3rd Horseman:
You seem to agree that the 3 ice-breakers are not an undesirable purchase. The proposal calls for 500 personnel to man them and support them. The Norwegian Icebreaker discussed here
(
http://forums.army.ca/forums/index.php/topic,38894.0.html )has a crew of 52 (including air det). Port and Starboard crews for 3 vessels would result in a manning requirement of ~300 PYs, allow another 100 for forward support and 100 for command and rear area support and you have 500 PYs.
Those ships need local forward support otherwise they are going to spend a lot of time off station. Therefore they need a useable port in their AO. Iqaluit and Nunavut generally could use port facilities. There doesn't seem to be a conflict of needs there to me.
I have mentioned before that I have worked a lot in the past with the American fishing fleets in Alaska. These vessels are homeported in Seattle, roughly the same size as a frigate or one of these icebreakers (American Triumph is typical of the large trawlers. She was built by the same yard that built the Svalbard for a fishing company owned by the owner of the yard -Kjell Inge Rokke - has a gross tonnage of 4294 tonnes , a Length Over All of 285 feet and carries a crew of 130 - 80% processors and 20% ships crew at a guess
http://www.atsea.org/association/amsea.html) and operate out of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians on a seasonal basis. Dutch Harbor supplies the forward operating location (FOL) while Seattle supplies the fleet maintenance facility (FMF). Dutch is lightly manned on a year round basis with surge man-power added during operational periods. It seems like a reasonable plan to me for operating the 'breakers.
As to the Cambridge Bay base - the PY allocation there is supposedly 100 persons to maintain the facility for training purposes. Is there anything to say that all those 100 persons have to be there year round or could they float in and out depending on usage.
Finally, wrt sovereignty patrols and training it seems to me that they go hand in hand. Rather than running up and down Shirley Road or doing circles around Wainwright why not do more training in the back of beyond sending out platoon/coy teams for a week or two? The time spent in isolation and dependent on the radio would do more to teach junior leaders about management and logistic skills than all the running around bases ever could. It would also quickly demonstrate who the leaders were. This would be done in a taxing but non-threatening envirionment. Tactical skills can be taught on controlled bases. It would be expensive but it would also demonstrate that we consider this turf ours - we can deploy the government's forces here anytime without asking permission.
I don't get the sense that we are talking about recreating something like Pet or Valcartier above the Arctic Circle. Perhaps something more like Dundurn.
