{"id":11308,"date":"2011-09-24T10:48:11","date_gmt":"2011-09-24T14:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11308"},"modified":"2019-04-23T14:01:16","modified_gmt":"2019-04-23T18:01:16","slug":"canadian-military-the-bureaucratic-tail-is-wagging-the-parliamentary-dog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/09\/24\/canadian-military-the-bureaucratic-tail-is-wagging-the-parliamentary-dog\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian military: &#8220;the bureaucratic tail is wagging the Parliamentary dog&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/fullcomment.nationalpost.com\/2011\/09\/24\/christie-blatchford-bureaucracy-calls-shots-on-reservists\/?utm_source=dlvr.it&#038;utm_medium=twitter\" target=\"_blank\">Christie Blatchford<\/a> looks at the amazing ability of the military bureaucracy to frustrate, delay, obfuscate, and disobey their parliamentary masters:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Written by distinguished military scholar and veteran Dr. Jack English, it shows how the bureaucracy in Ottawa &mdash; an incestuous nest of regular army bosses with turf to protect and intractable civil servants &mdash; has consistently ignored or thwarted government directives to increase the size of the reserves.<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s more, either those defence ministers whose pledges came to nought had the collective attention span of gnats, or they failed to grow a set of nuts sufficient to demand their instructions be followed, or they were simply shifted within Cabinet and the new fellow came in.<\/p>\n<p>Any way you look at it, Dr. English says, the bureaucracy is calling the shots.<\/p>\n<p>In the result, despite pledges to grow the reserves, the militia part-time head count remains still at about 16,500, or, as Dr. English wryly notes, about the size of National Defence Headquarters, or NDHQ as it\u2019s called.<\/p>\n<p>By the way, just getting the damn numbers out of NDHQ is a trick.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Virtually everyone who has studied the Canadian army, and their number is legion, agrees on a couple of things: The bureaucracy is obscenely bloated, far out of proportion for the size of the army; the citizen soldier, who until called up to full-time service costs only about 20% of the regular one, is a bargain for the taxpayer; the militia is more diverse, ethnically and otherwise, than the regular army.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christie Blatchford looks at the amazing ability of the military bureaucracy to frustrate, delay, obfuscate, and disobey their parliamentary masters: Written by distinguished military scholar and veteran Dr. Jack English, it shows how the bureaucracy in Ottawa &mdash; an incestuous nest of regular army bosses with turf to protect and intractable civil servants &mdash; has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,5],"tags":[31,448,214,745],"class_list":["post-11308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-cancon","category-military","tag-army","tag-canadianforces","tag-rcaf","tag-rcn"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2Wo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11308"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11309,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11308\/revisions\/11309"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}