To Transform An Army: The Canadian Interpretation of The RMA and The Transformation of Armoured Vehicle Design, 1992--2008: The Case of the LAV-III

Between 2003 and 2006, the Canadian land force pursued a program to create a Direct Fire Unit (DFU) vehicle family based on the Light Armoured Vehicle (LAV)-III as part of military Transformation. This program grew out of 1990s discourse on the concept of a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). RMA proponents argued that the emergence of information technology would allow the creation of completely new weapons systems and military capabilities. As opposed to this intention, the criticism that Western military forces pursue procurements which are characterized by "trend innovation" has emerged in some studies. Trend innovation describes a tendency for military forces and industries to make modifications to existing categories of weapons platforms rather than developing fundamentally new systems, usually driving up costs while failing to achieve concomitant gains in military effectiveness.;The LAV was not a new platform, but had originally been developed in the 1970s. In 2006, the Canadian land force cancelled the DFU, which had been intended to replace its Leopard-1 main battle tanks, and instead acquired Leopard-2 tanks. The Leopard 2 had also been developed during the 1970s. Why, then, were these two platforms pursued as part of Transformation, and why did the reversal happen? The overall thesis of this work is that governmental politics refocused what were intended to be far-reaching initiatives into addressing near-term concerns, reinforcing trend innovation. More specifically, the case study of the DFU shows that bargaining for limited funds between subsidiary organizations within the Canadian land force, as well as between it and the Canadian federal government, spawned first the creation of the DFU program, and then its termination.;This bargaining also has specific implications for the history of Canadian defence procurement. A small number of studies of Canadian military procurements have used variants of the governmental politics methodology. However, they generally focus on aspects of organizational bargaining between a given service and other services or government departments. These works have also found that tracking Canadian military procurements through publicly available information is very difficult, with one describing the Canadian acquisition process as "opaque." This dissertation shows that it is possible to examine the details of governmental politics within a Canadian military acquisition program, and that such politics reach deeper than the interactions between federal departments and between those departments and elected officials. In the case of the Direct Fire Unit (DFU), disagreement and organizational bargaining within the land force itself had a greater effect than difficulties in coordination between the land force and other government departments.