Re: What? No way...

>At least last week's JDW had a picture of a Canuck Leo C1 in Bosnia...
>didn't say how old the pic was, though <g>

Heh.  That's new then.	I think they were scared of taking them overseas
up
until recently.  I believe we tried to sell them off when they were
still
in Europe (with the Mech Brigade Group we had in Germany), and when they
couldn't sell them to anyone we *reluctantly* brought them back here...
And they've been trying to make them useful since.  We didn't deploy
them
to Bosnia during any of the major Canadian deployments there while the
Bosnian war was still going.  When General Lewis MacKenzie drove for the
Sarajevo airport with a Canadian Mech Battalion to open it up, the
heaviest
"armour" they had with them were M113's with TOW.

>
>>They did take some to Kosovo, but again, only a few (4 or 8, I think).
> 
>
>But you only *have* a few, so even "a few" can be "most of those" ;-)
>;-) ;-)
>

Heh.  Even less of that few are WORKING at any one time.  It's like our
airforce - we *own* 130 or 140 (ish) F18's, but there are actually only
60
*operational* at the fighting squadron level, and of those, not all are
mechanically fit at any given time.  When we deployed 18 F18's to Italy
during the bombing campaign in Kosovo, that was a *significant* portion
of
our operational fighter force...  It's tough for the military here
having a
government who truely doesn't give a crap about them.  

>
>>The gov't has just announced an upgrade for the fleet, though, with a
>>new turret, electronics, etc etc etc.
>
>A new glasis plate would be nice too... none of the Leo I variants is
>really designed to be shot at by another tank :-(
>

Well at least they're getting up-to-date night fighting and sight
equipment, so if we're lucky and we have to use them against anyone else
with armour, we can out see them like they did in Iraq...  And they look
really mean sitting at roadblocks in Kosovo...