More Canadians in Afghanistan.

Here's another picture provided by Dr. Sean Maloney, a military historian who works for the Canadian Forces.  Yesterday we were looking at a Canadian Leopard 1 with mine-plow, today, let's take a look at a nattily-dressed Canadian Leopard  2A6M leading the Quick Reaction Force (ORF) along the highway, responding to an IED strike.


Larger version available by clicking here.

For those of you who don't go back and follow comment threads, I thought I would bring some stuff up out of the comments on other posts on this subject.  Of course, if you want to start from the beginning, you would click here and read that post and the supporting comments.

There are some interesting comments in *this* post, some of which I'm dragging up here that serve to illustrate some of the differences between "then and now" in the US Forces (specifically the exchange between Bill and Paul involving confiscation of journals, photos and such) and some of the tension in the arena that Dr. Maloney works in - essentially the Lessons Learned business, which has been institutionalized in the US Army, and is, seemingly, still in a state of, oh, call it dynamic tension in the Canadian Forces (and CF personnel are urged to jump in, pro and con, officially or unofficially).

Commenter Paul said:

During the Vietnam War War of Glorious Liberation, the U.S. Air Force came up with the concept of Project CHECO -- Contemporary Historical Evaluation of Combat Operations. They assigned teams of historians to work with the Air Force combat units in Southeast Asia, and tasked them to prepare historical monographs identifying what worked and what didn't work.

Of course, such historical honesty made them extremely unpopular with promotion-seeking commanders, and the program withered fairly quickly.

I've read some of Sean's work - and I can't believe he hasn't fallen afoul of Canada's politically correct senior leadership. Either he's got one heckuva powerful mentor - or there's still enough ingrained honesty in the Canadian Defence Establishment to allow him to do his job despite his candor. Good on you, Sean! Keep up the good work and let the chips fall where they may!

To which Sean responded:

Thanx, Paul:

Oh yeah, I've run afoul all right. Challenging the whole Lester B. Pearson-Canada-invented -UN peacekeeping orthodoxy using their own records to explain what was really going on during the Cold War; demonstrating how nucs were GOOD for Canada-and we liked having them despite what two generations of historians had been telling everybody else....that kind of thing. Now its our phony, dangerous, and wasteful foreign aid policy that's next on my list.... But that's in my spare time. Because of the amount of knowledge I have built up on Afghanistan over the years, I am morally obligated to assist with the lessons learned process and continuity process, especially when our soldiers' lives are at stake in that incredibly lethal place. I also believe in putting my ass on the line to in order to understand the operational environment so I can constantly improve my knowledge and thus do my job better, and not sit at home in my safe office and pass judgments from afar. Some people don't like that for some reason, BF'EITCTAJ.

Cheers!

-Sean

I also believe in putting my ass on the line to in order to understand the operational environment so I can constantly improve my knowledge and thus do my job better, and not sit at home in my safe office and pass judgments from afar   [Hmmm.  That made the House Pundit squirm a bit.]

Interesting little window into military politics among our Northron brethren-in-arms!  There'll be more to follow on this topic in the post immediately above this one.