The first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight
Club. The first rule of the Conference
of Defence Association’s annual Ottawa conference is not to disparage the F-35
… unless you do not mind being buttonholed by a Lockheed representative. Yesterday, I attended the first day of the
two-day conference, and dared to ask a question only once, at the end of the
day, about the tendency
to deny, deny, deny. People did not
like the question too much (I should not have used the detainee stuff as an
example), but did engage me afterwards.
So, unlike a friend who showed me the ropes, I am not persona non grata
at the conference or in an African country not to be named here.
What did I learn?
Well, the first thing I noticed was that among the premium sponsors of
the event was Rafale, the French aerospace company. That was pretty interesting given that unlike
most of the other sponsors, Canada is not current purchasing any Rafale
products (that I know of). But if the
F-35 were to be rejected, Rafale does make a competing plane. So, it was instructive that Rafale senses
that it is worth an investment in the major defence contractor conference.
Beyond plane competition, the thoughts of the panelists in
the morning focused mostly only whether Canada should develop a national
security strategy and what that would look like. This is something I have discussed at CIC
before (here
and here). The conversation started with a new
Vimy paper that provides one take on Canada’s strategic outlook. The key theme in the paper and the ensuing
discussion is financial constraint—that Canada will not be engaged in
significant interventions in the near term due to the costs of such
operations. No argument here on
that. Indeed, the big largely unanswered
question of the conference, funded by defence contractors, is which programs
will be cut. While there were references
in the discussion about an optimal mix of defence cuts, it is not clear what
that means in practice.
The next session was a conversation with John Manley that
covered a lot of issues pretty quickly and none too deeply. He reiterated a statement he made in the
aftermath of 9/11—that Canada is neither a neutral country nor a pacifist
one. After a decade of on and off war,
this is less controversial than perhaps it once was. When asked about the panel that he led that
facilitated the final renewal of the Kandahar mission, Manley indicated that it
was the right decision at the time, as a result of the accumulation of previous
decisions. As a social scientist, I
appreciated his understanding of path dependence—that each decision constraints
subsequent ones. He focused on factors
outside of NATO and Canadian control that produced “an outcome not as positive”
as we would have liked—corruption, Pakistan and so on, and these factors
were/are clearly key. Yet, it would have
been interesting to see if Manley could suggest what Canada and NATO could have
done better.
The focus then went onto whether
Canada should direct defence procurement efforts at domestic producers even if
the costs are higher. Given how tangled
the Canadian procurement process is already, I am not sure focusing more on the
job-creating aspects is a good idea.
Also, given the budget cuts of today and tomorrow, buying more expensive
equipment for the sake of domestic industry does not seem wise.
The third panel was most
interesting: Ian Brodie, former Chief of Staff to Harper; Jack Granatstein, the
well known historian; and Major General (ret.) Richard Blanchette, former
senior adviser to the Canadian National Security Advisor discussed whether
Canada needed a national security strategy.
This panel had some interesting disagreements, including Granatstein’s
assertion that Canada was bound by its colonial past to be a strategy consumer,
adopting whatever the strategy is of the country upon which it depends. Brodie suggested that Canada did not need the
equivalent of American quadrennial reviews and made the controversial claim
that the Prime Minister did not learn of Operation Medusa until the plans were
discussed on the BBC. The military people
around me found this problematic in the extreme. So, the history of the Kandahar mission is
contested still. Blanchette said we need
a national security strategy more now but that we are moving away from one at
this time. The takeaway from this panel is
that Canadians who have observed and experienced the big decisions cannot agree
on either the past or the future.
The keynote speaker at lunch was
Admiral Samuel Locklear, who is the American commanding all of U.S. forces in
the Pacific and most of Asia (the line is drawn at the India/Pakistan
border). It was a pretty vanilla speech,
although he did a good job of discussing the “strategic complexity” of his area
of responsibility. He asserted that the
American pivot to Asia is not about the containment of China. So, he gets points for being diplomatic, a
primary job of any “combatant commander,” but I am not sure I bought it. He spoke of deepening American alliances in
the region, which was reminiscent of one of the primary strategies the U.S.
used to contain the Soviet Union. His
speak did remind me of one basic truth that I learned in the most unilateral of
times (in Rumseld’s Pentagon in the early 2000s)—the U.S. military deeply and
sincerely believes in multilateralism.
He did provide a note of realism—that China will be doing rising power
things and that we should not be surprised like when China acquires an aircraft
carrier.
I spent the next two panels talking
to individuals who are or were in the Canadian defence sector, including former
students who proved that a B.A. in Political Science is not a career
killer. They are doing quite well,
working for the government and for defence contractors.
The final panel of the day was the CF and
Public SAervice, moderated by Doug Bland, who held a Chair in Defence
Management Studies at Queen’s with Mel Cappe, who was former Clerk of Privy
Council, and LtGen (ret) George Macdonald, former Vice Chief of the Defence
Staff. This was a panel close to my
heart as it had a former military person and a civilian talk about
civil-military relations. Macdonald
argued persuasively that the two sides would never see eye to eye, and this is
ok—that a healthy tension between civilians and military is fine and
productive. Of course, what is healthy
and what is problematic can be hard to distinguish, as I have tried in this
column over the past year. Cappe argued
that the civilian side needs to do a better job of educating themselves about
the military, including the parliamentarians—that they have a responsibility to
know what they are spending tax dollars on.
It was at the end of this panel
that I asked a pesky question about the tendency for DND/CF to deny rather than
clarify. I got a fair amount of push
back—most on the examples. They somewhat
read into the question that I might be engaging in conspiracy thinking and that
the reality is that things are most often complex, and that the folks involved
may sometimes make the stupid choice, like saying the C-17 mission in Mali
would only last a week and then only a
few weeks when they could have specified a longer time span. I clarified that my concern is not that there
is some great conspiracy to avoid the truth, but that the government seemed to
lack a learning curve—making the same mistake over and over again. A little straightforwardness and anticipation
might go a long way to reducing the credibility gap that seems to have opened
up.
It was a very educational day. I went back for the second day with
speeches by the Minister of National Defence Peter MacKay, Chief of Defence
Staff General Tom Lawson, the Commander
of American Special Operations Admiral
McRaven, NORAD commander General Charles Jacoby, and others. I will provide my take on that tonight or tomorrow.
The good news is that I have learned a great deal in a short time,
reminding me of a phrase I learned in the Pentagon: drinking from the firehose.
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