Time to pay the bill
The military has been under-funded and over-stretched for too long, and now we're suffering the consequences
Douglas Bland
Citizen Special
KINGSTON - The Queen's University study, "Canada without Armed Forces,'' released in December 2003, forecast a gathering foreign policy crisis caused by Canada's failing defence capabilities. That crisis was evident during media interviews in the United States when Prime Minister Paul Martin reportedly told a frustrated American reporter that Canada could not send troops to Iraq because "Our troops are stretched very, very thin." It was also evident when the prime minster demanded that the United Nations do something about the humanitarian disaster in Sudan, but could offer no military units to help defeat the disaster he denounced.
Canadian troops and ships and aircraft are "stretched" because they have been asked to do too much with too little. But the stretch is not merely the result of over-employment, it comes from miserly investments in military capabilities since at least 1987. Canadian foreign policy has been living on credit and the skill and courage of members of the Canadian Forces who are asked "to do more with less." Now the bill is due. The crisis for the government is that when military capabilities are needed to act in this hostile world, Canada's foreign policy is disarmed.
The government's dilemma is stark. Even if the cabinet agreed to pump billions of dollars into defence policy immediately (and that is what will be needed), the crash in essential, basic military capabilities cannot be avoided and foreign policy must suffer.
Recently, Vice-Admiral Ron Buck candidly illustrated this fact of life to the Senate Committee on National Defence and Security, when he explained that the Canadian Forces could not produce the 5,000 new troops the government had promised during the election campaign as its central initiative for national defence. The problem is caused not just by the lack of funds, but also by the lack of facilities, equipment and leaders to train the new force. Getting from 60,000 people to 65,000 will, according to Vice-Admiral Buck, take five or more years and the clock is ticking while little of substance is being done.
Take any major projects and the predictions are the same. The new maritime helicopter fleet announced by the government earlier this year will not come into service for eight to 10 years, depending on whose counting you accept. Seen another way, the crews who will meet these new aircraft when they become operational are still in primary school. The same is true for new support ships, armour vehicles, transport aircraft and logistics equipment, if and when the government decides to purchase them. Even if the Canadian Forces could recruit, train and deploy 5,000 more people in a year or two, these new warriors likely would find themselves armed with failing equipment and without experienced leaders as the overworked ranks are depleted by retirements and casualties.
The government is struggling to advance a credible foreign policy with limited armed forces and will have to do so during the long interval between now and when -- if ever -- the Canadian Forces are reconstituted.
One unhappy solution might be to just spend soldiers' lives to make up for lack of numbers -- over-stretch and do more with less as policy. Another idea is to take a two or three-year "pause" in operational deployments -- now undeclared but underway -- and hope that new, serious international events will not upset this period of renewal. Unfortunately, the world keeps spinning and sudden conflicts and crises as in Sudan, Haiti and who knows where else will arrive before the reconstruction of the armed forces can possibly be completed.
Of course, interrupting the reconstitution period for whatever reason makes everything worse.
The government could also simply decide that the Canadian Forces are not as important to foreign policy as they have been in the past. Indeed, this seems to be the policy the government has adopted. Canada apparently will use other means -- public administrators here and there, judges to Vietnam, small training team to Africa, and unprotected election monitors for Iraq and Ukraine -- leaving the really troubled places to others. These initiatives are worthy and necessary, but when allies are looking not just for money and soft power, but for deposits in blood to match their own sacrifices, Canada will be out of sight and out of mind.
The Canadian Forces are almost disarmed and there is not much that the government can do, even in the medium term, to avert the consequences. Leaders can only watch the nation's steady decline in foreign policy importance as Canada's place at the table in the councils of the strong is taken by someone else. Ironically, Canada has long campaigned for more influence in the United Nations Security Council, and just as the idea for expansion of the council takes flight, Canada's self-imposed weaknesses will ensure that we don't advance past the first cut.
The defence review now underway inside defence headquarters, however, provides the government with a chance to take bold steps to begin to redress this crisis.
As a first step, the government might acknowledge the seriousness of the problem and declare that the Canadian Forces are not merely stretched, but in rapid technological and organizational decline. Then political leaders ought to forthrightly explain to Canadians why the nation must invest considerable funds to rebuild the Canadian Forces and the costs of not doing so. The defence minister should then take personal charge and present to Parliament not a review, but a defence policy that lays out a fully funded, coherent seven- or eight-year program to reconstitute the Canadian Forces.
In the meantime, the prime minister (and the next one as well) will have to manage Canada's international interests and place in the world as adroitly as he can with increasingly limited and diminished armed forces and a necessarily soft foreign policy.
Douglas Bland is chairman of the Defence Management Studies Program at the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University.
