A Grave New World

By LCol (Ret) J.C. Berezowski

The Senate committee chairman, Senator Kenny and members of his Standing Committee on National Security and Defence, released their report on 29 Sept. 2005. Entitled Wounded: Canada’s Military and the Legacy of Neglect, it is a blistering condemnation of the inept defence policies of succeeding Canadian governments over the past two decades.

“Most importantly, while the federal government has made some commitments toward upgrading Canada’s armed forces, creating the politically satisfying illusion of progress, the ugly truth behind the illusion is that the health of Canada’s military continues to deteriorate,” said Senator Kenny. He likened the state of the over-committed Canadian Forces to an elastic band stretched to the breaking point.

So far, the government’s political solutions have not added up to anything close to a substantive solution, said the report. The abdication of this responsibility cannot serve Canadians well. We simply cannot afford to gamble that everything is going to be okay for us, and those who come after us. A decade and a half of cuts to defence spending are going to produce at least a decade and a half of vulnerability.

To infuse the Department of National Defence’s budget with $12.8 billion over the next five years may have sounded good to people unfamiliar with the scope of the deterioration that has set into the Canadian Forces, but any thoughtful analysis would demonstrate that this is a half-measure at best. The Canadian Forces are badly in need of renovation. The budget gave them a paint job.

Despite the fact that studies have shown that Canadians continue to believe in the myth of the Canadian Forces as international peacekeepers, whenever our troops have gone overseas they have nearly always served in dangerous combat situations. But the myth of the gentle warriors persists, and it is probably the reason that when the government promised an additional 5,000 personnel during the last election campaign, it took pains to insist that the new personnel would be designated as peacekeepers, said the report.

Canadians need to wake up to the fact that the young men and women they send overseas are far more likely to find themselves fighting than standing between two pacified groups with smiles on their faces.

Fighting requires the right training and the right equipment if a person is going to survive.

Sooner or later, an under-funded military is going to put the lives of young Canadians in jeopardy. It is inevitable. And they will be going up against people willing to go to any end to annihilate them, and they need all the help they can get in the committee’s view.

Training for war

Taking a lead from this Senate report, it is time to re-direct our emphasis on “Training for War” despite the misgiving of the feint of heart within the government and its sycophantic bureaucrats. Canadians must re-learn that there are only two kinds of warriors on the battlefield, the quick and the dead. And, the sooner we re-learn that lesson and resume dedicated preparation for war, the more secure our nation will be.

Internationally, there are no friends, only national interests. Moreover abroad, intelligent states have always subscribed to one key tenet in terms of military strategy: it is best to fight wars as far away from the homeland as possible. This Canada has done, although the new shape of warfare suggests that our day will come, as it did in past World Wars.

In this grave new world of the 21^st century, future training for war could study recent lessons learned in the Iraq war. Ten lessons are offered by Ralph Peters, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer who has authored 20 books based on his experience in 60 countries on six continents. He has laid out his 10 lessons for the U.S. in the Armed Forces Journal, April 2005.

1. Technology still can’t win wars by itself. Remember “shock and awe,” the farcical concept sold to civilian Pentagon cadres who lacked military experience?

2. Land warfare still demands ground troops. Security problems we face are overwhelmingly of flesh and blood arisen from the rage of souls in failing states.

3. We need those ground troops in sufficient numbers. Mass is back. Numbers still matter; Marine Corps are too small for inescapable global roles.

4. Speed is the dominant battlefield requirement. Forces must operate swiftly, inside the media cycle. Forces will now face a third “combatant”- the media.

5. The enemy must be convinced of his defeat. Enemies and their supporters must be broken down to a sense of utter hopelessness.

6. The details of combat operations must be left to military professionals. The civilian leaders in the Pentagon refused to allow the military to plan for all contingencies including an occupation of Iraq.

7. Occupations have fundamental requirements. Presence matters and is manpower intensive. There is no such thing as occupation-lite. Put people to work and keep them busy.

8. Military intelligence is broken. Military intelligence services were incapable of providing intense, incisive and imaginative support combat commanders required. Certainly technology can help but there is no substitute for talented, trained and dedicated human minds fixed on our enemies.

9. Language skills and cultural knowledge are vital combat multipliers. If there is any single factor military services neglect that could enhance strategic tactical performance, it’s the command of foreign languages. How can we “know our enemies” if we don’t know what they are saying?

10. The three crucial types of operations in which our forces will engage are strategic raids, punitive expeditions and full-scale invasions, followed by occupations. We can project the need for brief strategic raids that strike finite targets, and then leave; longer punitive expeditions that engage a more complex enemy, reduce his capabilities, then leave; and full-scale invasions, some of which will be followed by occupations.

Such operations demand an expeditionary mentality in every service, but that’s only a return to our military heritage. Empires, even postmodern ones, need to be able to tell the difference.

Canada’s Legacy

As stated in this latest Senate defence report, Canada cannot afford to be passive in a very active world. There have been – and will always be – situations in which Canadian military personnel put their lives on the line because Canadians desperately need quick, effective non-verbal responses to immediate threats, at home or abroad.

The Canadian military has never flinched in responding to urgent calls for help. But in recent years, it has been forced to stretch itself like a worn-out elastic to fill the enormous demands that have been placed on it. Nobody can depend on worn out elastic for anything, particularly a nation’s political and economic survival.

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