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Lieutenant-Colonel Marc Kieley: This is really going to be the primary focus for the Canadian Army for the next five years at a minimum and it’s really going to eat up 75 to 80% of our deployable capacity. So it is like “The Mission” full stop.

Captain Adam Orton: Hi, I'm Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. The Canadian Army has a new mission: lead a multinational brigade in Latvia to act as a deterrence and defence in case of attack. We're going to be asking questions about what we're doing and how we're going to do it, and what impact it will have on the troops. Lieutenant-Colonel Marc Kieley is part of the planning team here at Army headquarters, and he's going to give us the details.

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Welcome to the podcast!

LCol Kieley: Hey, Adam. Great to be here!

Capt Orton: Alright. So we're in Latvia with the battlegroup right now under Operation REASSURANCE doing training and deterrence. We're scaling up. What's changing?

LCol Kieley: So right now we've got the Canadian led multinational battle group. It's about 1200 declared NATO soldiers, you know, about 40% of that is Canadian Army. What's changing though, is right now that Battle Group is part of the Latvian Mechanized Infantry Brigade, the primary army element of the Latvian Land Force.

Capt Orton: So we're integrated into them?

LCol Kieley: We are. It's a Canadian lieutenant-colonel working for a Latvian colonel who's responding to a Danish two star general at Multinational Division North.

Capt Orton: That sounds complicated.

LCol Kieley: It is very complicated, but it makes for great meetings because you get to meet lots of interesting people from all over Europe, and the world. But what's changing is NATO has asked us to actually stand up a whole new brigade, so we're going to pull that battle group out of the Latvian brigade and we're going to use it as the cornerstone of a new multinational brigade, so that they'll be two brigades. The line for the deterrence and defense, if necessary, of Latvia.

Capt Orton: Ok so how many troops does that come to?

LCol Kieley: So a brigade will expand from about 750 Canadian Army positions to up to 1600 Canadian Army positions, and on top of that the Canadian Army is supporting some theater assets such as the National Support Element, the National Command Element and a few other smaller pieces such as theater signals. So we’re looking at close to tripling the number of Canadian Army personnel on Op REASSURANCE.

Capt Orton: Why are we doing this expansion? Like, what's the purpose of adding these extra soldiers?

LCol Kieley: So you know, I think many of your listeners will remember that we started the eFP Battlegroup in response to Russia's first invasion of Ukraine when they seized Crimea. Right. So we had a smaller series of land missions, mostly in Poland, the Land Task Force for Op REASSURANCE. Once, you know, we kind of went from about 2015 to 2016 rotating troops through Poland. And then in 2017, we took the lead of the eFP Battlegroup, the enhanced Forward Presence Battlegroup in Latvia, which many of our soldiers and officers have deployed over the last year. So immediately after the second Russian invasion, the full scale invasion of Ukraine, NATO doubled the size of the eFP program. So we went from four battlegroups to eight battlegroups. So we added an additional four and that kicked off a round of planning and discussions in NATO, both on the military side and the political side about what was the required footprint in Europe, not only to deter, which had been the mission since 2017 but also to be able to defend if necessary, should there be any Russian incursion, either into the Baltics or really any of NATO's eastern front countries.

Capt Orton: And are we adding any capabilities with this? Is anything new coming in to help out, such as new tools?

LCol Kieley: There's quite a few. New capabilities coming on board, you know, some immediate decisions were taken. You know, there's been some fantastic work by maintainers all across the Canadian Army getting our Leopard 2 squadron out the door, so that’s an immediate top-up to the current battlegroup as an interim measure. Over the next year, we're going to be shipping, you know, hundreds of pieces of major equipment, vehicles and sea containers over to Latvia to start expanding our footprint. More command and control vehicles, more sustainment vehicles, more intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. Separately, we're actually pursuing about $1 billion worth of hard capabilities. Investments specifically for the Canadian Army in the Op REASSURANCE mission that will be, you know, arriving between 2024 and 2026 to reinforce our capabilities on the ground.

Capt Orton: So with all of this going in, what, what is that extra funding going towards?

LCol Kieley: So many of the members of the Canadian Army have already heard about some of the urgent operational requirements they were actually announced around March 2022, so about a month after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and those were still for the battlegroup. So the government committed to some additional funds for the Canadian Armed Forces writ large and part of the army’s slice of that was anti tank guided missiles, counter uncrewed aerial systems - counter UAS, as many know it as, as well as our first real set of man portable or soldier portable air defence systems, so SPADS, a short range air defence system that you can carry and and move around by foot, but those were still up just for the battlegroup and a couple months later the government announced that they are going to continue being the framework nation in Latvia as we expanded from a battlegroup to a brigade. So as part of the planning for that we went back to the government and said “Ok, well, now we're going to need to in some cases double the scale of those UORs to match the scale going from a battlegroup to a brigade.” We've also asked for some additional new capabilities that are really tied to in support of the operations mission. So some of the things that are coming down over the next few years pre-deployed light tactical vehicles, so we can fly light forces over to Latvia and they'll have a platform to move around on. We're taking some of the armored heavy support vehicle systems, the AHSVSs that our soldiers used initially in Afghanistan.

Capt Orton: Pretty cool trucks too.

LCol Kieley: They are the big transformer looking trucks, they've been in preservation. So imagine like boat wrap, you see the blue plastic over a boat they've basically been in that state in Montreal for the past few years. There's a few in Latvia, there's a few in the divisions, but we're going through the entire preserved fleet and doing a repair and overhaul and sending them forward to Latvia. So we have additional heavy logistics capacity. We're also investing in some new capabilities like loitering munitions. So hopefully in 2025 we'll be able to take some of the training and expertise we developed with small UAVs in the Canadian Army, think like the Raven, and convert the training and experience that soldiers in the Artillery and Armored Corps have into loitering munition detachments would be an awesome capability for us.

Capt Orton: Would you like to explain a little bit what loitering munitions are, for people who may not know?

LCol Kieley: So a loitering munition is a soldier controlled one way uncrewed aerial vehicle that has a warhead, either anti personnel or or anti-tank in the front of it. They've become a significant feature of Russia's tactics in Ukraine and they're targeting them on Ukrainian key sites, air defence or radars, for example, or artillery. And in return, Ukraine has been using a significant variety of weaponized commercial drones. So loitering munition, I would say is like the, quote-unquote, professional version of that, where it's purpose built, say for example like it's got the same back end of a remote control airplane, but the front is a javelin warhead that’s designed to take out a tank or a self-propelled artillery piece so we're targeting a system that's around 40 kilometres of range, so that you know as we use other surveillance systems in the Canadian Army's assets, either ground manoeuvre reconnaissance or things like the ARQ 21 Blackjack UAV that's operated by a 4GS, you know there's an option there to find and then hand off to a strike platform so that we have a capability to reach out and engage targets in that 40 kilometre range, which we can't do right now.

Capt Orton: Yeah. And those things are pretty cool in the sense that I remember if you look at Afghanistan just having some type of air support on hand, you know, it makes you feel a little bit safer. And it makes you feel like you have access to some capabilities to do things that you might not otherwise do as infanteers on the ground. And so now you have access to that in the palm of your hand is your own air strike capability that you can launch yourself.

LCol Kieley: Which is pretty exactly that, you're not dependent on, you know, higher weather. You know you're not dependent on what conditions are in an air base two countries away. It's something in a commander’s back pocket that he has, like, he or she has a guaranteed weapon to destroy a tank or a self propelled artillery piece, or a key enemy C2 node. You know, engage in that 30 to 40 kilometre range, can that make a big difference on the battlefield?

Capt Orton: Yeah absolutely! So you can't help but notice it's not called the Canadian Latvian Brigade. Obviously there's a multinational component to this. What does that mean in terms of the deployment of troops and who we’re going to be working with?

LCol Kieley: So I mean big picture, the Canadian Army has three manoeuvre brigades and we're supported by 6 Canadian Combat Support Brigade out of Kingston, which harnesses a real expertise and enablers and specialist abilities. You know back once upon a time, well before I joined the army, when I was still a very young child, Canada did have a force, you know, a CMBG based in Germany. So we had a persistently deployed 4th Manoeuvre Brigade based on members posted to Europe. We're just, we're not there, you know, right now the Canadian Army is significantly smaller than it was in the 80s in the early 90s. So it's a challenge for us to imagine how we could have sustained a brigade overseas when we only have three brigades total to work with, of course. So you know, as much as we would like to be able to commit to persistently. A full Canadian brigade, and if you know this was a mobilization scenario, this is an actual specific war, but we're… we're talking about something we want to sustain on a 3-5-10 year horizon.

So it's going to be a Canadian lead brigade and what that means is we're going to continue to provide the eFP battlegroup, the Canadian led eFP Battlegroup is the cornerstone. So one of the manoeuvre units, we're going to deploy a proper brigade command team and headquarters. So actual brigade commanders from the Canadian Army are going to deploy for a year long with a selection of their staff who will rotate between 6 and 12 month deployments based on their personal circumstances. To provide that command and control for the brigade, they'll be supported by, you know, Canadian signalers, Canadian logisticians Canadian soldiers providing that close protection for the headquarters element, but the rest of the brigade is really going to be a mix of either, like fully multinational combined units or independent sending nation commitments from our allies.

So, for example, we'll have, you know, the current eFP Battlegroup, which has, you know, over about 60% is sending nation allies like Spain, Italy, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, you name it. It's a great coalition of fantastic partners. There will be an independent Danish battlegroup that will be assigned to the brigade. It will be on the ground about four months a year and the rest of the year on high readiness at home in Denmark. There'll be a fly-over third Canadian infantry battalion. Really, imagine a warehouse full of light vehicles, anti tank guided missiles, and heavy weapons. That one of the light battalions can get on one of the new Royal Canadian Air Force A330 transports, which can take 300 passengers and all their equipment and weapons and extra cargo. Imagine if you had filled that plane with light infantry soldiers flew over to Latvia and they file in that warehouse of vehicles and missiles and they went out to the woods and closed off the close approaches into Latvia. Like it's a great option to expand our combat power without having those 300 soldiers persistently deployed all the time.

Supporting that there will be a multinational artillery unit, so there's actually more artillery in the current eFP Battlegroup than in one of our brigades back home. Like… there is a lot of guns. It's awesome if you're a battlegroup commander, but it's almost to the point where it's hard to command and control. So we're going to break that out into a dedicated artillery battalion, still multinational, but under Canadian leadership, so we’re harnessing all of the firing units, like so actual batteries of guns, as well as all of the various intelligence and surveillance target acquisition. So imagine, you know, one integrated chain of command that has guns to fire, electronic warfare to detect where an enemy may be operating, UAVs, all the assets that you need to really understand the battle space and then find targets for those guns, supporting the Brigade Commander and all the manoeuvre units. And it's taking a bit of pressure off the current battle group command staff to do that.

There will be again, a multinational logistics unit. So imagine that that second line support - the people that are bringing you fuel, bullets, water, recovering your… your damaged vehicles and… and fixing them up and getting back in the fight. There will be an expanding Canadian Forces Health Services medical footprint. So you know that we have the close support medics that we're all used to. We're looking at forward deploying the equipment for our Role 2 Bravo Hospital. So like actual field surgical care. So that you know, if we do have to activate the brigade, if the geopolitical situation advances where there is a more pressing threat from Russia, the equipment will already be there to rapidly fly over and surge on and activate actual surgical capability right in our back pocket.

Couple of other interesting contributions: The Royal Canadian Air Force is going to get involved. So we're going to see persistently deployed Griffins directly supporting the brigade, and in the future we'll be able to surge Chinooks over as well for major training exercises or operations. So in a couple of years, you'll... you know, imagine Canadian soldiers working alongside a Danish battlegroup, getting supported by RCAF helicopters once we're really fully set, we have all our infrastructure, all our ranges, everything built. Like picture, all the… the good stuff we bring in from Maple Resolve, but now it's happening in Latvia as this major international. Exercises where we get a lot more play from our allies because we're in Europe in their backyard.

Capt Orton: That's right. We're going to them. They're not coming to us. Yeah.

LCol Kieley: Exactly. So it's gonna turn into a really great opportunity just to work with all sorts of different partners with NATO both in Latvia and eventually in the neighboring Baltic countries. And just play with a lot of assets and learn from a lot of other forces that you wouldn't get today here in Canada.

Capt Orton: Have other nations also committed to support this brigade specifically?

LCol Kieley: Yes. So all of our partners have, you know, really stepped up and they've said, “Hey, like we, we've got a lot of pressures in Europe.” We have in many cases countries that were members of our battlegroup are now hosting their own battlegroups that also have to expand into brigades, into their own in their home countries. But they've said, “You know, we've been here with Canada since 2017.” They genuinely appreciate the approach that Canada has had to integrating multinational partners as pure full partners, part members of the team and ensuring that every member of the battlegroup, whatever flag they're wearing on their shoulder, gets high quality training and they go home better trained when they left. They're really appreciated, they've told us that at every, every engagement we've had and they're going to, they're going to stay in our battlegroup. You know, with the exception of one partner, Slovakia, which is going to pull out at the end of 2024, you know, understandably, Slovakia is really on the frontline of NATO's eastern flank and then now hosting a new eFP Battlegroup, that also has to expand to brigade. I mean, it's a completely logical decision and we fully support them focusing on the defence of their homeland.

Capt Orton: That's right. Yeah, they're still supporting. They're just supporting from their own borders.

LCol Kieley: Everybody is still doing the same, you know, NATO fight, like we're all defending Europe from the threat of Russian aggression. You know, whether they do it in Latvia or whether they're doing it at home in Slovakia, like it's on the same mission in the same team, and we'll see them again in training in the future. But, you know, we appreciate that it's… it's going from four battlegroups to eight battlegroups and then telling each battlegroup that it needs a plan to expand to a brigade in as little as ten days. But it's a huge change in the situation, so for all of our countries, all of our partners that have said, “Notwithstanding this massive new challenge across Europe, we're still going to stay with you in Latvia.” like that's incredible camaraderie and we really appreciate it.

Capt Orton: Yeah. It would be really interesting for soldiers to actually have the chance to work with multinational partners. If I think of… Afghanistan for example: Sometimes you had the opportunity to work with maybe one or two different nations as you're going on missions and stuff being integrated into a multinational battlegroup means you're really going to get a chance to sample how everybody else does their business and maybe learn some things from that that you can take back and improve our own, you know, tactics and procedures and stuff.

LCol Kieley: And also just see other types of equipment that are out there. You know, Denmark's going to bring a lot of high end capabilities to the flight. You know, we're fairly similar in our equipment, but it's always good to see different perspectives. You know, people who speak the same language as you have the same mission, but approach it in a slightly different way. Like there's a lot to learn there. And especially as we're all trying to, you know, get back into the mindset of large scale conventional combat operations, and kind of push aside 20 years of the War on Terror and the lessons we were in Afghanistan and… and actually think about how we're going to fight drones. What do you do if a drone drops a grenade on you? Right. We haven't thought about that. And we have all these partners who are now actively trying to solve the same problems. So rather than a bunch of Canadians sitting in the field and land right, trying to think of how to solve these problems, it's going to be, you know, 10-12-13. NATO partners sitting in Latvia with you know, 10-12 different approaches to the same problem, different pieces of equipment and we'll really be able to share those lessons and walk away. Like actual TTP's tactics, techniques, and procedures, you know that are validated by a multitude of operational experience, not just you know, something that we came up with on paper ourselves.

Capt Orton: Ok so as it stands now the army works on a three year cycle where you have a lead mounting division that’s expected to provide troops to missions. Is there going to be changes to the way that works?

LCol Kieley: So I think many people in the army are tracking that we've been adjusting the managed readiness plan over the last year. The management plan which had been based still on all of the deployments being serviced in a single year. So you'd go through build, you'd move into contingency. So you build up all that readiness on the high scale, you hold it for a year and then just in case of war kind of box. And then in the third year you would go on deliberate scheduled missions, but the scope and scale of all of our missions was enough that a single lead mounting division could service them all in a single year. That's no longer the case. You know the size of the mission in Latvia with also Op UNIFIER our support to Ukraine and other small missions like Op IMPACT, you know still on the books there just was too much pressure for a single weekend division to service everything. So we've been adapting the managed readiness plan so that you move through a year of training. Then you'll spend a year focused on the NATO mission. Whether you're deployed in Latvia deliberately for Op REASSURANCE on a scheduled deployment, or whether you're at home on some notice to move, to reinforce, or potentially you deploy, and you come back or not, then in the third year, there's an opportunity for the lower intensity missions, to deploy on things like UNIFIER, where you can integrate new people who just came in at posting season, or different members of the Army Reserve who haven't gone through the full war fighting training package but can do top up training at their home station, go out the door. So it’s been a bit of an interesting first year for the brigade because it's also the transition year for the Managed Readiness Plan.

Capt Orton: What units are going out the door to like, kick this off a little bit?

LCol Kieley: Yeah. So the major building blocks, it'll be five brigade headquarters out of 2 Division in Valcartier. That's going to provide the headquarters. So Colonel Aspirault, the current commander of Five brigade, will go for the first year as the commander of the Multinational brigade in Latvia. The first battlegroup will be the second R22R Battalion leading and then they will be replaced after six months by the Lord Strathcona's Horse is going out the door for the second battlegroup. Inside that, though, we're increasingly going to see a mix of forces from the different divisions. So now they've got tanks deploying, you know. Tanks deploying at the same time as the armor core centralizing the tanks with the ‘Strats, in Edmonton. So we'll see this Christmas. We'll see the first and only Royal Canadian Dragoons, C squadron at Gagetown. They'll deploy once for rotation in Latvia and their job really is to operate, operationalize the Leopard 2 Squadron, so. Get out of the training area, get training with all the partners, figure out all the range and training implications for Canada, and now having our own Leopard 2s in the field there. But after they come back, they're going to be downing their tanks and returning as a cavalry squadron. So that means the Strats will always have to have tanks. Many of the specialist capabilities like air Defence, counter UAV, those only live in 6 Brigade units. You know really, 4GS Artillery for example. So they're always going to have someone on the ground. So it's an interesting mix where there is the managed readiness plan for the army that shows the big… big building blocks but little subordinate micro MRPs as we call them are popping up of how the strats are going to take their three tank squadrons and always have one training, one deploying, and one recovering and the same for a lot of the specialist elements like air defence and counter UAV. But a big piece for us, though, is that like all these dates are, are there on a calendar like it is very, very predictable.

Capt Orton: It's real.

LCol Kieley: Yes. And interesting. Like if you've looked at the way the management plan has changed over the years and we recently mapped them out you know from about 2003 when the Army's first kind of modern three phase managed readiness plan came into effect, it has ebbed and flowed, so when we don't have a specific mission, the MRP is very generic. It's like this division will be there just in case. Like this division will do the known things. But during the peak of Afghanistan it was a hyper detailed scheduling tool down to which company or squadron is going to do which task where and when. So we're moving back to a bit of a blend. You know, we're less focused on these generic “what if” readiness remits and really focusing on like someone needs to deploy on this exact rotation and it needs to look like this force structure and you need to train exactly to that. The perk of that though, is we can lay this out for three years. We can put the relief in place, dates on the calendar and say three years out the divisions all need to tell the army commander what exact unit is going on, which exact rotation, which frankly from my seat, I think that predictability is going to enable a lot of things in the army. First and foremost, it lets our members arrange their personal lives, their military lives, for Regular Force members. Critically, it lets our Army Reserve teammates look at where they are in their life, school, work, what have you and find opportunities that they can go on a scheduled deployment, but it also lets the army take a bit of a more mature look at, who needs to get posted to what unit and when you know, when do you bring someone back from an outsider he regiment posting back into the regiment to make sure they get the proper experience profile. When what unit gets priority for individual training? Where does key pieces of equipment or resources move around? Like that… that three-year scheduled predictability is going to be a huge enabler for us. Both at the individual soldier and officer level, but also as an institution, so we can make sure, like the right people, the right equipment, the right resources are there for the known tour. So I'm really looking forward to… to being able to use REASSURANCE as a lever to ensure some predictability for… for all members of the Army.

Capt Orton: You know, a CO of mine once remarked that, if you look at a police force as an example, always has a predictable job in the sense that, you know, you have your rest, training, administration cycles and you know what the job is because you're there and you're doing it. The military kind of has to get ready for a big question mark and you don't know what that is.

LCol Kieley: It will immediately impact the way soldiers train for deployments. The previous model was based on maximizing generic readiness, so you get your brigade out in the field, you train for large scale combat operations and you're ready for any contingency. But now that we have a very specific mission, we have a very specific force structure that's required, there's no question over the next three to five years what we're preparing for, which is allowing us to change the collective training model to go back to a mission specific focus, which is what we did in Afghanistan, rather than a generic readiness model. So a lot of the readiness is going to move from this one giant exercise every year, Maple Resolve, out West into actually being incorporated in the deployment plan. So, you know, Maple Resolve is being disaggregated, you know, broken apart. So rather than one big exercise, you have Maple Resolve in Canada, which would be up to kind of Level 5 Company/Squadron Live Fire and then in your first couple of weeks in your deployment in Latvia, you actually do the traditional maple resolve that people are thinking about, which we've just recently decided to call Oak Resolve. Oak is kind of the… the Maple tree equivalent in Latvia, the national tree. So just for clarity, Maple Resolve in Canada, Oak in Latvia, we figured it was a good compromise.

So you'll get to Latvia and you'll do your combat team live fire with the Leopards that are now deploying, and then you would go into that like 14 day force-on-force exercise, which will also be your NATO combat readiness evaluation level which a lot of people have heard of. And then you'll be, you know, checked off, ready to go. So the big thing for us is like, you know, we listen, we truly listen to what feedback is out there from soldiers. And we realized that the tour before the tour was a lot.

Capt Orton: It is a lot to take on.

LCol Kieley: The last time I went to Maple Resolve was 92 days on the front and back end. People were in Wainwright for a really long time. It was good training program, but for people dragging their equipment from Valcartier, Gagetown, or even Edmonton, which is still not at home, even if you’re in Wainwright, it’s still a huge demand on our soldiers, and in some cases we’ve seen as long as 17 weeks away from home for a 26 week deployment and that’s really not going to be an option when knowing that Latvia is going to be a constant demand signal for 3-4-5-10 years and we’re going to be asking our soldiers to go we understand that. So a key element for us was what could we do to reduce the time away from home that it takes to even go on that deployment with the goal of getting it down from 17 weeks to less than 10. So a big part of that is now Maple Resolve, all the… all the really great elements of the training will be explored to Oak Resolve in Latvia and it'll be even better because you have all the multinational partners. The US Army, Europe assets and a whole bunch of tools in the toolbox so that we can have a better exercise that's built into your six month deployment anyways. So you're not, you're not doing those six months away from home before you spend six months away.

Capt Orton: You know, I also heard the Commander in a… in a recent interview talking about implementing experiential learning in the context of tasks in that deployment in the sense that, if… if allies are coming in from, let's say, Poland or wherever and they need to do a road move, the best way to train to do road moves is to help them do the road move and then you know like bringing all that gear down and doing the logistics movement, that's training.

Like you're… you're helping somebody do something or you're doing it yourself. And so by being over there, just by virtue of being over there, you're exercising yourself by just conducting routine tasks. But by doing that routine task, you're getting better at it and you're understanding it better. And so that's, in a lot of ways, maybe viewed to be better than doing it inside of an exercise construct where it's not real. You know you're just road moving from point A to point B through a training area. To practice it as opposed to actually doing a real road move from a place to a place because it needs to happen.

LCol Kieley: You know, it's interesting there… there's a been a long history of people writing off Op REASSURANCE as a training mission, you know, quote-un-quote. But it's it's an issue dynamic because it's a real mission, but it also has lots of opportunity to train embedded in it, which is really if you think back to the Cold War, you know, when we had 4 CMBG posted to Europe like they, they weren't spending every day in a trench staring at the Russian border like they were posted there, they had their families, they were doing career courses, you know, they were, they were doing all the things, professional army does to train to sustain and improve itself, but they were also ready to fight and that's really the model we're we're looking to.

So you know it, it is not a training mission we're spending, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to stockpile ammunition and equipment that will be there, you know, in case of… in case we actually need to defend Latvia and we will be prepared to do it. But that doesn't mean that we have to spend like every second of every day staring at the eastern flank. We will have time in a coordinated program to deliver training events you know, like in the future is Combat Team Commander going to be run in Latvia? It's possible right? We have tanks there. We have multinational tanks. Like why would I task a company or a battalion of soldiers back here in Canada to go to Gagetown to run this bespoke course when I could just send 10/20 candidates to Latvia and then we could bring in multinational candidates and you could have a Spanish officer and an Italian officer and a Danish officer like, there's a lot of opportunity there. Like once… once we get the program established, once we build infrastructure and trading areas, a lot of the things that we do in the training system here, we can start moving forward to Latvia so that you know you're potentially going on a deployment, but you're also getting a qualification while you're there, you're doing some of your professional development.

Capt Orton: So speaking of infrastructure, obviously that's going to be a big push, you referred to it a couple of times. What can troops expect during this deployment in terms of… are they going to be sitting in trenches the whole time? Or sleeping on cots in the middle of the field or what's that look like?

LCol Kieley: So, you know, I think a lot of people having been to Latvia would not be surprised if I say that camp Adasi, the primary military base in Latvia, is… is full like it is full.

Capt Orton: Yeah, it's probably packed.

LCol Kieley: You know, the Latvians have been very generous with their land and their space, but there's two things going on so we're trying to increase our footprint, but the Latvian armed forces have also reintroduced conscription, so they're trying to grow 3 battalions of conscripted forces, including extra artillery, extra missile forces, extra air defence. So they're… they're doing their own massive growth program as well, and that's really just going to completely strain the capacity of Camp Adasi, so you know. Right now, I just got back a couple weeks ago from visiting Latvia, I was there early last year. You know, I've seen how busy it is. I've seen how long the lines are for, you know, for food. I've seen how busy the gym is and we understand that if we're putting soldiers into Latvia, we need to, you know, maintain a certain standard of quality of life because like. You know, it's… it's one thing if the enemy is coming in five days and you're going right to the field. But the… that balancing that you need to be ready in case that happens.

But also you're gonna be there for six months and you need to maintain your physical of well-being and your mental health like it's it's a tough balance with the current infrastructure constraints, so you know right now really the same section that you roll out of the back of a LAV with you live together, you know eight to ten in a room, you understand it's it's very, very constrained space and it is a friction. So we're trying to carefully balance the speed at which we add new people and capabilities with the speed at which we can build new infrastructure.

So there's going to be a whole new Canadian Camp in a place called Ceri. It's a Latvian National Guard base. It's just to the West of the Latvian International Airport in Riga. So if you got off the plane and you didn't go right into the terminal, you went left and cut your hole through the fence, you'd pretty much be at Ceri. OK, so we're building a camp there that will hold 700 Canadians at steady state and, can surge up to 1400, so a lot of the the idea is to move a lot of the new capabilities won't deploy until this new space is ready and then you know as we go down the trace, we'll see if we can reallocate some of the people that are at Adazi and move them about 45 minutes away into Ceri. So this will kind of be the brigade headquarters. You know, new artillery elements, air defence. It's not a perfect world, having them disjointed, but it's certainly better than trying to squeeze people. You know, we'll go from 10 to a room to 15 to a room!

Capt Orton: Problem solved!

LCol Keiley: We’ve reached the carrying capacity of Adasi so, so opening up the Canadian camp at Ceri is gonna be a a huge win for us, and that's probably gonna be fall winter 2024, a little bit behind where we wanted it to be, but it's a, you know, tough contracting environment, there's some issues in Europe and a lot of the, the, the temporary accommodations, the ATCO trailers people used to, they were actually built in Turkey, where the earthquakes have recently significantly disrupted their economy, so there's been a bit of a slowdown, but it's on track now. So you'll see you'll see a bit of a delay like I'm not going to lie the first couple of months is going to be a bit spicy. So from like June 24 to… to whenever we get Ceri online, we'll call it November 24. There's going to be… there's going to be crowding at Adasi. I’m not going to sugar coat that at all. Like that's going to be the tightest time. But as we move into November, December 2024, like we're talking about like hundreds and hundreds of extra bed spaces being opened up and.. and starting to kind of properly balance the load.

A little bit further down the trace, we're waiting to work with our Latvian partners. They're opening up a whole new training area. So it's called Celia. It's about an hour and a half away from Adasi towards the southern border, but this is eventually going to become their second, you know, big manoeuvre area. So if you can kind of imagine, like, the Peregrines Camp and Wainwright, where all the the big tents are, where you stage it when you go to Wainwright or Camp Petersville, in Gagetown, that's going to be the new kind of training base where we will send companies/squadrons/batteries for a couple of weeks at a time. In the future, they'll live in, you know, semi austere tent accommodations and they'll have a larger training area to break out of a Adazi, see something new and and do some better training once a larger training area opens up, you know that's going towards the end of 2025 to get our first ranges. But really that's at 2026 kind of time frame when we'll have actual manoeuvre spaces there and in the in the interim, we're going to see, you know, as Finland joins NATO as other partners expand their own programs like we're going to start deliberately looking at you know what, what other training is in the region, you know, our soldiers deploying on this mission to see more of Europe than they currently see, you know, going to Europe and not only seeing g camp Adazi and downtown Riga on Saturday isn't cutting it. So the more we can get people out the door to train in Estonia, Finland, Poland with Lithuania, like that, that's going to be a win for us and we're going to keep finding, you know, new opportunities as we wait to expand the training areas in Latvia.

Capt Orton: Yeah. And I mean, I think it's generally well known as your, your old roto 0, you know the… the first crew in always has a little bit of a growing pain to adjust to what it looks like. And then each iteration after that, you build off of that and then it gets a little bit better and until you hit that steady state of everybody's figured out kind of how it all works. And then after that it's kind of good to go.

LCol Kieley: Yeah. And it's like I wanna assure people that like very senior level, it's like up to the Chief of Defence Staff. You know, people are very cognizant that this is a long term endeavor and squeezing people in 15 to a room for the first year is just going to create, you know… bad memories, right? So there's there's no point in rushing to failure, and we'll take a bit of time, we'll take a bit of a pause and make sure that our our you know, ramp up our our reinforcement schedule matches the, you know, the infrastructure, the feeding, the gym, like all the things we need so that people actually have a comfortable time.

Capt Orton: So there’s always a lot of back and forth in terms of Reg and Reserve force integration, and that we have the deployment coming up, what’s the deployment plan for Reservists?

LCol Kieley: So from the very first, you know, steps of planning, we were very clear in the army that we we're going to rely on our teammates in the Army Reserve to help us fill these positions. The Army Commander has said that he wants 20% of the deployments. That's like the target. He wants to be filled by the members of the Reserve and we're really leveraging kind of the best practices and the lessons learned from all the divisions in… in managing Reserve augmentation to set up on the right foot. You know, for example, in even recent years, a battalion commander would get the list of positions at like maybe six months before and they would kind of go through randomly and decide which positions they were going over to the Reserve. So it was always like short notice. You kind of never knew it was coming down the pipe. And for Reserve members who need to get time off work or get time off school or or balance out, you know, their professional life with their military life, that's just really not a tenable solution to get, you know, large scale augmentation and also let every member of the Reserve have a have a fair shake at a deployment. So you know, we're moving to a model where we're actually going to establish one specific elements that are dedicated to the Reserves in advance. So for example, there's going to be a force protection platoon for the brigade, which would come from the lead mounting division. And we're imagining a pure Army Reserve TAPV based force protection platoon. You know, I imagine the Reserve CBG, the Canadian Brigade Groups, will get this task and they'll find some mix of armored and infantry units to fill this. That's their space, but that would be a dedicated, like platoon level Army Reserve deployment that will be scheduled like years in advance that the brigades can work on. Similarly 5 Canadian Division and 6 Brigade will have the opportunity to use their Reserves, who aren't usually affiliated with one of the leading divisions, they're also going to get a force protection element inside the artillery battalion that will be theirs to fill moving forward.

Broadly though, you know we've recognized that to make deployments attractive and viable, we have to look at a full year of employment. So if we're targeting, you know, the soldiers who could take a year off at the end of high school or a year off in university or a year off the end of college before they go into their career, we need a full year of employment. It can't just be like a couple of weeks of work up training and a six month deployment and then you're on your own. So what we've asked for from the very beginning, we went to government and said, like, how much is this going to cost? What resources do you need from day one, we calculated a full year of employment for those Reserve members for 20% of the entire deployment.

So right now we're just going through, you know, the administrative details to set this up, but we want members of the Army Reserve to be able to join their host unit for six months of integration training and then go on the six month deployment as one cohesive contract like a full year of employment, so we're just we're just working through that right now. But… but the funding was granted by the government specifically for that line operations for Op REASSURANCE and we think it's going to be very important to sustaining this. We also know that the more months you give a member of the Army Reserve notice that they are going to get this position the better opportunities you have. So, you know, we know the gold standard is 18 months confirmed task position with a message before deployment.

Capt Orton: Yeah, that's right. It's in your hand, you know what's happening.

LCol Kieley: Army doesn't control the actual when we go to fill an individual's name into CFTPO, that's Canadian Joint Operations Command space, but we're really good teammates. We've become very close for the last year with our CJOC counterparts and we're… we're working through right now. We've built this predictability like we've said, this these blocks of positions, this entire sub sub unit will be at Army Reserve we're going to take some risk and offer those positions very far out to members of the of the Army Reserve so they can commit early, get everything they need done as far as DAGing and then join the the integration training as as early as six months out if their personal life supports that. If it doesn't, there'll be plenty of opportunities for, you know, headquarters, staff liaison officers, individual augmentees that could join, you know one or two months out, but really our goal is to offer that full year of employment at least 18 months out before the deployment date. So people can really maximize the number of Reserve members that we bring on a mission.

Capt Orton: And will Reserve members also be integrating into the actual units, proper cause force protection is one thing, but actually being a part of people doing the thing is maybe something else?

LCol Kieley: Yeah. So it's an interesting balance. During Afghanistan, we actually had formed Reserve subunits like force protection companies for the national support element, so imagine the people protecting convoys running around Kandahar with logistics supplies. So it's that tough balance where we are always going to rely on individual augmentation. You know? So an individual Corporal C9 gunner who can come from the Brockville Rifles, for example, and join one of the first Royal Canadian Regiment. But we also still want that opportunity for Reserve leaders, officers and NCO's to have an actual dedicated element that they can train up their work training and deploy with, so it it will certainly be a mix. You know, we if… if we can reliably force generate all Reserve force protection platoon that day-to-day. Like let's be clear, it’s going to train with the battlegroup. They're going to be off on their own doing actual training with the fighting echelon. But that would be like a great success for the Army Reserve, I think, and a great opportunity for Army Reserve leaders. And then they'll still be individual augmentees across the entire spectrum. Whether they're in the back of a LAV, in the battlegroup, whether they're pulling a lanyard with the guns in the artillery battery or couple years down the trace, are they working with the 5 Div/6 Brigade specialists and and you know, crewing a soldier, portable air defence, missile pointing at the sky looking for Russian drones like I think we'll see that mix of the next few years.

Capt Orton: You know, in the 90s, we kind of had Bosnia and there was a lot of peacekeeping and UN missions happening. And then, you know, 2000s, and 2010s, you know, that was the Afghanistan time. So we kind of did a lot of things there that changed the way the army did business. This is the next big thing. I mean, I guess we kind of already answered it, but is this going to change the way the Army does business moving forward?

LCol Kieley: This is really going to be the… the primary focus for the Army for the next, you know, five years at minimum and it's really going to eat up 75 to 80% of our deployable capacity. So like it is the mission like full stop for… for the Canadian Army and it's going to really force us to… to manage our resources carefully. So you know we understand that people are going to deploy multiple times to Latvia, which means that we have to pay attention to individual career progression, right, because if you're gonna go to Latvia three times, you have to learn and grow and see something different every time, or you're gonna lose interest. So it's going to require, like, a bit of… of nuance, being like, what's the right job for… for this Corporal, because the next tour they are a Master Corporal and the next tour, they'll be here as a Sergeant. So actually making sure that you put people in the right jobs to grow and not just see the same thing over and over again. So that's kind of on the personnel management side.

On the equipment side, I think everything you're going to see Director of Land Requirements doing for the next couple of years is kind of taking a pause, looking at the entire portfolio of Army projects, and being like, OK, like, what's going to Latvia? What's important now, where do we prioritize? Where do we park an idea? And we get back to that in the future. Like you'll see a real focus on making sure that the right equipment, the right capabilities are forward in Latvia.

There's going to be some frustrating consequences in the back end of that, like a lot of vehicles and equipment are going to move forward to Latvia and it's going to reduce the number of vehicles and major pieces when they're back here in Canada for training, like, no question about it. And… and I can't sugarcoat that everyone can see that coming. But that will be balanced in some part by the changes in the training approach. So really training to the specific readiness requirements rather than training to generic readiness requirements will be one of the major changes we see certainly over the next five years. We're not going to the fields you know for weeks away from our families to train just in case, we're… we're going to have well planned, very specific training programs that are designed to train the right forces for… the… the known mission set.

Capt Orton: So what's the end state of all this? Like, obviously, we have a big plan moving forward. It's gonna last for quite some time. Is this gonna be the new mode of operation basically moving forward or are we envisioning an end state to like… where are we going with all this.

LCol Kieley: So a lot of it's going to depend on what happens with Russia and Ukraine? You know the security situation in Europe is being driven by Russia's completely unjustified invasion of Ukraine. And the way that conflict ends and when that conflict ends is going to tell us a lot about what the security posture in Europe needs to be. So, you know, I'm not going to try to, you know, read the tea leaves and tell you what is going to happen in the future.

I would tell you that you know the rotational posture, like the traditional six month deployment with some members doing 12 month deployments, over the next three to five years is really,... that's how we're going to manage it as a first bound. You know the Chief of Defence Staff and the Army Commander have had conversations. I've had a chance to sit in the back of the room and… and chip in a little bit about what we need to be thinking about option space in the future. Eventually we will have to adapt. Six month rotations times ten years is… is going to be a bit… a bit too much.

What you could see is more and more people transitioning to postings instead of deployments. So I think you'll see even in the short term more supporters, specialist mechanics, HRA's, you know, human resources administrators, financial services administrators, kind of those high demand low, low strength trades where we start saying you know what instead of trying to find someone to deploy every six months, let's post someone with our family to get a bit more stability. So you'll see more of a move over the coming years to… to actually posting members. You know, five years from now, it is entirely possible that we look to replicate the old Germany model at a much smaller scale, like right do we do we have a battlegroup posted to Latvia five years from now? Maybe. Alternatively, we could have an entire brigade worth of equipment sitting in Latvia with a skeleton crew manning it and then having all those troops ready back home in Canada to fly over within, you know, a couple of weeks and activate it all.

So these are… these are ways we could adapt in the future. Certainly. You know the… the next three years we will staff it with a rotational model, traditional deployments and we'll see you know what… what the security situation demands. The future I don't personally want to see a world where, you know, a Corporal on their seventh rotation to Latvia in 2032. So we… we will adapt based on the security posture, but I think… I think Latvia will be a significant Canadian footprint in Europe for many years to come. Just wait to be determined what the balance is between deployed members, posted members and pre-staged equipment and… and munition stocks that are ready for activation would be somewhat. Those are kind of the tools we have to work with.

Capt Orton: Well, I'm looking forward to see how it all works.

LCol Kieley: Me too. You know, I'm kind of trying to figure out how to get there myself. So as we look at increasing the number of postings.

I filled out my member aspiration profile in the new evaluation system for the very first time a couple of weeks ago. In my midterm objectives, I put that I wouldn't mind bringing my family to Latvia in 2027 maybe as part of the team that's posted there but. But certainly like it's been a big part of my professional life For the last year.

And I'm very excited, you know, for… for summer 2024 to see the… the first elements and then. You know, first two weeks in November 2024 will be the very first field training exercise for the Canadian led multinational brigade in Latvia, so I'll be very anxiously awaiting, you know, the feedback from that, hoping to see some, some great photos and videos of our soldiers doing the business on the ground in Latvia, and hopefully that they had a good time.

Capt Orton: Maybe we can get the podcast on the ground for that one and get some video and audio.

LCol Kieley: We'll get you a podcast Armored Combat Support Vehicle in a couple of years.

Capt Orton: Yeah I think we submitted a request in for one of those?

LCol Kieley: Yeah, I'll. I'll talk to the G34 and if I can make sure that gets lined up.

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Capt Orton: Perfect. Sounds good. Well thanks so much for talking to us, Sir!

LCol Kieley: Oh, thank you, Adam. Thanks.

Capt Orton: That was LCol Marc Kieley who is part of the planning team for the Multinational Brigade here in the Operations cell at Army Headquarters. I’m Capt Adam Orton for the Canadian Army Podcast. Orton out!

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