Sorry Weinie. I just don't buy that.
A nation does not spend $20+ billion per year (roughly 8% of the total budget) just so that 100,000 civilian and military civil servants can collect a paycheck to help boost the economy. If you left that money in the public's hand they would use it to contribute much more to the economy.
Canadians spend that money to ensure that when a security threat faces our country, we have the ability to respond. In other words they contribute their hard earned money to ensure that Canada can generate the necessary defence outputs to ensure their way of life.
For some time now it has become obvious that DND/CAF does not have the ability to generate the defence outputs that Canada's investment should buy because we spend over half of that money on full-time personnel of whom far too many do nothing but administer the system. Don't get me wrong; this isn't a teeth to tail ratio argument - tails are essential. This is a self licking ice cream cone administration argument that employs numerous marginally useful GOFOs and all their staffs which produce little, if any, defence outputs and whose costs starve the system of the necessary dollars for equipment and O&M needed to deliver proper defence capabilities.
When I saw the meagre "concurrent operations" provisions in the SSE I was quite frankly embarrassed because I knew (as did everyone else) that this provision was written by our military leadership as to the limits of what they thought we could do. 100,000 full time salaries and 27,000 part-timers (on a good day) and all that we can generate are two battlegroups and two company+ contingents on a continuous basis. And we aren't even doing that much and are nonetheless being stressed doing it.
I'm tremendously proud of today's soldiers, sailors and airmen but regretfully have come to believe that our leadership has lost it's way. I think for me the straw that broke the camel's back was the lack of follow through on Leslie's report on transformation which in itself was quite modest. We have far too many folks who, while I don't doubt their good intentions, seem to be doing little more than protecting the rice bowls of their fiefdoms.
I do agree with you on White Papers. I frankly don't think they matter one bit as long as you have a military leadership whose only solution to security issues is "more money and more full-timers". It's time for a radical change in approach and I doubt a simple Ottawa written white paper will ever deliver that.
Betcha that if the Minster, the CDS and the Deputy Minister were told that of every headquarters position that was cut in Ottawa half the money was to go to equipment and the other half to divide between the three of them no questions asked, we'd have ten thousand less positions in Ottawa within a year. ;D Seriously though, right now there is no incentive to "fix" the problem and to a large extent there is denial that there even is a problem - its kind of like the boiling frog fable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
:stirpot: