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"Combat logistics is not sexy and it is certainly not overcomplicated, but it will reach out and cut your throat if it is taken for granted in times of war," he writes...
"And cut it did in Afghanistan in the early summer of 2006."
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Remarkably frank for a book by a serving officer, he also points out that logistics had been ignored or outright neglected until Afghanistan began to force a change in thinking, although one rather too incremental for his liking.
He is also frank about his own problems, such as when fighting flared in July 2006 and the Canadian Forces was in real danger of running out of bullets.
Conrad had been estimating that ammunition would be used at a steady rate, a planning concept that transfers poorly to a rapidly-changing war. He points out that on most Canadian deployments, the biggest danger is having ammunition go stale, because guns are rarely fired on peacekeeping tours.
With a major Taliban offensive ongoing and Canadian soldiers returning daily in armoured vehicles up to their knees in spent brass, Conrad had to arrange an emergency airlift of ammunition from Canada after a humiliating sorting out by a general that he details in the book.
After having one of the best combat support capabilities for the two world wars, the logistics capability was ignored, he writes, increasingly privatized and neglected by senior leadership, which saw it at the bottom of the Forces' cap-badge hierarchy and knocked it around like a political ping-pong ball. That neglect clearly angers Conrad to this day, although he puts some blame on the branch's own leadership.
"Somewhere during the maelstrom of the 1990s ... the bureaucratically organized Logistics Branch lost its balls," he bluntly puts it.
That can be seen in even the little things. While the Canadian Forces bought the capable LAV III armoured vehicle, they became suddenly frugal when it came to buying the LAV variant wrecker that was gutsy enough to quickly haul a damaged one out of the field when its wheels were blown off or would no longer turn. That left crews to figure out how to use two civilian-model flatbed trucks to effect an already dangerous battlefield recovery.
"A cheque written a decade before by army planners was cashed during our tour," he writes.
"LAV III recovery was a huge problem for us in Kandahar and we struggled with it the whole mission."
