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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.
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Captain Adam Orton: Hi, I’m Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. The Canadian Army has a lot of gear and it takes a pile of people to make sure it’s working right. That job mainly falls on the Corps of Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, or RCEME. MWO Josh Wolfrom is the ETQMS or Equipment Technical Quartermaster Sergeant for the Royal Canadian Dragoons in Petawawa. And he’s going to give us a rundown of who does what in the RCEME world. Welcome to the Podcast!
Master Warrant Officer Josh Wolfrom: Thank you for having me.
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Capt Orton: So, every trade has its little bits that catch people’s attention. You know, infantry people are running around blowing things up. The armoured people are driving big vehicles. What brought you into the RCEME world? What gets you jazzed about RCEME stuff?
MWO Wolfrom: Well, we’re the ones, I guess, to blame for allowing them to be able to go out and do what they need to do.
Capt Orton: Right.
MWO Wolfrom: If we don’t have our technicians, nobody’s driving out to the range or to the exercise. Nobody’s shooting bullets. Nobody’s fixing their stuff. Nobody’s getting a warm heater in their bed at night because that’s what we do. We sustain them so that they can do the fighting.
Capt Orton: If I’m driving my truck, I could probably skate by without a year of maintenance. Why does military gear require that kind of attention?
MWO Wolfrom: Where do you usually drive your truck?
Capt Orton: On the road, I would, yeah.
MWO Wolfrom: So, you add armour, you add bullets, weapons, things like that. You drive it through fields, hills, swamps. Well, they get a lot of places where they probably shouldn’t get. Causes a lot of wear and tear to the vehicles, even though they are an off-road vehicle. They do drive them like they stole them, which we don’t like, but is necessary.
Capt Orton: Yeah, that’s right.
MWO Wolfrom: I mean, obviously they have to be able to operate their vehicle at the capacity, so…
Capt Orton: Yeah, fair enough. Maybe you could describe, like, what trades are in the RCEME Corps. How do you guys do the thing? Who’s all in it?
MWO Wolfrom: Well, we’ve got five trades. We do have our officers as well. They’re EME officers, just electrical, mechanical, engineering officers. Usually those are from a science background, whether it’s engineering, chemistry, physics. That’s usually the type of officer that will be an EME officer. Then our five trades, we’ve got our material technicians, “MAT TECHs”. They work basically fabrication with textiles and metals. They’ll do all the welding. They’ll do body work, tents, clothing. Well, they don’t usually do the clothing, but they do have the capability of doing that. So, they’re a big support to all of us because they also will take care of extractions. So, if we break a bolt or a bolt is seized, they’ll go in there with their torches and their drills and they’ll get the bolt out without wrecking the hole, which we’re really good at doing.
Capt Orton: Right.
MWO Wolfrom: So that’s basically the MAT TECHs. We’ve got our weapons techs. That’s pretty much in their name. They repair the weapons. So, they’ll do anything from our handguns up to the cannon on the Leopard tank or even the M777s.
Capt Orton: Big artillery pieces.
MWO Wolfrom: Big artillery pieces, the howitzers. But also, they take care of our propane. So, our kitchens, mobile kitchens or flying kitchens, as well as they are our hydraulic experts.
Capt Orton: Oh, wow, so they cover a lot.
MWO Wolfrom: Yes. So, I mean, that’s just two of the trades. Moving on, we have our EO Techs, so that’s electronics and optics. They take care of the fire control systems and the turrets of the armoured vehicles. They take care of all of the optics, night vision, thermal imaging, anything Army related. As well as they deal a lot with electricity. So, they work on generators up to about 60 kilowatts and they will create a power grid for a camp. So, depending on the size of the camp, they’ll have different generators set up, balance the power to have the generators working efficiently and supply power for your heaters, your command post, kitchen, even a toaster in the mess tent, so…
Capt Orton: That’s a wide range of stuff, like, fixing a set of night vision goggles could be far more difficult than working on a generator, I’d imagine.
MWO Wolfrom: Obviously, both have their challenges, depending on what it is. They do also have to have a better knowledge of radiation and then lasers as well.
Capt Orton: Right.
MWO Wolfrom: That’s just due to the fact of the optics do have some radiation in some of them. So, they have to have that knowledge. There’s also the vehicle technicians. So, same with them. It’s pretty self-explanatory. They take care of the vehicles. They’ll fix anything from a weed whacker to a Leopard tank, tractor trailers, heavy engineering equipment. So, there’s a wide spectrum of the vehicle platforms that a vehicle technician will work on. And our last trade is my trade, it’s LEET, which is Land Equipment Engineering Technologist. We’re a new trade that has come in. It’s only been around for a few years. Any one of the RCEME trades that are promoted warrant officer, we now become LEET. Usually at the point where you’re promoted to warrant officer, you’re one of one in a unit. So, therefore, you are the junior expert in the unit for running all of the different shops. So you have to have an understanding of how it all comes together. We do also have another trade that’s not a part of the RCEME, but does work with us in the workshop, in most cases anyways, and those are signal technicians.
Capt Orton: Okay.
MWO Wolfrom: So they are the ones that repair communication systems within our vehicle platforms and handheld platforms.
Capt Orton: And I know in, like, a lot of trades, for example, you know, we have financial services and sometimes human resources. We’ll have support from the civilian world. What role do civilians play in what you do?
MWO Wolfrom: Well, we’ve got basically two different types of civilians that are in our shops. So, we have our public servants. They usually work on the heavier equipment. And then we’ll also have contractors. Contractors will come in and they’re usually more of a vehicle specific contract. So, in my shop right now, we have three. They’re there only to work on our MSVS, the Medium Support Vehicle System.
Capt Orton: Yeah, big truck.
MWO Wolfrom: Big truck, big truck. Nine tons, I believe it is.
Capt Orton: Yeah.
MWO Wolfrom: So, they’re there specifically to work on MSVS. They work on all of the brigade vehicles, not just the RCD’s. So those are basically the two different types of civilians that you’ll have.
Capt Orton: And, you know, it’s worth noting that the military’s got a lot of different kinds of vehicles. And so, it’s not always easy or immediately obvious. It’s, like, truly from Cats to Zambonis, you know, everything’s there.
MWO Wolfrom: We do fix Zambonis as well.
Capt Orton: Yeah, right. Absolutely. And what about the Reserves in all of this? How do they contribute to the trade? How do they contribute to the trades?
MWO Wolfrom: Trades, yeah. Well, to start off, I guess, with the first portion of that, we don’t have all trades in the Reserves. We’ve only have the weapons and the vehicle. With their regular workflow, they have obviously three different levels. They’ve got their A, B, and C classes. An A class reservist usually will go in on their parade nights and then do some training on their different equipment types. So they will work within their reserve units and do their training. Our B class, as long as they’re employed within trade, they’ll usually work a regular 8 to 4 type of job in a military workshop and repair the kit that we have. And then C class, they’ll be usually joined up with us in the Reg Force or on a domestic operation.
Capt Orton: Right, and just there to backfill and support as required, I would imagine.
MWO Wolfrom: Correct.
Capt Orton: Can you describe a little bit how a shop works then? Like, a vehicle is rolling in, things are happening on your day-to-day. What does the shop look like?
MWO Wolfrom: So, probably one of the more important parts of the start of the job is the sergeants. So, the sergeants will arrange for the vehicle to come. I tend to say vehicle, I should be saying equipment.
Capt Orton: Yeah, that’s fair. Yeah, that’s on me.
MWO Wolfrom: So, they’ll arrange the equipment to come in. If it’s preventative maintenance, then they’ll ensure that all the filters and all the preventative repairs are arranged. So that equipment will come into the shop, it’ll be assigned to the workshop responsible for doing those repairs. If it’s a multi-workshop type of a job where it goes to the vehicle techs, weapons and EO, it’ll go to all the different shops required. But that sergeant will do all that pre-planning. When that vehicle arrives, as I mentioned, it’ll go to that shop. In that shop, the technician, the corporal, master corporal, will identify the faults, do the inspections, the servicing, whatever was required. And then that master corporal will turn out to order in the parts that are required. From that stage, we’ll go back up to the sergeants to acquire the parts, cycle them back down to the master corporals that would then complete any repairs. So that’s the basic outlook at a single shop. Basically, if it is a multi-shop type of repair, it’ll just get passed between the different sergeants and each trade will complete their jobs. Sometimes they will be able to work on the vehicle at the same time. So, they would just coordinate between the different shops to have the repairs completed.
Capt Orton: One of the highlights of my corporal career was, I was driving a LAV III and it was having power issues. Like, it was just like, you know, you could just feel it was kind of sluggish. And so we took it in to the vehicle techs. And so there we were and we pulled the engine, the power pack on it, and it’s this giant thing. It’s the size of a car. And there’s just a giant crack from one end to the other. It was incredible to see that this armoured vehicle could still run with that kind of insanity attached to it. So I guess you guys see that stuff all the time.
MWO Wolfrom: Cracks don’t seem to happen as much as they used to. We do have leaks and we do have engine failures. The LAV 6 is just basically a bigger version of the LAV III. Same basic idea with the power pack, roughly 45 minutes to an hour and a half. Pull that out, and if it’s broken, we can put a new one in, or we can do repairs on it while it’s outside of the vehicle. We can also run up the engine and test all the sensors and everything out on its stand. So it doesn’t even have to be a part of the vehicle.
Capt Orton: So, we talked about being in garrison, you know, being on a base and doing shop stuff. I would imagine things change a little bit once you get into the field because, you know, there’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of people outside, austere environments and stuff like that. How does the system work when you’re outside of that, kind of, shop environment?
MWO Wolfrom: So, when we go to a field environment, I would say one of the main differences is now we’re a little bit more concerned about defense. So in a field environment, depending on the setup, whether we’re in an admin company or if we’re in a forward echelon or what the case may be, we’ll determine how much security we have to be concerned with, with ourselves or by ourselves, or how much will be provided to us. Other than that, the same repairs, the same inspections, all the same work still goes on, just a matter of being in a different area. So, there’s no solid floor, you’re out in the field or out in the parking lot, but we can do, if not all, very, very close to all the repairs that we do in a shop out in the field.
Capt Orton: Let’s talk about the echelon system a little bit. Like, I’m not even a subject matter expert on it because I haven’t done a whole lot of mechanized stuff. What is that?
MWO Wolfrom: So, the echelons is basically a division of where your forces are. So, we’ve got our fighting echelons, so that’s not usually any of the tech trades. They’ll be nearby with medics. So, if we’re with the RCD, we’ll have armoured personnel with us as well. And we’ll be just a little bit back from the fighting edge. When there is a repair, however, with RCEME, we do try to repair as far forward as possible. So, if on the front line there is a vehicle that goes down or a piece of equipment that goes down, we will send somebody as far forward as possible to do the repairs up to and including on that line. In the fighting echelon, anyone that moves up there, it’s what I like to call, kind of, like a duct tape and bubble gum type of repair.
Capt Orton: Yeah, that’s right. Just make it work.
MWO Wolfrom: Get it to work, get it to work quickly. Whether it’s to move it back to do a better repair, whether it’s to keep it in the fight, whatever the case, it’s something quick and easy. It’s usually up to about four hours or so of work. It all depends on obviously what parts they are carrying, what the situation or scenario is around them, to what they can do for repairs. After that, they’ll move it back to the admin company. That’s considered to be a first line workshop. In that first line workshop, we’re looking to do repairs for components other than major assemblies to about a maximum of eight hours. Beyond that, we’ll move to a second line organization, which especially in a field environment is a service battalion. They will then do repairs up to about 24 hours. So, they will do the major assemblies. They’ll take care of your engines, your transmissions, differentials, transfer cases. If we’re looking for weapons, that’ll be some of the major barrel changes, especially if we look at the M777s. So, they’ll do the bigger components of the equipment. EO Techs, I think I mentioned before, some of them require a clean room. Those clean rooms are there for changing the sensitive equipment within the fire control systems.
Capt Orton: It’s a little bit tricky because I imagine on the front lines, there’s maybe combat happening, kind of like casualties in my infantry experience, you know. So there’s things happening on the front lines and you can’t necessarily risk your technicians or the people who can repair things. But on the other hand, you got to get things back into the fight. And then, as you move back, you know, it’s safer and safer and you can do more and more stuff, but you want to be as close as possible to the edge to be able to support the team and far enough back to be safe enough to be able to do it and not risk your people.
MWO Wolfrom: Yes, and that’s, I mean, if we are dispatching a crew as far forward as possible, usually the further they go, the more security they’ll carry with them. Not saying that RCEME personnel are more important than anybody else, but they want to ensure that we’re protected as well as they can be, because our job is to sustain the fight, not to bring the fight.
Capt Orton: Yeah, definitely. And then you’ve got your third line.
MWO Wolfrom: Moving back to a third line. A third line, there’s two variations. Third line could be a 202 Workshop in Montréal, where we’ve got technicians that do a repair and overhaul type of repairs. And then sometimes it does move out to industry. So, if we have a third line repair for LAV 6, it may go down to GDLS, General Dynamics Land Systems, in London, to have the hull, weapons, turrets, whatever it might need, repaired.
Capt Orton: It’s got to go all the way back home.
MWO Wolfrom: Yeah. And then we’ve got a fourth line system. It does get very blurry between third and fourth, just because it’s already gone outside of the Army, I’d like to say, into the 202 Workshop or into industry.
Capt Orton: So, what’s your favorite part about all of it? Like, why do you do this?
MWO Wolfrom: It makes me very proud to understand that we’re responsible for allowing the fight, like, to enable the fight. It’s also some of the stuff with innovation.
Capt Orton: Okay. What’s that look like?
MWO Wolfrom: So, I’m going to use an example. So, before I got to the RCD, I was with the 3rd Royal Canadian Regiment. I was the control officer there, which is the warrant officer. The CO at the time had challenged maintenance to come up with an anti-tank weapon that could be mounted to an MRZR.
Capt Orton: It’s a little scooty thing.
MWO Wolfrom: It’s a four-person side-by-side that’s been militarized.
Capt Orton: Right.
MWO Wolfrom: It’s just a Polaris RZR. So, what we did is with a coordination between the different shops, the weapon shops got the weapons parts, the EO Techs got some of the mounts, and the MAT Techs fabricated what we couldn’t find. So, the MAT Techs created a platform to put in. Vehicle techs removed some of the roll cage in the rear seats so that they could mount the system. And they mounted this system on top of the MRZR. It could fire anti-tank missiles. It could fire a grenade launcher, the C-16 grenade launcher, or a .50-cal machine gun. So, obviously, if you’re thinking of a little side-by-side that people drive around in the bush, well, this one has some serious weapons on it.
Capt Orton: You know, it’s funny because you wouldn’t necessarily think, or I wouldn’t necessarily think that sometimes there’s a lot of space for that kind of creativity when you’re doing Army stuff. Is that something that comes up a lot?
MWO Wolfrom: It does. It’s not usually as big a scale as this one was. The challenge from the commanding officer was to take these vehicles and their crew and deploy them from airplanes.
Capt Orton: Right.
MWO Wolfrom: So, they would drop in with the MRZRs to an anti-tank and then to a support vehicles behind enemy lines, drive up, engage the armoured vehicles, deploy their weapons, retreat back, and pull out with Chinook helicopters. So, they went and tested that a couple of times. They did an exercise, Lethal Weapon 7. Name sounds a little funny.
Capt Orton: Great name. Yeah, I was just going to say.
MWO Wolfrom: But it does actually coincide with everybody that was involved. I mean, it was an exercise. The lethal weapon, meaning they’re putting on this anti-tank weapon onto a side-by-side. And 7 was their call sign. So, the name of the exercise actually was what everything was. It worked out pretty good. Yeah, so they deployed four of these vehicles from an aircraft. They parachuted in with their crews as well as with technicians. So, we had some jumpers. They deployed in, they verified the equipment, they assaulted the target. Then they withdrew, got picked up by Chinooks and had the MRZRs slung underneath the helicopters as they took off out of the battle space.
Capt Orton: So you had, RCEME has parachutists as part of that task?
MWO Wolfrom: Correct. At the light infantry battalions. There are other positions as well, but mainly at the light infantry battalions. Maintenance usually tries to hold on to roughly four positions. So, one for an EO tech, one weapons, and two vehicle techs. It’s basically to support the light infantry battalion after they’ve jumped in somewhere. What the CO at the time had come up with this MRZR idea, it enabled our techs to jump with them so that when the vehicles hit the ground after parachuting in, they could verify that there was no major issues, that the weapons were going to work when they got on target, and that the vehicles were going to be able to get there. So, I was very proud to be a part of that. I don’t take any credit for that because it was the technicians, the master corporals, and the corporals were the one that came up with the design, made the design. And they’re furthering the project. They’re trying to make a standardized install for these MRZRs to have this capability. So, we came up with a rough design. We tested it, it worked. And now they’re just trying to manufacture it into a forever deal.
Capt Orton: So the military is looking for people in all of these fields. Why should people be interested in joining RCEME trades and coming over to the Army?
MWO Wolfrom: Well, through my career being a vehicle tech, I’ve obviously developed a lot of skills, a lot of different platforms, tool knowledge, knowledge of electricity. The knowledge that you get out of this, the experience that you get, you can’t get in the civilian world. It only happens in the military. I did leave the military for a few years during my career to become a reservist. And at that time, I rejoined the workforce as a mechanic. And I was very happy to rejoin the military. The life as a military vehicle technician can be long, difficult, but it is extremely rewarding. And, like I said, the knowledge that you gain, the experiences that you gain throughout the military, it’s amazing.
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Capt Orton: Well, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us and tell us about your story and telling us what the RCEME Corps looks like.
MWO Wolfrom: It’s a great place to be. Got 22 years doing it and I don’t expect to stop anytime soon, so…
Capt Orton: Well, thanks again.
MWO Wolfrom: Thank you.
Capt Orton: That was MWO Josh Wolfrom, ETQMS at the Royal Canadian Dragoons, and I’m Captain Adam Orton for the Canadian Army Podcast. Orton out.
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