TITLE:
LOGISTICS OFFICER
LIEUTENANT COLIN DE GRANDPRÉ: I’m Lieutenant Colin de Grandpré from Ottawa. I’m a Logistics Officer at 2 Service Battalion, in Garrison Petawawa, Ontario.
In order to be an effective presence at home and abroad, the Canadian Armed Forces requires the provision of efficient and coordinated logistics support.
Whether it’s with the Navy, the Army, the Air Force or Special Operations Forces, Logistics Officers are responsible for ensuring that all military operations and exercises are properly supported.
LIEUTENANT COLIN DE GRANDPRÉ: The broad scope is supply, transportation, finance, and human resources. But every officer is going to want to specialize in one of those branches, and then they can diversify their skill set based on there. So I decided to choose supply because I had an interest in warehousing, material movements and material management. But my job will also touch on finance, budget management, and then transportation planning as well.
Providing support to air operations is a considerable challenge due to the stringent maintenance cycles of aircraft. Being able to replenish the fleet anywhere in the world is essential to keeping it operational.
In the Navy, Logistics Officers will serve as Ship’s Logistics Officers in the early stages of their career. Responsible for the oversight of all shipboard logistics, their main role is to take care of getting the ship what it needs to get its job done.
Army Logistics Officers are primarily concerned with coordinating sustainment of the field force, whether it’s warehousing or moving supplies, ammunition, fuel and food, or the actual vehicles and armaments being used on operations or training exercises.
A Logistics Officer employed at a Special Operations unit needs a wide breadth of logistical knowledge, flexibility and resourcefulness to fully support their unit, at times in very austere environments and always with enhanced requirements for operational security.
This is a multifaceted career, throughout the course of which Logistics Officers will work in: Transportation and Movements, Supply, Ammunition, Food Services, Human Resources Management, Finance or Postal Services.
LIEUTENANT COLIN DE GRANDPRÉ: Understanding what our combat soldiers, what our pilots, what our sailors do is really important because it allows us to better understand how we can support them. It’s a question of being able to do jobs that, you know that if they go well, no one will ever notice. There’s a joke that if logistics goes right, you’ll never hear about it. But that’s part of the goal, is that there are no kinks in the system. The ultimate supply chain is the one that gives you everything you want, at the right time, in the right quantities, at the right place.
As an officer, their primary responsibility is to lead a team of talented professionals under their command.
LIEUTENANT COLIN DE GRANDPRÉ: A huge part of the job is accepting that you are not the most qualified person in a technical skill. But it’s knowing who to talk to, and how to talk to them to get their ideas, get to know solutions that come from them, and finally apply them to the overall goal. I think one of the strongest skills that you need is good interpersonal skills and a strong will for communication, both verbal and written.
LIEUTENANT COLIN DE GRANDPRÉ: One of the things I really appreciate about this job is that it throws you in positions that you would never see in a civilian equivalent. So for someone my age, with my qualifications, to be put in a managerial role, in charge of a warehouse, communicating with all sorts of units and entities around, you’d never see that for a 23-year-old.
On completion of their military and occupation training, Logistics Officers will be typically posted to a tactical unit in the Army, Navy or Air Force to build on their training and to develop their leadership skills and experience.
LIEUTENANT COLIN DE GRANDPRÉ: So when you first start out in the job as a platoon commander, it is pretty intimidating to be placed in charge of these experts, these technicians who have a huge vault of qualifications, training, experience, even operational deployments under their belt – and every single day, if you talk to any of my soldiers, they’ll tell you that I bombard them with questions. I’m always going to ask them more about how the warehouse works, how our material management is being done, so that I can better understand how their technical job fits in the bigger picture.
As their career progresses, Logistics Officers will have opportunities to be employed at higher headquarters, dealing with the management of logistics functions in Joint and Combined Operations. There are also opportunities to work with Special Operations Forces, as well as out-of-country postings working with allies and partners.
LIEUTENANT COLIN DE GRANDPRÉ: I’m really, really happy in the job that I’m doing right now. Being able to work with the soldiers that we have in the warehouse and in the platoon is a blessing, every day. It’s a challenging job – I’ve always joked that if you’re enjoying your time, 100% of the time, as a platoon commander, you’re probably doing something wrong. That’s all part of the job, and that’s all part of the challenge, and that’s why I really appreciate what I do.
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