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The Army has modernized its approach to preparing troops to operate in cold weather environments and the Arctic.
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]
Sergeant Pier-Luc Dubé: So, in militaries, we are always to train as we fight. This is why soldiers need to be put in the worst situation ever, in order to be good at any situation.
Captain Adam Orton: Hi! I’m Captain Adam Orton for The Canadian Army Podcast. We all know that Canada is synonymous with frigid temperatures and the Army needs to be able to survive and operate in the most austere conditions. Recently, the Canadian Army has made some changes to its Cold Weather and Arctic Training. What better place to talk about this than at the Canadian Army Advanced Warfare Centre or CAAWC in Trenton. I’m here with Seargent Pier-Luc Dubé who’s going to tell us about his journey through learning about Cold Weather and Arctic Operations, and how we’re changing the program. Welcome to the podcast.
Sgt Dubé: Hi! Hi! Thank you!
[Music ends]
Capt Orton: So, why do we need to change the course? Why are we changing the training?
Sgt Dubé: The program before was old. It was not bad—not at all. It was updated this time. But, we focused a little bit too much on the past wars; we were in Afghanistan, and we were involved in a lot of European stuff. So, we kind of forgot about our winter. Right? Equipment went old, drills went old. So, what they did is they can now turn their head on the right and look at this and then: “Okay, so we’re not updating anymore.” We got cold weather injuries for two weeks in the field at minus twenty outside—“what’s this thing?” So, they kind of mandated CAAWC to look at this and find a way to modernize our winter training. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last three years.
Capt Orton: You know, this reminds me of when I was teaching on a leadership course a couple years back. And I had to look up the winter warfare manual—the Pam, as they call it. And I’m finding this thing is this old, like borderline typewritten document from 1987. And it was still cold back then—still good. But it’s like some of the equipment and they’re like: “Wow, that’s some old stuff.” So it probably needed an update.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, and I know what book you’re talking about. We are actually going to rewrite that book. Like snow was snow fifty years ago and snow will be snow in fifty years. But the knowledge we have right now is better than fifty years ago and the equipment available out there is also better. So, if we want to improve, we need to always keep our stuff up to date.
Capt Orton: You know, a Canadian living day-to-day might say: “I live with winter all the time I go outside people live in Manitoba. They’re fine.” What does military training give you that your average person just living in Canada doesn’t already know?
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, even if you are in Shilo, maybe you may never have slept outside at minus forty-five. A lot of Canadians live in Canada, but they don’t like snow. I think we all know people will also fly to Florida wherever to enjoy their winter. Right?
Capt Orton: The answer is you leave.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, exactly. So in militaries, we have to always train as we fight. So, if we have to fight in winter conditions, well, it’s going to be outside and outside and outside. And we may end up in the situation where resupply won’t be an option and you’ll be a week outside with the gear you have on. And to survive, you need to first take care of your weapons and stuff like that and take care of your body temperature level, and your soldiers—your subordinates that are cold as well. And so on. So we need to train in these situations in order to prevent that if it happens. Army is a big ‘If.’ Army is good with all the ‘If.’ This is why I think the soldiers need to be put in the worst situation ever, in order to be good at any situation.
Capt Orton: Yeah. If you train for the worst, you’re already good to go for the easy stuff.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, yeah.
Capt Orton: Nobody plans for things to go well. You know what I mean? If things go well, you don’t have to worry. Piece of cake.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, that’s true.
Capt Orton: So, how did you find yourself in the seat of you know, the subject matter expert and the person that's making all these changes? Why are you the person?
Sgt Dubé: Yeah. First of all, I am not the god of winter. Ok. I heard some ex-students that I got some emails with them, and they called me “the legend” because I went in the water twice in the same day, whatever, in the winter.
I came here to CAAWC on July 19. From here, they posted me in this platoon. I was not qualified—not at all. I got civilian experience. I’m a trapper, a hunter, I'm always outside. So they got me on the Norway course. It’s AWIC—Advance Winter Instructor Course, which is five weeks long. My job was to look at the course with the optic of creating something here in Canada based on what I’m seeing there. I’m not going to copy-paste their course, but I’m looking at how they do things, why and adapt towards them because Norway is the NATO Centre of Excellence in winter warfare. So they know what they’re doing. So I ended up being here for that. And then the year after that I was on my Canadian Arctic Ops course as an instructor and candidate.
Capt Orton: The old—the old candidate instructor, eh?
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, exactly. So yeah. And then a year after I became in that chair, assuming, and I like it. So I hope I’ll be here for years.
Capt Orton: Yeah, a good chunk of time.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, that’s what I want.
Capt Orton: So, what did you learn from Norway?
Sgt Dubé: Different culture. They are great at what they’re doing. If I'm not mistaken, Norway is the army that puts the most budget in their personal equipment on their soldiers. They have very good kits. Nobody can argue that. I was working with twelve or fifteen different countries—looking at their course as a candidate and we were all surprised how good their kit is. When you’re talking about winter, winter comes with kit. If you have no kits, you end up doing the basic, basic. So that was the first thing. The second is they all ski, as civilians, so that they have an advantage—let’s say like that, but their army also put a lot of effort in their training about skiing, how to adapt the skis on that pack on support and logistics. They ski everywhere. So this way they can travel more than us, let’s say. So they are more manoeuvrable and more flexible. Yeah, this is what I was impressed by. They use their resources very, very good in wintertime.
Capt Orton: Why are skis better? Like, I mean, I know the go to standard these days for the Canadian Army is snowshoes. Why are skis better?
Sgt Dubé: Well, there are different ways of thinking, and I understand both of them. Skis are better. First, you won’t lift your knees and stuff like that. Over there, we were travelling between 5 to 8k an hour, which is big. That’s huge. That is huge. The 8k an hour—let’s say it was a downslope. Ok, I was not Superman over there.
Capt Orton: Well, you’re not going 8k an hour on a downslope on snowshoes. That’s for sure.
Sgt Dubé: That's for sure. Yeah, exactly, and we covered, I don't know about 100k 110k within five or six days. After that, yeah, my feet were destroyed. But my energy itself I could have attacked for two or three days—no problem. So that was obvious over there. When I say there’s two ways of seeing things is because in Canada we have deep snow—not the same. So in deep snow, you need snowshoes sometimes. So I can understand why we moved away from skis a little bit. But now with the technology we have out there, skiing can be brought back in every condition ninety percent of time would be better than snowshoes for movement. And that’s saying for mission wise attacking something. But for movement, skis will ninety percent of the time be better.
Capt Orton: And people like often don’t appreciate and even sometimes we forget ourselves—is that there’s really two pieces to the whole attack thing is you have to get there and then you have to attack. And if getting there takes all the energy out of you, the attack bit gets really difficult.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, exactly. And you cannot just be inserted two kilometres from the enemy. Right? You need to be quiet. So you have a sixty-seventy pound rucksack, you have one-hundred pounds toboggan behind you and you ski toward your objective and the best minds and the best trained soldier will win.
Capt Orton: You know, the other thing I think you brought up which people often forget is deep snow. I’ve had a couple of experiences with deep snow. But, I remember in particular one time, I was up in BC, and we were driving BV206s—which are big track vehicles. If you got Google, just look it up. It’s really cool. That is a military vehicle which I think they use in Nordic countries. And so we’re driving and I forgot about deep snow. Right? And so I opened up the door, we got to where we’re going to open, I opened the door, I jumped out of the BV 206. And I just sink right up to my arms and snow right here like oh yeah, that’s why we’re using track vehicles and all that. It’s like the snow is really deep. Yeah. And it’s hard to operate in really, really deep snow.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, definitely. And this is why in our courses, we tried to train soldiers to do a better route analysis with a map. Okay, where’s the deep snow—you try to avoid deep snow, though. If you have a long way to go, try maybe more windy spaces or whatever. But if you go in the deep snow and you don’t reach your objective, it won’t work. So the mission first—you need to go to be at your objective and be able to fight. So, if you have to go in deep snow, you go in deep snow. It’s okay if you have a trailbreaker in the front. People have no rucksacks; they have nothing. And they just break trail. It would be a slow one like snowshoes. But, the thing is, if it’s avoidable, you try to avoid it.
Capt Orton: Everything comes at a price.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, yeah. And there is no perfect world. In winter, there is no perfect world.
Capt Orton: Well, what are the new courses? And how are they different from the old courses?
Sgt Dubé: So, the old courses, there was too much of a big gap between the Basic Cold Weather and then the Arctic Operation Advisor’s. Arctic Operation Advisor, at the end of that course you were supposed to advise COs, Commandent to plan operations in the Arctic. So there was no middle for junior leadership, let’s say. So we cut that course in two. Now we have the Basic Cold Weather. And we have the Cold Weather Operations Leader. And we have the Arctic Operations.
Capt Orton: So, talk to us about the basic course or Cold Weather Operator. What does that look like?
Sgt Dubé: The basic course is section wise. So, what I mean by that is they will do dismounted mobility. They will have their pulk behind them, their equipment, their tents for two nights. And they will do a survival. The survival portion in there—it will be section wise. They will be together in one big shelter and provide shelter. And you will pass the night there. It’s kind of an introduction if I might say. Because once a soldier comes into the Canadian Armed Forces, they don’t know how to operate our Coleman stoves, they don’t know how to put up a tent. It’s basic soldiering. Right? So in their basic course, they learn how to tie their shoes.
Capt Orton: Yeah, that’s right.
Sgt Dubé: So they need to start from something. So we teach them the basic stuff, and a little bit of mobility and a little bit of survival. Just a touch.
Capt Orton: So what changes were made to that course.
Sgt Dubé: Well, the basic didn’t change much. And it is basic, we just bring back skis in. And now they had to jump into the water at the basic level.
Capt Orton: And then the next course, tell me about that one.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah. So when we go to the second course—this is where it’s more advanced and individual. It’s called Cold Weather Operations Leader, which is a three week course based on mobility in winter, based on survival, based on the basic of snow dressing, how to lead your soldier in a winter environment, how to keep them motivated, how to take care of themselves, how to deal with cold weather injuries, how to prevent them, and so on. So that’s the goal of it. Because in the past, we had too many injuries. And so we needed to focus on this. So this year, we were in Shilo, Manitoba. We had minus forty pretty much the whole time. So they learned.
Capt Orton: You know, I got a quote, an old instructor of mine who said: “You’ll either learn or you’ll suffer and then you’ll learn.”
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, this is something that people maybe don't notice about winter training, is you don’t need a PowerPoint to teach something. When you let’s say there’s ten people in a tent right now that are doing whatever at night because there is no task. Well, they all learn, okay, they forgot something in their backpack outside. It’s minus forty. We’ll put you boots on and go get what you forgot. So you won’t forget the next time. Yeah, you always learn. If you freeze your hands, well, you’ve just learned that these gloves don’t work. So you know, I mean, winter is very self learning.
Capt Orton: Yeah. And it’s worth mentioning that, you know, it’s not about intentionally hurting people or anything like that, you know what I mean? But it’s just everything that I’ve learned in the military certainly is accomplished by a certain amount of pain.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, definitely. And they adjust, they adapt, and then they just get more confident outside and the trick is to be outside. The goal of this course is to put candidates outside. They are always outside in tents. At the end, they do a survival portion, which there are no tents. They are three to four days under a tarp. And they have a fire and that’s it. One rabbit. At the end of this course first there is no injuries. And second, everybody learned on that course. No doubt. Other than that, it was a mounted course before on this three weeks it was on sled and snowmobile. And now it’s more dismounted mobility with skis. We lack in the Canadian Forces of movement of mobility in dismounted.
Capt Orton: Right. Because it’s tougher to move on snowshoes than on skis for sure.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, yeah. Before, it was on sled, on snowmobile prior to going to the Arctic. So it didn’t train on mobility, navigation, and this stuff in dismounted capacity. So, in the future, the aim is that there will be a lot of people qualified on this, but not necessarily they will go up in the Arctic. So there will be multiple Cold Weather Operations Leader running at the same time for let’s say one Arctic Operations Course.
Capt Orton: And what does the Arctic Operations Course cover now?
Sgt Dubé: Now the Arctic Operation Course is covering—there’s an acclimatisation phase during a week. So the candidate will build an igloo, they will sleep in, they will build a snow cave and sleep in, they will construct a fire trench. And then we move on to the planification portion, which is, you know, in the Arctic seems easy. But you don’t just show up one-hundred people in the Arctic in a two-hundred person civilization and think that you are going to go to the grocery store and fuel your truck in their communities. It doesn’t work like that. You will empty the communities. So stuff like that you plan, plan your plane, if you need to move from A to B, you will reserve some planes. It will be Twin Otter so it is going to be a civilian contract, probably. You will plan your contact, your RCMP contact into your communities, details like that. So, they will learn that as well. You will also learn the mounted mobility portion, which is we move in snowmobile. Over there we have BV206 to support. So they will learn that. Cold start procedure, how to troubleshoot a snowmobile because don’t worry about it—you’ll troubleshoot every day. It’s so cold, so. And at the end, there’s a final exercise, which is the community where they planned a trip with a certain budget. They need to go there on flight. And then they have their snowmobile and all their kits and everything that they have planned they need to execute with them. So is it a one-hundred kilometre patrol with some fishing, or a community event or they have planned something there. And then when they come by this is where the course pretty much ends.
Capt Orton: So, how many serials of the course have we run so far in this new program?
Sgt Dubé: Right now, we’ve done two courses. So about two times forty personnel that have been qualified.
Capt Orton: And how many people was that?
Sgt Dubé: Eighty, total.
Capt Orton: Oh, okay. Did you learn anything from it?
Sgt Dubé: Yeah, the course went well. A pilot course is never easy. A pilot course is always running square—and you just need to embrace it. But we saw good things. We changed the things that we think we needed to improve. There are still things that need to be improved. For the second course in a row, we had the same issue. So in the future, we will work on that. But the course, itself, went well. The tactical portion in there, this is what we noticed, it was not very accurate. I understand it's important to teach tactical. But, in the three weeks course, we noticed that it was hard to bring everybody at the same page for this small amount of time. So, my goal is to take every minute and put knowledge into their head and experience into their hands. So this way, when they go back to the unit, they can train tactical around this.
Capt Orton: And what’s happening to the people who have the previous qualification. What’s the impact on that?
Sgt Dubé: It’s part of our duty. Right? I have a qualification. It’s been ten years since I’ve qualified for something. If I have to do the job, it’s my duty to just put myself up to date. It’s just what it is. If not, we’d end up having to requal everybody, every five years.
Capt Orton: It never ends.
Sgt Dubé: It never ends.
Capt Orton: What can soldiers at the unit level do to improve themselves?
Sgt Dubé: Without having to consume too much time on training skis to the soldier, there’s a good way of doing it. It is to add in to their physical training, which is we call it PT. If you do this, let’s say twice a week, without consuming any time in the work hours, your soldiers will become very good at skiing. The easiest thing to do is to be outside. You just go outside, put your gear on, go outside and everything’s about acclimatization. I know the lumberjack before—I don't know if you’re aware—but every morning when they woke up they went outside peeing with their bare feet. They freeze on purpose their feet in order to pump the blood in and their feet will stay warm the whole day. That’s just an example as if you don’t go outside if you always need you at twenty degrees in, well, you won’t be for this. It’s all in the head.
Capt Orton: You want to be a better soldier, you go shooting, get better at shooting. You want to be a better winter soldier, go out maybe try some skiing—or snowshoeing or whatever.
Sgt Dubé: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Because training on skis is very time consuming. But, if you add that it’s doable and the benefit of it is incredible. Totally incredible.
[Music starts]
Capt Orton: I’d like to thank you for coming out and talking about Cold Weather and Arctic Operations.
Sgt Dubé: And, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Capt Orton: That was Sergeant Pier-Luc Dubé at the Canadian Army Advanced Warfare Centre in Trenton. If you want to know more about the Canadian Army in the Arctic, check out our Arctic training podcast on season two episode five.
I’m Captain Adam Orton for the Canadian Army Podcast. Orton out.
[Music ends]