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The Acting Army Commander MGen Michel-Henri St-Louis is all fired up about “what’s next” for the Canadian Army.
This podcast is for and about soldiers of the Canadian Army.
Its primary goal is to provide them with useful information through thoughtful and open discussions that reflect their mutual interests and concerns.
Though soldiers are our primary audience, the topics covered on this podcast should be relevant to anyone who supports our soldiers or who has an interest in Canadian military matters.
[Fast paced music plays]
Major-General Michel-Henri St-Louis: Building an army for tomorrow that is different than the Army of today.
Captain Adam Orton: Hi! This is Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. And this is the first episode of season three. We’re starting off with a bang with the Acting Commander of the Canadian Army Major-General Michel-Henri St-Louis. And he’s going to talk to us about what the Army is going to look like moving forward. If you haven’t heard him speak, he’s an awesome speaker, and his favourite tagline is that he’s “fired up,” and I’m fired up for this podcast. Welcome to the podcast, sir.
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MGen St-Louis: Hey, thank you, Adam. We’ll see after our chat, if you’re still fired up. Hopefully, hopefully you will be! And I’ll tell you up front, I wish I had a radio voice like yours. I could listen to you all day long. So thanks so much for having me today.
Capt Orton: Thanks, sir. Well, thanks for making this possible. So as we were discussing, what we’re going to put in this podcast at the beginning, we were kind of like going through different topics of a conversation—and we had this one question that we’re like, “we’ll save it for the end.” But really, it should be the first question. So kind of bottom line up front or “BLUF” as we like to say in the Army: what’s in the future for the Army?
MGen St-Louis: Adam, that’s a—we’re going to spend all afternoon talking here.
Capt Orton: That’s the idea.
MGen St-Louis: There’s a lot of stuff going on in the Army. There’s a lot of stuff coming in the future for the Army. We are tackling two, or three, or four, or 58 million things at the same time.
As you know, and your audience probably is tracking, the Army is a huge institution. It has a regular force component; it has a part time force component; it has public servants; it has Canadian Rangers across the periphery of our country; and a footprint all over our country.
And right now, of all the things we’re trying to do, we’re trying to move kind of three big ideas, all at the same time—all as important one than the other. We’re moving towards making our people better, safer, more connected with each other—more diverse, just working at our conduct and culture, that it has been highlighted, and it is clear to us that we need to change some of the ways we treat ourselves, treat each other, behave with each other, and look after our conduct and culture. And while we’re doing that, we still have to deliver what the Army’s delivering right now—has delivered in the last year, continues to deliver either on expeditions in Europe, in Ukraine, in the Middle East, or at home.
Just recently, you heard about a group of nurses from the Canadian Armed Forces that are returning from a task in Edmonton and Alberta are helping the healthcare service of that province. So we need to look after our conduct and culture. We need to continue to deliver in expeditions and at home. And, en plus, on top of those two things, we need to get after modernizing the force. We need to make choices, investments, decisions that will position the army modernized for the future.
But you kind of just gave me one thing. You said, like: “What is the one thing the Army’s looking forward?” So, kind of the idea that’s going to bring all of these three things together in kind of the immediate future. And if you can accept that 2025 is the immediate future, is this Force 2025 idea that you might have heard about is one of the elements of the Canadian Army’s Modernization Strategy that is looking at rethinking our structure—rethinking how we establish readiness levels, rethinking where we position some of our widgets and our equipment, rethinking the nature of some of our teams, how they band together and group together, and structure together.
And that thinking of Force 2025 is helping us do a number of things. It is done in line with our conduct and culture adjustments. It is done with an eye on the outputs. So, restructuring with an eye on what you need to put in terms of an effect in the land domain in an expedition and domestic front—and restructure ourselves to give the best possible output; in making choices with that eye on the future, modernized Army, and using 2025 as a waypoint towards 2030 and that future force that the folks who will join the Army today will have as a structure for tomorrow.
So, long winded answer; three big things that we’re moving as a team. We’re moving our conduct and culture. We are moving our eye on keeping our outputs—expeditionary and domestically—and modernizing the Force. And the thing that is kind of holding it all together in the immediacy is that Force 2025, that restructure, that reload, that re-questioning of ourselves and our structures, and saying: “Are we positioned in the best way to deliver on those three big, big domains that we’re working on Adam?”
Capt Orton: That’s a lot of stuff, sir. Let’s drill down into it a little bit, shall we? I think maybe the first thing that a lot of people are faced with right now is, over the past couple of years, the Canadian military has been going through culture changes. And it’s been in the media a lot recently. What is the Canadian Army doing to kind of drive that culture change?
MGen St-Louis: It is—I think, key for us to think about the fact that not everyone has a super perfect experience in the military. Not everyone loves coming to work. Not everyone has loved coming to work. Not everyone has always felt safe within that construct. So there’s a realization from me to, I think, every Junior Leader and in between, that we all have a role to play in the atmosphere of your work environment, in the—how you feel in your team.
You ask what we’ve done. There’s a number of things that teams and leaders have done. It has started by listening; a number of listening sessions at the senior level, mid level, lower level—just coming together as groups and listening. Listening to people that have had a harder time than maybe I’ve had in my career. And I’ve been extremely fortunate with the experiences and the teams I’ve been in. But, other folks have not. And listening to what it means to feel ostracized—what it means to feel excluded, what it means to never feel that you belong. And I’m not even talking about listening to what it means to feel agressé—to feel that someone has done something to you. I’m not even talking about someone that has been on the receiving end of physical abuse, mental abuse. I’m not even talking about some of the worst cases that I’m hearing that have happened in the past, and that they're still happening today.
So, you start by listening. And in that listening effort, the Army has tried to learn and understand at the senior leaders level—talking about it, coming together during town hall or workshop sessions. We have delivered training to ourselves, stemming from orders and guidance from the Army on misconduct, on harassment, on sexual misconduct. And there’s workshops and trainings that have been put together. Thousands of soldiers and leaders have received one training that comes to mind, and that is the frontline workshop that was put together by a survivor from the Army that now delivers some of that training. And that has just been one example.
I have reserve brigades that come together as groups and put up aide-mémoires of how to do field training or Garrison training in a way that doesn’t exclude you if you’re a different gender, doesn’t exclude you if you’re from a different group—a diverse group.
So, from listening to trying to understand and learn, we go into the act of changing our behaviour. And across the board in the Army, what I’m seeing is leaders making different choices in their leadership.
You know what? The pattern of me as an instructor, repeating what I was taught, in the same way I was taught it, no longer holds. And the way I was treated as a lieutenant, is certainly not the way that I would like to treat my lieutenants today. And the way that I was taught as an officer cadet, hopefully the captains now, at the Infantry School, have come to realize that we do not teach and instruct ourselves the same way. I use hope in that sentence. But I know that the instructors, and school leadership, and training establishment are all kind of recalibrating our approach to training, our approach to taking someone that joins this team and making them feel that they are safe in this team. Going from joining a team and trying to become like the team members to having a sense of belonging, no matter what you bring to the table.
So that approach that starts with listening goes hopefully to understanding and learning from that. We are now going into the act and we have been in it at least for a year. We’re going to continue on it from an Army’s perspective, but also dovetailing to what's happening in the Canadian Armed Forces as a whole.
You know, we have a new three star command lieutenant-general command structure. It did not exist a year ago. It did not exist six months ago. You do not come up with a new lieutenant-general command without a clear impetus for change. And that lieutenant general is enabled with director generals and structure has been given authorities and responsibilities that no one had before. And that is to be that culture officer for this corporation that is the Canadian Armed Forces. That is that agent of change that keeps us on this track of transformation—that keeps us questioning our practices, that keeps us honest with each other. And the contract we have with a new recruit that joins this team, in which we say to them: “You are joining a team that's going to get ready to face adversity, face an enemy, maybe put yourself at risk, but a team that will not put you in danger while you are inside that team.” And, I think, for too long, people in the team were abusing people inside the team, and were victimizing and making folks be on the receiving end of behaviour that is unacceptable if you are within a team.
Within a team, the impetus should be to feel safe, so that you are ready as a team to face that adversity that is outside of the team. You ask: “we hear a lot about conduct and culture and what are we doing about it?” I have not done it justice in these four or five minutes. But, from leaders, to mid level leaders to soldiers and everyone in between in the Army, we are spending a lot of time listening, trying to understand and learn and then act in a way that we would like to be acted on. Behave in a way as leaders, the way we would like to be led, and maybe break the paradigm of repeating the same behaviour that we were the subject to when we were coming into this institution, and setting up something that is different, better for a diverse, cohesive team going forward.
Capt Orton: And I really appreciate that you mentioned the chief of professional conduct change, Lieutenant-General Carignan. She used to be the Chief of Staff of Army Operations when I worked there, and she’s serious business. Like she’s a former engineer now, general—you know—and that lady does not mess around. She gets after it, and she’s good for it.
MGen St-Louis: And she has been given a huge mandate, that is a mandate for all of us to share in. And that is, if we are serious about who we are as an institution, we need to pivot, come to a reckoning with our past, and move differently in the future.
Capt Orton: So shifting gears a little bit, something that floats around a lot the headquarters, and surely at least some people have heard about it, the Canadian Army Modernization Strategy. I saw the book. I’ve read through it. Talk to us a little bit about what that’s all about.
MGen St-Louis: So the Canadian Army Modernization Strategy came about almost six months—a year of work in Army Headquarters, when General Eyre was the Army Commander. And he came to the job, and looked around, and saw all the different initiatives, all the different efforts that were going on to look at our force structure, to look at the acquisition of new widgets, to look at what we needed to maintain a fit force, to look at how we integrated better the reserves and the regular force in different ways going forward. And when he looked at all of it, while all of it was good on its own merit, it had no kind of cohesive, ‘un fil conducteur,’ ‘une ligne’ that joins all of these efforts. So his effort was, let’s put all of these things that we’re doing towards change, all of these things that we’re doing to modernize the army—bring them all together with an understanding of what is needed for the future so it captured the impetus for change, it captured future threats, it captured partly that future environment where the land component needs to be able to fight and win. And with that appreciation of the future landscape, where climate is an issue, demographics is an issue, extremism continues to be an issue, we are digitizing, modernizing, we have threats in domains that I never trained on when I was a lieutenant thirty years ago, and I did not realize that I could be defeated on the information space, or in the cyber domain, or be attacked from space in ‘92, and be defeated even before there was a bullet exchange.
Well, the Canadian Army Modernization Strategy tried to put that up front. What does that future landscape look like? What is everything that the Army is trying to do to transform and bring it under one singular agenda for modernization? So it is the Army’s change agenda. It is the Army’s kind of set of waypoints to transform and modernize with the same impetus—the same requirement for that future force that is able to fight and win across multiple domains, able to answer the nation call when that call comes. That’s what the Army Modernization Strategy was, and is, and is still the book that is on my table in the office that I try to refer to every day when we talk about what are we doing? What are we pursuing? It is under which objective of Army Modernization Strategy. Are we delivering? Are we not delivering? It continues to be what inspires me to deliver on the Army’s program.
Capt Orton: Now, you mentioned before also outputs, and, you know, briefly mentioned readiness, and a lot of people hear that word floating around. I know even like, on the drill hall floors, or you know at the units, people use that word, readiness. And I understand readiness has to be something that you do your preparatory training, you do your DAG, your preparation to deploy, and all that stuff, and that makes you a soldier that's ready. Can you explain? I think I got it right. Could you explain what that means to like a layman? What is readiness? Generals, I found consume readiness to create action. What is that?
MGen St-Louis: Adam, I think you people should listen to what you got to say; you described it perfectly! Readiness under an army’s lens—the lens of the role that I play is to have capabilities mostly made up of soldiers because the Army’s in a people business. The Army exists to have soldiers ready to answer a nation’s call whatever that nation call may be. So let me take a long winded approach to say kind of what you said in ten words, very eloquently.
So, a nation can come to us with, right now, a number of outputs or expectations of what we do as an army. Right now, our government, our senior leadership is asking the army to go to Latvia, and have a battle group construct, serve in Latvia for six months, and be part of a NATO mission that serves some objective of deterrence towards potential adversaries and presence in North Eastern Europe, and confirms our commitment to an alliance, the NATO alliance. It asks that we serve with about 150 army trainers in Ukraine, and help the Ukrainian army get better, get more tactically proficient in their own right, so that they can withstand their own security challenges. Mostly for them, it is the threat of an adversary that is Russia, at their doorstep, and some internal tension within their own country. Our government in our senior leadership expects the Army to deploy to the Middle East, to places like Jordan and Lebanon and Kuwait and Iraq, and be there to do capacity building with those middle eastern armies and help them become better security forces to tackle their own national security interest challenges. It asks us to be present in UN missions in Africa, in Congo, in Sudan, in Israel. It asks us to serve across the world, in different places, different scope, different scale. But if I’m going to go with a group of soldiers to Ukraine and train Ukrainian army soldiers, if you’re going to go to Jordan and train, Jordanian soldiers or Lebanese soldiers, you need a certain level of proficiency. You need to be fit. You need to have a certain level of skill set in the land domain. You need to have the capability to be away from your home. Your family needs to have a solid footing. So your training, your personal preparation, your ability to deploy to these places, is kind of the long winded approach to me saying: “Are you ready to do what the nation asks of you?”
And then the nation comes and asks other things of us. It has to go into senior care homes. It asks us to go today. It asks us to go to get our gear, get our equipment, get on a plane and go to Iqaluit. It is asking Army people today to be in Iqaluit and be ready to deliver clean potable water to a town that has an issue with their water system and are going to the river and the lake to get their own water.
So, a group of Army folks had to be ready two weeks ago, because the call came a week ago and they had to leave on a C17 with a ROWPU. A ROWPU is a big container size machine that filters water. And they had to fly into Iqaluit, set up, and now are just waiting for some of the last instructions but are poised to help the city deliver clean water. How are they able to do that? Because they were ready. They had done the training, the preparation. Their equipment was ready to go. Their family care plan was ready. They were ready to be used in the way that they are trained and equipped to be ready to, if I look back at last summer, send forces to British Columbia to combat forest fires to Yukon, to help with flooding around the Mackenzie River.
Readiness is an Armed Force that is ready to answer the call when the call comes. And the call is everything that I’ve described, from the gamut of helping with a flood, with a hospital, with a city that is overwhelmed, to deploy overseas, to stand up to some potential adversaries. And I’ve just described what I know, because it’s what we’re doing today. But what’s the call going to be like tomorrow? I don’t know what the next call is going to be. I just hope that when the call comes, our answer will be: “We are ready.”
Capt Orton: I really liked that you put it that way too, because a couple of years ago, Lieutenant Colonel commanding of the Foot Guards—he once said to me: “Preparing for the next military thing is a challenge because you never know what’s going to be there.” Right? And he said: “You know, compared to first responders who know their cities, like police or medical services, or whatever, they kind of know what they’re facing off against in terms of challenges. But in the military, we don’t know what the next thing is going to be.” You just kind of try and train for stuff and try to be at a certain level so that when the thing happens, hopefully you’ve developed soft skills and skill sets that allow you to respond, and then you just kind of do the best you can with what the tools that you've built around you.
MGen St-Louis: That’s a good analogy. I would use it to try to be even more specific. I would say to you, if you train a land team of soldiers that come together, they can maneuver, they can communicate, they can shoot when required, and take an objective. If you do that, and you attain a certain level of proficiency, because you are fit, your equipment is ready to go, and you have exercised that a couple of reps at platoon, thirty men, women teams at company—maybe one hundred to one hundred and fifty men, women teams, and you’ve done that repeatedly been validated on and certified that you're good to go—I would contend that if you can do that, you can answer almost any call.
Capt Orton: Right.
MGen St-Louis: You can answer the calls to go defeat an enemy if that’s what is required. But you can answer the call to go train an ally. You can answer the call to be present. You can answer the call to be a Command and Control Node. You can answer the call to go take over a battle space of Toronto and be given three hospitals to help in the just the running of the resupply and cleaning of the hospital. And why? Not because you’re an artillery person that delivers long range precision fires, or you’re an armoured officer that can maneuver a tank and direct fire onto an enemy, or you’re an infanteer that can walk to an objective to apply lethal force. No, you can do all of that because what? You have developed a cohesive team— hopefully a team where you feel that you belong, that you feel safe. And that is the self contained group of folks that are autonomous in the space, and can achieve from the high end, the defeat of the enemy, and on a different spectrum. Just doing whatever other task is given to us.
Capt Orton: This is the good army stuff. You’re getting me pumped up. Shifting gears a little bit, you talked about Force 2025 at the beginning and kind of, like, outlined what that looks like. So, how does that fit into all of this?
MGen St-Louis: Hopefully, it fits really well. And you’ll tell me—you’ll tell me in five minutes.
Capt Orton: Right.
MGen St-Louis: After I’ve done trying to explain it. But Force 2025 is a realization that we have structures within our Force that are legacy structures that we have not revisited in a long time. It is our effort to look at those structures and maybe realize that those structures are not optimized for the equipment that we will need in the future—are not optimized for some of the domains where we need to be proficient in the future, are not optimized for some choices we need to make for a number of reasons because of what the future security environment looks like. Because we are hollow. So we are missing mid-level leaders and soldiers across different capabilities. So, all of these impetus for change is making us look at our structure, look at the way we come together as a reservists Regular Force teams that then come together to go and generate an output either in an expeditionary setting or domestically and relook at our structures and say: “Do we have it right? Is this the way a Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group should look like? Or is there a different way? Is this the way you should come together to deploy a unit? Is this the way to assign tasks and responsibilities to the Reserves to the Rangers to the Army Regular Force component?” And by the sheer premise that we’re asking the question, you know, that sous-entendu, is that this is not the way or there’s a better way, or there should be a different way. Some of it is just by the sheer fact that we can’t afford it. For example, the Army of tomorrow cannot afford the current way that it is using and has distributed the heavy tank force across the Army. It needs by sheer choice, needs to reposition some of its tank capabilities differently in order to do some savings to afford the capability that we have. So repositioning the Armoured Corps differently across Canada is an element of Force 2025; assigning different tasks to the reserve, tasks that they can generate on a predictive and regular basis, and then come together with Regular and Reserve Force components for an output going forward. Leveraging as much as possible from the Rangers while giving them the tools and structure and policies that the 5,000 plus Rangers need to continue to be this force of choice in the periphery of our huge country. It is looking at the vacancies across the army and shedding some of those vacancies away and accepting that they will never be filled. And, if they’re not going to be filled, what can we use them for going forward? Relooking at our structure, and doing things differently. Our allies are doing this. The Americans are doing this. The British are doing this. The French are doing this. They are relooking at their structures that they had ten to twenty years ago, that might have been gear for the Gulf War or for service in Afghanistan, and thinking in the future, if an enemy can defeat me in the information plane—even before we start fighting, if an enemy can undermine my capability to generate readiness by a cyber attack or undermining my tools on the cyberspace, if space platforms can detect me the minute I emit and destroy me, even before the fighting starts, what does that mean for the Army? I think it means a different structure, a different construct, a different way of bringing our force together in 2025. Building an Army for tomorrow that is different than the Army of today is what Force 2025 is all about.
Capt Orton: Wow, it’s a good sales pitch. Alright, so as we know, the pandemic has really disrupted the Army’s training objectives, and we're facing a number of challenges on those fronts. And it’s still not over yet. In fact, my very first podcast ever was with General Eyre where we kicked off into it. Where are we on that? And what are we doing to address those changes or those challenges?
MGen St-Louis: I know people are working hard on army refloors to continue and kick start or re-energize reserve recruiting. I know that at the Canadian Armed Forces level, the Joint Force is hard at work, getting our recruiting centers working again, in attracting that talent. But, let’s just take a step back. Even before COVID was our reality, and it has been now for more than a year. Even before that pandemic kind of stopped our human interaction and human activity that is at the basis of what an army does, who we attracted, who enrolled, who came into the army was at a level of numbers that did not allow the army to grow, let alone maintain, let alone grow its numbers. We were already challenged. Not because we had high levels of people wanting to leave the Army—just because we had levels of people leaving the Army that were higher than what was coming into the Army. Not at an alarm level, not at a panic level. But more people were leaving than were coming in. That was already a challenge. That challenge was exacerbated by the pandemic—by recruit centers that could not connect with Canadians by mobility in Canada. You were ordered to stay home. You cannot leave your home. I came back from deployment to lock downs in this country. So our recruiting numbers fell to really all time lows that if you add to an old ready rate of entry and rate of exit that was already skewed, when it gets added together, it means that we have suffered some losses in how many people need to come in, if we are going to ever maintain and grow the Army. Leaders at all levels are recognizing that. And, while they’re looking at our conduct and culture, and generating our readiness, they’re hard pressed to also open the doors of armoury floors and say: “Come and join us.” We are poised to leverage marketing campaigns that are coming for more recruitment. And we are looking at the way we train ourselves and accepting that maybe we're going to train ourselves differently, maybe accept that we train ourselves faster, cut the amount of training to deliver these recruits, these entry level leaders and soldiers in the Army—because we acknowledge that we have suffered a hit. Hit we have. But, since the last year, we are hard at work, training, attracting, recruiting, to get us out of this bind that we found ourselves in.
Capt Orton: With that last piece, I want to touch on a positive note. What do you think we’re the best at right now?
MGen St-Louis: That’s a great question! And, I don’t know what we’re the best at. And I don’t pretend to know much Adam. But I’ll tell you this. While a lot of travel in battlefield circulation has been curtailed, I have been fortunate enough to go out there and see some soldiers as the acting Army Commander. And I remember a conversation with a Lieutenant from the Reserves. He is a Combat Engineer. He is first generation Canadian, immigrated with his family from South East Asia, and he has a Ph.D. in engineering. And this trilingual, scientist engineer is a Second Lieutenant combat engineer soldier. And he is in a trench. It is now day four or five, I think, on the exercises. He is covered in mud, he is digging his trench because he is being assessed on a defensive position. I didn’t remember we could stink so much when we’re in the field. I don’t remember the last time I stunk like those soldiers were smelling in the trench. And you know what, that Second Lieutenant had a smile though the grime and camstick and camouflage in his face—had a smile from ear to ear, when he wasn’t falling asleep, because he was dead tired, and what he was telling me was that he was living his dream. He was doing what he thought we was meant to be as this part-time soldier for Canada, getting his qualifications to be ready to fight when the call comes.
I think what we do best is that sense of belonging to a team that has a purpose larger than yourself. What we do best is coming together and doing something that you will not do anywhere else. And that is, be given a weapon, ammunition, come together as a team to train to apply lethal force lawfully on behalf of your country when asked for. I think that when you ask me: “What do we do best?”—it’s this Lieutenant’s smile on his face, and at the end of our conversation, before I’d get out of the trench, he says: “Sir, can I ask you something?” and I’m like: “Yes!” He says: “On top of all that I’m doing, I still have some time on my hands and can you find a way for me to be able to, on top of what I’m doing, which is a full-time job, part-time reservist, I hear that Royal Military College has an engineering department. Can I teach there part-time? Can you make it so that I can give more?” What I took away from that conversation is our responsibility is to not disappoint that Lieutenant in his service.
Capt Orton: Wow! Powerful story! Well, sir, I really appreciate you taking the time to unpack all this and thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
MGen St-Louis: Hey Adam, thank you so much. I’ll tell you, at the start of the conversation, I was expecting, yes, great session, we’re going to talk about the Army and so on. But, maybe I wasn’t as fired up as I am right now. You put the questions to me and asked me to verbalize some of the challenges and some of the opportunities and what we’re doing in the Army. You know what? I’m kind of fired up right now and I thank you for the opportunity to talk about what we’re all about.
[Music starts]
Capt Orton: Thank you so much, sir. That was MGen St-Louis, Acting Commander of the Canadian Army, and this has got me fired up for season three of the podcast. So keep listening. I’m Captain Adam Orton. Orton out.
[Music ends]