Canadian Air-Sea Transportable Brigade Group
The number of men continually increased starting in October 1953 with the arrival of the 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade (1CIB), then the 2nd, and finally the 4th in 1957 which included a full armoured regiment.
The Canadian Navy was expected to add to the NATO mission of maintaining control of the North Atlantic and thereby guarantee the logistics needed to operate the 4th in combat conditions.
As part of this review, and in keeping with the general desire to significantly reduce the size of the Canadian Forces, the active European commitment was halved.
They would be able to play a more decisive role in Norway than the same force could in the main battle line in Germany, and the Canadian troops experience in arctic warfare would prove useful.
The argument won over NATO command, and the Norway mission was handed to the 5 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (5 CMBG) formed up at CFB Valcartier.
[3] BORAL relied on the Norwegians supplying the required roll-on/roll-off sealift capability, while Canadian commercial aircraft would be commandeered to move in advanced parties.
These comments eventually prompted the Defence Minister, Jean-Jacques Blais, to formally request that CAST be operationally deployed in its entirety under wartime conditions.
Finally, traditional rivalries between the land and air forces led to a division of effort between helicopter and fighter support that was never addressed.
In the summer of 1982 the then Secret Land Force Operational Effectiveness Study conducted by Mobile Command under the direction of General Bezile sharply criticized the entire concept of sending a Canadian Brigade to Norway.
It concluded in part that the CAST Brigade group "suffers important shortfalls in manning, operational stocks and war resources" and further that "there were no comprehensive plans for assembly, deployment and reception".
Although couched in technical language, the report made it abundantly clear that Canada had been publicly proclaiming a commitment to an operational task that it had little capacity to fulfill.
Although military spending had increased dramatically in the late 1970s, before the PCs took power, Beatty's paper complained that "if 'rust-out' were permitted to occur, either by intent or neglect, the loss of equipment in the 1990s would by itself dictate a new, greatly diminished defence role".
[14] Primary among its capital expenditures were the purchase of an additional six Halifax-class frigates in addition to the six already ordered, a replacement for the CH-124 Sea King helicopter used on these ships, up to a dozen nuclear submarines, new ships to clear mines in Canadian waters (delivered as the Kingston-class coastal defence vessel), and the development of Canadian operated space assets for communication and reconnaissance.
Numerous commentators complained that the Canadian mission should have been reversed; instead of moving the brigade group to Germany, where it represented a limited amount of additional firepower, they argued that the German units should be shifted to Norway, where they would cause a significant change in the balance of power.
This point was made early by the Liberal defence critic, Doug Firth,[17] but these concerns were generally unheard given the outcry over the nuclear submarine issue.
