And then this one:
Tug of War
Richard Foot
The Ottawa Citizen, September 25, 2004
The problem with Canada's military, as one directive put it recently, is that the military is too small to carry out its tasks, yet too big for its shrinking budget. Today, we commit comparatively less money to our military than any other country in NATO except Luxembourg. Despite all of this, health care and social services, not national security, dominate the debate.
"Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight. But Roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right."
- Hilaire Belloc
- - -
Inside the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, among books bearing the names of more than 115,000 Canadians killed overseas on military service, a solemn epitaph declares: "War has not spared our people."
The words are a testament not to a bellicose nation, but to Canada's record of courage and fortitude in the face of foreign peril. Like Hilaire Belloc, the English poet and philosopher, Canadians have understood through most of our history that military power is the necessary price of inhabiting a world with real enemies and real evil, where peace can sometimes only be purchased through the harsh rigours of realpolitik.
Lt.-Col. Lockie Fulton, a retired Canadian army officer, knew dozens of the men whose names are inscribed in the memorial books at the Peace Tower. Mr. Fulton was one of the first Canadians ashore at Juno Beach on D-Day, leading soldiers of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles through months of bloody combat in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany during the Second World War.
He says he volunteered for battle not simply to defeat the Nazis, but to make Canada a stronger nation -- powerful enough to influence world affairs, and in the process help preserve the hard-won peace.
"I thought at the end of the war, after all our sacrifices, that Canada was set to be one of the great countries in the world. But I don't think this country has lived up to that role," says Mr. Fulton today, at 87.
"After World War Two we had one of the best-equipped, best-trained, most powerful armies in the world. Today we don't seem to have an army at all. I find it a great shame."
Mr. Fulton isn't the only Canadian distressed by the decline of Canada's Armed Forces. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the country has been awash in warnings about the fragile state of its military, its international influence and its domestic security.
"No developed nation in post-modern times has experienced military bankruptcy," declared the Conference of Defence Associations, an Ottawa-based think-tank, in 2002. "Canada, however, is embarking on a course that would demonstrate military bankruptcy."
"Why is it," asked Royal Military College of Canada professor Sean Maloney, writing last May for the Institute for Research on Public Policy, "that Canada, a G8 power, can sustain only one or two battle groups of fewer than a thousand personnel each overseas, while other NATO nations such as France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom are able to deploy self-contained brigades, and even divisions, to stabilize critical areas?
"Why is it," he asked, "that Bangladesh and Nigeria deploy larger forces than Canada, for all of its peacekeeping rhetoric, to UN operations?"
The country's self-image as a serious player in world affairs amounts to nothing more than "a fool's paradise," said historian Jack Granatstein in his 2004 book Who Killed the Canadian Military?
"Canada," he wrote, "has reached a new level of irrelevancy in foreign and military affairs." Equally stark warnings have also been issued by the House of Commons, the Senate, and the federal Auditor General, who has said that after decades of underfunding, the Canadian Forces "do not have much capacity to tolerate further decline."
Even Tom Axworthy, former principal secretary to Pierre Trudeau -- a man of great ambivalence toward the military -- urged the government this year to rebuild the Canadian Forces by diverting a third of all annual budget surpluses to national security needs.
"In particular," he wrote in the journal Policy Options, "the Armed Forces need steady annual (funding) increases first to maintain existing capacity and then to expand it."
It has been six decades since the Second World War, when the Canadian Forces reached their pinnacle of power and respect, and one decade since the Somalia scandal, when the Forces hit their dark nadir. After so much turbulence, what is the real state of the military today?
Capt. Tyrone Green, one of Canada's most celebrated serving soldiers, says the army itself isn't the hobbled, ineffective organization many observers make it out to be. In 1993 Capt. Green led a platoon of troops with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in actual combat against Croatian forces, during the infamous firefights of the Medak Pocket in the former Yugoslavia.
A reservist then, Capt. Green is now an eight-year veteran of the regular forces. He says, without a hint of hyperbole, that Canadian soldiers are the best-trained and best-educated troops in the world.
He believes one of the benefits of having a smaller army is that "you're able to go after quality, not quantity.
"Obviously we're not as well-equipped as the Americans or the British, but you put a Canadian soldier up against his counterpart from any other nation, and we have the best." Still, Capt. Green says, the army is far too small to sustain the unceasing demands being placed on it by the government.
"My own opinion is that the army definitely needs to be bigger," he says. "If the Canadian people want Canada to be out there talking about Canadian ideals and our love for the rule of law and everything else, our only instrument to do that other than foreign aid is through our troops."
Sixty years ago, when Canada's population was a third its current size, the country owned one of the most potent military forces on the planet.
By the end of 1944, at the height of the Second World War, there were 300,000 Canadians fighting on land in Europe. The army, with five infantry and armoured divisions, was more than five times the size of today's entire Forces. The Royal Canadian Navy was the third-largest, and the Royal Canadian Air Force the fourth-largest. Retired lieutenant-colonel Lockie Fulton says Canadians who think the country could mobilize formidable forces today, in response to a new global crisis, are kidding themselves. In 1939 the world moved at a slower pace. Wars were not run with computers, orbiting satellites and instant communications. Unlike the Second World War, with its armies of citizen-soldiers, Mr. Fulton says national security in the 21st century demands well-equipped, mobile professional forces ready to respond to a crisis at a moment's notice.
"Today, you've got to be prepared with modern equipment and training to ward off what could be an instant attack," he says. "We had time to get our army together in World War Two. But there'd be no time for that today. It's a different era."
The most pressing question now for Canada's professional forces is not whether they could respond to a major military emergency, but whether they can even survive and sustain themselves as a small, peacetime defence force.
Today's Forces include a mere 52,000 effective members, far short of the 75,000 mandated by the Chretien government's 1994 White Paper on Defence, which, although a decade old, is still the most recent comprehensive federal policy document on national defence. The sharp end of the military includes three army brigades of roughly 15,000 troops in total, all of the units under-strength and filled out for their foreign missions by part-time reservists.
Although new acquisitions are on the way for all three combat services -- ship-borne helicopters for the air force, supply ships for the navy and Stryker attack vehicles for the army -- the Forces remain plagued by aged equipment and scarce resources. Canada spends between $12 billion and $13 billion a year on defence, about six per cent of the federal budget, a relatively small figure compared with other nations.
Canada has the world's 34th-largest population but only the 56th-largest army. Our defence spending amounts to about 1.1 per cent of our gross domestic product, making us only the 153rd-largest military spender in the world as measured by economic output. In the late 1950s, Canada spent five to six per cent of GDP on defence, but the number has declined steadily since. Today, at 1.1 per cent, we commit comparatively less money to our military than any other country in NATO except Luxembourg: Less than a long list of smaller nations including Norway, Portugal, Poland, Denmark, Hungary and Belgium.
The United States spends 3.2 per cent of its GDP on defence; Australia, a non-NATO nation, spends 1.9 per cent.
One little-known fact about Canada's "military spending" is that less than half of the defence budget actually goes to the army, navy or air force. The Defence Department spends billions every year not on combat or emergency capabilities, but on a miscellany of other programs from employee pensions to public affairs.
A small defence budget has not only provided Canada with a small military, but also a catalogue of military problems and embarrassments. Among them, the country's Hercules transport aircraft -- the air force's principal workhorse -- are now so old that in 2003 two-thirds of the fleet was grounded due to airframe cracks. Today only half the 32 Hercs are serviceable on any given day.
Aside from the old Hercs and a handful of Airbus jetliners that are too vulnerable to operate in war zones, the military has no air- or sea-lift capability. The Canadian Forces has a $1.3-billion deficit in its operations and maintenance budget, according to the Auditor General, and over the next 15 years will face an $11-billion deficit in its capital budget.
A Senate investigation discovered that the Forces are "under-equipped" to deal with a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear "crisis of any magnitude." So cash-strapped is the army that it has stopped buying spare parts for many of its vehicles, as well as many other supplies.
Re-stocking its shelves would now cost the military an estimated $800 million. One example of the supply crunch is that the army lacks enough basic infantry gear, such as flak jackets and ammunition vests, to equip all of its front-line soldiers. Although the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment was designated one of the country's two high-readiness units for 2003, its troops had to share such essential equipment with other soldiers across the country during training exercises.
The military's infrastructure is crumbling. The army's bases alone require $1.6 billion in maintenance and repairs. The Department of National Defence's environmental cleanup liabilities on its bases and firing ranges now total more than $1 billion. But by far the greatest problem is the burnout of the military's people, thanks to the impossible demands placed on it by the federal government to participate in foreign missions.
So busy have some sailors and soldiers been for so many years, that many junior officers, sergeants and warrant officers have not had a summer holiday in a decade, according to the Senate's standing committee on national defence.
One consequence of excessive "operational tempo" as the experts call it, is that the military's most experienced members are away from Canada so much that there aren't enough people left behind to train recruits, or to sharpen the skills of other personnel.
Colin Kenny, the Liberal chairman of the Senate's defence committee, says Canadian prime ministers have failed to understand that the country doesn't have a large enough military for the missions politicians assign it -- whether that means sending its warships to the Arabian Sea, or having its soldiers respond to floods, ice storms and forest fires at home.
"The price you pay for doing too much," says Mr. Kenny, "is you stress your military to the point where it becomes incapable of doing anything. Right now, after all its efforts in the Persian Gulf on Operation Apollo, the navy can't get going on anything."
The essence of the problem, as one army directive put it recently, is that the military is too small to carry out its tasks, yet too big for its shrinking budget. Mr. Kenny's Senate committee, and other analysts, have called for a defence budget increase of $4 billion to $5 billion a year, not just to make the military more effective, but to keep it solvent.
Yet there are some who disagree with calls for multibillion-dollar budget increases. Historian Terry Copp, director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Disarmament Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, says the military is about the right size for a small, middle power such as Canada. He also says some branches -- such as the army, with its top-of-the-line Coyote surveillance vehicles -- are well-equipped for the precise roles required of them. Mr. Copp agrees that the army's regular force battalions need to be brought up to full strength, and that the operational tempo of the Forces should slow down. But aside from these issues, he dismisses the warnings that the military is close to collapse.
"A lot of the military analysts want a Canadian Armed Forces capable of going off to fight in Gulf War II. But it depends what you want. If you've got American army envy -- if you want a force fully compatible and interoperable with the Americans, that is to be deployed in response to American foreign policy -- then you have a view of the military in which it has a lot more problems than the view that I take.
"I don't want to go to Iraq. The kind of military I think Canada needs is a military very similar to the one it has now, but which is under less operational stress in terms of the number of operations it's called to do."
Lawrence McDonough, a professor at Royal Military College, also says the military's problems are exaggerated.
"The role of the Canadian forces in international affairs differs from the larger powers," wrote Mr. McDonough this spring in Policy Options magazine.
"Canada is not expected to lead in the international projection of power. Canada is not expected to provide the major proportion of military capabilities in international conflict. Canada is highly unlikely to enter into any conflict without the co-operation of allies or the international community. Canada's military role in international affairs is one of support."
Joel Sokolsky, dean of arts at RMC, has argued that increased military spending also won't boost Canada's international influence, particularly in Washington, D.C. "Behind the easy realism that equates defence spending with stature abroad is a much harder, uncomfortable truth," wrote Mr. Sokolsky in June for the Institute for Research on Public Policy.
"Given the nature of American national security policy, especially in a post-Sept. 11 world, plausible increases in Canadian defence spending, while understandably expected by Washington, would afford Ottawa no measurable increase in its ability to influence the direction of American policy."
Whatever the truth, the problem remains that the prime minister and his cabinet won't say what they want from the military. While other nations including Australia and Britain have embarked on comprehensive defence policy reviews since 2001, Canada continues to rely on its outdated, unfulfilled White Paper of 1994. Defence Minister Bill Graham is promising a "review," which might include a public phase.
On his first full day as prime minister, Paul Martin paid a symbolic visit to National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, the first prime ministerial visit to the building in more than a decade. Soon after, he donned a flight jacket for a photo-op with the airmen and airwomen at Greenwood Air Force base in Nova Scotia. Yet for all his actions, Mr. Martin and his government continue past patterns of neglect, saying little about what kind of military Canada needs in the 21st century, and how ambitious or how minor its future role should be.
Fellow Liberal Tom Axworthy says "the primary responsibility of the state is to defend its citizens from harm."
In Canada, however, health care and social services, not national security, dominate the debate.
Liberal Senator Colin Kenny thinks Canadians, lulled by half a century of domestic tranquility and the false promises of the post-Cold War "peace dividend," are sleepwalking through an age of global insecurity. He says it's time for the country's leaders to wake up the nation, to teach that the best way to keep peace is not by stockpiling blue berets, but rather, as George Washington said, by "being prepared for war."
"Politicians have been fairly accurately reading the public mood," says Mr. Kenny. "But what are the obligations of politicians to say things that the public isn't in a hurry to hear? It's fundamentally a question of political will."
Mr. Kenny finds it strange that across the land the first duty of local governments is, without question, providing police officers and firefighters to keep communities safe. Canadians care about security for their towns and cities, but lately, not for their country or the wider world.
"It seems ironic that I want a strong military to provide for peace, but I think that's the essence of it," says Mr. Kenny. "It's the same as investing in a fire department or police department -- you have to make those sorts of investments if you hope to keep citizens secure."
39: I think poor old Gunner walked into a PPCLI ambush. STOP STOP STOP!!! ;D Cheers.
