Quotulatiousness

May 10, 2022

Canadian Armed Forces considering banning Islamic, Jewish, and Christian chaplains for their racist, misogynistic, and bigoted beliefs

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

When an organization goes woke, there’s no halfway measures … it’s all-woke, all the time. Recently the Canadian Armed Forces received a report that could result in current chaplains being forced to resign their commissions because their religious beliefs “are not aligned with those of the Defence Team”. One wonders how future recruiting efforts will go with believing members of those faith-based communities who are potentially going to be explicitly described as “racist, misogynistic, and bigoted”:

Calling other parties racist in the House of Commons is bad. Calling whole religions and their adherents racist, misogynist and bigoted is worse

And yet, this government is being called to support one of the most egregious examples of anti-religious sentiment I have ever seen in Canada, and it was published by the Minister of National Defence Advisory Panel on Systemic Racism and Discrimination. This document is supposed to advise the Canadian Armed Forces on racism and discrimination in the military and, if the government were to follow through on its recommendations, it would effectively disqualify chaplains from Canada’s largest faith groups.

In its final report, this panel recommends that the military should “not consider for employment as spiritual guides or multi-faith representatives Chaplaincy applicants affiliated with religious groups whose values are not aligned with those of the Defence Team.”

As you read the document, it quickly becomes clear that their understanding of “values” appear to be completely ignorant of the actual practice of the very religions they defame. Yet the report would disqualify clergy from — at the very least — the three major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) under the grounds that these faiths are inherently discriminatory.

Not content to deal with actual cases of misogyny, sexism and discrimination, the government’s panelists have taken a go at determining which beliefs and philosophies are acceptable in Canada’s new modern military.

“The Advisory Panel has observed that there are varying degrees of misogyny, sexism, and discrimination woven into the philosophies and beliefs of some mainstream religions currently represented in the cadre of chaplains in the CAF,” the report says.

Then it gets worse.

April 2, 2022

Lessons from Operation Unifier — Canada’s military training mission in Ukraine (2015-present)

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Paul Wells talks to Lieutenant Colonel Melanie Lake, Royal Canadian Engineers, who commanded Operation Unifier from March to September, 2021:

Operation Unifier shoulder patch for Canadian troops in Ukraine.
Detail from a photo in the Operation Unifier image gallery – https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/operations/military-operations/current-operations/operation-unifier.html

Lake has had a hell of a career, as high-ranking soldiers usually have, though I cover soldiers rarely enough that I always manage to be surprised. She’s from Churchill Falls, Labrador and has a degree in chemical engineering from the Royal Military College. She served three tours in Afghanistan, including one collecting HUMINT, or human intelligence — interviewing Afghans in Kandahar for information on the insurgency. Later she led an explosives-clearance operation at Winisk, ON, way up north on Hudson Bay, where a DEW Line outpost had been shut down so quickly in the 1960s that large quantities of TNT had been left buried too close to the ground for comfort. This involved a lot of camping and trying to figure out how to explode only those parts of the landscape they wanted to explode, while trying not to explode one another. Canadian Forces Rangers worked with Lake’s team, keeping polar bears away. She really is a problem solver.

Lake confirmed both of my hunches about Op Unifier, at least in part. She sees a Ukrainian army that is performing well for specific important reasons, and a Russian army that is having serious trouble its commanders should have expected. She does think she and her colleagues in Op Unifier and other Western training missions — the United States, United Kingdom and Lithuania — can take some satisfaction in contributing to the substantial improvement of the Ukrainian defence effort since 2014. But she was careful to put a low ceiling over that effect.

“Certainly what the training missions provided have helped,” she said. “But I want to be really careful about taking credit for the performance that we’re seeing right now. We can’t teach courage. And [the Ukrainians] are showing that in spades.”

Where did training help? “The area where I think we had a really big influence is in helping them understand or institutionalize the idea of mission command. And decentralized decision-making — pushing authority and decision-making power down to lower levels. And helping them build a professional senior NCO corps. Those are things that, you know, when you look at the old Soviet system were certainly non-existent.”

Let’s unpack this. “Mission command” is a term of art in Western militaries. It holds commanders, down to quite junior levels, accountable for results while leaving them wide latitude to decide methods. How junior? “Senior NCO” refers to sergeants — career soldiers who’ve risen from the enlisted ranks and who are responsible for a section, which is between 6 and 20 soldiers. Canadian doctrine, American doctrine, NATO standards dictate that it should be routine for higher echelons to trust a section sergeant to figure out how to accomplish a task, and that’s something the Canadians have passed on to their Ukrainian colleagues.

The Russians haven’t built that trust into their system. This is an understatement. “A lot of what you’re seeing on the Russian side — you know, we keep talking about these general officers who are getting picked off, because they’re so far forward. They have no decentralized decision-making and their communication chain is breaking down. So you’ve got these generals going forward, way too far forward, trying to sort things out. And they’re just getting picked off left, right and centre. So training matters. Training matters an awful lot.”

To an Ottawa political reporter in the Trudeau era, there is a metaphor here as big as a billboard about what happens when too much decision-making is too centralized. But maybe just this once, I’ll resist the urge to jump in, more than I just did, and I’ll let Lake keep telling her story.

March 18, 2022

Jean Charest tries to position himself as the pro-military Conservative leadership candidate

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadian politicians — generally speaking — are unwilling to tread too far into discussions of the Canadian Armed Forces and the utter disaster that is our federal government’s procurement “process”. There are lots of good, electoral reasons for this: Canadians have been propagandized over the last two generations to see Canada as a country with no real enemies and having no need of military force except for overseas peacekeeping and disaster relief. Any identified need for new equipment or even just updated replacements for existing capabilities is always a politically dangerous discussion, as it’s remarkably easy to get public support for almost any non-military spending instead of anything even vaguely warlike. Worse, on those few occasions when the government of the day bites the bullet to buy new ships/tanks/planes/helicopters/etc., the top priority isn’t military effectiveness or even lowest-price but where the money will be spent. Bidders for Canadian military contracts can’t just crank off a few extra units of the weapon or vehicle on existing production lines (which in almost every case would be both militarily better and economically cheaper): the government almost always demands new, expensive production facilities be constructed in Canada or for the foreign supplier to “partner” with an existing Canadian company to produce as much in Canada as possible.

This procurement charade usually means the Canadian Forces end up with far fewer weapons or vehicles because the increased costs of partial or complete production in Canada gobble up far more of the allocated budget. For example, back in 2017, we purchased a batch of new machineguns. It was the same model already in use with the Canadian army and with many of our NATO allies. If we’d just bought from one of the foreign manufacturers who already had production lines and tooling set up, each gun would have cost between US$6,000 and US$9,000 depending on configuration. But because we insisted on having Colt Canada set up a new production line, each weapon ended up costing C$28,000!

Multiply this across the entire range of equipment needed by the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Air Force, and it’s quickly obvious that we’re running one of the least efficient military procurement systems in human history. And even on a domestic spin-off/job creation/vote buying spectrum, it’s insanely expensive and wasteful.

All of that out of the way, here’s Conservative leadership hopeful Jean Charest deliberately touching one of the “third rails” of Canadian politics by proposing an increase in funding for the military:

Our military procurement system is broken. For years experts have been warning about our incompetence at making major defence purchases. The past few weeks have shown us the price of our inaction.

While our allies, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, have entered into a new security pact to counter China in the Pacific, Canada wasn’t even invited to the table.

Germany, Sweden, and other NATO allies promise to increase their military spending to prepare for the uncertain times ahead. Canada has a moral responsibility to act. Now is the time.

If elected as the leader, my Conservative government will make significant changes and upgrades to our nation’s military capabilities. I will move quickly to ramp up Canadian defence spending to two percent of GDP, increase personnel to 100,000 and equip our forces for the challenging times ahead. I will modernize our cyber security infrastructure to prepare for future risks. And I will fix our embarrassing procurement system to ensure we get the equipment we desperately need.

The current conflict has also driven home the need to assert our sovereignty, especially in our North. As major sea lanes, essential to global trade and export of our natural resources, open within our arctic territory, we must be on high alert to Russian and Chinese encroachment. Neither recognizes our sovereignty there. In fact, no one really recognizes our sovereignty there and the imbalance in our military investments compared to our allies explains why that’s the case.

The war in Ukraine is a cruel reminder of why we cannot ignore these threats. Russia has a modern military base in the arctic — another area where indecision and delay could be extremely costly unless addressed.

A proud Canada must assert its sovereignty in the North and generate military support through major investments in equipment and coordination with our NATO allies. We need to get our act together.

The threats remain real and demand immediate attention from leaders willing to act in the best interests of their respective nations.

Canadians need experience and expertise overseeing our military. We need a government that supports our military.

March 17, 2022

The “Three-Block”, “Four-Block”, or “n-Block” war

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter explains the genesis of the original “Three-Block War” idea and how a Canadian general tried to put theory into practice:

During General Rick Hillier’s first visit to Colorado Springs as Chief of Defence Staff, he takes a few minutes to talk with Tech. Sgt. Devin Fisher of NORAD and USNORTHCOM Public Affairs about Canada-U.S. Relations
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1999, a US Marine general named Charles Krulak wrote a piece in which he claimed that the future of combat for the Marines would be in urban environments in failed or failing states. In these situations, front line infantry might be doing humanitarian relief in one part of the city, performing peacekeeping duties in another, while doing intense urban combat in a third. He called this the “Three Block War“. Figuring out how to prepare and train for this scenario would be the central military challenge of the 21st century.

While the Three Block War was picked up and booted around as an interesting idea, it was never formalized into Marine doctrine. But one person who did take it seriously was Rick Hillier, the former head of the Canadian military who brought it into the Canadian forces when he took over as chief of the land staff in 2003, arguing that the Three Block War in failed and failing states was the future of warfare. He wanted a CAF that was trained and kitted out for this reality. When he became Chief of the Defence Staff in 2005, Hillier kept pushing this idea on Paul Martin and the Liberals, who loved his “vision” and firm sense of priority-setting.

In Hillier’s hands, the Three Block War concept was a disaster. Some American analysts blamed the strategy for Canada’s elevated casualty rates in Kandahar. The concept also came under considerable scrutiny from Canadian military analysts. In a highly critical paper, Walter Dorn and Michael Varey described the three block war idea as “fatally flawed“. While the Three Block War concept might have served as a useful description of a certain type of tactical reality (amplified maybe by a few too many viewings of Black Hawk Down), as a strategic concept it had a number of problems. For example, it wasn’t clear how it would apply to other armed services, or to theatres other than urban centres. It seemed to threaten the specificity of mandate and mission that is crucial to military operations. It clearly ran the risk of “block inflation” — why not throw governance, economic development, general nation building, and anything else you think you can get the military to do into the hopper? Indeed, in 2005 General James Mathis co-authored a piece proposing the concept of the four block war, which added psychological and information operations to the mix.

Ultimately, Dorn and Varey were concerned that crucial distinctions central to warfare were being elided. As they put it, the whole point of doctrine is to make a clear delineation between things that are “war” and things that are “not war”, and the Three Block War threatens to make everything into a type of war.

Two decades later the verdict is in, and it looks like everyone was right. When it comes to the tactical environment, people like Krulak, Hillier, and Mathis were more prescient than they might ever have imagined, at least if Ukraine is any template for how modern warfare is evolving. Yet at the same time, everything the critics of the Three Block War concept worried about has also come to pass: the confusion of mission and mandates, the endless proliferation of “blocks”, and most seriously, the assimilation of everything, and everyone, into “war”.

In his original article, Krulak argued that the reality of the Three Block War meant that any local engagement or interaction could have repercussions on the mission as a whole. For example, if a squad of Marines based in a “peacekeeping” block of the city gets jumpy and opens fire on a civilian truck carrying humanitarian aid (and not a truck bomb), that could have serious impacts for the entire strategic effort. And so he coined the notion of the “strategic corporal”, a front line soldier who would have the training, judgement, and moral fibre to do his or her job in a way that would always support strategic objectives.

March 15, 2022

For military procurement blunders, “no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Germany has announced that they will be purchasing US F-35 stealth fighters as part of their re-armament program. My favourite headline on this was over at Blazing Cat Fur: “Germany To Buy 35 Lockheed F-35 Fighter Jets From U.S. Amid Ukraine Crisis … Canada Will Buy Cool ‘Fighter Jet Stickers’ With Eco-Friendly Adhesive”

On a more serious tone — but with sadly the same basic message — Mitch Heimpel looks at the multi-generational rolling catastrophe that is Canadian military procurement since the unification of the forces in 1968:

Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army since WW2. When I was in the reserves, we were told this was due for replacement in a few years. I was in the reserves from 1976-1980. It still hasn’t been replaced.

To say we have a checkered history with military procurement, fails to capture exactly how bad it is. Our political leadership has failed us continually over the course of half a century. No party has done it well. Some have done it better than others. But no one can claim any kind of bragging rights.

Fighter jet procurement in this country is so fraught it once caused the birth of a new political party. Trying to buy helicopters helped bring down a government. We only successfully bought those helicopters after they [the old helicopters] became a greater danger to the personnel manning them than they were to any potential adversary. We have been running a procurement for the next generation of fighter jets for an entire generation. Even Yes, Minister writers would have given up on something that absurd.

Our submarine fleet seems to be almost permanently in dry dock. Our most recent ship procurement resulted in the absolutely monstrous prosecution of one of the country’s most accomplished military leaders.

And we just issued a revised bid to finally replace our Second World War-era pistols … last week.

Just cataloguing that level of incompetence is exhausting. No leader or party looks good. The civil service, as the one constant through all these cartoonish blunders, surely has to wear some of this, too. The fact that we seem to repeat the same mistakes can, at least in part, be attributed to a significant institutional memory failure on the part of the people trusted with having the institutional memory.

Now, it is worth noting in fairness that no nation has an easy time with large scale military procurement. Ask the Americans about the development of the V-22 sometime. But, still, no nation has mastered the ability to step on every bloody rake quite as well as Canada.

I’m not a hardware expert. I can’t tell you which pistol we should buy. There’s also genuine policy questions here that need to be settled — I don’t know whether we should focus on the navy because we’re an Arctic nation, or the air force because it allows us to participate more readily in allied force projection exercises — like, say, no-fly zones? The necessary mix for Canada is no doubt some of both, and it’s fine to have disagreements between parties on what the right mix is.

But setting that aside, I want to talk about what it would take politically, to get us to start taking procurement seriously — just a few basic rules that any government would need to follow to procure anything that they chose was important for Canada to have.

February 27, 2022

Canada couldn’t intervene in a modern war even if we wanted to

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney considers the state of the Canadian Armed Forces, which have been systematically starved of resources since, oh, 1968 (we started cashing in the “peace dividend” long before there was one):

Canadian Army LAV III convoy near Khadan, Afghanistan – 2010-01-25
Photo by Staff Sgt. Christine Jones via Wikimedia Commons

We assumed that we’d never need the heavy, nasty stuff — history had ended. We cut our budgets and our force levels again and again, until many of our critical capabilities really exist on paper only. Canada’s fighter jet fleet of alarmingly elderly CF-18s is large enough to technically meet the requirements of keeping a few jets on alert for NORAD missions, intercepting the odd plane near our airspace, and showing the flag on NATO missions. We can even hurl some bombs on enemy groups that are annoying us, as we did with the Islamic State, because, well, they can’t shoot back. Our navy is much the same: we have a fleet large and capable enough to more-or-less patrol parts of our own coast and contribute to the odd international patrol mission abroad, because doing so buys us some diplomatic credibility — it is table stakes for being a sorta-paid-up member of the Western alliance. Our army has enough men and equipment to help out with domestic missions at home or to contribute in small missions to broader coalition efforts, though it’s a struggle to do both at the same time. That’s basically all we assumed we’d need, and we “rationalized” our budget and capabilities accordingly.

Again, yes, this made sense for a time. But it was obvious a decade or so ago — around when Obama was mocking Romney — that China was a power on the rise. Russia invaded Ukraine the first time in 2014. That was another wakeup call we ignored. For the last decade, certainly for the last five years, we’ve indulged in a kind of make-believe defence policy planning, where we were enthralled to an increasingly obsolete and dangerous post-Cold War mindset that was as narrow and misguided as the “Cold War thinking” the soft-power advocates of the post-1991 era disdained among the old guard.

We defence hawk weirdos who sweated blood with each abandoned capability were right, though. History wasn’t over. We hadn’t seen the end of great power war, or at least the real danger of it. The world is a dangerous place. This might be a surprise in the corridors of power in Ottawa, but it’s not like they weren’t warned. I’ve got 15 years of National Post bylines to prove it.

We are missing critical capabilities that our troops would need — need — in order to not get wiped out in a conflict with a relatively modern opponent. The Canadian Army has very good armoured vehicles for infantry. That’s good! Our LAVs are genuinely excellent. But we don’t have self-propelled artillery. We have only a few dozen tanks, and very little anti-tank missile capability (anti-tank missiles can be fired by infantry on foot or from vehicles; we don’t have a ton of missiles to go around in any case). Recruitment has lagged, and we are notoriously slow at actually processing an applicant into service. Perhaps most alarmingly in the current context, the Canadian military has basically zero air defence capability. If under air attack by helicopters, attack aircraft or, increasingly, drones, our guys could fire wildly into the air and hope to get lucky. That’s about it.

It’s a classic Canadian procurement story, of course, and perfectly emblematic of the bigger problem. We used to have mobile air defence. We didn’t have a ton, but we had 36 M113 armoured vehicles — an older vehicle, but a proven workhorse — that came armed with eight missiles that could be used against attacking air threats or tanks (given our paltry anti-tank capability, that’s two birds with one stone!). We procured the “ADATS” vehicles right at the end of the Cold War, never ended up needing them on any of our missions during the 1990s and early 2000s, and scrapped them without replacement in 2012, because Stephen Harper had a budget to balance and didn’t want to spend a bunch of bucks either modernizing the system or buying something new. We realized by 2019 that that was a bad idea, and began a procurement process to replace them, and the earliest we could expect delivery is … the end of this decade.

So for now, we try to buddy up with allies that have anti-air defences, or expect our troops in the field to put their faith in the Lord and mediocre Russian targeting systems. But even if we rush a procurement of some air-defence systems, that would just plug one gap among many. Why the hell haven’t we picked a fighter jet by now? Oh, yeah: Because no leader wants to spend the money and assumed we’d never need them, anyway. Oops! Why haven’t we gotten the new navy ships under construction, or begun work on the next-generation submarines? Huh, that’s weird — it’s the same reason: we’re cheap and assumed we wouldn’t need them, so flaking out wasn’t risky. Why aren’t we pushing ahead with NORAD radar modernization? Why was buying trucks such an ordeal? Why are we still incapable of buying a new 9mm pistol? Same, same and same.

For the politicians, military spending is a boring and distracting waste of money they’d rather spend on something they think voters would like. This is a mindset that is deeply set in among Canadian politicians, and it applies basically evenly across Liberals and Conservatives alike (the others are even worse). There has been a massive failure of imagination across not just our political class, but our society more generally. We have dropped the ball, and are now at the mercy of events.

February 14, 2022

QotD: Canadians and imaginary peacekeeping

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the word “peacekeeping” triggers a series of powerful memories and positive images in the Canadian mind: Lester Pearson’s Nobel Peace Prize; a Canadian soldier in a blue helmet interposed between warring factions; the peacekeeping monument in Ottawa, and the widely believed mantra that, while Americans make war, we Canadians keep the peace.

Canadians are fixated on peacekeeping. We believe that Mike Pearson invented it, that Canadians are the best in the world at it, and that if we do peacekeeping, ideally for the United Nations, then we will not need large numbers of troops or much expensive equipment. The idea of peacekeeping as our métier has certainly shaped Canadian defence policy, and not for the better. The billions of dollars that Liberals and Conservatives have belatedly pledged to rebuild the Canadian Forces will take years to make a difference and to undo four decades of neglect …

J.L. Granatstein, “Wake up! This is our war, too”, Globe and Mail, 2006-02-28.

February 4, 2022

Canada’s delusionary approach to the question of providing military support to Ukraine

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, “Tommy Conway” explains why it makes no sense to take Canadian government and military leaders’ talking points on the situation in Ukraine seriously:

Canada has not done these things. We say we’re not sending weapons because “diplomacy is the solution”, but the reality is we can’t send anything meaningful. Any small arms we send would likely be on a NATO standard, and thus not very useful for Ukrainian forces who use Soviet calibers. As for the stuff the Kyiv really needs — the anti-tank and anti-air systems that the Americans, British, and Balts are sending — we are not sending them because we barely have any. Our anti-tank capability is mostly theoretical. Because we have not replaced older, worn-out systems, we have less anti-tank capability now than we did during the “decade of darkness” in the 1990s. We’ve known for decades that we need to equip the infantry with highly-portable, effective guided missiles like the U.S. Javelin, but we haven’t bothered, save for a few Spike missile systems for our special forces. Maybe our regular ground forces will get something similar by 2033. We have literally no air defence capability besides shooting machine guns in the air and hoping for the best, so we have no air defence missiles to send. Besides the fact that we can’t support Ukraine with weapons, we can’t really support NATO allies with reinforcements either because our units, on a modern battlefield, would lack the ability to defend themselves. We might be welcome as a political gesture, but we might also just be in the way.

Our deficiencies go deeper than weapons. CAF is well below strength. But instead of doubling down on core capabilities, CAF leadership insists on putting more people and resources into newer, faddish capabilities like cyber and information warfare, when we already have an entire government agency that does cyber. Our brigades — the core of the Canadian Army’s fighting power, are under-strength, and the army’s recent “Force 2025” concept concedes that the army should hope to field small, combat team elements as the core of any near-future operational deployment. To put this in perspective, a combat team makes up part of a battlegroup, which makes up part of a brigade. The Russians have 50 battlegroup equivalents on the Ukrainian border, and roughly 16 in the Kaliningrad exclave bordering Poland and Lithuania.

A Canadian deployment of a few combat teams would be too small a force even to help manage a large number of refugees in an active combat zone. We might be able to scrape together a battlegroup, but it would be vulnerable to air and tanks — in other words, not very useful. Once it was destroyed, that would probably be the majority of the Canadian Army’s combat power gone, with no hope of reconstituting it.

It would be one thing if the army sold this reorganization as a necessary evil in lean times, but this sort of hollowing-out is instead presented as allowing the army to “remain[…] ready to operate not only in the land domain, but pan-domain in a joint environment beyond simply reinforcing its existing capabilities.” Strip away the jargon, and it should be obvious that this phrasing is the victim of too much powerpoint and too little thinking. Junior NCOs and junior officers alike are instructed to build a “priority of work” into their plans for even small, simple operations. Given that we don’t have realistic “current capabilities”, reinforcing our shell of an army should obviously be on the top of the list before we commit resources to new things. At the very least we should be open and honest about what we can and can’t do.

If you ask most talking heads in the Canadian “defence space”, battlegroups that can’t battle aren’t a big deal. The idea that modern war will be won on social media or through “integration” and digital technologies, thus making the old ground-pounders outdated, is a common staple among civilian defence academics. It’s also present in the government’s defence policy, which goes on at length about space and cyberwar and climate change and “ungoverned spaces”, but little about building a realistic fighting force. This hopeful language about an army that can operate in a chaotic world without much messy stuff like hurting people or breaking things is obviously nonsense, but novelty and wishful thinking are pretty standard fare for academics and politicians. It’s much more concerning to see supposedly practical military people hold reality in such low regard.

The officer class’ shoddy thinking comes from decades of misguided pseudo-intellectual development. After the Somalia Affair in the 1990s, the CAF turned to liberal arts education as a way to buy credibility. There was nothing wrong with the idea of intellectual broadening in theory — the officer corps obviously needed reform. But the reforms were rushed and packaged, so they replaced one set of intellectual deficiencies with another.

November 21, 2021

British Columbia’s annus horribilis

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson does a distressingly good imitation of Cassandra’s warnings … and just like Cassandra, her words are probably going to be ignored until things get much worse:

“A job well done by @RCAF_ARC’s 442 Transport & Rescue Squadron. Using 3 CH149 helicopters and supported by a CC115 Buffalo, the Sqn evacuated 311 people, 26 Dogs and a Cat to safety in Agassiz after being trapped by landslides on roads in BC.
RCAF Operations, Nov 16, 2021 (https://twitter.com/RCAFOperations/status/1460664604648947721)”

So now here it is. We have flooding so acute that we are airlifting food supplies to small towns in British Columbia cut off by destroyed transport routes that it may take weeks to repair. The damage has cut off rail and road links from the city of Vancouver to the rest of Canada. Not only does this trap all the rail and truck resources now stranded in the isolated areas, it also cuts off one of the largest ports in North America in the midst of a global supply chain crisis.

On top of that, many of those economists who told us inflation was not going to happen are now hedging their bets. Oh, and we are still dealing with a pandemic, and its lingering health and economic damage.

Once again we have proven ourselves utterly dependent on the military to manage a domestic crisis — a military that is so profoundly underfunded and under equipped that it has reached a state of generational decline. (For more on that, read Matt Gurney’s piece in The Line from yesterday [linked here].)

Meanwhile, we’ve been writing here at The Line about the utter collapse of our institutional capacity; the unavoidable fact that our governments seem totally unable to anticipate obvious, immediate, and pressing disasters. A recent example of that came from the federal government’s failure to sound the alarm on COVID-19 back in 2020. However, the residents of British Columbia sure didn’t get the same kind of notice of imminent danger that their American counterparts surely did.

God help us if a really bad winter storm hits somewhere in this country over the next six to eight weeks. Another severe ice storm, or a real blizzard; I genuinely fear we would have people starving to death in their homes for lack of resources to spare to dig them out.

I am a 37-year-old woman who had never seen an empty shelf in a grocery store until COVID-19. Now I’m seeing scenes out of Kamloops supermarkets that look like something out of The Walking Dead. No serious shortages in 35 years — and now I’ve seen two episodes of panic buying clearing out the shelves in the past two.

We keep on acting as if this disaster is the peak. This is the worst year ever, and we’re going to get back to normal any minute now.

Maybe.

But what if we don’t?

November 19, 2021

“We don’t even fund our search-and-rescue units properly. That’s the least controversial thing the military does.”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney discusses the situation of the Canadian Armed Forces as domestic demands escalate (especially in the Vancouver area this week), and the already under-staffed units strain to meet Canadians’ needs:

“A job well done by @RCAF_ARC’s 442 Transport & Rescue Squadron. Using 3 CH149 helicopters and supported by a CC115 Buffalo, the Sqn evacuated 311 people, 26 Dogs and a Cat to safety in Agassiz after being trapped by landslides on roads in BC.
RCAF Operations, Nov 16, 2021 (https://twitter.com/RCAFOperations/status/1460664604648947721)”

If you’ve heard of General Wayne Eyre, Canadian Army, it’s probably because he’s currently the acting chief of the defence staff — that’s the top officer in the Canadian Armed Forces, in command of the army, navy and air force. He got the job after the last CDS got entangled in the sexual misconduct scandal now roiling the military. Gen. Erye stands a pretty good chance of being the next CDS on a full-time basis, assuming the government ever gets around to making a decision on that front. Given the attention the Liberals usually give the military, this is not a guarantee.

If you’d heard of Gen. Eyre before all the weirdness alluded to above, there’s a decent chance it’s because of a pretty stark warning he sounded not long ago. Interviewed by the Canadian Press, the general, then head of the army, warned that the military was simply too small to do all that was being asked of it. Specifically, he warned that increasingly frequent domestic deployments were interfering with the military’s ability to conduct large-scale, multi-unit exercises. In typical Canadian fashion, the general reached for a hockey metaphor to describe why such large exercises are essential, and told the CP, “It’s like a hockey team that would never train, never play on the ice together, and then all of a sudden being thrown into an NHL game and be expected to win.”

There are other concerns with increasing domestic deployments, which the CP noted were becoming larger as well as more frequent in line with worsening natural disasters. They exhaust personnel and wear out equipment. But the point was made — the general was telling Canadians that our world was changing, and our military was struggling to keep up. Military guys usually aren’t verbose or particularly expressive. The fact that Gen. Eyre gave this interview at all was notable on its own.

The interview was published on Jan. 20, 2020, by the way, on a day when hundreds of troops were helping Newfoundlanders dig out after a nasty winter storm. Anyone recall what else was getting underway back in early 2020?

As I write this column, I’m watching a press conference from British Columbia government officials, addressing the massive damage done by recent floods and landslides. It’s an unusually emotional press conference. That’s not a criticism, but simply an observation from a journalist who’s watched more of these than he can remember over the years. The ministers are clearly possessed by the enormity of this problem; the minister of transportation aptly described the province’s transportation network as “crippled.” Major highways and railways are either underwater or blocked by debris. Some others seem to have been partially destroyed, the ground beneath them simply gone. Many communities in B.C. are now entirely cut off from the outside world or have, at best, extremely limited access; helicopters are hauling supplies in and stranded people out. The city of Vancouver, Canada’s third largest, is essentially detached from the rest of the country unless one wants to take a huge detour through the United States, which only reopened its land border to Canadians a few days ago.

The economic toll of cutting off the Port of Vancouver from the rest of the country, at a time when supply chain disruptions are already biting hard, is going to be gigantic. Economist Trevor Tombe did some quick math and estimated it at over $2 billion a week in trade between B.C. and the rest of the country that’s just been wiped off the national GDP, not to mention the direct costs of actually fixing the damaged infrastructure, of repairing property damaged or destroyed by the tragedy and, sadly, and the massive losses to farmers in property and livestock, much of which has drowned. This is a big, big economic hit to Canada.

November 11, 2021

Remembrance Day ceremonies — please keep them short and on-topic

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line “Tommy Conway” (pseudonym for an active service member of the Canadian Armed Forces) has some thoughts on Remembrance Day and particularly the official ceremonies to mark the occasion:

Members of the Lorne Scots (Peel, Dufferin & Halton Regiment) at Georgetown Cenotaph, 11 November, 2014.

Canadian troops are generally regarded as a practical, irreverent bunch. They absolutely hate that “hoo-ah” stuff you hear south of the border, and resent any attempt to import it. I’ve never met a more snide bunch and I wouldn’t have it any other way. When it comes to Remembrance Day, the most meaningful ceremonies for them involve a few close friends, or a small gathering of colleagues. One veteran related to me a ceremony he had on the job: a well-respected officer asked those present to speak well of lost friends, if they felt like it, then they had a moment of silence and carried on with the job. The least profound experience I’ve had was at the National Memorial in Ottawa, where a bunch of mid-career captains used the event as a way to catch up and barely shut their mouths for the speeches. Not that they missed much: the Chaplain-General took the time to tell us that our brave predecessors sacrificed their lives and youth, in part, to secure a harassment-free workplace. I don’t expect it will get better this year, or ever.

When it comes to local ceremonies, I understand, I really do, that organizers want to convey their thoughts about the fallen and want to do so in detail. Please try to keep speeches few and short, and ceremonies simple and purposeful. The more wreaths at a local ceremony that dignitaries want to lay, the more elements of the program you have, the longer you keep that young private soldier, who was bussed from a base that morning, from having a beer with his or her friends afterwards. For many young soldiers, the post-ceremony refreshment time is where their NCOs open up about the really hard stuff they’ve been through and let the new guys listen. It’s meaningful and right that your local business and civic leaders want to show respect for the dead, but it means more for everyone involved if you do it after the ceremony.

The National War Memorial itself is a great illustration on the pitfalls of trying too hard. Traditionally, the memorial was just let alone by the authorities, except for ceremonies. In 2006, a couple of drunks peed on it. While this was offensive, drunks doing offensive things is a fact of life. A confident society with reasonable people in charge would have let the legal system work out the mischief charges and carried on. Not long after, however, the CAF decided to post sentries at the memorial to guard it from stray drunks. Then, tragically, one of the sentries, Corporal Nathan Cirillo, was murdered in a terrorist attack in 2014 while performing this duty. So now the Ottawa Police guard the sentries, who in turn guard the memorial. Imagine yourself as a Canadian sapper who entered a major firefight in Panjwai, in a bulldozer with steel hastily welded to the windows because the chronically under-equipped CAF had no proper armoured bulldozers available, and think of this obscene waste of everyone’s time and money. If Canadian troops are looking at the memorial from the beyond, they’re looking in disbelief, not reverence. And they’re making snarky comments, too.

September 30, 2021

“The nicer the Canadian, the worse the hypocrisy gets”

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line a Canadian veteran of Afghanistan (writing as “Tommy Conway”) explains why Canada’s “nice guy” illusions have made us weaker and unable to succeed at so many of our endeavours:

Canadian Army LAV III convoy near Khadan, Afghanistan, 2010-01-25.
Photo by Staff Sgt. Christine Jones via Wikimedia Commons.

We do not merely have an institutional problem, but a spiritual one. The peoples of the Western democracies have lost their sense of shame. Canadians, in particular, have lost our collective self-respect. We have become “nice guys”, the sort of people who expect to be praised because we can do no harm. We have ceased to be a citizenry that values honour — the kind of people who are capable of doing hard things, and willing to spend a lot of effort doing the right ones.

During the Afghan war, many NATO soldiers lived in very harsh conditions “outside the wire”. In forward patrol bases or on extended missions, water was at a premium, so washing socks was a weekly treat. But for others, Afghanistan meant a lot of time generating PowerPoint decks in bloated headquarters. Go past the walls in Kabul which separated the safe NATO bases from the bustling city, and one could find cafes staffed by friendly Nepalese baristas, air-conditioned gyms, and plentiful cold drinks.

Absurdly, in the American compound at the same Kabul International Airport where desperate evacuees tramped through trenches of human waste and barbed wire to escape the country as the Taliban advanced, the U.S. Air Force maintained a pleasant compound with green grass. Kandahar International Airport was well-known for a much-frequented strip of fast-food outlets, including a Tim Hortons.

These amenities warped the perspective of those with regular access to them. Canadian Army lore is full of tales of confrontations between bedraggled, unshaven troops coming in from patrol being denied access to an iced capp for improper dress. I’ve rarely been so embarrassed as the time I took tea from an Afghan father of three, smiling in the sweltering heat of an Afghan summer, only to return to my relatively comfortable quarters behind safe walls to hear people bitch and moan about the fridge being out of their favourite pop.

It wasn’t just individual troops who lost perspective. Senior leaders made a big deal about receiving two beers on Canada Day, and put extensive measures in place to conceal the festivities from Afghan staff because the presence of alcohol might offend cultural sensibilities. I am not a cultural expert, but I imagine the locals were offended about the well-watered, visibly overfed, air-conditioned people in less than a kilometer from the poverty of the population they were supposed to be protecting. Some of the old-timers, who had served with the Communist army, stated categorically that they liked the Russians more because they shared their vodka — and their hardships.

We barely had perspective then, and we sure as hell don’t now.

Predictably, the further from the theatre of operations, the more that perspective was distorted. Somehow, the Canadian public grew “war-weary” over Afghanistan, though it’s difficult to understand what tired them. Between 1939-45, this country sustained a full field army, despite drawing from a population a third of today’s size. Canadians withstood rationing as tens of thousands of their countrymen died overseas, and came out of the war optimistic about the future.

[…]

Compare that to what we suffered in Afghanistan; we sustained a strong battalion group, and maintained a few bloated headquarters — all of this proved to be too much to keep up. Canada slid into a training mission in 2011 and then gave up completely in 2014. During the fighting, the vast majority of the population felt no impact whatsoever. As Tom Nichols paraphrased a U.S. officer in Iraq, “We’re at war, America’s at the mall.” Canada was there with them, complaining about the lines in the food court.

September 20, 2021

Canada was given advance notice of the AUKUS deal … about five minutes notice

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When the news broke about a new western alliance involving Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, the official line — belatedly — was that our allies had kept Canadian officials “in the loop”, about the negotiations. Now that everyone’s attention is on the vote-counting, it can be safely acknowledged that the Canadian government got a heads-up just a few minutes before the formal announcement, as Ted Campbell discusses:

US President Joe Biden with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (onscreen) during the AUKUS announcement.
Image from businesstelegraph.co.uk.

So, Steven Chase and Robert Fife say, in the Globe and Mail, that “The Canadian government was surprised this week by the announcement of a new security pact between the United States, Britain and Australia, one that excluded Canada and is aimed at confronting China’s growing military and political influence in the Indo-Pacific region, according to senior government officials [and] Three officials, representing Canada’s foreign affairs, intelligence and defence departments, told The Globe and Mail that Ottawa was not consulted about the pact, and had no idea the trilateral security announcement was coming until it was made on Wednesday by U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.”

Not only did our oldest and closest friends and allies kick Canada out of the “inner circle”, they didn’t even bother to tell us that the political and diplomatic kick in the arse was coming, although, the Globe journalists say, the Australian and British defence ministers gave Harjit Sajjan a brief “heads up” just minutes before the announcement. Mr Sajjan’s spokesman said that Canada “had been kept in the loop”, I call BS.

Vice Admiral Mark Norman, someone who knows a lot about what happens at the highest echelons of government in Ottawa said that “if Mr. Trudeau was fully briefed” [on this new AUKUS pact, then] “he doesn’t understand what is going on internationally and he doesn’t understand what the significance of an arrangement like this is as it relates to international security.” I don’t think he had heard a word about this until Minister Sajjan’s senior aids called the PCO and PMO on Wednesday afternoon.

One can easily imagine the conversations on Wednesday and Thursday in some of the corridors of power in Ottawa: “ Biden us!” said one senior official. “No,” said another, even more senior, “this has been coming for a long time. It’s a shock, but it really shouldn’t be a surprise.” “They screwed us,” said a third, “we’ve done nothing to deserve this. It’s just because we aren’t spending as much as Biden and Morrison want on the military and it’s because we’re not sending more ships to Asia, more often.” “No,” the second person said, “it’s because we decided, all of us, you and me, too, to not do whatever it took to arrest the changes in our national strategic outlook.” “How can you say that?” the first speaker said, “We all protested, I wrote a long brief explaining why we needed to step up …” “We’re still here,” the more senior official said. “We didn’t resign and go public as soon as we saw how things were shaping up. Almost no one did.” “No one listens when senior officials or admirals or generals resign,” said the third official, “it wouldn’t have done any good.” “You’re right,” the most senior official answered, “resignations are, normally, not news and they rarely change politicians’ minds … not, anyway, when they’re done one at a time. Back in 2016, when many us started to see, clearly, how things were going we should have resigned en masse ~ and not just we three, but dozens of us from PCO, from Foreign Affairs and from DND and the military. If the senior public service had rebelled, as it should when the government makes destructive policy choice against our advice, then there would have been enormous, even irresistible political pressure. But we didn’t, did we? We all stayed on and wrote a couple of arse-covering briefing notes and went about our business. We are as much to blame for this as are those dimwits in Trudeau’s cabinet and inner circle. We failed Canada.”

Vice Admiral Norman, the article explains, “said the agreement goes far beyond access to U.S. submarine technology [which is Mr Trudeau’s lame excuse for why Canada was kicked out of the inner circle] This is about accessing both current and emerging technologies, from cyber and artificial intelligence, to acoustics and underwater warfare – a whole range of very important strategic capabilities.” Further, “Mr. Norman said Canada has many national interests in the Indo-Pacific – including trade, promoting the rule of law and democracy, and countering China’s aggressive behaviour and posturing – but he suspects close allies do not take Canadian defence commitments seriously [and he added] I don’t think our allies think we are serious when it comes to defence. I think they have concerns not just about our defence expenditures, but also the extent to which our [international] commitments are both lasting and meaningful.” This has been evident since 2015. Justin Trudeau effectively campaigned on doing less in the world. Everyone knew this was coming ~ especially those who voted for the Liberal Party … it is what they wanted. It’s what Canada got.

September 17, 2021

Australia, the UK, and the US join in a military alliance … Canada of course is nowhere in sight

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, China, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

News broke the other day about a new three-nation military arrangement clearly aimed at containing Chinese ambitions in the Pacific, involving Australia, Britain, and the United States, to be known as AUKUS (or AUUKUS, depending on the reporting source). These three countries are already tightly linked in the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing network which also includes Canada and New Zealand. As more than one wit noted on Twitter after the announcement, it’s a good thing Canada doesn’t have a Pacific coast or any economic interests in that ocean…

Ted Campbell, who recently emerged from a blogging hiatus to comment on the ongoing federal election, felt this new pact cemented the idea that Canada is “no longer a serious country” in military terms:

It is now abundantly clear that the USA, inter alia, puts Justin Trudeau’s Canada in the same league as (anti-nuclear) New Zealand. Canada is no longer one of the most trusted allies … Australia is; Britain is: India is; Japan is … Canada is NOT.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, in six short years, moved Canada from one of America’s best friends to, de facto, a Chinese puppet state. He has done this with his own (and his many advisors’) eyes wide open. Canada, Justin Trudeau’s Canada is no longer a serious nation … perhaps we don’t really deserve to be. After all, we (almost 40% of the almost 70% who bothered to vote at all) elected him … then we did it again. Maybe the world is just concluding that we are not serious people who can be relied upon when the going gets tough.

He followed this up with a bit more concern on the sinking Canadian international profile:

Just take a look at those technologies ~ AI, quantum computing, cyber warfare ~ those are all areas vital to Canada’s security and prosperity and what are we focused on? Climate change and Québec’s latest attempts to make Canada into an illiberal state. China spews out more carbon in a week than Canada does in a year. China is aiming to displace America as the global guarantor of peace, security and trade. Do any of the dimwits in the Liberal government understand that? Why in hell is Prime Minister Trudeau attacking Alberta’s (relatively clean) oil industry rather than, for example, concentrating on making Canadian nuclear energy work for us?

A few days ago I said that Canada needs nuclear powered submarines to assert and protect our sovereignty in the waters we claim as our own. No one contradicted me. No one ever raises any serious, well-founded objections to nuclear submarines for Canada. It’s a no brainer. But, look at the last line in the quote above. Who is getting nuclear submarines? Australia … because it is a serious country with adult political leadership.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s regime has sidelines Canada. Our strongest, most traditional allies have abandoned us. We have been sold out … to China.

I use that term “sold out”, intentionally. I do NOT believe that Justin Trudeau is a traitor … for heaven’s sake, he’s not smart enough to betray anything. He’s barely able to memorize his lines. But a lot of people have invested a lot in China ~ the Desmarais family (of Power Corporation fame) and former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Bob Rae, Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, for example, are all closely tied together and even more closely tied to the Canada-China trade file. I assert that the “China lobby” in Canada is very, very powerful, very, very rich and extraordinarily well connected to Canada’s political leadership ~ Liberal and Conservative, alike. I further assert that it, not Justin Trudeau and Marc Garneau and the mandarins in Ottawa, drives Canada’s foreign, trade and fiscal policies. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is NOT a traitor … but he is puppet and people whose vital interests are centred on China, not Canada, pull the strings.

Why is Canada excluded from the AUKUS pact?

One reason Canada isn’t involved is certainly the distraction of the federal election, and there would have been no way that Justin Trudeau would have wanted to answer questions on the campaign trail about anything geostrategic or military, and he especially doesn’t want Canadians looking closely at his servile deference to the Chinese government. Of course, given that he’s literally bribed the major newspaper chains and TV networks with “subsidies” right before the election was called, he might well have been safe from any hint of an awkward question from his unofficial PR branches in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Over at the Thin Pinstriped Line, Sir Humphrey looks at the military and technical implications of the new alliance:

The Royal Australian Navy is likely to become the next nation to join the nuclear submarine operators club. This is the key headline emerging from the surprise tri-lateral announcement on Wed 15 September by the Prime Ministers of Australia and the UK, and the President of the United States.

The move, forming a new “three eyes” club known as AUKUS is a genuinely significant development intended to provide a significant uplift in capability in the Indo-Pacific region. For the first time in nearly 70 years, the US has agreed to share some of its most sensitive technology with a third party, to help Australia become a “naval power underway on nuclear power”.

There are several ramifications of this decision, that will be felt for many years to come. The first is that from an American perspective, this is a good opportunity to take steps to increase burden sharing in the Pacific.

[…]

From a wider diplomatic perspective, there are three distinct groupings to consider. Firstly, the remaining 5-EYES members (Canada and New Zealand). Its unlikely that this will do much damage to 5-EYES – for example New Zealand would never have been approached as the acquisition of a nuclear submarine would be vastly beyond the budget, or needs, of the small but incredibly professional Royal New Zealand Navy.

Canada may be feeling slightly raw about this – particularly those with long memories who recall the 1980s and the doomed plan to acquire nuclear submarines for the RCN. But who knows, in terms of timelines these vessels may be entering service in the same timeframe as Canada seeks to replace the Upholder/Victoria class – it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they may seek to join in later on.

Given 5-EYES is more than just an Indo-Pacific focus, it would be wrong to read much into this as a statement on the future of that Alliance. Rather it is better to see this as a subgrouping of a very successful international alliance.

HMCS Victoria
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

August 28, 2021

The name “Afghanistan” is becoming a badge of shame for western politicians, and deservedly so

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney points out that while it was probably beyond the capabilities of the Canadian government to evacuate all Afghanis who had assisted Canadian efforts in that country, the actual efforts fell very far short of even “adequate”:

On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.

We have to cut through the fanatics on both sides and be very clear about this: the evacuation was always going to be messy. We were never going to get everyone out. But it is obvious that we did not get out as many people as we should have. It’s clear that we made major errors, including failing to work with veterans and aid groups on the ground; we did not lift bureaucratic hurdles quickly enough. We lost time dithering. That is our shameful failure.

It is not the Canadian government’s fault that our American allies decided to pull out of the conflict. Frankly, I still can’t entirely blame either the Trump or Biden administrations for that decision, although the execution of that decision has been catastrophic.

This was not a decision made in Ottawa, but in Washington, and for entirely American reasons. Further, the Liberals are not to blame for the U.S. government’s massive intelligence failure. We were caught totally flatfooted by the rapid and total collapse of the former Afghan government — what had been expected to take months took days. Canada, a member of both NATO and the Five Eyes, relies heavily on the intelligence gathered by our larger, more powerful ally. I do not fault Liberal party leader Justin Trudeau or his government for being caught unprepared.

So let’s dispense with that nonsense right away. In the big picture, there is not a whole hell of a lot Canadian governments could have done to avoid this crisis.

But we could’ve managed the crisis much better.

Over the last 10 days, we’ve had repeated reports of bottlenecks caused by over-restrictive paperwork requirements. We’ve seen other allies flying helicopters into Kabul to allow them to retrieve their people from sites around the city; Canada has helicopters and the ability to deploy them, but we didn’t follow suit.

Reports indicate that there was a gap of several days in any meaningful Canadian Armed Forces presence on the ground — and that gap set us back in terms of intelligence and planning. Canadian officials reportedly worried about the number of seatbelts on our transport planes even as other allies were loading their aircraft up with as many people as they could (we eventually began cramming evacuees into ours, as well). In several recent pieces here at The Line, Kevin Newman has described the struggle faced by those those trying to escape — people to whom we had had promised safe haven as their lives were now in peril due time they spent helping us during our missions in Afghanistan. There are numerous reports of our government telling these people to show up at gas stations and hotels — only to ghost them.

Facts beyond our control limited how effective we were ever going to be at getting people out, but we did not max out our effectiveness within those constraints. As a result, people will die who did not have to. The gap between the best-possible Canadian response and the actual Canadian response is a gap measured in lives.

I’m always happy to point the finger at Prime Minister Trudeau for his mistakes, but as Matt Gurney writes above, there was little that Trudeau could have done to avert the humanitarian disaster still unfolding around Kabul. The blame for deciding to pull out without adequate (or any) notice to allies or competent logistical and administrative planning lies with Joe Biden, as Conrad Black explains [this was written before the bomb attacks outside the airport in Kabul]:

Biden, in his address last Monday, in his midweek interview with George Stephanopoulos, and in his address on Friday, uttered a series of egregious falsehoods that were quickly exposed. He said there was no expression of discontent from America’s allies. For the first time in history, references to an American president in the British Parliament were met with shouts of “shame”. When Thomas Tugendhat, the chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee and a retired colonel who served with distinction in Afghanistan and was decorated by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division for combat bravery, said that it was shameful for a commander-in-chief who has not served under his own colors to mock the sacrifice of men who have, all parties in the British House agreed. No American president has been so severely or — unfortunately — deservedly insulted.

No American, consuming only mainstream media narratives, would realize that there were three times as many allied forces from assorted NATO countries in Afghanistan as there were Americans, or that they were not consulted before the Americans abruptly departed and brought the roof down on all of them. The Western alliance, as former President Trump emphasized, has its problems. Most of the members were not pulling their weight. Germany, the strongest NATO country after the United States, has almost disarmed and has effectively made itself a Russian energy satellite through the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. But they did not deserve this.

After this horrifying fiasco, where the Americans scuttled and turned tail and left their European allies and Canada to fend for themselves, the NATO members have already indicated that they are in no mood to follow this administration anywhere. No one can blame them. Biden said on Friday that the United States was not sending armored vehicles to collect its citizens and bring them to Kabul airport as the British and French were doing because, he explained, Americans were not being stopped by Taliban checkpoints. Half an hour later, the inarticulate Pentagon spokesman John Kirby squarely contradicted his commander-in-chief, and the official explanation was changed to advise Americans not to try to reach the airport because of the danger.

Biden said the Afghans wouldn’t fight so they weren’t worth the risk of American lives; but 50,000 Afghan soldiers and scores of thousands of civilians have died in this war. No Americans ha[d] died in Afghanistan in 18 months (in stark contrast to the soaring crime rates in almost all American cities). As Tugendhat told the House of Commons, it is not for the commander-in-chief of this cowardly, shameful, and disastrous flight from American national responsibilities, who has never served in his own armed forces, to disparage those who have died in allied forces for a cause that he has abandoned and doomed.

The one potentially positive aspect of this horrible debacle has been the unarguable revelation that the president is not up to his job.

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