It represents the largest peacetime procurement ever for the Canadian Army: by the end of this year, the Land Force hope to embark on the purchasing phase of a $5 billion “meta-program” to upgrade its armoured vehicle fleets.

Central to the program are two significant new purchases: a Close Combat Vehicle (CCV), intended to carry troops into battle alongside the Leopard 2 tanks, and a new Tactical Armoured Patrol Vehicle, suited for both reconnaissance and transport roles. The army plans to order 108 of the CCV, with a possible second order for thirty more, and 500 of the new TAPV, with an option for another 100.

While the CCV program appears to have encountered a major delay, the army should announce its choice for the TAPV before year’s end. With a commitment to purchasing something off-the-shelf, the army has been looking at a number of choices for both vehicles. Given how imminent these decisions might be, however, it is understandably tight-lipped about the selection – even a recent request for shortlists of the possible choices was refused by army public affairs.

Military hardware has its own magic. Watching YouTube videos of a tracked infantry fighting vehicle using its gun to reduce a Volkswagen camper to scrap metal, or an Oshkosh M-ATV becoming airborne as it crests a hill, it’s easy to get caught up in the flash and dazzle, the pure mayhem, of the heavy metal on display. Easy, too, to forget that behind all the boom and flash, there has to be a strategy – the why behind the what.

As Major Jim Gash of the army’s Directorate of Land Concepts and Designs puts it, “as long as it meets the requirements we’ve determined, it really doesn’t matter what the vehicle is.” In other words, his job – and that of LCol Ian Hope, head of the directorate – is to look past the hype and find the vehicle that best meets the army’s needs.

Put that way, it seems mundane – almost as mundane as the location of the directorate’s offices on the second floor of a low-rise building in a fairly raw industrial park in suburban Kingston, Ontario. Even once inside this military think tank, apart from a proliferation of flags and the fact that everyone is in uniform, it could be the offices of a mid-size insurance company.

In fact, though, there is nothing mundane about Gash’s words. Choosing a vehicle that meets the army’s requirements takes some serious thinking. The CCV and the new TAPV will be serving with the army for the next 25 years. Their selection will reflect not just the culmination of the military’s recent experiences, most notably in Afghanistan, but even more important, where it may go next.

The directorate is made up of the people who do that kind of looking ahead, taking the new ideas about equipment, strategy and tactics from conception through to commitment of resources, and fleshing out their ideas in such publications as Toward Land Force Operations 2021 and Designing Canada’s Army of Tomorrow. Talk to Hope and Gash, and you quickly discover that there are other ways to look at these vehicles than in terms of armour, firepower and speed:

Capability: A favourite term of the directorate, particularly when yoked with gap. What is a capability gap? Speaking of the Canadian army’s experience in Afghanistan, Hope says, “we quickly learned that certain vehicles were not robust enough for Afghanistan. And by robust I mean in terms of terrain and the IED [improvised explosive device] threat.” The LAVs couldn’t always go where the army wanted them to or withstand the ever more powerful IEDs being used against them. Both the CCV and the TAPV acknowledge these capability gaps, and will help to overcome them in future.

Flexibility: Talk of capability leads to the question “capable of what?” The directorate itself sees the army as becoming a “balanced medium-weight, high-tech force optimized for counter-insurgency, but effective across the spectrum of conflict.” That spectrum ranges, says Gash, “from limited interventions – evacuations, that sort of thing – through peace support and peacekeeping, through stability operations and counter-insurgency to total warfare.” To carry out these roles the directorate talks about the “Family of Land Combat Systems,” or FLICK, often represented as a series of overlapping coloured circles, referred to jokingly as the “flick flower.” The CCV and the TAPV are two important petals in this flower, useful across a broad range of possible scenarios – the CCV would fare best in all out ground war, the TAPV in peacekeeping, and both would have a place in counter-insurgency.

The army can never cover every possibility. “If,” Hope says, “someone had told me in 1985 or 1986 that toward the end of my career I’d be fighting in Afghanistan, I’d have laughed at them.” Nonetheless, when Canada was called in, the army was ready. “We had one of the best equipped units in Afghanistan in 2006 when I was [first] there.”

“It’s too late,” says Hope, “when something starts to say, oh, we didn’t think of that one.”

Sustainability: “We’re pragmatic from the beginning,” says Hope. “Although sometimes in the past we have not been. It’s based on what we have been in and what we think we will be in the future, which is not a big army. You may want technologies that don’t exist yet, and at the same time to build an army that’s sustainable and affordable. There’s no point in going out and building an army where you can only have a small proportion of it at high readiness because it’s so bloody expensive.”

“We like to think 20 years out,” he adds. “We need to build five years out. And that tension will never go away.”

Ian Coutts is the author of four books, most recently Brew North. His writing has appeared in Toronto Life, Canadian Business, the Globe and Mail, and elsewhere.

The combat vehicle contenders
Although the Canadian army is saying little about the contenders in both the CCV and TAPV programs or the results of testing at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, the following are believe to be the remaining contenders for the two programs.

Close Combat Vehicle (CCV)

BAE Systems Hägglunds CV 9035 MkIII
Tracked infantry fighting vehicle originally developed for the Norwegian army

Nexter Systems VBCI
Two variants of the wheeled 8×8 vehicle, CCV-25 and CCV-30, now in service with the French army

General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada Piranha 5
A beefier version of LAV III with 30 mm gun

Tactical Army Patrol Vehicle (TAPV)

BAE OMC RG-35
Upgraded version of the RG-31 4x4s, currently in use by the Canadian army

Force Protection Timberwolf (Cougar 6×6)
An updated, six-wheeled version of vehicle already serving in Canadian army

Oshkosh/LMI M-ATV
A two variant option done in partnership with General Dynamics Land Systems – Canada

Textron TAPV
Serves the United States army’s military police as the M-117