I'll also go back to what I said earlier. What's the actual need? Because if the requirement is strictly defence of Canada, that can be done for less than 2% and an even smaller full time army. Anything above and beyond derives from the obligations we understand and perceive for our participation on the world stage. And to the average voter, that is quite subjective.
I'll truck out the old canard that the defence of Canada starts at the Fulda Gap (now the Latvian border). I had a Russian diplomat tell me that if the Baltic states join NATO, the tanks will roll. They didn't but I don't doubt they will if the Russians see or make an opportunity for that.
Deterrence matters. The first line of deterrence for us is now the Baltics. The golden rule of deterrence is that the opponent must see that his aggression will fail. To convince the Russians of that they must see credible forces opposing them. I don't quite think we're that credible yet because we have too little behind what we've put in the shop window.
The second aspect of having forces in Europe is getting brownie points for being there and having a pin on the map with a little Canadian flag big enough for others to see. It gives you a voice at the table and a hand up on some hard power. Currently we have been so far behind that our soft power is pretty much nonexistent.
Some here want divisions in Europe. Once you take the cost of recruiting, equipping, training and sustaining that force, we're talking north of $10B per year (going by a rough wag
from this US CBO doc says various brigades cost and looking at conversion and inflation). If we want balanced budgets at the same time, how are we going to convince voters that this is more important than say universal dental care or say reducing the lowest income tax bracket by 1-2%?
I'm one of those who thinks we would do better having a division in Europe. By that I do not mean 15,000 Canadians and 300 of our tanks.
For starters you can make a fairly decent modern armoured division with around 10,000 folks in two manoeuvre, one fires and one sustainment brigades. And they don't all need to be Canadians. We could furnish a div HQ a manoeuvre brigade and elements of the fires and sustainment brigade while other, smaller European countries provided the rest. Denmark, right now is furnishing a skeleton multinational div in Latvia. IMHO we could and should take that over but we're already being challenged by the MN brigade we are leading.
Further, of the troops we provide, they don't all have to be posted or rotated to Europe - prepositioned equipment and flyover troops are adequate. They don't even all need to be full-timers. The ratio of everything would need to be confirmed as would the base required at home to sustain it during combat.
Having a credible force in Europe, backed up by a credible force at home, is a price we pay for belonging to the club and getting the recognition for being a valued member of the club. It's like an insurance policy. The premiums are just a drain on your resources until your house catches fire. Until then everything is an intangible that maybe someday even gets you a seat on the Security Council.
I'm a cynic at heart and right now my biggest complaint about the army is that it doesn't deliver the defence outputs that it should for the money being spent on its annual salaries. There's little sense in having 25,000 full-time and 18,000 part-time soldiers if all that we can realistically put into the field and sustained is 2,500 of them. We were barely able to do that for Afghanistan.
I'm not happy with what I'm seeing as the next stage in army modernization as it doesn't improve the outputs unless and until a fairly serious materiel package allows the force to expand. I tend to believe that a peacetime army can and should have much of its force in fully equipped reserve formations and thus greatly reduce its annual running costs. Those same CBO tables show you how much. Canada doesn't want to do that.
