britain-US-New Zealand (alliance), we have some pretty intense Army interoperability forums where we sit down a number of times each year and talk about the specifications needed to drive the technical interoperability. So we are talking about the ability to put a battalion in each other’s brigades, a brigade in each other’s divisions and seamlessly share data back and forth. That is what we’re aiming for. Our projects will have a huge part of that. The other challenge with the C4ISR piece is changing the way we procure. So the spiral procurement – fielding a little bit of the capability at a time because technology is advancing so fast. We need to be agile to get these capabilities in the hands of our soldiers so what we’re fielding is not absolute.
Esprit de Corps: But won’t you end up with an Army equipped with a variety of various systems doing the same role?
Eyre: I told my staff I am fine with an asymmetric Army that is constantly fielding updated versions of equipment so we can keep that technological edge. If we fail, we fail and we revert back to the old systems. We have to take some risk because our potential adversaries are doing it. They are rapidly fielding new technologies. What we need to have is a culture of continuous change. We introduce new capabilities and learn very rapidly how to incorporate them and employ them.
Esprit de Corps: Most big organizations have an aversion to risk. Won’t the challenge be that others might not feel the same way about accepting risk?
Eyre: But if we don’t we’ll be irrelevant. We’re not the only ones wrestling with this. Every military in the west is facing this challenge.
Esprit de Corps: What is your assessment of the current status of the Army procurement system?
Eyre: I take a look at the projects currently in the pipe and I think back to times in the 1990s. Some of my predecessors would be somewhat jealous to see the number of projects now coming through the system. That being said, no Army in history has ever had all the equipment and all of the capabilities that it wanted, or in some cases, needed. But relative to certain periods of our history I think we’re doing fairly well. Could we do better? Absolutely.
Esprit de Corps: I’m always puzzled when I see defence analysts claiming the Army is in dire straits when it now operates a wide range of modern equipment, including some of the most modern Leopard tanks, the new TAPVs and recently delivered upgraded LAVs. The Army, when it comes to equipment, seems to be in pretty good condition.
Eyre: Yes, but you could probably notice the Canadian proclivity to look at our navels and beat ourselves up.
Interview by David Pugliese
Part 2 of the interview with Lt.-Gen. Wayne Eyre will
appear in next month’s issue of Esprit de Corps.
