Cold reality: Canadian troops struggle in Alaska as military relearns Arctic warfare

A series of internal Department of National Defence documents suggest Canadian troops were ill-prepared and occasionally ill-equipped for the harsh conditions they faced last winter during a major training exercise with American forces in Alaska. 

The evaluation reports, obtained by CBC News, show the military has a lot to learn and a long way to go to rebuild its capability to defend the Arctic.

The training involved over 400 members of the 3rd Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment (3RCR) which was folded into a much larger U.S. Army brigade during Exercise Global Response in February at the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, north of Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Carney government has committed to an almost year-round presence in the Far North and the reports indicate, among other things, that troops will need to learn to rely less on technology and more on basic skills in order to fight and survive, according to defence experts.

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Separate Canadian and American evaluations were prepared and both show a litany of concerns that raise questions about how prepared troops and their equipment are to fight in harsh conditions, where the temperatures plunge below –30 C.

"Throughout their stay in the waiting area the Coy [Company] consistently demonstrated a lack of preparations needed to live in Arctic conditions," said an undated Canadian evaluation, which assessed individual companies within the battalion.

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The report was critical of a recent initiative which allowed the regiment to purchase off-the-shelf civilian equipment to augment military cold-weather gear — something that created problems.

"This was evident when observing soldiers attempting to remedy issues with a Coleman stove and lanterns or watching them attempt to set up a 10-man tent," said the evaluation, obtained by CBC News. It said that among some Canadian units there was a "lack of emphasis on basic winter soldiering skills."

In an interview, Lt.-Col. Aaron Corey, the commander of 3RCR, disagreed and said his troops trained for winter conditions for a year before the Alaska training deployment.

"Every soldier to go up on that exercise had to be a cold weather operator qualified," Corey said.

"All of our leaders from the sections and up, we received cold weather leader training and then we had Arctic operations advisers that were sprinkled into the battalion as well."

He added the battalion "put a lot of effort into preparations for this exercise in the year preceding it and to get back to a level of winter warfare — or Arctic warfare — that we haven't seen in a few years."

Canadian soldiers have wrestled with the problem of fighting in extreme cold for decades, and even prepared for the possibility of Soviet attack across the polar region during the early Cold War.

The Alaskan exercise reports did note that despite the challenges — and as many as 30 troops suffering various levels of frostbite — the battalion was successful in the exercise by capturing its training objectives.

Corey said troops learned valuable lessons, most notably how they have to slow down and take the weather into account, more so than when they are on operations in other parts of the world.

"We had the enemy and the weather, which was a greater enemy in most cases," Corey said. "So we had to slow down. We had to make sure that our troops had warming cycles. We had to slow down because the kit and equipment you're carrying is heavier. We had to slow down because there's more energy being exerted as you fight your way through the muskeg or up the mountains."

The Ottawa Citizen previously reported on the frostbite casualties. The documents obtained by CBC News, however, paint a broader picture of the challenges faced by the regiment.

One document noted how "several gaps emerged regarding the medical team's understanding of their required tasks" during the exercise.

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The medics thought they were only on standby to treat real casualties, not participate in the training scenario, said an undated evaluation prepared for the health services branch. On three occasions some of them were seen using personal phones for long calls, giving away their positions to the enemy.

It was also noted that the medical team was only given a four-hour professional development seminar on Arctic medicine principles rather than a five-day U.S.-led course at the Arctic medicine simulation centre.

Chief Warrant Officer Robert McSpadden, the regimental sergeant major for 3RCR, said he found the medical team to be outstanding, especially when it came to treating the frostbite casualties. He said he couldn't speak to the training decisions.

The Canadians also ran into problems with the rapid cold weather draining batteries for their drones, leaving in some cases only 10 minutes of flying time. There were problems with communications because of the absence of satellites so far north.

The separate American assessment, prepared by the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies and published online, noted how U.S. units experienced similar difficulties. It pointed to basic preparation problems such as a lack of snowclearing equipment and a shortage of fuel to keep engines running in order to prevent them from freezing. 

Retired colonel Pierre Leblanc, who served in the Far North in command positions in the late 1990s, said it's been almost a generation since Canadian troops were present in large numbers in the Arctic and many skills will have to be relearned.

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"It's a different world," said Leblanc, who noted the unpredictability of the weather and the vast distances made it the most challenging place to operate he'd ever encountered.

He used the example of having to dispatch a repair team to a North Warning System radar location during his tenure. 

It was supposed to be a simple job, lasting only a few hours. The team was stuck there for 21 days, Leblanc said. 

Today's high-tech, web-enabled, satellite-tethered military needs a serious back-to-basics approach in a place where technology can't be counted on, he said.

"If you rely too much on it, you're going to very quickly have a problem. Have to be able to work with very, very basic systems," said Leblanc.

Rob Huebert, an Arctic defence expert at the University of Calgary, said the Canadian military in the 1950s and 60s was expert at training and fighting in the Far North.

There was, at the time, the capacity to move more than 1,000 troops and their equipment at short notice anywhere in Canada.

For example, in February 1950, more than 5,000 Canadian and American troops took part in Exercise Sweetbriar along the Alaska Highway between Whitehorse and Alaska, specifically testing how combined forces could move, fight and sustain themselves in Arctic conditions.

Canadian troops subsequently trained for the possibility of Soviet airborne attacks in the North, while the military experimented with clothing, vehicles, communications, mobility and survival techniques. In the 1970s, the Canadian Airborne Regiment practised its own parachute assaults at places including Coral Harbour and Inuvik.

Huebert acknowledged the increase in winter exercises that the Carney government has enabled through its increase in defence spending. But he says they are a smaller scale. 

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"You can't just simply say, we know how to do this with small units and we can magically do it with big units," Huebert said.

It's also a mindset problem, he added.

Several years ago the country's former top military commander, retired general Walt Natynczyk, quipped that if the Russians ever invaded Canada's Arctic, the first thing he'd do is launch a search and rescue operation.

"I really think that that was a very unfortunate comment," said Huebert, who added it established the notion that troops wouldn't have to fight in the Far North.

"The Russians know how to fight in the North. We would be much better off if General Natynczyk, at that time, had actually said there are growing signs that the Russians are not the friends that we thought they were."