OTTAWA—Senior military and defence officials say that the threats North America faces today have never been more challenging. With the war in Ukraine, Canada’s defensive capabilities are getting stretched and gaps are becoming more apparent.
“This geopolitical upheaval comes at a difficult time for the Canadian Armed Forces as an organization. Our numbers, as you know, are not where they need to be. Our readiness is not where I would like it to be nor where it needs to be,” Canada’s chief of the defence staff general Wayne Eyre said during a fireside chat at the 91st annual Ottawa Conference on Security and Defence on March 9.
He had been to Ukraine a week prior to the March 9–10 conference hosted by the Conference of Defence Associations and its charitable organization the CDA Institute.
“Our lethality vis-a-vis potential adversaries has decreased in recent years … That is a challenge writ large,” he said in response to a question on what gaps in defensive capability keep him up at night.
Canada needs long-range precision strike capability “so that we can reach out several hundred kilometres and do what needs to be done,” and the country also has a tremendous need for ammunition to sustain a military operation, Eyre said.
“It’s OK to have a nice shiny piece of equipment. But if you don’t have the ammunition and the sustainment that goes with it, that will pose challenges.”
What to Prepare For
Eyre also said that “Ukraine has shown us again that mass is important. The sheer number of armoured vehicles that we have in our inventory has gone down over the course of the last decade or so.”
James Fergusson, deputy director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, told The Epoch Times that he estimates Canada’s munitions stockpile is in a bad state.
“We’re really at the bottom of the barrel,” he said.
He notes that all allies will be trying to replenish munitions while supplying Ukraine, but that the question is what Canada is stocking up for and what are its priorities.
“Russia is not really the issue for us, or at least not the issue for the Americans. The issue for the Americans—and by default for us—is China. That’s a different game entirely for us,” Fergusson said.
University of Calgary political science professor Rob Huebert told The Epoch Times that it’s hard to gauge where Canada stands in relation to a best-case scenario of keeping Russia engaged far away from Canada and a worst-case scenario of running low on stockpiles of military equipment without a good supply chain to recapitalize.
