Spat between regular and reserve armies a reminder that both deserve better leadership
Christie Blatchford
13/06/28
A couple of years ago, while still riding the memory of my time in Kandahar as an embedded reporter in 2006-07, I received an invite to speak to what I believed was a Canadian army reserve regiment.
Such invitations weren’t unusual in those days (I’d written a book about our troops in Afghanistan) and I accepted just about any that came my way, because generally speaking, I like talking about soldiers almost as much as I like writing about them, which is almost as much as I like being around them.
In any case, I hadn’t heard of this particular regiment before, but that didn’t surprise me: Despite the best efforts of governments and sometimes the regular army brass to reduce the militia in size and influence, the reserve army remains scattered about the country, in small-town and big-city armouries both.
I digress, but this genuine connection to Canadians through reservists — citizen soldiers — is the militia’s greatest strength.
In any case, as speech day drew closer, I tried in my disorganized fashion to learn a little about the unit. Somewhat to my dismay, I discovered it was essentially a group of re-enactors, fellows who dress up in period costume and keep alive old rituals.
The only thing that made me feel marginally less stupid was that an army friend, whom I’d got to know in Kandahar, had made the same mistake.
It was too late to gracefully back out of the commitment, so I went, as did my friend, and had a lovely time.
But make no mistake: These guys weren’t real soldiers.
By then, I’d been to enough events and dinners at my most beloved reserve regiment, The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders of Hamilton, to know how such things are supposed to work, and this wasn’t it.
In fact, at several points during the evening, I had to bite back rage at the sight of the younger members, who were perfectly capable of actually serving in a real unit, like the young men and women of their age I’d met in Kandahar, but who instead contented themselves by playing Mr. Dressup.
And that brings me, and the comparison is not one drawn by the author and is altogether cheeky on my part, to a recent report on the appointment of honorary colonels in the Canadian army by Jack English.
English is a distinguished military writer, actual former soldier and Honorary Colonel of The Brockville Rifles. Every few years, he produces a scathing report that hugely rankles the prickly military brass in this country.
With this one — An Historical Examination of the Use and Abuse of Canadian Army Honorary Colonels, published last month by the Royal Canadian Military Institute — he has done it again.
The 32-page report has received virtually no public attention, but within the higher echelons of the Canadian Forces, it has caused a real stir.
While it appears that English’s ire was formally raised by a 2012 article about “the re-branding of honoraries,” as one himself, he was already well familiar with two regrettable modern tendencies — the one, for the regular army to mess with appointments that should properly be in the domain of the reserves; the other, the effort, spearheaded by now-retired army boss Andy Leslie, to appoint civilian “captains of industry” who may have no connection to the units.
To that, of course, could be added a third — the perpetual re-invention of the wheel, because in fact Canadian militia units have a long history of often appointing as their honoraries leading businessmen, wealthy civilian patrons and even politicians.
As English notes, and proves in the report, “units have always been more than capable of perfecting their own combination of civilian benefactors and former military officers.”
The difference was that until the mid-1990s, when acrimony between the regular and reserve force was at a peak, the units themselves nominated and got the honoraries they wanted.
That has changed, English says, starting perhaps as early as 1996, but accelerating under Leslie, who two years ago personally nominated Blake Goldring, chair and CEO of AGF Management Limited, as the first Honorary Colonel of the Army, ostensibly to strengthen ties between the CF and Canada’s business community.
Or, English says, the appointment may have reflected Leslie’s own “ambitions of becoming CDS [Chief of the Defence Staff].”
On the other hand, English says, the appointment may have been an imitation of the 2009 appointment of Senator Pam Wallin as Honorary Colonel of the Air Force (in which case, in light of her recent expense controversies, it was clearly by far the wiser one).
He has many more examples — the honorary who called himself a “colonel” and forgot the honorary part; the fellow who treated his appointment as a corporate board membership; the honoraries who competed in log-rolling, small-boat rowing “and other such fun games,” as English sneers.
His point is that reserve regiments managed this civilian/military balance nicely on their own, but “there was never any question of strangers totally unknown to unit personnel being forced upon regiments.”
As background, if you haven’t figured it out, the regular army and reserve are in a perpetual cat fight about what the role of the militia should be.
The regular force sees the reserves’ primary role as augmenting them, which is indeed what reservists so ably have done in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Afghanistan; the militia sees itself, and this is the role government policy confirms, as being the national base for mobilization in event of war and therefore needing reasonable numbers and stable financing, neither of which it often gets.
Concomitantly, so would regular army leaders prefer the honorary colonel to toe their “one army” line and to advocate for the army as a whole, while reservist leaders want men and women who will fight for the unit, first and foremost, and for the perpetually under-attack militia.
As happens almost every time Jack English writes, this report reminds that Canadian soldiers, regular and reserve, are worthy of far better leadership than they get.
Postmedia News
cblatchford@postmedia.com
