Contributors

Towards A Grand Strategy for Canada, Part 2

Last week, I started to talk about Canadian grand strategy, with a consideration of the threats facing Canada. I guess I should have started by being clearer about what I mean by “grand strategy.” Essentially, a country’s grand strategy is the way in which it tries to maintain – and perhaps enhance – its position in the world, given the threats, opportunities, and constraints it faces. How does one match capabilities with commitments and interests to secure the country and achieve whatever it seeks to achieve? I started with a discussion of geography because for most, geography is destiny. (Consider a hypothetical country, for instance, that is stuck between two or more hostile countries that are far more powerful. What does that mean for the country’s goals and strategies?) Compared with most countries, Canada has more discretion to choose a course through international politics, because its placement on the map means it does not face an existential threat in the same way many other countries do. Knowing that the threats facing Canada are relatively small, then, the next step in figuring out Canada’s grand strategy is to consider the commitments it has made, and is likely to keep, in the future. More …

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Towards a Grand Strategy for Canada

On Tuesday, I participated in a live chat at the Canadian International Council. As I typed furiously to keep up with the conversation, I began to ponder the question of Canadian grand strategy: What are the key threats and opportunities facing Canada over the next couple of decades? What commitments has Canada made? Which ones must it keep or shed? What are the kinds of capabilities Canada will need in the face of these threats and commitments? How must Canada combine military, diplomatic, and other means to address these? Answering these questions requires serious thinking and the facing of difficult trade-offs. More …

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Lessons From Afghanistan

Lessons learning is something that all modern militaries do.  War is too costly to repeat mistakes, so the Canadian Forces along with the rest of the countries operating in Afghanistan have spent and will continue to spend much time and effort looking back at the past decade to figure what they can do better next time. 

The starting point is to consider how the Forces view the effort: as a success.  While Canadians have been wondering what went wrong (see the CIC’s posts of the last week), it is pretty clear that the Canadian Forces saw the Kandahar mission as a success.  How can we tell?  Nearly every officer who commanded in Afghanistan has been promoted.  Why do the folks in the Canadian Forces think the mission was a success?  Because Canada proved it can do some heavy lifting in a hard place, adapting to the circumstances, and being a better ally than most.  More …

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The Three Bad Decisions Made In Afghanistan

The CIC hosted a discussion on Afghanistan, asking what caused the NATO mission to fail there. Well, it might be premature to say that the mission failed as NATO has not fled in defeat quite yet, just as it is premature to say the U.S. ultimately succeeded in Iraq. The answer depends on how you define the question, which was not entirely clear, as Margaret MacMillan pointed out in her interview. If the mission after 2001 was to build a self-sustaining Afghanistan, then it was not quite doomed to fail but it certainly faced a mightily difficult challenge.

But before moving onward, one key point stands out: Canada was not the only country operating and struggling in Afghanistan. We can blame Ottawa for how Canada handled the operation but responsibility for mission failure, if and when it occurs, lies in the region and at NATO headquarters in Brussels. The focus here is on the Afghanistan question. Considering Canada’s efforts and what we can learn from them is a topic for another day. More …

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Why the Violence Will Go On

Earlier this week, Jennifer Welsh addressed the role of Kofi Annan and his effort to end the violence in Syria. While his efforts are impressive and his past performance has been remarkable, we cannot hold out much hope that this ceasefire will stick. I am not an expert on Syria, but everything I know about the international relations of civil wars screams at me that this civil war will go on.

For one thing, it is a civil war by conventional definitions. All it takes to have a civil war is two sides with the ability and will to harm each other. In the past, Syrian violence fell short of this definition because the violence was all one-sided. Not anymore. More …

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The Limits of Civilian Oversight

It has been an awful week for civilian control of the Canadian military. Apparently, only the auditor-general can get real answers about the cost of the F-35. Given that parliamentarians have been asking questions like this for a few years now, this underlines both the opacity of the Department of National Defence (DND) and how incredibly feeble Parliament is when it comes to monitoring DND. The news at the end of the week is not going to make things any better: DND is cutting one-third of the positions at its educational institutions (the Royal Military College of Canada, the Canadian Forces College, and the Royal Military College of St. Jean). This, plus the cuts to the Security and Defence Forum, points to a key problem in Canadian civilian-military relations and civilian control of the military: shrinking expertise.

For any government seeking to control any agency, there is a basic problem: the agency will have more information and more expertise than the people seeking to exert control. This is especially the case when it comes to the military, where secrecy is actually required some of the time, and where the gap in expertise is vast. One can argue that it is the job of the minister of national defence and the folks in DND to oversee the military, and parliamentarians have told me exactly that. The auditor-general’s report shows that this mechanism of civilian oversight of the Canadian Forces is incredibly lacking. There are two other ways that civilians can facilitate oversight: via Parliament, and through improved civilian expertise. Unfortunately, recent events and trends suggest that civilian oversight is going to remain problematic, and even worsen. More …

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Too Many Generals…

The new NATO Smart Defence initiative sounds really … well, smart. Given constrained budgets, it makes sense for NATO countries to work together to plan their military budgets so that they create less duplication. The logic is incredibly compelling: Each country focuses on certain capabilities so that when they come together as part of a coalition operation, each country can contribute its niche capability to the effort.

There is one major problem with specialization: If you are on the battlefield and you need an ally to show up with a key capability, such as helicopters, reconnaissance technology and personnel, light or heavy armoured vehicles, etc., there is no guarantee that the ally will show up. The lessons of Afghanistan were not new ones, and they were repeated in the skies over, and the seas near, Libya. Countries always impose varying restrictions upon their own contingents, even as they transfer operational command to the alliance or ad hoc coalition leaders. More …

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Covering the Guilty, Ignoring the Victims

As an American ex-pat living in Canada for the past decade, I have felt far more shame than I ever expected to feel. Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, the Koran burnings last month, and, now, the massacres in Panjwai raise the question of accountability in very powerful ways and draw a sharp contrast between the American way of doing things and Canada’s way (where one killed captive in Somalia led to many top figures losing their jobs). However, sometimes the lines are not as sharp as we might want to draw them.

In the wake of the recent Panjwai massacres, I have had a running conversation on Twitter with Roland Paris about the fact that the American media is far more concerned with the shooter, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, than with his victims. The New York Times and other outlets have been overly curious about Bales’ background, while failing even to list the names of the Afghans who were killed. In fact, the first outlet to list the victims was Al Jazeera English. More …

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Giving Perspective to the Killings in Kandahar

The events of this past weekend in Panjwai need to be put into perspective. There is a tendency to come to quick conclusions and think that the most recent event is most significant – a turning point – and far more consequential than any prior event. However, the reality is that there are many events, and the most recent one always stands out simply because it is new. To be clear, the mass-murder shooting spree that took place last weekend is horrible. But we really do not know much about what happened yet, so initial reactions tend to be based more on our predilections than on the facts on the ground. Below, I address several realities, aiming not to apologize for the American armed forces or excuse the event, but to put the incident in perspective. More …

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A Crisis in Canadian Civil-Military Relations

People are usually quite eager to consider any utterance by any military officer as producing a crisis in civil-military relations.  The past year or two, we have seen more than a few opinion pieces worrying about the militarization of the Canadian public, whatever that means.  In a robust democracy like Canada’s, there is always some tension between the civilians and the military because they have different outlooks based on very different experiences.  It is to be expected that civilian officials will not look at things in the same way as those trained to engage in war.  No, a crisis exists when civilians or military personnel overstep the relatively clear if hard to describe bounds of appropriate behavior.  Such as when military personnel are asked to find information about opposition politicians and when the military goes ahead and does so.

The crisis du jour is that the Canadian Forces were apparently asked to protect Minister of Defence Peter MacKay after news broke about an inappropriate use of a search and rescue helicopter.  Once again, it is not the crime but the effort to ameliorate if not cover up the crime.  Getting a ride on a military helicopter is mildly controversial, but not a very big deal.  But getting the military to be involved in politics by seeking to find information about similar rides by opposition members is very much a big deal.  The former can almost be seen as a perk of higher office—questionable but not too problematic.  Relying on the military to rat out opposition politicians violates a cardinal tenet of civil-military relations in advanced democracies—the military is to stay out of disputes between politicians. More …

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