Canadian soldiers from the Royal 22nd Regiment conduct a foot patrol in a volatile area in Panjwayi district, Kandahar province, in this November 2006 file photo, supported by a Light Armourved Vehicle (LAV) manned by soldiers from the 2nd Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. Canada has "rushed" scores of fighting vehicles with five tonnes of additional armour plating to Afghanistan to try to counter the Taliban's lethal success with larger homemade landmines.Photograph by: John D. McHugh, AFP/Getty ImagesKANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — Canada has "rushed" scores of fighting vehicles with five tonnes of additional armour plating to Afghanistan to try to counter the Taliban's lethal success with larger homemade landmines.
The latest response to improvised explosive devices that have killed more than 100 Canadian troops involves putting a smaller, remotely controlled mobile gun system atop what had been an anti-tank variant of Canada's light-armoured vehicles instead of the turret-mounted cannon commonly found on the LAVs, Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie and a Canadian improvised explosive device specialist based in Afghanistan confirmed in recent interviews.
The cannon-less LAVs now entering service in Panjwaii, Dand and Daman districts were the only ones if the Canadian inventory that had not already been deployed to Kandahar, they said.
"We took those 66 LAVs and built on the lessons of Afghanistan," Leslie said, adding that as well as more belly plating, there was shock frame seating and straps to hold soldiers in place like fighter pilots in a cockpit.
There will not only be frank political discussions about what role Canada intends to play in Afghanistan when the current combat mission ends in July 2011 when Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander, meets this Thursday in Ottawa with senior Canadian officials. Among the many military issues to be discussed, none has a higher priority than how to reduce the number of coalition deaths and catastrophic injuries caused by IEDs.
Canada and the U.S. have both established anti-armour task forces to examine this vital issue. The U.S. spent more than $26 billion to develop (mine-resistance ambush protected) vehicles, but as Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell explained to McClatchy Newspapers last month, there had still been "real problems . . . off road in Afghanistan" recently, so another $5 billion has been spent on a new variant that is more manoeuvrable.
The U.S. army's 5th Stryker Brigade, which uses a high-tech version of the Canadian-designed light armoured vehicle, also quickly ran into difficulties when it deployed to Kandahar this summer, losing more than a dozen soldiers to IED strikes in a few weeks.
The changes to the new Canadian LAVs entering Afghan service "sacrifice a bit of weapon power" in return for "the most up-to-date armour," said Capt. Olivier Sylvain of Montreal, who as chief of battle damage assessment for Task Force Afghanistan is a forensic specialist of sorts on IEDs.
Sylvain studied the effects of IED strikes on armoured vehicles for a year before an Afghan deployment that was only three months long, so that he could bring the latest insights back to Canada as soon as possible.
"In general terms, no vehicle is invulnerable," Sylvain said. "What we are doing is assessing the threat and reacting very quickly. The threat is changing and we adapt. In many cases, we are pro-active."
What Canada learned from IED strikes was constantly exchanged with U.S. forces and other NATO allies, he said.
"It is a very sharing relationship. The threat is a lot different than in Iraq so the Americans used a lot of our research when they brought the Strykers here."
Whenever a Canadian vehicle gets hit by an IED, Sylvain and a small team make a first-hand assessment, sending the information and suggestions for improvements directly back to offices in Ottawa, Toronto and Valcartier, Que., where vehicles are blown up to test them against the types of threats that are seen here.
"I find the work intellectually fascinating," the young Van Doo officer said. "It is like a puzzle. You have a piece of a vehicle and you try to reconstruct what happened."
Of the Taliban's IED capabilities, Sylvain said: "We are not in a closed bottle. There is a lot of communication between insurgents about what works and what our developing tactics are. It's a fluid environment. What was true a year ago has changed, and it changed from the year before, too.
The "new, old LAVs" now in Kandahar were what Leslie called "a bridging mechanism" until Canada can complete a $5.2-billion upgrade to the entire fleet that is slated to begin in 2012.
"When completed, it will reset our LAV fleet for the next 15 to 20 years," the army commander said, "because it is a fair assumption that wherever we go next after Kandahar, we will be facing an asymmetric threat from suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices."
Source:vancouversun.com/
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