by David J. Bercuson

PHOTO: PfC Andrew Hillegass, courtesy of u.s. army

The Canadian Forces has chosen a modified version of the Stryker armoured vehicle used by the United States Army.

There has probably been more kerfuffle, more public debate, and more hand-wringing within the army over last fall’s announcement that the Land Force is to acquire the new Stryker Mobile Gun System mounting a 105 millimetre cannon than on any other recent procurement decision. The government announced that, in effect, 60 of these vehicles would replace the older Leopard tanks acquired in the 1970s but recently upgraded with new turrets and modern fire control systems.

The Mobile Gun System consists of a high velocity, direct fire, 105-mm gun mounted on a modified Light Armoured Vehicle chassis. Its purpose is to provide heavy direct fire support to infantry without the weight and additional capabilities of a traditional tank, such as the Leopard 1A tank that Canada still has.

The Mobile Gun System will fit into the newer models of the Hercules military transport aircraft, though their add-on armour will be carried in a separate aircraft. Current versions will not have any capability to fight tanks. Indeed the Mobile Gun System is not designed to fire on the move, as a tank can.

The controversy over the Mobile Gun System arises because it sounds the death knell for the traditional tank in Canadian service. Canada was somewhat late in acquiring its own armoured capability, but, under the leadership of F.F. Worthington, had established the Army Fighting Vehicles Training Centre by the outbreak of WW II. In that war, Canada fielded two full armoured divisions.

When the Canadian Shermans slipped into obsolescence in the early 1950s they were replaced by a much smaller number of British-built Centurions. But the army still maintained a capacity of several hundred tanks, enough to field an armoured brigade.

By the time the Leopard was purchased, the Armoured Corps had shrunk to 128. Now the number is to be reduced to zero and a major Canadian capacity will be lost, probably forever.

Most of the debate over the wisdom of acquiring the new system is as much about symbolism as it is about a lost capacity. The Armoured Corps is still dominated by soldiers who once drove, or commanded, tanks. Some have recognized that Canada’s army must evolve quickly from a small and obsolescent heavy-weight force to a medium-weight force that is still combat capable over a wide range of conflict possibilities. The army simply cannot afford to maintain capabilities that it is never likely to use again. Others dream of past glory renewed.

No one disputes that infantry lies at the core of what an army does. Absolutely nothing that has happened in any of the armed conflicts of the past 50 years—including the Kosovo air campaign of 1999—can be cited as proof that infantry will ever be obsolete. Thus a combat-capable infantry is a core capability that Canada’s army will always require. What, then, are other capabilities the infantry must have in order to accomplish its mission? The list is long and includes combat engineers, logisticians, communicators, lift and heavy firepower. It does not include tanks.

The original tanks of World War I were “infantry tanks” designed to give troops mobile firepower in their advances. Tanks could also be used—as Canadian tanks mostly were in Korea—to defend the infantry and to provide defensive support, as mobile, but dug-in, gun bunkers.

Tank against tank warfare developed in World War II—the epitome of a force-on-force conflict—and thus armour acquired a second role. From then until now, that dual role of tank versus infantry and tank versus tank has been the heart of the armoured mission. For some nations’ armies that role will continue to be relevant for some time. But not forever.

There are now other effective weapons systems that can kill tanks as well as, or better than, other tanks. Helicopter gunships, heavily armed and armoured aircraft such as the American A-10, infantry-fired missiles or systems such as the wire-guided rockets in use by the Canadian army itself for years can kill tanks and have done so in great numbers.

The Canadian army now intends to deploy its recently acquired Air Defence and Anti-Tank System, a highly effective missile system designed to fire from vehicles such as the M-113 armoured personnel carrier, or from a newly adopted Light Armoured Vehicle equipped with a special turret, in the tank killing role.

What all this means is that the Canadian army will continue to maintain a direct fire support capability for the infantry with the Mobile Gun System and protect its troops from enemy tanks with its new anti-tank missiles. What it will not be able to do is deploy tanks against other tanks. One capability will most definitely be lost, but a core combat capability won’t.

There is no point in dreaming about what the Canadian military did in WW I, WW II, Korea or the Cold War. It faces none of those possibilities now. Although the Canadian Forces must, of course, plan for the far future, the force they plan needs built-in flexibility in matters such as communications systems, means to deploy, leadership, and weighing and using an effective range of force options, far more than it needs to forecast the need for specific weapons systems.

It is just as likely that no nation will deploy tanks as we have known them in the past 30 years as it is that a new generation of very heavy main battle tanks will emerge. In the future, technology, not heavy armour—reactive or not—will protect combat vehicles. If not, the sheer weight of armour will render these vehicles hard to deploy and difficult to operate. It is the heavy main battle tank that will play a niche role in future force-on-force wars.

The Mobile Gun System is the right decision for the army today. The tank’s reign on the battlefield will prove to have been far shorter than the horse, but like the horse, it will soon be gone forever.