I like to write threads with funny gifs about Canadian Armed Forces culture, doctrine, and management issues - mostly late at night to avoid sleeping. This is a meta 🧵 of 🧵:

Something I'll never understand is that we live in a world where billionaires & trillionaires manipulate politics, culture & economy to get richer at the cost of humanity's health & prosperity - but instead of dealing with that - people just make up dumb conspiracy theories.

This is exactly what it feels like to be mechanized infantry.

Unlikely but worth considering how 🇨🇦 is postured. Reg army is too small. Reserves are designed to augment but complex training is hard to achieve part time, limiting scale. Arguably ResF should be flattened into a generic combat trade. Min training length = max societal reach.

Rumour has it that the Canadian military is finally going to receive our new annual retention bonus this Christmas, and I for one am looking forward to making some sound financial investments.

This is the appropriate and healthy reaction of a sane human being when told they need to make two seperate Treasury Board submissions to seek approval for a procurement that the Prime Minister already announced.

In 1964, Canadians submitted 3,541 proposals to the parliamentary committee tasked to pick a new national flag. Honestly, I think we should have picked Keith Quasena's bold depiction of our country's fiercest and most bloodthirsty predator.

The CAF failed to meet recruiting goals for a decade yet in 2025 hit a post Cold War record. In 2025 the Snowbirds had a historically light schedule, only performing aerobatic shows at 15 🇨🇦 events. In this paper I will demonstrate that the Snowbirds actually hurt recruiting...

Listen, don't pretend that if your neighbor asked you to help them out and shovel their driveway every winter since 1961, you wouldn't eventually get fed up and tell them to buy their own damn snowblower.

Manifesting this for myself so hard.

Sig Sauer's marketing team has the opportunity to make the funniest slogan of all time.

Despite big investments it's unlikely that 🇨🇦 Army logistics will improve anytime soon. Part of the problem is a persistent inability to procure rational fleets. It's not just overlapping trucks, but the basics. 7 different beret colours, 16 sizes each. 112 line items to manage!

For anyone who ever worked at the old Canadian Army headquarters at 110 O'Connor, this is what it looks like today. It wasn't the nicest building, sure, but at least there weren't any damn geese.

Colt 🇨🇦 is great at making receivers & barrels for AR-15s but the Munitions Supply Program gives them 1st refusal to make any small arms, including ones they don't know how to make (Tikka T3x, M240) Non-zero chance we're paying them to try to CNC mill glass from aluminum billet.

If I was the head of the Canadian military I would simply order my staff to submit a Memorandum to Cabinet & Treasury Board submission to the Government, creating an urgent procurement system via a Crown Corporation to rapidly modernize the CAF via fast contracts with 🇨🇦 firms🤷🏻‍♂️.

I am once again begging people not to simply divide the contract value by the quantity and assuming that's the unit cost. 20-40% of any military contract is typically in-service support, spare parts, accessories, training, all necessary additional spending above item cost.

Most 🇨🇦 military exercises in the Arctic are about sovereignty & survival - when the weather gets bad, you hunker down. 3 RCR however was sent to JPMRC, which is an exercise about fighting a real enemy who wants to kill you, along with the weather. Good context in this article:

The 🇨🇦 Army is making the Caiman our standard helmet but the exciting news is how. Rather than launching a lengthy procurement, we're using existing NATO framework contracts. Up next? We need to start using procurement as a service contracts to manage basic clothing & equipment.

🇨🇦 has said we won't participate in the conflict in Iran. A political position of course - but what could we even contribute? We started an air defence project in 2017. It has acquired nothing. We have nothing to fight these threats. We are irrelevant until we fix procurement.

Communication is a leadership responsibility, but CAF + DND handed that responsibility off to public affairs staff long ago, creating a risk-adverse system of endless approvals at every level that delays & muddies all messages. We need empowered uniformed spokespersons, now.