Reserves need funding

Re: Neglected reserves highlight the dire state of our military — Michel Maisonneuve, March 27 (online)

During the late 1970s and much of the 1980s, I served as a non-commissioned medical assistant in the primary reserves. The senior NCOS and officers of our medical company were dedicated to their roles. They juggled parallel military and civilian careers with the needs of their families. I respected the best of them, deeply.

Training time was short. The number of military exercises, which require extensive planning, was few and far between. The number of realistic field manoeuvres could be listed on one hand. Paid hours each week were often cut near the end of each fiscal year when money ran short.

I found it difficult to take our training seriously as the reserves lacked, and probably still lack, the training time and equipment to realistically train for war. In the early 1980s, we drove in Korean War era 2.5-ton trucks and fired FN C1 semi-automatic rifles that first saw service in 1955.

In some ways, the world is a more dangerous place than during the Cold War in the early 1980s. Back then, NATO and the Warsaw Block followed unwritten rules, actively avoiding direct military conflict.

Unlike the early 1980s, we can no longer depend on an increasingly isolationist and unstable United States to act like a global police force. The military and political weaknesses of NATO no longer deter acts of military aggression. Unforeseen chains of events, like what happened in August 1914, can easily escape the control of leaders.

Under our treaty commitments, Canada could easily be dragged ill-prepared into an armed conflict overseas, on short notice, against a well-equipped and better trained military opponent.