Say What?

Military 23 Comments

CP;

The army is looking into a bizarre incident in which a tractor-trailer loaded with anti-aircraft missile launchers was seen rolling down a major Ontario highway.
Several police cruisers were needed to pull over the vehicle as it travelled westbound on Highway 407 near Toronto. The trailer was carrying two armoured personnel carriers bearing Department of National Defence licence plates and loaded with anti-aircraft missile launchers.
Police say the carriers, formerly registered to the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, were supposed to be delivered to Montreal on Thursday.
Police took the driver into custody at the scene, and the armoured carriers have been taken to a storage depot. A spokeswoman for the Department of National Defence says the army is investigating.

“Formerly registered”?
Did Bill Graham trade them in on a new SUV or something?
Via Neale
Update: In the comments readers say the CP has misidentified the type of missile.
Update 2 – Toronto Star has more details. The driver was “confused”. You don’t say!

23 Replies to “Say What?”

  1. The media can be seriously unreliable sometimes.
    They’re not anti air, they’re tow – wire guided anti-armour. Also there is not munitions on them.
    It is bizarre that they were using a private contractor to move them though, considering DND has its own transport people.

  3. I read somewhere else that they were ADATS’s units. Primarily AA, not AT use, but able to do both.
    The other article ALSO indicated they were “with missiles” which is most unusual. (NOT CF policy and practice.) (maybe dummy cannisters? Dunno)
    We’ll see.

  5. If these vehicles were on strength to the PPCLI then they were TOW under armour M113 A2 Armoured Personnel Carriers (APC). The ADATS APC is identical to the TOW variant in that they share the same chasis. The turret portion of these vehicles are vastly dissimilar. The ADATS has missile launchers externaly mounted to the sides of the turret. The TOW APC does not. The one clear difference between the two vehicles is that the ADATS APC is the only one to have an externaly mounted radar dish.

  8. ?????????????????????
    Harassment by anti-war lefty group/individual?
    Maybe Svend? Parrish? Bruno? Blagh? CBC? Raging Grannies?
    Round up the usual suspects.

  10. I hope they publish some pictures soon. It’ll help us evaluate better what went on.

  11. There’s a kind of a low res picture attached to the story. What is it that we are looking at or do we need to look for gentlemen (besides the obvious APC)?

  13. Yep, just saw the CTV national news, the vehicles are TOW Under Armour (TUA) variants of the M113 A2 armoured personnel carrier. The announcer, Sandi Renaldo, improperly identified the vehicles as being Anti-Aircraft variants.

  15. Given that the driver, didn’t know where he was going, this would be the perfect opportunity for someone planning something nasty to intercept and use same for a darker purpose.
    I’m sure the TOW missile wouldn’t be welcome in the Pearson International Airport Lobby either.
    Even if the launchers were empty; if you are planning murder,mayhem, and you are one of those suicide types, I’m sure you can find a TOW on the black market for the right price. A little corruption here, a little graft there and you have a nice terrorist scenario on your hands.
    Adscam was one thing, now do that in the military hardware sphere and the pyrotechnics would be quite illustrative.

  16. Hey there’s some ready made election candy for Martin…we need to spend 2 billion on a missile registry to know where all the missiles are out in the public and get all those privately owned missiles off the streets…waddaya think?…ready made liberal voter bait?…they’ll bite at anything these days đŸ˜‰

  17. did you get Pravdas(CBC) take on the bombs in Iraq- called them homemade –they were made from artillery shells.
    Calling them homemade gives it a folksy underground resistance sound rather than a nasty kill sound.
    Pravda announces every American killed , they have done everything but run a counter in the top of their website.
    Widespread torture in China hasnt made their website yet, not a mention . whereas the frat tricks pulled by Lindsay English were decried for weeks.

  18. As far as these things being dangerous, the mere fact that they are military machines makes them no more dangerous by themselves than a front end loader.
    CBC’s report was full of wrong information (surprise, surprise) that could have been quickly checked if they had any journalistic standard at all.
    Ignorance is bliss and the fact that such a big deal was made of a single wayward transport truck demonstrates not only the ignorance but also the irrational fear many in Canada have for anything military.

  19. What I still don’t get is how does a certified truck driver get WEST mixed up with EAST. Unless he’s from BongoBongo, the sun still rises in the East and sets in the West.
    Here’s a couple of more questions no one seemed to ask:
    1. With a given delivery date why are you driving around with items if you think you got an extra day – as in why pick it up a couple of days early for a simple 10 hour trip?
    2. Granted you’re not carring a boxed in item, but on a flat bed, for the whole world to see, wouldn’t you be wanting to get this thing out of the way fast as you could be a possible hijacking target?
    3. Personal family problems aside, it isn’t more than a 10 hours to get to Montreal and back, must have been some SERIOUS personal family problems, enough so he didn’t call in “sick”.
    4. Doesn’t the GPS tracking equipped truck have a map?
    5. Dosn’t the GPS tracking equipped company have cell phones to call the guy and ask “Where the HELL are you going?”
    6. How long did it take to discover this guy took the wrong turn?
    7. Why Montreal? Is the Liberals equipping a new Quebec army behind the scenes, meaning there isn’t any storage depots in Ontario for this?

  20. If you want to know where most of the mothballed equipment is kept,look no farther than Quebec.That is why during the last referendum,Canadian forces had designated two or three western based land regiments to secure their goods in the event of a “yes” side win….

  21. Folks: much ado about nothing. No munitions on board – consistent with the fact that these were being transported outside a training area. Also the fact that these were either surplus and or being decommissioned/scavenged probably meant that the actual launchers themselves had already been stripped of the functional parts (for the ones still in service) and that what you saw was largely useless to anyone meaning harm.
    Of course the military does pick them. Couple of years ago we had a contract dispute with a container ship operator bringing back a battlegoups worth of equipment from Kosovo.

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