Canada’s Military Breakdown： More Generals Than Tanks, Jets, or Ships？
Episode Stats
Summary
Canadians are being asked to join the ranks of the Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force, but how many of them are there? And how many are they actually serving in them? How many are there in charge of them?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
get your elbows up boys canada's back mark carney's gonna make canada great again
00:00:28.240
and pull the military up by its bootstraps hooah chief of defense staff and weepy dei general jenny
00:00:35.360
kerringan signed a directive to increase the size of canada's reserve forces from 25 500 to 400 000
00:00:43.280
for those rubbing their eyes at that number that's a 16-fold increase cue the laugh track
00:00:52.160
canada's already paltry reserve force has thus far failed to ever hit its personnel target
00:00:57.600
of 30 000 every single year since it was set in 2017 when it was 26 500. even if the canadian
00:01:06.080
armed forces were fully funded and furnished with adequate equipment and resources it's just not
00:01:11.360
going to happen at least not without conscription the thing is the federal government and the senior
00:01:16.240
military leadership appointed by it openly loathe the very things that have traditionally fueled
00:01:22.160
voluntary military recruitment the new military prioritizes dei in its recruitment and promotion
00:01:29.520
this is a problem for a profession that by its very nature is attractive to nationalistic young
00:01:34.960
white men on aggregate they tend to like guns struggle comradeship and feeling a part of something
00:01:40.560
meaningful when they join a nation's armed forces they feel pride in the uniform other demographics are
00:01:46.320
great and welcome but the main source of recruits has been made to feel decidedly unwelcome the planned
00:01:52.640
wildly unrealistic sextupling of the reserve force got me to thinking just how top heavy is our new
00:01:58.720
dei army navy and air force too many chiefs and not enough indians doesn't quite do justice to how
00:02:04.400
upside down our military has become we've got 145 flag officers that is officers with the rank of general or
00:02:12.720
admiral including commodores which are the navy's equivalent to an army or air force brigadier general
00:02:18.240
of this an estimated 27 are in the navy 27 in the air force and 77 in the army another 15 are in joint
00:02:25.600
commands across the branches or organizations like norad so how many indians are our chiefs leading
00:02:32.160
lock and load this is going to be good as of january 2025 the royal canadian army had just 82
00:02:40.320
leopard 2 main battle tanks and its armored forces but due to maintenance issues only 41 were combat
00:02:46.080
ready that means that for every combat ready main battle tank canada has nearly two generals crazy you
00:02:54.400
say maybe but it could make for a rather direct command structure if canada were to ever mount a
00:03:00.960
defense against an invasion from say vatican city we could have one general pilot the tank and another
00:03:07.040
general man the gun with our top brass so close to the action their orders would be immediately
00:03:12.160
followed without any hesitation the royal canadian air force is in slightly better shape on paper we
00:03:18.320
have 88 cf-18 hornet fighter jets mostly built in 1980 of that only 30 to 35 are combat ready well
00:03:27.200
let's be generous and round up to the high end of that figure that means that our air force would
00:03:33.200
almost have one general piloting every single fighter jet in operation if you're not gonna
00:03:37.920
have a big air force then you better put your best man where it counts right and the vaunted royal
00:03:42.560
canadian navy the floating force that ended the second world war as the third largest navy on the
00:03:48.240
planet well it's got six to eight combat ready warships mostly halifax class frigates again let's round
00:03:55.840
up to eight to be generous in this exercise with 27 flag officers that means that we have
00:04:01.760
more than three admirals for every single combat ready warship in the royal canadian navy with the
00:04:08.320
deck so crowded they might need to bunk up but perhaps i'm being unfair in april the royal canadian
00:04:14.000
navy posted on x that the hmcs cornerbrook was upgraded and ready for operations they said and i
00:04:19.520
quote freshly upgraded it's now the most advanced submarine in the canadian fleet correction the hmcs
00:04:28.320
cornerbrook is the only submarine in the canadian fleet one diesel submarine built in the 1980s to patrol
00:04:38.320
the largest coastline of any country on the planet but we can rest assured that the cornerbrook will
00:04:45.280
be well commanded with three admirals aboard if we combined every single one of the 145 generals and
00:04:51.680
admirals in the canadian armed forces and gave each of them a fighter jet tanker warship they would outnumber
00:04:57.520
their equipment by nearly two to one canada has nearly two generals or admirals for every operational
00:05:03.920
fighter jet tank and warship in operation canada's armed forces have been in decline for a very very
00:05:11.440
long time with a moderate resurgence during the first half of the harper government that blip wasn't
00:05:17.280
enough to reverse the damage of decades of neglect and since then the imposition of radical progressivist
00:05:23.600
ideology into the command structure has destroyed its meritocracy and martial culture i grew up in
00:05:29.440
military towns and dreamed for most of my bud of joining the navy's ranks if i had done so perhaps i'd
00:05:35.440
be an admiral by now and get to command the engine room of the hmcs cornerbrook thank god i didn't and
00:05:41.600
based on the truly wretched state of our forces it's doubtful that we'll be meeting our 400 000 man