As a follow up, I finally found the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies (CISS) publication I was looking for and just finished reading it.
The publication is called Canadian Forces: Hard Choices, Soft Power. It was written in 1999 by Dr. Joseph T. Jockel. It is a retrospectively interesting read. It was written in a time when the CF had just been in major operations in the first Gulf War / the Balkans and was really thin with respect to equipment, organization, and political support and things were not looking too good for our future.
Two notable points.
1) It is interesting all of the doom and gloom in the book, with the big looming question, could the CF contribute to combat operations if they had too? Then to know now that three years later we were starting out foray into operations in Afghanistan. The CF was really not in the best of shape in terms of equipment / organization when we pulled the trigger to enter that conflict.
2) There are some real parallels from this 1999 publication with 2014. It is worth a read in order to remember that we have been through some of these challenges before and then think about how we overcame them to pull off a major, decade plus operation in Afghanistan.
Conclusion... if you can find a copy (or have on on your bookshelf from years gone past), give it a read. It is worth it. Quick read (130 pages) but well written and concise.
As an aside, Danneskjold was correct. CISS was eaten up by the Canadian International Council and is now represented as the Strategic Studies Working Group (SSWG). If you are looking for the meat of the SSWG it really resides in the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute which is a major contributor to the SSWG.
MC
