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SMOL: Let’s stop pretending vaunted Canadian Rangers are real soldiers
What can be worse than a country that refuses to protect itself? How about a country that deliberately deceives its people into thinking that they are protected by a viable military force when, in fact, they are not.
For the last few years, our highly publicized, vaunted northern Canadian Rangers have been basking in a public affairs love-in fuelled by our politicians and generals’ desperation to appear to have a serious standing military presence in the Arctic when, in fact, we do not. In reality our Canadian Rangers are a non-combat capable, largely untrained militia auxiliary component of the reserves. They are the only substantial component to our otherwise token military presence in the Arctic.
The need to generate this new “militia myth” of a crack, mostly Indigenous, special service northern sovereignty protection force is understandable. Unlike even smaller NATO allies such as Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, we here in the Great White North have no combat-capable unit operating in the Arctic. Nothing even remotely resembling well-trained, equipped and winter operations-ready units like the famed Finnish Jaeger Brigade or the Danish Sirius Patrol in Greenland, the Swedish Norrbotten Brigade or the Norwegian Ranger Battalion GSV exist in Canada’s North.
