George Wallace said:
Peaches
You may want to do a little more research into what your proposal really should be. What you just proposed is unworkable. 100 tanks, would not even fill the requirements of one Regiment, let alone three or more. As well, it would not provide enough for the School, Wainwright, and War Reserves. As for cascading the Leo 1 C 2 fleet down to the Reserves, you are really stretching your credibility. We had enough of a problem with 128 tanks filling the requirements of one Regiment, the School, and War Reserve. There was no Combat Training Center in Wainwright at that time. Nope. You proposal doesn't cut it.
You've got a pretty good point there, George. Just the other day, as a thought exercise I wondered how many troops we'd need to support a fleet of 300 - 400 tanks (a country of Canada's wealth should be able to acquire that many). This is a minimal number which would allow for basic combat stocks and training, but not war reserve.
What I came up with was:
Hive off 100 tanks for a training establishment - 100 recruits just entering their trade plus a minimum of 200 training officers and NCO's (allowing roughly two pers per candidate, one to deliver the training, the other to assist with monitoring the training and handling the admin work associated with developing and managing the training syllabus). That's 300 personnel. Now add on another 100 - 200 other support people (adm clerks & supply techs, etc.) to assist with running the entire training establishment overall. Add about 150 technical types - your mechanics, electro-optical techs and other vehicle maintainers, and your total training establishment, candidates included, runs to 650 people.
Now take the combat fleet on top of all that. That's 1200 personnel to actually operate the tanks (assuming four-man crews). Now, using the general rule of thumb that you need a minimum of 3 - 4 personnel to support one soldier in the field, you need a support establishment of 4800 all ranks/trades.
Your total establishment is 4800 + 1200 + 650 = 6650 personnel. With these kinds of numbers needed to run even a
de minimis armoured division, it's a wonder how we managed to run 128 Leopards with as few people as we did for as long as we did.
In fact, with a fleet of just 128 tanks being, as you point out, insufficient to handle training, combat and war reserves, I'm left with the impression that the few tanks we had in Germany up until 1990 would have only been able to play a very minimal role if the Soviets had attacked NATO. To put it more bluntly, the 36 - 54 effective tanks we had in Lahr would have had very short shelf-lives in battle if Soviet forces had penetrated the US VIII Corps FEBA in any significant numbers. It would have been like Hong Kong all over again. In saying so, I don't wish to diminish the work of the Canadian soldiers posted in Lahr at the time. They did extraordinarily well, despite being chronically underequipped and undermanned. The quality of the work they were doing was so high that they were actually training US soldiers, rather than the other way around, and they were held in very high esteem by German troops as well.
Let's face it, the 128 Leopards Trudeau bought in 1977 were just a form of tokenism intended to keep trade links with Germany open, and prevent Canada from being kicked out of NATO entirely. It was a pretty cynical move, knowing that at the time Canada had the wealth to be able to do much more.
The numbers I've generated in my scenario may be off base (hell, I might even be totally out of my lane here) but the idea of the exercise was not get absolutely accurate numbers, but to get an idea of just how many people you really need to run and operate several properly-sized tank regiments.
