A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War

[TcDohl]

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/712556--ex-top-soldier-hillier-fought-taliban-tories

OTTAWA – Canada's former top soldier waged war on many fronts during his long march to the post of Chief of Defence Staff.

But the most intense were the counter-insurgencies waged on Parliament Hill against Conservative officials who wanted him silenced and bureaucrats who tried to stifle his ambitious agenda to rebuild the military.

"We in the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence were at war but the rest of the government was not, and sometimes our war felt like it was in Ottawa, not Kandahar," retired Gen. Rick Hillier writes in A Soldier First, a copy of which was obtained by the Toronto Star.

Hillier recounts the rocky recent history of the Canadian military from the perspective of the ultimate insider.

...

A large part of Hillier's final years was spent shuttling between Canada and Afghanistan, but his legacy will be in Ottawa, where he is credited with single-handedly reviving the confidence of the Canadian Forces following what he termed the "Decade of Darkness" — the 1990s — that was defined by massive budget cutbacks and crushed morale.

His folksy manner and ease with the media masked a laser-guided vision for the Canadian Forces when he was selected Chief of Defence Staff by former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin in January 2005.

But Martin's successor, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, wasn't as comfortable with Hillier's ease in front of the television camera.

Harper was a "very quick study" when the two men first sat down to discuss the Afghan mission after the Conservative election victory of 2006.

"He grasped the military situation quickly and had obviously been following the mission, though he didn't have as many details as I was now giving him," Hillier writes. "It quickly became apparent to me that he supported the mission and what Canada was doing in Afghanistan."

Gordon O'Connor, Hillier's former commanding officer, was a different matter.

O'Connor had an "out-of-date understanding" of the military and went around senior officers when seeking advice "to get the answer he wanted."

While Hillier says they were able to resolve most of their differences, interference from officials in the Prime Minister's Office was a constant during his three-year-term as CDS.

It began on March 4, 2006 after a series of newspaper and television interviews to promote the Canadian Forces and to try to boost recruiting efforts. Hillier was pulled into O'Connor's office for a private chat.

"We want to see less of you," O'Connor told a stunned Hillier.

"While he was never specific about who had been complaining about my profile, there was no doubt in my mind this `request' was coming from the Prime Minister's Office staffers and that Gord was acting as the front man, loyal soldier that he was."

 

[Edward Campbell]

Gen. (ret’d) Rick Hillier’s memoir, A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, is being released this week according to this article reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from the CBC web site:

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/10/19/hillier-memoir.html

Hillier wanted Canadians in safer Kabul: memoir

Monday, October 19, 2009

The Canadian Press

Canada's former top soldier says in his new memoir that he argued for Canadian troops deployed to Afghanistan to be kept in the relative safety of Kabul, and he rebuffs claims he was responsible for getting the country mired in the bloody battlefields of Kandahar.

The decision to send Canadian soldiers to southern Afghanistan was largely made before Rick Hillier became the country's military commander, the former chief of defence staff says in a provocative new memoir, A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, which is now available.

Blunt, hard-hitting and often cheeky, Hillier lays out his side of the story through the tumultuous early years of the war, including his strained relationship with former defence minister Gordon O'Connor and an attempt by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office to limit his public profile.

But it was the Liberals — both publicly and privately — who've tried to shift the blame onto Hillier for getting the country into the bloody, bitter guerrilla war in the south that has claimed the lives of 131 soldiers. One diplomat and two aid workers have also been killed.

"It had already been largely decided that the Canadian presence in Afghanistan was shifting to the southern half of the country," Hillier writes about his return to Ottawa in the fall of 2004 after a stint as NATO commander in Kabul.

"Even before I returned from commanding [the International Security Assistance Force], NATO had announced its intentions to expand the ISAF mission beyond Kabul in 2006, and planning was already well on its way for a move into Kandahar province by the time I landed back in Canada that fall."

In a book written two years ago, former Liberal staffer Eugene Lang and academic Janice Gross Stein argued Hillier persuaded former prime minister Paul Martin to take Canadians into the heartland of the Taliban.

But Hillier says the decision to set up a provincial base in Kandahar was made before his time, and that he had argued within National Defence for Canada to take over responsibility for the reconstruction of the airport in Kabul, a much more benign assignment.

"Nobody in Ottawa seemed interested, so the idea died," he writes in the 498-page memoir.

"The government had already signalled its intent to go into Kandahar province, and the Department of Foreign Affairs, CIDA and National Defence were well into their planning of that mission by the time I came back to work at [Defence headquarters] after my time as ISAF commander."

And with the decision made, Hillier said, he did argue forcefully — as a responsible soldier — for a battle group to back up the provincial reconstruction base that the Liberals had agreed to establish.

"If the security situation in Kandahar became dire, as indeed it did soon after our arrival, those [provincial reconstruction] soldiers would be stuck out in vulnerable positions with no easy way to ensure their security or rescue them from the extreme risk they would face every day," he writes.

Clashes with Liberals

In vintage Hillier style, the book brims with praise for members of the Forces and is sprinkled with anecdotes about his family and early life. But it is his political and bureaucratic battles that make the most engaging reading.

Hillier clashed publicly with the Liberals over his description of the budget-cutting Chrétien years in the 1990s as a "decade of darkness" for the Canadian military.

The party's defence critic at the time, Denis Coderre, painted the general as a Conservative stooge, a response Hillier characterized in the book as "dumber than dirt."

Despite the seeming bad blood, the Liberals tried to persuade him to run for them soon after his retirement in mid-2008. And Hillier himself gushes in the book about his respect and personal rapport with Martin and former defence minister Bill Graham.

His relationship with Harper was cooler and more business-like. Hillier describes the prime minister as someone who was sharp, asked good questions and above all was committed to the military.

At times, Hillier sneers at the whirlwind of Ottawa media speculation that accompanied some of his public statements and his relationship with those in power, including O'Connor, who was his first Conservative boss and a former brigadier-general.

Clashes with defence minister

While he was happy to have a minister who already knew the "ABCs of defence," Hillier was frustrated by O'Connor's tendency to go around him for advice. O'Connor would "sometimes meddle in the day-to-day details" of the department.

"Gord constantly reached out to information from generals or colonels in the army, navy or the air force, or would go directly to a colonel running a base with a question," Hillier's memoir says.

"It seemed to me he was asking the advice of the lower ranks of the Canadian Forces in order to get the answer he wanted, not the answer I would necessarily have given him.… He preferred to hear advice that he liked, that was in line with his own views."

They disagreed, too, over the level of funding for the military and what big-ticket purchases could be made and when.

Hillier also describes a closed-door meeting, soon after the Conservatives were elected in 2006, at which O'Connor passed along a request — likely from the PMO — that they "see less" of him in public.

It was a request he says he ignored.

© The Canadian Press, 2009​

Several copies of his memoirs will have been provided to various reviewers so that interest can be created in advance of its general release date.

A point to remember: this is Rick Hillier’s memoir, it’s his account of what happened and why and not everyone, including many people serving today, will have seen everything in quite the same way.

 

[Edward Campbell]

The media are going to have a field day with this. Hillier's views were not universally popular but he was a reliable source of "newsworthy" sound bites - the fodder for TV journalism.

Consider this clip from CTV news, especially the reporter's take and the video of O'Connor's farewell.

 

[observor 69]

Put my name on my local library's book reserve list this morning.
I'm number 2 of 2. Yippee!  ;D

 

[MarkOttawa]

From Norman Spector's Globe and Mail blog:

Canada’s orphan war
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/spector-vision/canadas-orphan-war/article1330399/

Victory has a thousand fathers — so the expression goes —and defeat is an orphan. So it’s not entirely surprising that in his memoirs to be published next week,
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/A-SOLDIER-FIRST-General-Rick-Hillier/9781554684915-item.html?pt=yxm2dq55dyee0t55cnmxtymdSyo9VndNlDQ4SANQTOjpTIX%2f954%3d&pticket=2wappazcuatr1qm4lfed1d55vAkV31NrF%2f8v6CgcFLyjFsTH4fY%3d
Rick Hillier disputes the commonly-held view that he was the driving force behind the deployment of the Canadian Forces to Kandahar, the most dangerous part of Afghanistan.

That version of events received a huge boost in Eugene Lang and Janice Gross Stein’s book, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar.
http://www.amazon.ca/Unexpected-War-Janice-Gross-Stein/dp/0670067229
According to the authors, Prime Minister Paul Martin favoured sending the Forces to Darfur in 2006 rather than have them stay in Afghanistan.

Not so, according to a Canadian Press report by Murray Brewster, who got hold of a copy of General Hillier’s memoirs.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/hillier-says-he-argued-to-keep-troops-in-kabul/article1330086/
According to Mr. Brewster, the former Chief of the Defence Staff maintains that “he argued to keep the troops in the relative safety of Kabul, and has rebuffed claims he was responsible for getting the country mired in the bloody battlefields of Kandahar. The decision to send Canadian soldiers to southern Afghanistan was largely made before Rick Hillier became the country's military commander.”

The House of Commons did not vote to send our troops to Afghanistan, nor did MPs vote to deploy them to Kandahar. The take-note debate about that deployment — late at night with few MPs in attendance — went virtually unreported by the parliamentary press gallery. And, notably, while two separate articles on the Hillier memoirs dominate the front page of today’s Toronto Star, no reference is made to the two, now-competing versions of the Kandahar deployment decision.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/afghanmission/article/712799
http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf20/CAN_TS.pdf

Today, while our troops continue to serve in a war that President Barack Obama says has always been bereft of a strategy, a Conservative-Liberal conspiracy of silence reigns in Ottawa. Yet, by the latest count, 131 of our troops have died in Afghanistan, along with one diplomat — making it Canada’s bloodiest conflict since Korea. We owe it to them, and to future generations who may be called on to serve, to determine through testimony under oath how and exactly why we got into this war.

Plus Mr Spector's...

THE COLUMN I’M GLAD I DIDN’T WRITE
http://www.members.shaw.ca/nspector4/TWO.htm

Missing the most important point

Hillier refuses to stay silent (Martin)
http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/story.html?id=2121691

Mark
Ottawa

 

[Old Sweat]

I had ordered a copy from Amazon.ca and received it last Thursday. It is an easy read and I finished it at noon Friday without sitting up all night or missing the crosswords and sudoku in the Citizen ahd the National Post. It is fairly lengthy at 509 pages, with 190 pages devoted to his tour as CDS and the first 13 pages about his selection for the job.

He probably is most critical of two groups: the leadership of the Armour School when he was on Phase 4 (somehow 63 candidates were loaded on the phase and the armoured community decided to only pass enough to fill the available slots in the units. Don't get me going on it, as I was the Chief Instructor of the Artillery School at the time and it was not a pretty sight as two thirds of the course were failed, most for no good reason.); and most of the senior public service who deliberately scuppered or delayed programs for turf reasons. This delay probably cost some troops their lives, a matter which was of little consequence to the bureaucrats.

 

[GAP]

Some of the articles out there....

Don Martin: Hillier defied PMO, bureaucrats, biography recalls
Posted: October 19, 2009, 6:48 PM by Ron Nurwisah Don Martin, Canadian politics, afghanistan
Article Link

OTTAWA -- Befuddled by a straight shooter who was hogging the spotlight, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s staff finally tried to gag and hide Rick Hillier from public view.

It didn’t work, of course.

Retired chief of defence staff Hillier’s soon-to-be-released autobiography A Soldier First, published by HarperCollins, fell into my hands recently and, as expected, he pulls no punches in needling those huddled inside the parliamentary bubble.

He spits out the sock they tried to stuff into his mouth, rages against an unwieldy federal bureaucracy, reveals private showdowns with former defence minister Gordon O’Connor and twice dismisses Liberal MP Denis Coderre’s politics as “dumber than dirt.” Ouch.

But while he will undoubtedly flesh out his recollections during the book promotion tour to come, Gen. Hillier’s observations about the Afghanistan detainees caught my attention because he insists the government was kept in the loop about prisoner torture allegations.
More on link

When Hillier was pushed, he pushed back
When he was pushed, he pushed back
Article Link

OTTAWA–Canada's former top soldier waged war on many fronts during his long march to the post of chief of defence staff – but the most intense were the counterinsurgencies on Parliament Hill.

Gen. Rick Hillier has for the first time revealed his battle against Conservative officials who wanted him silenced and bureaucrats who tried to stifle his ambitious agenda to rebuild the military.
More on link

Article Link
Hillier's fiercest foe was PM's office
Former defence chief recounts in new book his biggest battle of Afghanistan was the one with Ottawa

TTAWA–Officials in the Prime Minister's Office ordered the military to hide the return to Canada of the first female soldier killed in combat because they didn't want her flag-draped coffin seen on the news, according to former chief of defence staff Gen. Rick Hillier.

In a new autobiography, the popular former top soldier recounts the battles he waged against all-controlling officials in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government. Meddling in the hero's welcome that the Canadian Forces had planned for the repatriation of Capt. Nichola Goddard was Hillier's "line in the sand."
More on link

Politics could use a man like Hillier
By Don Martin, Canwest News ServiceOctober 19, 2009
Article Link

Befuddled by a galling straight shooter hogging the spotlight, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's staff finally tried to gag and hide Rick Hillier from public view.

Didn't work, of course.

Retired chief of defence staff Hillier's soon-to-be-released autobiography, A Soldier First, fell into my hands recently and, as expected, he pulls no punches in needling those huddled inside the parliamentary bubble.

He spits out the sock they tried to stuff into his mouth, rages against a foot-dragging federal bureaucracy, reveals private showdowns with former defence minister Gordon O'Connor and twice dismisses Liberal MP Denis Coderre's politics as "dumber than dirt." Ouch.
More on link

 

[The Bread Guy]

Just ordered a copy for myself and a few for gifts (including to some local libraries) via Amazon.ca...

 

[dapaterson]

He probably is most critical of two groups: the leadership of the Armour School when he was on Phase 4 (somehow 63 candidates were loaded on the phase and the armoured community decided to only pass enough to fill the available slots in the units. Don't get me going on it, as I was the Chief Instructor of the Artillery School at the time and it was not a pretty sight as two thirds of the course were failed, most for no good reason.); ...

The Armour school has been a dysfunctional mess for years.  One friend was psoted there for a stretch in the late 80s / early 90s; at that point, the PERs for Capts posted to the school were ranked based on the number of students they failed over the course of the year.

 

[vonGarvin]

This delay probably cost some troops their lives, a matter which was of little consequence to the bureaucrats.

I wonder if there were a way to make those bureaucrats responsible for their actions...

Anyway, this book is on my wish list. 

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Will have to make a request for the local library to buy a copy.

 

[leroi]

I'm ordering my copy today plus one for our library.

-Looking forward to reading it!

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

Hilliar's last hurrah?  Hilliar sure had a lot of misunderstandings with a lot of people while seems to think he kept everything squared away.  If I were Gordon O'Connor and could have gotten away with it, I would have sacked him.

 

[Edward Campbell]

The Minister of National Defence cannot sack the CDS. The CDS, like the Deputy Minister, is appointed by the Prime Minister and serves at his (or her) pleasure.

Ministers do not hire and fire Associate or Assistant Deputy Ministers either, the Clerk of the Privy Council has the greatest say in that process.

Ministers can, if the PM's chief of staff approves, sign cheques for PR firms in la belle province and things like that.

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

The Minister of National Defence cannot sack the CDS. The CDS, like the Deputy Minister, is appointed by the Prime Minister and serves at his (or her) pleasure.

Thank you.

 

[MarkOttawa]

E.R. Campbell:

Ministers can, if the PM's chief of staff approves, sign cheques for PR firms in la belle province and things like that.

Touch, er, é, eh?

Mark
Ottawa

 

[George Wallace]

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.


Hillier says PMO was one of his toughest foes

LINK

20/10/2009 6:02:34 PM

CTV.ca News Staff
Canada's former top soldier, who took on the Taliban while at the helm of the nation's military, says in his new book that the Prime Minister's Office was one of his toughest adversaries.


Former chief of defence staff Rick Hillier fires a salvo of tough criticism at Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his inner circle in "A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War."

The book is set for official release on Oct. 24, but CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife obtained an early copy of the provocative new memoir.

"General Rick Hillier is a straight-talking general who has had the loyalty of his soldiers, and when Prime Minister Harper and his gang came in he didn't get along with them and that was no secret, everyone in Ottawa knew that," Fife told CTV's Canada AM.

Hillier didn't favour Kandahar deployment

In the blunt autobiography Hillier denies he was responsible for getting Canadian soldiers involved in volatile southern Afghanistan, where the highest number of casualties have occurred.

He writes in the book that he wanted Canadian troops to stay in the much safer Kabul area where they were originally deployed, but the decision to send troops to the dangerous southern Kandahar region was made before he became military leader in 2004.

"It had already been largely decided that the Canadian presence in Afghanistan was shifting to the southern half of the country," Hillier writes.

"Even before I returned from commanding (the International Security Assistance Force in the fall of 2004), NATO had announced its intentions to expand the ISAF mission beyond Kabul in 2006, and planning was already well on its way for a move into Kandahar province by the time I landed back in Canada that fall."

He suggests it was then prime minister Paul Martin's decision-making that resulted in Canada's costly commitment in the south. To-date, 131 Canadian troops have died in Afghanistan.

Hillier also has tough criticism for NATO, saying the military alliance is rife with infighting and political posturing and needs serious emergency medical attention if it is to survive.

He said it was "embarrassing" that the secretary general of the powerful military alliance had to beg for troop and equipment commitments from individual countries.

Hillier warns NATO is a "corpse" that needs serious attention if it is to be revived.

Repatriation controversy

He also sheds light on his strained relationship with former defence minister Gordon O'Connor and what he paints as businesslike relations with Harper.

Hillier also gives his side of what was a tense standoff over the repatriation of Canada's first female casualty in Afghanistan. He writes that he was ordered by the PMO to hide the return of the body of Capt. Nichola Goddard, because the PMO didn't want the event covered extensively by the media.

In the book, he calls it a "line in the sand" moment and recalls telling then-defence minister Gordon O'Connor that it wasn't an option.

But Fife points out it wasn't that black and white.

"There's another side to that if you read the book. He did bar the media, and if he was as tough as he said he was, he could have said 'I'm not going to do this I'm going to let the media on.'"

In the end, it was the outraged public response by Goddard's family that resulted in a reversal of the policy. Harper eventually explained his intention was to give families the power to decide themselves whether news crews could cover the return of their relatives' flag-draped coffins to CFB Trenton.

 

[GAP]

More fun....

Feds wanted day-to-day control of Afghan mission: Hillier
Article Link
The Canadian Press Thursday Oct. 22, 2009

OTTAWA — The Conservative government considered taking day-to-day control of the mission in Kandahar away from the military and giving the authority to direct troops in the field to Canada's ambassador in Kabul.

The startling revelation comes from former chief of defence staff Gen. Rick Hillier, whose provocative new memoir is making waves in Ottawa for its scathing criticism of the bureaucracy and NATO.

Hillier also weighed in on the raging political controversy over the alleged torture of prisoners in Afghan jails by stating he "doesn't recall" seeing written warnings filed by a diplomat in spring 2006, nearly a year before the Conservative government admitted there was a problem.

In his memoir "A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War," the retired general makes brief reference to a proposal that would have usurped his control over the military, but expanded on it in a lengthy interview Thursday with The Canadian Press.

He said he first heard about the proposal from one of his ground commanders in Afghanistan, who telephoned him in Ottawa in late 2007 and he immediately set about nixing the idea.

"They could have talked all they wanted, it was simply not going to happen," the retired general said.
More on link

Hebert: Hillier book ensures mission's end
Article Link

MONTREAL—In what may be a case of unintended consequences, Rick Hillier, who once was the most effective promoter of Canada's military mission in Kandahar, has likely hammered the last nail in its political coffin.

In a much-publicized autobiographical book, the former chief of defence staff Hillier turns his guns on the political and bureaucratic masters of the mission, leaving few of the many non-military Canadian figures associated with the undertaking completely unscathed.

At a time when the mission is increasingly becoming a political liability in Canada, the former general goes out of his way to divest himself of most of the unsolicited credit he has accumulated over the years for presumably masterminding the operation.

On this score, Hillier's book likely marks the official opening of a lengthy blame season, as prospects for a positive outcome to Canada's lethal engagement in Afghanistan continue to dim in tandem with public support for the mission.

While he is not the first to take issue with the management of the Kandahar mission, Hillier brings more inside knowledge of the operation to the fore than the average informed commentator. For the general public, he, rather than any past or present politician, was the real face of the mission.
More on link

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

The ambassador directing troops in the field?  Nobody could be that stupid.  Methinks that Hillier could be exagerating somewhat.  If he isn't, that is really scary.

I think that Hillier broke the cardinal rule that the CDS should be seen and not heard.  Why he developed himself into a public figure and chose to publically spar with his political masters is an interesting question.  Not to be misunderstood, I do think that Hillier was a good general.

 

[Teflon]

The ambassador directing troops in the field?  Nobody could be that stupid.  Methinks that Hillier could be exagerating somewhat.  If he isn't, that is really scary.

I think that Hillier broke the cardinal rule that the CDS should be seen and not heard.  Why he developed himself into a public figure and chose to publically spar with his political masters is an interesting question.  Not to be misunderstood, I do think that Hillier was a good general.

You would have prefered that he acted like the meak little yes man?  If ANY of the past/present political leaders had done even a half ass job of presenting the CF's role, countering the "Peacekeeper Myth" and looked after the forces interests then he wouldn't of had to do it himself.  But that is just my opinion, Hillier did what had to be done as CDS.

If the cardinal rule is that the CDS should be seen and not heard then I have a figure 11 Tgt we can use to fill the posn, we can even attach a blinking landing light on it so that it can be seen and not heard even in low light conditions.