Small arms need to be maintained - either you ditch the old ones and buy new one, or rebuild your fleet after certain usage or time passage. Unfortunately, this can be affected by many factors. The organization have to have the infrastructure to inventory and keep track of history, but it also needs to have proper "management structure" and competent managers, all the way down to line supervisors, to act on the data and actually run the sustainment system.
For a small military like Canada, it is not an overly daunting task. When you have over a million of small arms of various generation scattered all over the world, it is a bit more complicated. The supply chain is huge. Also, many systems are based on peace time activities when usage are more predicable. I am sure lots of lessons learnt in dealing with sustaining the much more irregular activities and high output during war time. If money should be spent, it should be spent on perfecting sustaining system during war time -when weapons are being used in the field, how does the system becomes pro-active in maintaining the small arms fleet instead of being reactive, ie, replacing things when people start complaining of failure or when someone goes " ahhhhh" after the rack is filled up with NS tags.
Unless they have a wonder rifle that never ever break, they need to invest on the support and sustainment system first before running more expensive trials to buy toys. You can buy all the new toys, but it is a bit useless if the system that needs to sustain the new toys cannot handle them. People will still complain of broken equipment because everything has a limited usage life.
For a small military like Canada, it is not an overly daunting task. When you have over a million of small arms of various generation scattered all over the world, it is a bit more complicated. The supply chain is huge. Also, many systems are based on peace time activities when usage are more predicable. I am sure lots of lessons learnt in dealing with sustaining the much more irregular activities and high output during war time. If money should be spent, it should be spent on perfecting sustaining system during war time -when weapons are being used in the field, how does the system becomes pro-active in maintaining the small arms fleet instead of being reactive, ie, replacing things when people start complaining of failure or when someone goes " ahhhhh" after the rack is filled up with NS tags.
Unless they have a wonder rifle that never ever break, they need to invest on the support and sustainment system first before running more expensive trials to buy toys. You can buy all the new toys, but it is a bit useless if the system that needs to sustain the new toys cannot handle them. People will still complain of broken equipment because everything has a limited usage life.
