Planning for mobilization in 2002

Vincent J. Curtis

14 Nov 2025.

 In May, 2002, I submitted an article to the Army Doctrine and Training Bulletin entitled “From Here to There: Phase IV mobilization and the New Army Strategy.”  I don’t know if it was ever published, but this 6050 word opus covered the problems of mobilization through its four phases in light of the-then recently released “New Army Strategy” and before our major Afghanistan deployment. (of course, the NAS and full mobilization were completely incompatible.) It looks like the Army is once again reviewing plans to raise armed forces through at least a phase III mobilization.  To save time, and to provide old insights, below are the first few paragraphs of that 2002 paper.

The army exists to destroy Canada’s enemies.  In natural order of priority, the army is expected to defend from external threat the national territory of Canada, then North America, then the territory of its treaty allies such as NATO.  The army may be called upon by the Canadian government to make war upon a foreign country not contemplated under the previous three heads, as we are now doing in Afghanistan.  The army may also be called upon to contribute forces in support of United Nations operations, or undertake a range of customary domestic operations.  These latter uses of the army are decidedly of a second tier priority to that of the defense of Canada and of her interests against a direct external threat.  An army, in the first instance, is an instrument for war fighting, and all the other subsidiary capabilities of an army stem from that.

 Phase IV mobilization refers to the level of mobilization at which the entire country is roused for war.  A War Emergency is declared, the militia is called out, freedoms are restricted, and Canadian industry is turned over to war production.  It represents the maximum level of effort the country can exert in self-defense.  Twice in our history, in World Wars I and II, Canada stood on this footing.

The role of the Regular army in peacetime is not to fight a war.  The Regular army provides for the immediate defense requirements of Canada and the day-to-day deterrence against attack of Canada’s interests.  It makes the plans, conducts the training, and develops the doctrine of the army for its primary and secondary missions.  It serves as the basis for an operational commitment, but the capability of the Regular army and the scope of its overseas missions are strictly limited by the defense budget. The Regular army, as presently constituted, would never be called upon to fight in a major war, for it is too small to fight and its soldiers too well trained to waste in battle.  At best it could engage in strictly limited conflicts with a low risk of casualties.

The New Army Strategy is a plan of change that moves the Regular Force in the direction opposite to full mobilization.  Armour and artillery are going to be reduced in readiness.  Certain combat capabilities such as pioneers and mortar platoon are going to be stripped out of a doctrinal battalion.  The capabilities of the brigade group are going to be modularized into company-sized bodies so that a deployed unit or sub-unit can be more easily task tailored. The organizational structure of a task tailored unit may not resemble that of a conventional battalion at all; and losing pioneer and mortar platoons, the battalion is less of a combined arms team than it was.

The aim of the New Army Strategy is to create, in the Regular Force, a model army that is “more agile and lethal, tactically decisive and medium weight”.  None of these properties are absolute, they are relative, and depend upon the enemy and terrain.  For that reason, the Regular Force is expected to become “capable of continuous adaptation and task tailoring across the spectrum of conflict.”  This flexibility will be achieved by the Regular Force becoming “knowledge-based and command-centric.” 

The reason for these changes boils down to money: too much deployment, too little budget, and an urgent need to modernize. Part of the purpose of the New Army Strategy is to maximize deployable manpower for operations other than war.  Another part is to prepare the Regular Force, within our limited budget, to accept niche roles within a larger allied structure for combat like operations, and to maximize our combat power through the use of the new technologies.

The New Army Strategy is founded on the belief that until the government radically changes its policy on defense funding, the days of full, mechanized brigade operations by Canada are over.  Indeed, supporters of the New Army Strategy have argued that those days are over for everyone.  The United States Army and Air Force are now so technologically superior that they have made the army of every potential enemy of ours obsolete.  Nobody can stand in the field against an American armoured division supported by American air power.  Our potential enemies, it is argued, will not in the foreseeable future attempt to employ mechanized forces to impose their will against Canadian interests but will instead employ the techniques of asymmetric warfare, cyberwarfare, and terrorism to forward their aims.  Our enemies of the future may not even be governments.  Mechanized brigade groups are not able to shield us from these kinds of threats and these kinds of enemies.  In any event, Canada is quite unlikely to go it alone against an external threat; and with our spare defense budget and at a Phase II mobilization level, the New Army Strategy will enable the Regular Force at least to participate somewhere in a U.S. or U.N. led force.

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On the science of attribution and Thomism

Vincent J. Curtis

4 Apr 2026

Ross McKittrick is a professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, and he has become famous for his interventions in climate science. This is possible because the mathematical methods often used in climate science, regression analysis, are the bread-and-butter of economic analysis; and someone well-versed in statistical analysis is well-positioned to spot errors in the application of economic analytical methods to climate data analysis. McKittrick is an expert in a field of poorly trained amateurs applying mathematical methods they clearly don’t understand.

Dr. McKittrick presented a paper at the October, 2021 ICCC conference that had been published in the August edition of Climate Dynamics, in which he, and his co-author Richard Tol, proved invalid a method of analysis used in climate science since 1999, and begun in a paper referred to as ‘AT99.’

The science of attribution begins with the propositions that; (a) we can observe patterns and changes in climate data; (b) it can be hard to tell if there’s been a statistically significant change in the climate; and (c) it’s hard to prove that those changes were caused by GHG emissions.  The attribution methodology works by comparing observed patterns to patterns from climate models. This requires that we assume that climate models provide a true and complete representation of the climate, and that involves a statistical methodology known as regression analysis.

The beginnings of a logical fallacy are already evident. A model is a representation of reality, and if the model fails to accurately forecast the behavior of reality, it is assumed here that there’s something wrong with reality. This is a form of begging the question. A second problem arises from the data used to construct the model: is it truly representative, or is there a sampling problem unrecognized by the modellers? Sampling could be a problem if not a long enough period of time was sampled for data; in addition, there’s an implicit assumption of stasis in the climate and model.  ‘Alteration/ is not a change deemed within the principle of the climate.  Attribution tries to get around these logic problems by adjusting the parameters of the model to fit observed reality, and if more GHG is required by the model to fit the new data, that is grounds for attributing GHG as the cause of the deviation of reality from the expectations of the model. There is a fallacy in this also, but it goes unobserved by the Attributors.

Attribution was begun in 1999 with a paper entitled, “Checking for model consistency in in optimal fingerprinting” by Myles Allen and Simon Tett, published in the journal Climate Dynamics (AT99). The authors claimed to have provided an unbiased and ‘optimal’ (precise) measurement of the size of effects of GHGs on climate patterns (the ‘Fingerprint’), which allowed researchers to check that the statistical models are properly specified (the RC or residual consistency test). Theirs was a regression method. The IPCC grew to love the method, and claims it gives results that show unequivocally that “human activities” or “anthropogenic emissions” were responsible for the “observed warming over the last fifty years.”

Another logical error lies hidden in these words. By “human activities” and “anthropogenic emissions” they mean carbon dioxide, and hence “warming”, “climate change”, and alleged increases in incidents of bad weather were caused by carbon dioxide. There is no effort to correlate in detail rising concentration with rising temperature, extreme weather events, or other effects, as one would expect in a linear regression analysis; blaming carbon dioxide is the broad assumption.

McKittrick and Tol examined the certainty in the IPCC-approved fingerprinting method. AT99 specifically invoked the Gauss-Markov theorem to prove that their method of regression estimation was unbiased and efficient, or as precise as possible. (BLUE: best linear unbiased estimator)

McKittrick observed that AT99 made a number of errors with respect to the Gauss-Markov theorem: the authors didn’t state it correctly, and failed to noticer that it did not apply to their estimator! Hence, there is no basis for confidence in the estimator that others thought there was. AT99 results are biased, completely misleading, and largely meaningless. McKittrick found that it was unclear what the RC test actually tested, the test wasn’t derived in the usual way, no mathematical derivation of the test was presented, the RC test doesn’t relate to the Gauss-Markov theorem, and it doesn’t actually test what the authors said it tested.  The RC test is a completely meaningless statistic, said McKittrick.

The errors in the use of the Gauss-Markov theorem jump off the page to those experienced in using it and statistical analysis in general; and so the question arises, why didn’t anyone in the field notice this before McKittrick? He speculates that people with a lot of experience in statistical analysis haven’t been looking at this literature, and hence the theoretical inaccuracies have gone hitherto undetected.

McKittrick sums up the situation with a pair of quotes from his co-author, Richard Tol, who tweeted on Aug 21, 2021, “Allen & Tett introduced an FGLS estimator that is completely wrong and a test to show that they’re right, when they’re not.” And another on Aug 20, 2021, “Another literature that is entirely wrong…”  There is, in short, no reason to believe that AT99 fingerprinting method produces valid results; and a lot of the literature attributing changes in atmospheric moisture, snow cover, forest fires, etc. are based on a method that gives wrong and meaningless results.

Thus, the basis for claims of certainty of around climate attribution is mathematically flawed and invalid.

Those of a philosophical bend will find interesting a back-door introduction of Thomism into the “science of attribution”. To say that one’s model is a true and accurate representation of a climate is to say that the model is a true understanding the form, or essence, of the climate. Following upon that are efficient and final causality, or end-directedness, of the climate; the form directing the climate towards a normative range of ends, which may be weather events. If ends other than these normative weather events occur, these anomalies or perturbations may be caused by “human activities” and “anthropogenic emissions”, which are nothing but efficient causes of change to the end-directedness, to the essence, of the climate being perturbed. The climate is expected to behave in accordance with the essence or form understood in the model. “Alteration” is not a change deemed within the principle of the climate, and hence, when reality doesn’t follow the model, the cause of that anomalous behavior, or alteration, is deemed due to external forcing, possibly by man’s emissions of carbon dioxide into the air, being the efficient causes of that alteration.  The element of morality follows upon putting the efficient causality of ‘climate change’ on the activities of man, even as the proximate agent of change is carbon dioxide. Following upon that, the attributors attribute efficient causality to carbon dioxide - for bad weather events!

Since Newton, physical sciences have attempted to eliminate efficient and final causality, forms and essences, from the picture, and places all the causal eggs in the matter and in mechanisms. The science of attribution offers no mechanisms by which small increments in carbon dioxide cause changes in large atmospheric processes, or “weather events” (a possible violation of the principle of proportionate causality).  Climate science, in attribution, adopts a Thomist view of the physical world, including that of immorality in its efficient causes.

From its early days, the climate “crisis” has been a means of casting moral opprobrium upon the United States and Europe for their cultural and economic successes, and was used as a means of undermining a foundation of those economic successes, namely cheap and abundant energy. Newtonian science, with its materialism and mechanisms, does not readily lend itself to casting moral aspersions; but a Thomist view of the world, with its recognition of formal, efficient, and final causes, as well as material causes, enables the casting of moral blame upon its efficient causes, namely “anthropogenic emissions” and “human activities”, or, in short, America and Europe. Hence, the peculiar adoption of a Thomist analysis in what should be a Newtonian science

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