Alberta’s British Battleground
WIDE OPEN PRAIRIE NEAR MEDICINE HAT OFFERS SPACE FOR MANOEUVRE, FIRING
CFB SUFFIELD, ALTA• It’s fair to say that there is enough British firepower here to invade a good chunk of Western Canada before we could have any chance of stopping them.
Twenty- two battle tanks. About 350 armoured vehicles. More t han 1, 000 support vehicles. And during this particular exercise, about 1,250 British troops armed with everything from submachine guns to anti-aircraft missiles.
But the British remain our friends, of course, and this just happens to be the British Army’s annual mission of sending a battle group to invade a remote chunk of Alberta.
“Very complex, very dangerous … it’s the closest we think we can come to the replication of war,” says Col. Marcus Evans, commander of British Army Training Unit Suffield.
Evans stands amidst a landscape of British tanks, armour and infantry stretching as far as the eye can see. He is commanding the largest single gathering of British military ground strength outside the U. K. And like a futuristic Napoleon, he can keep tabs on the direction and speed of every single unit from a tablet computer.
But just before addressing news cameras, Evans turns to a row of his battle- wearied men and urges them to refrain from spitting, leaning or otherwise looking unBritish Army while he speaks to the Canadians.
“Just need to make sure my background is looking vaguely smart, please,” he calls back.
This is Canadian Forces Base Suffield, a massive military base on the outskirts of Medicine Hat, Alta.
At 2,700 square kilometres, it’s five times the size of Toronto. Half the size of Prince Edward Island.
It’s a place so massive that the British Army can stack up a line of tanks six kilometres wide and order them to shell a mock village into dust — and not a single Canadian will file a noise complaint.
“Those r ounds t r avel three or four miles, so the only space we’ve got to do that is here in Canada,” said Major Alex Mills, the unit’s senior operations officer.
Heck, they’ll even shoot aircraft out of the sky.
On the day the National Post visits, the training agenda includes flying a 45- kilogram drone at soldiers and having them blow it out of the sky with a portable missile.
As far as the soldiers are concerned, this bleak expanse of Alberta is the fictional country of Atropia. The enemy, meanwhile, are the invading Dovonians — another fictional country typically used as a stand- in for Russia.
The battlefields are filled with fake trenches, fake bunkers, fake minefields and fake villages staffed with local actors playing fake French- speaking inhabitants.
The U. K. isn’t planning military operations in any French- speaking countries, per se; it’s mostly so the soldiers can get used to having a non- English language screamed at them.
The Dovonians, meanwhile, mostly appear as distant wooden targets that occasionally flip into view — and are then hopefully blown to smithereens by alert British tankers.
The tactics tested here do usually find their way into foreign battlefields. The Falklands War. The 2003 invasion of Iraq. The British deployment to Kosovo. All were carried out by Brit- ish troops who had cut their teeth by fighting ghost tanks on the Canadian prairies.
And war, it turns out, is plenty dangerous even if someone isn’t shooting at you. In 45 years of training, 42 British soldiers have been killed here — mainly as a result of road accidents.
CFB Suffield has occasionally been dubbed Canada’s Area 51, not because of any extraterrestrial links, but because it is also the epicentre of Canada’s military research.
Military scientists favour CFB Suffield for the same reason the British do: It’s a giant space where they can set off massive explosions without anybody noticing. In the 1960s, they even blew up 500 tonnes of TNT at once to test how well military hardware would stand up to a nuclear blast.
CFB Suffield dates back to the Second World War. The British needed a big chunk of land to test their chemical warfare tactics. So, the Canadian government flipped through their survey books and roped off one of the most barren pieces of land it had. The base has no oil, virtually no trees and every attempt to farm it has ended in failure.
And in a detail that never fails to impress British sol- diers raised on American westerns, it is covered with tumbleweeds.
CFB Suffield is now strictly under the control of the Canadian Department of Defence, but the British continue to train here with Ottawa’s permission.
In fact, the whole reason the Brits tolerate visiting reporters is to stay in Canada’s good books. Or, as a conspicuous poster in the mess hall puts it, British soldiers must be sure to “maintain consent to train.”
The whole 30- day training exercise, known as Prairie Fire and repeated four times a year, is designed to precisely mimic the British soldiers’ experience of a foreign war. Troops are flown direct to Calgary, bused to the base, given a few days to acclimatize and then thrown into the field for 30 days of sleeping on the ground, eating cold rations and sweating out a flak vest.
Then, with the Dovonian threat successfully neutralized, they’re shipped right back to the U.K. and another group comes.
“It’s kind of outdated, really,” said one corporal as he tried valiantly to hide his shivering.
And the corporal is right. Commanders here are similarly candid that it is unlikely that the soldiers here are ever going to be thrown into a “conventional” war in which uniformed army battles uniformed army in a vast, flat European battlefield.
More likely they’re going to encounter the type of war that is trained for later in Exercise Prairie Fire: Fighting a pickup truck full of guys with AK- 47s or staring at a village full of people whose language you don’t understand and trying to parse friend from foe.
As one BATUS officer said while issuing a casting call for Alberta actors, “civilians pose a number of challenges … how you deal with them when you are trying to fight the enemy and then how you deal with them after you’ve won, hopefully.”
CLOSEST WE THINK WE CAN COME TO REPLICATION OF WAR.