[beaver fever]

Sorry I came from a military family.

May I remind you about the JTF2 snipers in Afghanistan who showed up with better equipment than their American brothers and proceeded to move out on three day sorties with no back-up and did double duty as snipers and artillery spotters.

Their American comrades were grateful for the forward protection and impressed with the quality and professionalism of Canadian troops. Not to mention that a Canadian shooter scored the longest distance record for a battle kill that has yet to be bested.

On a nostalgic note, when I was four years old my dad, who was an MP, had to go after an AWOL who deserted from Camp Petawawa. He found the guy on train headed for Ottawa.

The guy turned on him and broke three of his ribs. When he reported back to base with his freshly broken ribs his CO told him go back and find the guy and bring him back or he would be taking his place in the slammer.

After a week he tracked the guy down again and took the boots to him.

The standard punishment at the time for AWOL was 10 years of hard labor in Val Cartier which makes Gitmo look like the Club Med in Can Cun.

Men of that caliber still exist in the Canadian Forces you just don't hear about them. They can stand toe to toe with any soldier in the world.

The shoe doesn't fit so you wear it.

[Polybius]

Sorry I came from a military family. May I remind you about the JTF2 snipers in Afghanistan who showed up with better equipment than their American brothers and proceeded to move out on three day sorties with no back-up and did double duty as snipers and artillery spotters. Their American comrades were grateful for the forward protection and impressed with the quality and professionalism of Canadian troops.......... Men of that caliber still exist in the Canadian Forces you just don't hear about them. They can stand toe to toe with any soldier in the world. The shoe doesn't fit so you wear it.

The problem, beaver fever, is not the men of such caliber as that found in your family and in the one and only Canadian elite unit in existence now that the Canadian Airborne Regiment has been disbanded.

The problem is that, as a whole, Canada produces so few such men for a nation of its size.

The problem is that, as a whole, Canada has abandoned any pretense of having a military that can provide anything beyond a small number of niche-role support players to foreign militaries in either pacified theaters or in low intensity theaters.

Although its strength is classified, Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2), Canada's equivalent to the British SAS or the U.S. Delta Force, is estimated to have a strength that is estimated at 250 to 300 troops with a budget estimated at $25 million.

That's it.

Since Canada has no intelligence resources to speak of, JTF2 must rely on intelligence provided by foreign nations.

JTF2 combined ops with other Canadian units is kept to a bare minimum, ostensibly because of security reasons but, pragmatically, because there is little left in the Canadian Armed Forces to cooperate with. Thus, JTF2 either operates with foreign forces or it does not operate at all.

Even so, JFT2 must operate in either total secrecy or in Politically Correct mode lest an effete Canadian public become shocked, shocked that the JFT2 would do something so dastardly as actually capturing some Taliban prisoners and turning them over to the U.S. (Maybe Canada expected the JTF2 to keep the prisoners as camp cooks or to release them once they were given a good scolding.)

Since Canada had no armored forces capable of surviving against Iraqi heavy armor, the Canadian Army had to sit on the sidelines during Gulf War One. With no armor to speak of and with the evisceration of its artillery regiments, Canadian ground forces can now only safely operate as an appendage of the U.S. or British Armed Forces in a low intensity war theater such as Afghanistan or Bosnia.

The old Canadian ideal that Canada could "fight alongside the best against the best", as it once did at Vimy Ridge and at Juno Beach, has long since died.

Today, an extremely small number of Canadians constitute the light infantry, snipers and spotters that can only survive and can only be of any use whatsoever, as niche-role appendages of the British or the U.S. Armed Forces.