Three ways to fix the military
Douglas Bland is Professor and Chair of the DefenceManagement Studies Program at the School of Policy Studies, Queen's University.
Mobilizing defence capabilities in perilous times is a lost art in Canada. It is, however, an art the government must restore promptly if Prime Minister Stephen Harper is to achieve the national defence objective of a stronger military, as promised in the Throne Speech. Without significant reforms to defence management procedures, much money could be wasted, and Mr. Harper's goal of building a better, more capable military will likely fail.
Canada's last great defence mobilization effort began in 1950, at the beginning of the Cold War. In less than seven years, Canadian governments transformed the then tiny 30,000-man, poorly equipped armed forces into a 120,000-person, "high-tech" combat force with thousands of troops deployed in Europe, in the Atlantic, in North America and on peacekeeping missions in the Middle East and elsewhere. It was an impressive accomplishment made possible mainly because Ottawa was filled with scores of politicians and bureaucrats who had learned to manage wartime policies and to produce military capabilities quickly during the Second World War.
In 1993, Jean Chretien's government assumed that the "demand for armed forces" would decline, and he allowed the Canadian Forces to wither away. Significantly, as national defence and realistic attention to foreign policy dropped off the Cabinet table, public service skills and attention in these areas wasted away, as well. When Paul Martin became prime minister, he realized suddenly that the nation would soon become a country without armed forces or a say on the international stage. His plan to redress this crisis, nevertheless, was doomed by Ottawa's needlessly complex system of competing departmental policies, regulations, procedures and responsibilities for the production of defence capabilities.
General Rick Hillier, Canada's Chief of Defence, was in Toronto last Tuesday, where he laid out today's crisis starkly: "We need an acquisition process... that can deliver [major new equipment] in time. Not in 10 years or five years - [that's] not good enough." Unfortunately for the Canadian Forces and for Prime Minister Harper, there are very few experienced leaders in Ottawa today who could shape such a national mobilization strategy, and there is no credible system to manage such a strategy if one were discovered.
This largely explains the government-wide confusion in critical areas of defence procurement, personnel management, budgeting, defence industrial strategies and military base infrastructure. Overtop this muddle sits a parliament, suddenly eager to debate Canada's national defence, but ill-structured even to begin to do so in any meaningful way.
Three concerted, Cabinet-led initiatives must urgently be set in motion to change this.
- First, the Prime Minister should direct senior officials to present in the next months a comprehensive whole-government plan to rebuild and transform the Canadian Forces within the next five years. He should make plain that any policies, bureaucratic procedures or regulations that might impede this project are to be amended, modernized or discarded.
- Second, he should place the direction and implementation of this national plan in the hands of a single minister.
- Finally, the Prime Minister should engage Parliament in this (one would hope) non-partisan national effort to garner public support for a rapid rebuilding of the Canadian Forces. To this end, the Cabinet should convene a senior Cabinet committee on defence production chaired by the prime minster. The House of Commons should call together a well-funded committee, separate from the already over-tasked Standing Committee on National Defence, to oversee the rebuilding program. The Prime Minister might encourage the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence to join in this responsibility.
Prime Minister Harper expressed an essential truth when, surrounded by the boots on the ground in Afghanistan, he declared that Canada cannot play a meaningful role in our own interest or in aid of the international community "from the bleachers." The race now is between an armed force in steady decline and General Hillier's vision of an armed force "effective ... relevant ... and responsive" to a predictably violent world.
But let there be no doubt. The race will be lost if sensible military reforms remain burdened with the present government-wide, unresponsive system of defence management. Canada in the 1950s built from very feeble roots an effective, relevant and responsive military force in under seven years. Surely we can do the same or even better in these perilous times.
. Time will tel, but this far the Minister has spent more time sticking his foot in his mouth than he has solving problems not of his own making...
