The first challenge was cultural, he said, foregoing the Army’s normal tendency to seek the greatest solution possible with the resources at its disposal. We had to rationalize what was essential and what we could reasonably take a pass on, understanding that we are accepting some risk in terms of our normal road to high readiness, and make some deliberate and ruthless decisions as opposed to stumbling into it on a month-by-month basis.” “There is always tension at the best of times between personnel tempo and what we are trying to achieve, and it was just exacerbated by COVID,” explained Fletcher, an infantry officer who previously commanded 1 st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (1 CMBG), both based in Edmonton. Regular and Reserve Force individual training had resumed across the Division after a four-month pause, but it was clear collective exercises would need to be rethought to continue protecting soldiers and their families, while still achieving the training objectives necessary to confirm the Division’s various units ready as a contingency force for global deployment on July 1. “Nothing was foreign, nothing was broken, but it wasn’t where I expected it. The position had been a rewarding and career-building experience, but he was back in Canada, energized and keen to get started with the “ideas built up in my head about the training we were going to do.” Now, the new commander of 3 rd Canadian Division faced a road to high readiness severely disrupted by a global pandemic. I don’t know a better term to describe it.” Brigadier-General Bill Fletcher had just returned to Edmonton in August 2020 after a two-year posting as the Deputy Commanding General – Operations with XVIII Airborne Corps of the U.S.
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