Quotulatiousness

June 19, 2020

National Defence Headquarters needs to go on a crash diet

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

Ted Campbell knows how Canada’s NDHQ got into the state it is in, and has some suggestions for getting it out of its critical state of administrative morbid obesity:

Major General George R. Pearkes Building in Ottawa, home of National Defence Headquarters on Colonel By Drive.
Photo by DXR via Wikimedia Commons.

National Defence Headquarters is a HUGE place with diverse functions. First: it is, simultaneously, the management centre of the Department of National Defence, which is a very large (and complex) department of government that includes the Canadian Armed Forces (but the CAF is just one of DND’s “arms”), and it is the national command centre for the Canadian Armed Forces. Second: it is one of the biggest budget departments in Canada. Defence spending supports many hundreds of thousands of jobs in the military, in the civil service and all across the spectrum of Canadian industry from the highest of high-tech enterprises through to janitorial services. It is never surprising when things fall through the cracks in any large, complex organization, is it?

But there are two other problems:

As defence spending has declined, year-after-year, always in terms of GDP and often in terms of its share of the public accounts and sometimes in real, dollar terms, too, the headquarters, especially the military’s command and control (C²) superstructure, has grown. A bit of growth is not surprising when one must “do more with less” as I well remember being told during the rounds of budget and staff cuts in the 1990s. Although to their credit, defence ministers in the Chrétien-Martin era imposed a series of staff cuts on the HQs in Ottawa, there was a bit of growth in the (largely civil service) policy and financial management areas. But in the Harper era that all changed. Budget pursestrings were loosened by governments after 2001 and, under e.g. Conservative Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor the Canadian Forces began to receive some much needed new equipment including the big CC-177 Globemaster III transport planes, new CH-147F Chinook transport helicopters and Leopard tanks ~ all procured on sole-source contracts, over the objections of many. But then O’Connor was replaced by Peter MacKay and, it appeared to me, the generals and admirals took over and the HQ went from lean to overweight and then to downright fat. Then, in the Trudeau era, the HQ went from simply being fat to being morbidly obese. There are, now, hundreds of admirals and generals, managing a military force that numbers in the (too few) thousands. Even serving flag and general officers have told me that cutting the highest ranks by ⅓ would do no harm and some retired officers and civil servants (with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the HQ at the highest levels) say that a 50% cut would be healthy. The simple fact is that the Canadian Forces have too many very smart, very able senior officers with too little real work to do. They, not surprisingly, fill the time available with “work” of their own devising which, often, involves creating new and more complex command structures which require more and more general officers. The process seems unconstrained from the top.

Why? What happened?

Well, it started with the very best of intentions. I recall being told by one very, very fine general that we, the Canadian Forces, must, above all else, be “interoperable” with our American allies and that, he explained, meant adapting to their command and control system, poor as he thought it was. He said, and he meant, adapting, not adopting. But he retired and a new generation of officers entered the most senior ranks and some of them seemed, to me, to be more interested in adopting than in just adapting to. We seemed, in the 2000s, to be seized by a giant case of military penis envy and we seemed to want to have a local version of whatever the Americans had. The result was a proliferation of new command and control organizations, all put in place as the combat elements were actually shrinking. The end result was an unconscionable GOFO [General Officer/Flag Officer] to combat sailor and solder ratio and a bloated and, in my opinion, weak and inefficient command and control superstructure.

May 28, 2020

Wuhan Coronavirus versus Canadian government planning and implementation

As Chris Selley illustrates, this was a clear failure for the various levels of government:

When Ontarians look back on the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when their government finally ponied up the big bucks and fixed the province’s long-term care system, they will likely also wonder what the hell took so long. As appalled as everyone quite rightly is by the Canadian Forces’ report into the state of five long-term care homes that were in dire enough shape to require military intervention, we really shouldn’t be shocked. As the Ottawa Citizen in particular has reported in recent years, the system’s staffing levels were designed for a much less old, much less sick and much less Alzheimer’s-afflicted population than lives in them today — and it led to some terrible outcomes in normal times.

Perhaps it was easy to blame such incidents on individual villains: Ottawa support worker Jie Xiao, who was caught on video punching 89-year-old Georges Karam 11 times in the face; or Elizabeth Wettlaufer, one of Canada’s most prolific and yet somehow least-famous serial killers, who murdered at least eight senior citizens in long-term care homes during her red flag-festooned nursing career. Perhaps tales of society’s most vulnerable being forced to wallow in their own filth, or even just left alone in confusion and misery, are too much for the human mind to contemplate at length.

In any event, it only stood to reason that a virus as potent as the one that causes COVID-19 would exploit weak points in a long-term care system. Between wandering patients, fans circulating air throughout facilities and a lack of basic sterilization control, you would almost think these five facilities wanted the virus to spread. It’s a wretched understatement to say we can do better.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves, though: Long-term care homes will always be uniquely vulnerable. And as the economy reopens, it’s essential we keep focusing on them. It’s essential that we focus, period.

There is a tendency among media in Central Canada to treat “Canada’s COVID-19” outbreak as a single thing affecting all of society. It clearly isn’t. The numbers are all over the map. Quebec has reported by far the most cases and deaths: 5,655 and 480 per million population, respectively. Ontario is at roughly one-third of that: 1,778 cases per million and 144 deaths per million. At 1,569 cases per million, Alberta has a comparable number of cases to Ontario — but far fewer deaths, at just 31 per million. British Columbia has the same death rate as Alberta, but with only one-third as many cases. Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Newfoundland and New Brunswick have reported just 18 deaths between them. Quebec has nearly 30,000 active cases; Ontario has just over 6,000; Manitoba has 16.

December 6, 2019

“‘The world needs more Canada’, some of us love to boast. Just not if it costs money”

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

In hindsight, President Trump let Justin Trudeau off rather lightly for his blatant disrespect on the world stage. Trump has all the cards in our bilateral trade relationship, and the Canadian economy isn’t in a healthy state at the moment. It’s not a risk any Canadian PM should be running when we are so “delinquent” on our NATO commitments, as Chris Selley points out:

Canadian soldiers set a perimeter position after disembarking a U.S. Navy landing craft during a simulated amphibious landing, 24 April 2009. The training exercise was part of the 50th iteration of UNITAS, a multi-national exercise intended to increase interoperability among participating navies. Other participating nations include Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Germany, Ecuador, Argentina and Chile.
U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer Seth Johnson via Wikimedia Commons.

The unfortunate thing is that the precipitating event for this little spat could have been useful: An American president publicly calling out Canada, in effect, as a deadbeat brother. At their media availability-cum-fireside chat, Trump accused Canada — again in remarkably diplomatic language, by his standards — of being “slightly delinquent” when it comes to military spending, particularly as it relates to our NATO obligations. The unofficial target for NATO countries is two per cent of GDP. In 2018, the World Bank pegged Canada at 1.25.

This is far from a unique state of affairs. “The world needs more Canada,” some of us love to boast. Just not if it costs money. As a percentage of gross national income, Canada’s foreign aid spending is 0.26 per cent — below the OECD average of 0.31 and a pale shadow of countries like Sweden and Norway, which spend quadruple that. During the last election campaign, no doubt having extensively focus grouped the idea, the Conservatives promised to cut aid spending by 25 per cent.

Canada routinely lobbies for a seat on the UN Security Council for reasons no one can quite articulate — I suspect because it’s a relatively inexpensive thing that we can then boast about. Trudeau’s Liberals orated furiously about Canada’s alleged peacekeeping imperative during the 2015 election, dithered for an eon about how to fulfil it, sent 200 soldiers and eight helicopters to Mali for a year, and then brought them home. Peace kept! Conservatives spent the previous decade talking up Canada’s hard-power credentials even as military spending fell, as a percentage of GDP, for five out of the nine years Stephen Harper was prime minister.

No Canadian government of any stripe can procure a new fighter jet, icebreaker or frigate to save its life — because at the end of the day, we can’t use them to save our lives. If things really go pear-shaped we’re basically begging at Uncle Sam’s feet anyway, so military procurement has become about buying votes and very little else. Military spending has risen under Trudeau’s Liberals, but it’s still less than the 2009 high point under Harper — 1.4 per cent of GDP, in 2009. It was above two per cent as recently as 1987.

Justin Trudeau meets with President Donald Trump at the White House, 13 February, 2017.
Photo from the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

November 28, 2019

“The chickens are coming home to roost … but they are, actually, Pierre Trudeau’s chickens”

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

Ted Campbell looks at Justin Trudeau’s plight — needing to focus on policies that will increase his party’s chances of winning more seats in Quebec — with increasing demands from south of the border to get the Canadian commitment to higher military spending moved from “aspirational goal” to actual policy:

Justin Trudeau meets with President Donald Trump at the White House, 13 February, 2017.
Photo from the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

Many in the media are saying, and I agree, that Justin Trudeau’s agenda for the next couple of years is about 99.9% domestic and focused, mainly, gaining seats in on Québec and holding on, at least, in Atlantic Canada and in urban and suburban Ontario and British Columbia. The overarching aim ~ the ONLY aim ~ of this government is to be re-elected with a majority.

As I mentioned a week or so ago, Donald J Trump is about to rain all over Justin Trudeau’s parade.

As Murray Brewster reports, for CBC News,

    The Liberal government is facing renewed political pressure from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump to increase defence spending to meet the benchmark established by NATO [… and …] Robert O’Brien, the new U.S. national security adviser, said it is an “urgent priority” to get allies across the board to set aside military budgets that are equal to two per cent of the individual country’s gross domestic product [… while …] Speaking with journalists at the Halifax International Security Forum on Saturday, O’Brien rattled off a list of the world’s flashpoints, including Iran and Venezuela, as well as traditional adversaries such as Russia and China [… saying …] “There are very serious threats to our freedom and our security [… and adding that …] Canada made a pledge at [the 2014 NATO Summit in] Wales to spend two per cent. We expect our friends and our colleagues to live up to their commitments, and Canada is an honourable country; it’s a great country.”

Note the choice of words by Mr O’Brien, who is “a lawyer and former U.S. State Department hostage negotiator.” He doesn’t say that President Trump and the USA “asks” Canada to keep its word (although the Harper government said that spending 2% of GDP on defence was an “aspirational goal,” rather than a firm commitment) nor did he say something like “the US hopes Canada will change its ways and spend more on defence.” He said that Donald Trump’s America “expects” Canada to live up to its “pledge.” As I mentioned before, when President Trump negotiates with friends and allies he usually has both fists in the air and his knuckles are often reinforced with unfair trade tariffs and the like. Right now he is, for example, asking Japan and South Korea to pay much, much more to support American forces in their countries because, in his mind, he (America) is providing a “service” which is all for the Asians and is not, in any way, in America’s self-interest and, therefore, he wants to be reimbursed. It’s a very Trumpian notion. I am sure he sees NATO and NORAD in very much the same light.

[…]

The issue that worries some analysts is that while Canada is, in the final analysis, protected by the US because it is in America’s best interests to protect us, NATO provides a useful counter-balance and, in effect, helps us to at least pretend to be a little less than just another American colony. And that, having the status of being little better than a US colony, is what Pierre Trudeau willed upon Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he wanted to leave NATO, entirely and saddled Canada with his, juvenile, nonsensical, neo-isolationist “Foreign Policy For Canadians” white paper in 1970. Although Brian Mulroney wanted Canada to be independent – think standing up to President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher on South Africa – and Stephen Harper did, too, the cumulative impact of Trudeau-Chrétien-Trudeau for 30 of the last 50 years has been too much to change. When our political leaders don’t care about Canada being a leader amongst the nations and don’t, in fact, even care about Canada being a truly sovereign state then we will sink, inevitably, into the status of an American colony.

November 4, 2019

Canadian Army TAPV – Tactical Armoured Patrol Vehicle

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Matsimus
Published 1 Jun 2018

The Textron TAPV (Tactical Armoured Patrol Vehicle) is an armoured car currently in use by the Canadian Army. It is based on the M1117 Armoured Security Vehicle, developed for use by the military police of the US Armed Forces.

The Tactical Armoured Patrol Vehicle (TAPV) program began in 2009, and in 2012 the contract was awarded to Textron Systems, Inc. On August 16, 2016, Textron systems delivered the first Tactical Armoured Patrol Vehicle (TAPV) to the Canadian Army. An eventual 500 vehicles will be purchased, with the option to order an additional 100.

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October 18, 2019

Colonel Daniel Stepaniuk’s one-man campaign to wipe out (some) religious observance in the Militia

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

Christie Blatchford on the oddly partial actions of the officer in charge of more than a dozen Ontario militia regiments as far as religion is concerned:

The Lorne Scots (Peel, Dufferin and Halton Regiment) on parade in Brampton, Ontario on 24 September, 2016.
Photo by Nicholas Russon.

An army brigade commander has told the 14 Ontario reserve regiments under his charge that they must cancel any “church parade” they have planned.

Despite a lack of complaints about the parades, which see soldiers march to their regimental church, Col. Daniel Stepaniuk urged his commanding officers to stop participating in “any event where the primary purpose is liturgical, spiritual or religious … even if the service is non-denominational.”

A custom in the Canadian Army since the time of Confederation, the parades aren’t as common as they once were, though many units still have at least one a year, often tied to Remembrance Day ceremonies.

[…]

First of all, there is the glaring contradiction with Stepaniuk’s harsh stand on church parades and a parade that happened in Toronto last April.

A group of soldiers — I counted between 15 and 20 — were issued weapons, allowed to march in their military uniforms and were escorted by an armoured vehicle in the annual Khalsa parade for Canada’s Sikh community. It is considered a holy day.

The soldiers were from the Lorne Scots, one of Stepaniuk’s reserve units based in Brampton. The CO of the unit said at the time that he signed off on the weapons only after his commander (that would presumably be Stepaniuk, or perhaps the brigadier-general above him) approved the soldiers’ participation.

So weapons worn at a Khalsa Day parade good, though against the rules (The Canadian Armed Forces Manual of Drill and Ceremonial), according to army spokeswoman Karla Gimby.

But soldiers going anywhere near a church, bad, and against rules five years old that no one cared to enforce until now.

But most of all, in such small incremental strikes, does Canadian history and tradition lose strength.

September 7, 2019

C2A1: Canada’s Squad Automatic FAL

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 6 Sep 2019

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

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Canada was the first country to formally adopt the FN FAL as its standard service rifle, and in 1958 it added the C2 light machine gun version of the FAL to its arsenal. The C2, later updated to C2A1, was a heavy-barreled version of the regular FAL rifle. It shared all the same basic action components, but with a dual-use bipod/handguard, a rear sight calibrated out to 1000 meters, and 30-round magazines as standard. The gun was mechanically fine, but not a great light support weapon, as its rifle lineage sacrificed handling and sustained fire capability. Only about 2700 were produced, and it was ultimately replaced by the C9 (FN Minimi) in the 1980s.

Many thanks to Movie Armaments Group in Toronto for the opportunity to showcase their AR-10 rifles for you! Check them out on Instagram to see many of the guns in their extensive collection:

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July 22, 2019

FAL in the North: The Canadian C1A1

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 19 Jul 2019

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Canada was the first country to adopt the FAL rifle, purchasing trials rifles from FN within weeks of the formal standardization of the 7.62mm NATO cartridge. Canada acquired production rights to the rifle along with the technical package from FN, and spent 18 months converting the drawings into 1st-angle inch pattern (which would be used by the rest of the Commonwealth nations subsequently). Both a C1 rifle pattern and a C2 LMG pattern were made, although today we are looking at just the C1.

The first production was a run of 20 toolroom prototypes, one of which we have in today’s video. After a few changes were made – most distinctively to the rear sight – full-scale production commenced. Over the following years, a few minor changes were made, and a slightly improved C1A1 pattern adopted. These would service the Canadian military until eventually replaced with the C7 rifles.

Contact:
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PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754

July 18, 2019

Andrew Coyne interviews NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg

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

In the National Post, Andrew Coyne discusses NATO, Donald Trump, and Russia with the current Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg:

General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, later the first Secretary General of NATO during his military service as Winston Churchill’s chief military assistant in 1941.
Official British government photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Throughout their term in government — and especially since Donald Trump’s victory in America’s 2016 election — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have taken every opportunity to pay tribute to the “rules-based international order,” the consensus among countries that everyone’s interests are best served by following a set of rules and guiding principles that have evolved through the decades, expressed through things such as trade agreements and international alliances like the United Nations. If this consensus has a face it may be that of Jens Stoltenberg. The urbane former prime minister of Norway has been Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since 2014, and through tough times for the international consensus he’s been one of the loudest voices defending it. This week he was in Canada to meet with Trudeau, to tour the Canadian Forces’ Garrison Petawawa and to discuss Canada’s NATO deployments in Latvia and Iraq. He sat down for an interview with the National Post‘s Andrew Coyne.

Q. Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, famously defined the alliance’s mission as “keeping the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” When you hear some of the things Donald Trump says about NATO, about Article 5 (the collective defence provision) — are the Americans still in?

A. Yes. And they are more in now than they have been for a long time — meaning that they are actually increasing their NATO presence in Europe. After the end of the Cold War, Canada and the United States, for natural reasons, reduced their military presence in Europe. Because tensions went down, there was less need… Now tensions are increasing again, and both Canada and the United States are now increasing their military presence in Europe: Canada with a Canadian-led battle group in Latvia, and the United States with a battle group in Poland and also with a new armoured brigade. So what we see is that the United States is actually investing more in NATO, more military presence in Europe, more U.S. investments in infrastructure, in pre-positioned equipment, more exercises. So the message from the United States is that they are committed to NATO and we see that not only in words but also in deeds.

Q. But when you see Trump questioning the value of multilateral institutions, asserting “America First,” his chumminess with Putin, does it risk sending a signal that, if push came to shove — if Russia got up to no good in the Baltics or what have you — that America’s resolution to resist that would be less than certain?

A. For me the strongest possible signal to send is the presence of U.S. forces in Europe. The fact that we now, for the first time in the history of NATO, have U.S. troops in the eastern part of the alliance, in Poland and the Baltic countries. There is no way to send a clearer signal than that. And the Canadian troops because they are part of the picture. To have American troops in the Baltic countries sends a very clear signal that if a Baltic country is attacked it will trigger a response from the whole alliance… It’s not possible to imagine a stronger and clearer signal than that.

July 11, 2019

To lose one VCDS may be regarded as misfortune; to lose five looks like horrific leadership failure

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

(Apologies to Oscar for my misappropriation of his phrasing for the title of this post.) The current Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff has announced his resignation. Lieutenant General Paul Wynnyk will resign from his current role after rumours circulated that he was to be replaced with former VCDS Vice-Admiral Mark Norman. Ted Campbell has more:

I see, from a story on Global News, broken by Mercedes Stephenson, of Global and David Pugliese (Post Media), two journalists with very good sources inside DND and the Canadian Armed Forces, that “The second in command of Canada’s military Lt.-Gen. Paul Wynnyk is resigning after he said Chief of the Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance planned to replace him as the vice chief of the defence staff with Vice-Admiral Mark Norman … [but] … Vance then reversed that plan weeks later, according to Wynnyk, when Norman settled with the government and retired from the military.

Lieutenant General “Wynnyk was the fifth vice chief to serve under Vance, and questions are now being raised about his leadership, senior military sources told Global News … [and, the report says] … There are now questions about who will fill the job next. No one appears to be ready, the sources said.” With the utmost respect to Mercedes Stephenson’s sources, who are, I suspect three and two-star admirals and generals, almost any general officer is “ready” to be Vice Chief of the Defence Staff or to fill almost any other “flag” appointment (jobs like surgeon general and the judge advocate general being obvious exceptions). I lived through times when the head of the Army’s equipment engineering branch was not an engineer ~ but was picked specifically because he could lead and manage people and could leave the “engineering” to subordinates, and when a logistics officer ran the Army, to the horror or a few combat branch dinosaurs, and when a Signals officer was Chief of the Defence Staff, too, because, at the time, the top leaders still understood that generals are generalists. I will assert, some will disagree but they are wrong, that almost every rear admiral and major general, from almost every corner of the military, is “ready” right now, to be Chief of the Defence Staff and almost every commodore and brigadier general is equally “ready” to be the Vice Chief. If that is not the case then the Canadian Forces’ leadership system is in a crisis right now, which only a wholesale slaughter of admirals and generals will rectify … or else there will be a slaughter of young Canadian men and women when our armed forces muct face a near-peer enemy.

At the risk of repeating myself:

  • The current military command and control (C²) superstructure is beyond bloated, it is morbidly obese;
  • The military C² system has things back-asswards ~ staff officers outrank combat commanders. We have commodores and brigadier generals sitting behind big desks in Ottawa when they ought to be commanding flotillas, brigades and air groups. The desks in HQs should be occupied by Navy captains and commanders and Army and RCAF colonels and lieutenant colonels, all of whom are, already, proven executives;
  • The CDS should be a three-star officer, a vice admiral or a lieutenant general ~ Canada, with only about 110,000 men and women, regular and reserve, in uniform, doesn’t need a four-star CDS. Reducing her or his rank would be an act “pour encourager les autres;”
  • The military’s command culture must start with getting the foundation right. The recruiting, selection, training and development of junior leaders, corporals and 2nd lieutenants (using the Army as my example), must be the highest priority for every single senior officer. If the foundation is solid then developing admirals and generals will not be a problem. If, as I suspect, the foundation is weak, if there is rank inflation, as I assert there is, at the tank/rifle section and troop/platoon command levels, then problems are going to persist and be magnified at the unit (ship, regiment or squadron), formation (group, brigade, wing and higher) and command levels and in National Defence HQ, too. Eventually, if the foundation is weak then we, Canadians will pay the price in blood … the blood of our sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters.

Unofficial High Speed Tour of Borden Base Military Museum

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The_Chieftain
Published on 8 Jun 2019

Canadian Forces Base Borden is located about an hour’s drive North of Toronto. The base is open access, so anyone can go to the museum.

In addition to the vehicles at the museum, there are others scattered as monuments around the base. I encountered a T-72 and T-55 on my way out the gate.

July 4, 2019

Is there a country with which Justin Trudeau hasn’t messed up Canada’s relationship?

Ted Campbell responds at some length to a Globe and Mail article by Doug Saunders, outlining the degradation of diplomatic relations with almost all our allies and trading partners since Justin Trudeau became PM.

The Globe and Mail‘s award-winning international affairs correspondent Doug Saunders, someone with whom I (almost equally) often disagree and agree, has penned an insightful piece in the Good Grey Globe in which he says that “Suddenly, Canada finds itself almost alone in the world, with a Liberal government realizing that its optimistic foreign policy no longer entirely makes sense … [but, he concludes] … Even if the current crisis in liberal democracy proves temporary and short-lived, we know that it can recur – and likely will. If the institutions of 1945 no longer work and the doctrines of 2015 have failed to have an effect, we should develop new ones that will keep Canada connected to the better parts of the world for the rest of the century.

[…]

After the Second World War,” Mr Saunders writes, “Canada gained a few more foreign-policy outlets. Canada played a large role in creating the institutions that governed the postwar peace: the United Nations and its various organizations; NATO; the global trade body that became the World Trade Organization; the Bretton Woods institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Canada was decisive in the international agreement that authorized the future creation of the twin states of Israel and Palestine, giving it a role in the Middle East that expanded with its creation of the institution of peacekeeping after the Suez Crisis in 1956 … [but this really is a silly statement, albeit one that too many Canadians believe to be true. Canada didn’t create the “institution of peacekeeping” in 1956. It was already there, in the United Nation’s case since Ralph Bunch (USA) and Sir Brian Urquhart (UK) created it in 1948 and it had been around since, at least, Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points speech in 1918, but it is now part of the Laurentian Elite‘s quite dishonest revisions of Mike Pearson’s sterling legacy as a diplomat and politician] … And, starting in the 1950s, Canada became a player and a spender in the new field of foreign aid and development. Under both Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments, Canada used those tools to play a small but well-regarded place in the liberal-democratic order – and to slowly but profitably build its trade and economic relations.

[…]

I agree with Doug Saunders about the sources of Canada’s current weakness. He neglected to mention the root cause: Pierre Trudeau explicitly rejected, in the late 1960s, the “St Laurent Doctrine” and replaced it with a social “culture of entitlement” which meant that our place in the world had to be sacrificed on the altar of a reinforced social safety net. I agree that Donald J Trump is the key to our and the West’s current angst and confusion, not Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Arab terrorists, all of whom are easier to understand, but I would argue that we would be much better placed to cope with president trump and the 21st century had we not abandoned our role as a leading middle power circa 1970. I have reservations about all three of Mr Saunder’s prescriptions:

  • I’m not sure another G-N, not even a “committee to save the world” is a really good idea;
  • I am nervous about interfering in the internal affairs of other countries ~ think about “do unto others” and all that; and
  • I really doubt that Canadians are ready to spend what’s needed on our defence and, I suspect, they will not be until it is (almost) too late.

Like Mr Saunders, Mr Lang and Professor Paris, I, too, want to save the liberal world order and Canada’s place in it; I’m just not sure that any of the proposed solutions offered by Doug Saunders, by Eugene Lang or even by Professor Roland Paris are going to be enough. I think we need less formality and fewer organizations in international actions and a lot more ad hocery. I hope that we will have new, adult leadership here in Canada in the fall of 2019 and I hope that a new, grownup prime minister will begin, quickly, to mend relations with Australia, India, Japan and the Philippines and other Asian nations, to shore up our relations with Europe and, especially, with Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and UK. I also hope Canada will open new, more productive dialogues with Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America and with Iran, Russia and China, also. I am convinced that Professor Stein is correct and we must have an “interests-based,” even a selfish suite of foreign, defence, immigration and trade policies. We should not go about looking for enemies, but we must understand that we have precious few friends and, for now, we cannot count on America to be one of them. America, Australia and Britain, China, Denmark and India, Japan, Mexico and the Philippines, and Singapore and Senegal, too, will all act in pursuit of their own interests; Canada needs to be willing and able to do the same and to work with them, even with Donald Trump’s America and Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia when our interests converge and, politely, stand aside when they diverge. The G7 and G20 and a proposed new G9 are all harmless, but also, largely useless, talking shops. Both diplomacy and foreign affairs must be conducted on a case-by-case, country-by-country, issue-by-issue and interest-by-interest basis and diplomacy and foreign affairs can only be conducted with positive effect when Canada is respected for both its examples and values (soft power) and for its hard, economic and military power, too.

Thus, the first step in doing our part to “save the world” is probably the one that most Canadians will have near the bottom of their priority list: rebuilding Canada’s military ~ which must start, after a lot of the fat has been trimmed from a morbidly obese military command and control (C²) superstructure, with steadily growing the defence budget … and that cannot happen until the economy is firing on all cylinders, including energy exports to the world.

July 2, 2019

Rebecca Jensen on strategy, tactics and the need for a Canadian approach to “operational art”

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

Rebecca Jensen’s submission was selected as one of five winners of the 2018 Defence and Security Essay Competition:

Over 12 years, the Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan cost 162 lives, more than 10 times as many wounded, and $18 billion in direct costs. While the tactical capabilities of the Canadian Armed Forces were widely praised, it is unclear what benefit Canada or Afghanistan realized for this steep investment of blood and treasure.

“Operational art” is the term used in defence circles to describe the alignment of tactical accomplishments with strategic ends, since tactical victories alone, as coalition forces have learned in Afghanistan, do not ensure success. The development of a more rigorous approach to operational art in the CAF would help to shrink the gap between tactical accomplishments and strategic stagnation in future conflicts, particularly in coalition missions involving stabilization and development elements.

Operational art connects tactical activities to strategic objectives. Principle elements include the coordination of tactical efforts in space and time to achieve national goals, as well as the balancing of resources and risk. Fighting as part of a coalition, and in complex contingency operations that include elements of stability operations and conventional warfighting, makes the practice of operational art more difficult, as it increases the factors shaping inputs, the environment, and desired outcomes. In particular, it requires coalition members to account for, if not balance, coalition and national objectives, which may differ or even be at odds with each other.

The Canadian army adopted much US thinking about operational art in the 1980s. Confronted by a conflict in Afghanistan very different from that for which it had trained, the CAF reacted similarly, grafting American doctrine and perspectives onto the army’s existing thought and practices. Given the need for rapid adaptation in Afghanistan within an US-dominated coalition effort, this graft made had a pragmatic logic to it, but in the longer term, it is no substitute for the development of organic Canadian thought on the planning and conduct of war.

The publication of Land Operations [PDF] by Canada’s director of army doctrine in 2008 represented an important step in that direction. Crucially, it recognized the complexity of wars like Afghanistan, and the centrality of relationships with other services, nations, and agencies. However, the emphasis on particular end states, and the dualism implicit in the siloing of fires and influence operations, which take place on the physical and psychological planes respectively per the manual, is reductive and linear. When termination criteria include objectives as subjective and complex as a “stable and legitimate host government,” the military can more helpfully plan [PDF] for progress toward that state than be charged with achieving a particular result. While some military activities will be more concerned with influence than maneuver and vice versa, it is similarly unproductive to prompt the military to be aware of the physical and psychological planes. Not only are the moral and the material affected by any action, they are frequently irreducibly interconnected.

May 31, 2019

Addressing the Canadian Forces’ shortfall in recruiting

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

The Canadian Armed Forces have an authorized strength of more than 60,000, but have not been close to that level for several years: as of 2016 there were barely more than 56,000. Recruiting has not kept pace with the demand:

Canada’s armed forces have struggled for years to attract and retain talent. The latest reports only highlight the growing gulf between the number of members required for a fully staffed service, and the lack of actual personnel.

On May 7, Procurement Canada published an expression of interest notice asking the film and television industry to help boost the military’s brand among millennials and young Canadians.

The document ascribes young people’s apparent lack of interest in joining the military to a shift in generational attitudes.

“Millennials rank inward-focused values – happiness, discovery, etc. – higher than collective-focused values – justice, duty, etc.,” the report says.

“Characteristically, they want to contribute to society in a way that is meaningful as viewed in their own standards.”

Membership in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) fell from 58,000 to 56,300 between 2011 and 2016, while the forces’ staffing requirements actually grew.

The shortfall in personnel by the end of 2016 measured 4,200 jobs – nearly twice the vacancy gap of four years prior – with no evidence of a reversal of fortunes since.

A fascinating statistic popped up in the coverage that I hadn’t seen before:

The callout also targets celebrity personalities, influencers, podcasts and video games as potential vehicles for pro-military narratives, and stresses the importance of attracting visible minorities “as they account for 51 per cent of all science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) degrees and account for 50 per cent of the doctorate holders in Canada.”

According to the 2016 Census (summarized by Wikipedia), the national average of visible minorities is 22%, so that 22% is disproportionally represented in the graduating classes in STEM programs.

H/T to my friend William for the link.

March 11, 2019

Recruiting and retention in the Canadian Forces

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

Ted Campbell briefly discusses a “new” plan to recruit (some) soldiers for special forces units directly from civilian life:

Lee Berthiaume, writing in the Globe and Mail, says that “The Canadian Forces are considering whether to recruit elite special-forces soldiers straight off the street rather than forcing them to follow the traditional route of first spending several years in the military … [and] … The idea, which is still being debated, comes as Canada’s special forces – and the military as a whole – look at radical new ways to attract and retain people with the skills and experience needed to fight tomorrow’s wars … [some insiders suggest] … That includes not just computer experts, for example, but also those with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds and language skills, as the special forces aim to operate more effectively in different parts of the world.“

First, I agree that “tomorrow’s warswill may require some more people with scarce or special skills than we are likely to need in conventional or traditional military operations, but, despite the fact that a) I have been retired for almost a generation’s worth of years, and b) I was never in special forces, I am confident in saying that a special forces soldier is, first an foremost, a soldier and then, after much training, a special soldier.

Second, there is nothing new about recruiting special forces soldiers, right off the street, because they possess some special skills …

… but the men in the picture underwent horrendously difficult military training before they were ‘streamed’ into the special forces (Force 136) and sent to South East Asia to fight.

I take MGen Peter Dawe, Commander of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command [at] his word when he says that “This is not about achieving set quotas or anything else … [and] … From a hard-operational perspective, do we have the right mix of people with the right sort of background, education, language, ethnicity, gender … that will allow us to do what our government expects us to do and will expect us to do in the future?” I believe that any focus on gender is politically inspired rubbish; I know that many women can do everything that many men can do, sometimes better ~ their gender is totally and completely irrelevant.

I also know, from discussion with serving members, that the Canadian Forces have an across the board recruiting and retention problem. The solutions to the recruiting and retention (both matter, equally) problems include

  • Better pay and allowance ~ that’s always a pretty obvious solution to part of the problem;
  • Separate pay for leadership (rank) and for skill (trade) ~ it has been over 50 years since Paul Hellyer screwed up the rank/trade system (especially the junior leadership ranks) in a (very welcome by all who, like me, were serving then) attempt to solve a remuneration problem. It’s well past time to revisit the whole pay and allowances system;
  • Newer and better equipment ~ who can blame young, hotshot fighter pilots for not wanting to fly 30+ years old, hand-me-down from Australia, jets? Who can blame sailors for being tired of constant sea duty in old warships? Who can blame soldiers for showing disdain for an Army that cannot even issue them proper boots or replace a World War II vintage pistol? and
  • Fight! This may seem counter-intuitive, but history and experience and academic studies all say that the best recruiting sergeant, better even than a pay raise and shiny new equipment, is the voice of guns. Now, I know this is exactly 180º out of phase with the current government’s policies and also goes against what many (most, I suspect) Canadians think their military ought to be all about, but neither the government nor many people really know or care much about he health of the military.
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