With international threats rising, our military needs a new plan to train the next generation

General Jennie Carignan, the chief of the defence staff (CDS), last year called for a new force of 300,000 in the Supplementary Reserve, a lightly trained army of civilians who could assist in civil and military emergencies. The Supplementary Reserve at present is a list of under 5,000 retired officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who have indicated they would rejoin the CAF if needed. This new Supplementary Reserve is intended to be very different. These men and women would receive some rudimentary training in shooting, communications, truck driving, and drone operation, and would do a maximum of five days of training a year in peacetime. Their role, the CDS stated, was to be available in crises ranging from “low-intensity natural disasters to high-intensity large-scale combat operations.” It is highly unlikely that five days of training a year will provide members with what they would need to survive combat. But if there were regularly updated lists of skill sets and if contact is maintained with these men and women, they could be very useful, for example, in mobilizing firefighters and evacuations in civil emergencies. As General Carignan said, she could contemplate heavy equipment operators, cooks, and electricians being helpful in many circumstances. So could professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The CDS also indicated that she wanted to boost Primary Reserve strength to 100,000, a figure that would more than quadruple the Reserves and get Army units from a strength of one or two hundred men and women up to six or seven hundred. (The CAF is also aiming to raise its Regular Force strength by under 10 percent, unfortunately, an inadequate increase.) The CDS’s plans for the Supplementary Reserve are necessary and welcome, but there are two important questions left unanswered: where will the funding come from, and where will its leaders be found? Money is always tight, but for the first time in decades, Canada has a government that is serious about defence, and Ottawa will find the funds. But leaders need to be recruited and trained. A new tri-service Canadian Officers’ Training Corps could be a major part of the answer. Get the universities and colleges involved with the military again after six decades of absence. Sixty years ago, university students were overwhelmingly white males. Now the universities have more female students than men, and the students are multicultural—white, black, and brown—unlike the Regular and Reserve forces. A new COTC would link Canada’s military to the nation’s present and future population. The time is right. Youth unemployment is high all across the country, over 14 percent in the autumn of 2025. Pay rates for the armed forces were increased last summer, and COTC cadets could expect to be relatively well paid at a time when their peers may be unemployed. That matters, but so too does the desire to serve Canada when there are threats from abroad and from climate change disasters such as fires and floods. The COTC graduates would become the junior officers who could help to train the new Supplementary Reserve, a task the Regular forces, short-staffed as they are, could not easily do. As important, the COTC would provide a source of officer recruitment for the Primary Reserve units of the three services, something absolutely necessary if they are to expand as dramatically as the CDS desires. To make the new COTC work, the CAF needs to ensure that its recruiting system begins to work properly at last. Long delays in paperwork and glacial security screening will drive away applicants. There needs to be training infrastructure at selected bases to handle enrolees for summer training, and small cadres established at the universities and colleges to offer classroom instruction during the academic year. This will be difficult for the understrength Regular forces to handle, so some of the present officers and NCOs in nearby Primary Reserve units or on the present Supplementary Reserve list might be called out. General Carignan’s plans provide the opportunity to do something important for Canada’s civil and military defence. They can connect the CAF to the next generation of leaders at a time when there are real threats to Canada’s people and territory. We can do this; we need to do this.