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Wednesday, December 23, 2015

CAF Participating in Maple Detachment: OP REASSURANCE

Canadian Armed Forces News Release:

Some 50 Canadian soldiers are taking part in Maple Detachment with the 25th Air Calvary Brigade in Nowa Deba, Poland, as part of Operation REASSURANCE.

Maple Detachment consists of ongoing coordinated bilateral training exercises involving Canadian members of the Land Task Force and members of the 25th Air Calvary Brigade, located in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, Poland.

Canadian and Polish Armed Forces members take a knee.
CAF and Polish 25th Air Calvary Members at the Nowa Deba Training center in Poland. December 4, 2015. Photo: DND 
The training includes a series of firing range exercises (levels one, two and three), section and platoon attacks, parachuting, tactical exercises and reconnaissance patrols.

“The goal of the training is to conduct operations that will allow us to assess and improve our interoperability with the Polish Armed Forces,” stated Captain Yannik Trudeau, an officer in the Operation REASSURANCE Land Task Force. “During the training, we alternate between Canadian and Polish command. It’s an extraordinary experience.”

To date, three training exercises have been conducted with the 25th Air Calvary Brigade: three weeks of parachute training in Nowy Glinnik and Leznica Wielka, then helicopter support as part of combat-related first-aid training, and, finally, the training in Nowa Deba.

“Maple Detachment helps foster relations between the Canadian and the Polish armed forces by combining the operations of the Land Force and the 25th Air Calvary Brigade,” noted Captain Nicolas George, Deputy Commander of the Operation REASSURANCE Land Task Force. “In addition to the tactical aspect, Maple Detachment allows Canadian and Polish soldiers to share common values and develop a work ethic.”

The impact of the training provided through Maple Detachment can be measured in multinational exercises such as Ex DRAGON 15, during which Canadian soldiers were paired up with the 25th Air Calvary Brigade.

Den Tandt: Why Trudeau should keep CF-18’s in the fight against ISIS

Michael Den Tandt outlines here a great argument for why the Liberal Majority should reconsider its withdrawal of RCAF CF-18s from the US-led coalition against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

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An RCAF CF-18 flies over Iraq during a sortie on OP IMPACT. November 7, 2015. Photo: CAF Combat Camera, OP IMPACT, DND 

By: Michael Den Tandt, National Post 

There is a straightforward way for the Liberal government to get beyond the tangle in which it now finds itself over its pledge to pull Canada’s CF-18 fighters from the air war against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. That would be to break its promise, make a U-turn and keep them in the fight. This is not only the responsible thing to do; it is the politically smart thing to do, given the other options.

Since the Oct. 19 federal election, the debate has raged. Throughout the back and forth, the claims and counterclaims, Royal Canadian Air Force jets have continued to contribute to the U.S.-led campaign by, yes, dropping bombs on enemy targets. Late last week, Canadian forces took part in a battle that involved CF-18s and special forces ground troops.

In a year-end interview with the Huffington Post, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan committed to withdrawing the fighters within six months, though a parliamentary resolution calls for the air-combat mission to end in March. The reason for not pulling out immediately, Sajjan has said, is that the government does not wish to contribute to a loss of capacity for its allies. Translation: The CF-18s are making a valuable contribution to the overall effort, albeit a small one. If this were not the case, withdrawing them would make no difference to anyone and would have occurred already.

The arguments for keeping the CF-18s in the fight, or not, fall loosely into three groupings: tactical/strategic, philosophical/moral and political. In every case, based on a careful and fair-minded reading of the facts, the case for keeping the previous Conservative government’s policy in place is unassailable.

In military terms, simply put, the Liberals in crafting their policy and sticking to it doggedly have misunderstood the role of aerial combat in modern warfare. Repeatedly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has spoken dismissively of “dropping bombs,” as though it’s indiscriminate carpet-bombing of residential areas, like something out of the Second World War or Vietnam.

That assumption is false. In this campaign, which even now is modest in scope compared with the rate of missions flown in both Gulf wars and in Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, air power is being used precisely by the allies to degrade and destroy ISIL’s capabilities and allow allied local ground troops to take back territory more easily.

To dismiss the air war as indiscriminate “combat” is shallow in the extreme. On the contrary, the aerial campaign is arguably the last, best hope for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization powers to avoid sending in their own ground troops in large numbers. It is an alternative to a ground war – not a necessary prelude to one. U.S. President Barack Obama, a lifelong pacifist, and French President François Hollande, a socialist, are not war hawks. They are advancing this strategy because they can see no other way of defeating ISIL, short of all-out war.

The philosophical and moral arguments essentially resolve into a discussion of failed foreign involvements in various Middle Eastern and South Asian wars extending centuries back. Many Canadians wonder what was achieved by 12 years of war in Afghanistan. The quagmire in Iraq and Syria, it is often noted, has its roots in president George W. Bush’s failed U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Gen. Colin Powell’s famous admonition, “if you break it, you own it,” went unheeded. The result has been one catastrophe after another, one of which was the rise of al-Qaida in Iraq, which metastasized into ISIL. Yes. Point understood and accepted.


The fact remains that 2015 is not 2003. In 2003, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, beyond being an annoying blowhard and a demented tyrant to his people, threatened no one beyond Iraq’s borders. He had no weapons of mass destruction. Had he had them, he had no will to use them.

ISIL’s self-anointed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is no Saddam. He’s something much worse. He and his jihadists believe — and this is not opinion, but fact, available to anyone with stomach enough to do the research — that they are warriors for God on a sacred mission to bring about the end of the world. They believe that in the interim, it is their sacred obligation to wipe out all other iterations of Islam, re-introduce slavery and extend their caliphate worldwide. And they pose, as has been demonstrated repeatedly now, a clear and present danger to every pluralistic society, including Canada’s. Pearsonian Liberalism would opt for engagement.

That leaves the political argument, which is this: As long as withdrawing the CF-18s remains government policy, because it is incoherent, it will be a thorn in its side and a fundraising tool for the Conservatives. A flip-flop would cause short-term bruising. Longer term, it would validate the Liberals’ pledge to base policy on evidence, not ideology. And it would help establish them as responsible managers, rather than wishful thinkers.

National Post

Twitter.com/mdentandt

Monday, December 21, 2015

Canada in Iraq: RCAF Hits 3 ISIS Fighting Positions

In a press release on its OP IMPACT webpage, DND announced that on 18 December 2015, while taking part in coalition operations in support of Iraqi security forces, two CF-18 Hornets successfully struck three ISIS fighting positions northwest of Mosul, Iraq, using precision guided munitions