Addressing the Mandatory National Service Question and, yes, the Guy Recommending It

 I have accused LtG (ret). Michel Maionneueve of having me live me live rent-free in his head, as he ended up featuring me (the unnamed Liberal-funded academic who was seeking to cancel him) in the origin story in his memoir.  By responding to his latest piece, this time at Macleans, I have to admit he is living rent-free in my head just a bit.  Before I get to that new piece, just a couple of thoughts of this whole thing.

First, when I find myself not being able to resist responding to a specific individual's online musings, I try to avoid their stuff.  I am trolled easily, so the best way to avoid that is to avoid the bait.  This is why I don't read the blog posts of Walt/Mearsheimer or else this blog would spend way too much time on them. And this is why I don't read MM's regular columns in the National Post.

Second, as we approach the anniversary of MM's emergence as a pundit of some kind thanks to his awful speech at the Vimy Gala (the gala is always near and before Remembrance Day),  I marvel at how he started the speech by saying he was cancelled, that he managed to turn the controversy that I helped to generate (oops) about it into a perch at the National Post.  It also reminds me that there aren't too many people who are Canadian experts on civil-military relations to comment on this stuff, so my value over replacement pundit is still positive.  

Third, tonight's class is on the politicization of the armed forces in democracies around the world, and, well, MM is very much a part of that dynamic/effort--retired GOFOs playing upon their military service to suggest that the military is supporting the partisan stance that the speakers are advocating.  So, writing here is a way to sharpen my thinking before tonight's class. 

On to the show, Maisonneuve is arguing that "Canada Needs a Mandatory National Service."  I am not going to grade this piece like I graded his response to my op-ed about the Conservative Party ought not to platform retired senior military leaders.  But he entirely omits Canada's history of draft riots, so that this essay would not get a decent grade. How would Quebec react to a new draft?  Nothing on this. 

MM starts by talking about meeting his wife in the service, and I have to ask, since no one else has, is whether she was his subordinate at the time.  I have long wondered if is his pique about culture change is driven by the damage done to his identity as a part of a generation of senior officers who preyed upon subordinate women to sate their sexual appetites.  I simply do not know if Maisonneuve is another Jon Vance or not.  And to be clear, I do not mean this as the ad hominen attack it might appear to be (see his op-ed targeting me for some great examples), but as a real question for journalists--is this guy taking controversial stances because he was a perpetrator of the abuse of power that caused so much damage to the CAF?  Ok, sorry for that tangent, but he mentions his wife at the top of the post.   

My biggest gripe with piece is not that he is making a factless argument about something that has been well-researched, but that he starts off by talking about the decline of confidence in public institutions with no self-awareness.  A key dynamic around the world including Canada has been
for right-wing populists to denigrate public institutions.  His Vimy Speech was exactly that--an effort to reduce trust in government, in the media, and in the military.  And so I must post a meme a student created for tonight's class to illustrate the dynamic so very well (I have the the students create memes to push them to think creatively about the readings ... and to compel them to do the readings).  

 

Anyhow, Maisonneuve makes the usual arguments that having a draft including a variety of forms of national service--it would give the kids a sense of purpose, improve their discipline, teach them about Canada and importance of defending it (well, that last one only for those who don't opt for all of the other forms of service that aren't military), and so on.  He cites a bunch of countries that have drafts, but does not cite anything about how those have worked out.  Do the youth in those countries have a higher sense of national purpose? Do they have a better command of civics and identify more with their fellow citizens than democracies sans drafts? Sweden would be a great experiment--they had a male-only draft, got rid of it just before Russia got especially aggressive, and brought it back for men and women fairly recently--did all this stuff about national identity and such swing with these changes. We social scientists love variation as it gives us leverage over the question.  

I frankly do not have time to read the literature on this, but he should have.  However, I have bumped into conscription during my research for both the recent book and the next project.  I was not asking about national unity or how it improves the discipline of Gen Z folks, but rather oversight and such.  Conscription came up in South Korea and Finland.  I wonder what we should take from the South Korean case--that their military was asked to suppress its parliament and resisted--was that due to conscription? If so, a point for Maisonneuve.  In Finland, conscription, despite its vaunted role in national unity, was a sore spot in civil-military relations, as the civilians keep asking the Finnish military for data on what activities cause conscripts the most injuries, and the military has resisted sharing that info.  So, no, I don't really know if conscription is a magical exilir fostering unity, discipline, and such.  But then again, MM presents no evidence.

MM does not address any of the tradeoffs involved (just as he didn't mention Canada's troublesome draft history).  For instance, if you draft, say, 20k people, where are you going to put them?  Who is going to train them?  Doing conscription does not automatically solve personnel shortage problems--it complicates them.  The CAF has had trouble training the soldiers/aviators/sailors it gets in, this is a key source of the recruitment problem because it does not have enough trainers, that it did until very recently incentive people to be trainers, and the regiments tended to send their crappiest people to be trainers or recruiters.  If you dedicate significant personnel to train the temporary members of the CAF, who will train those who are joining to make the military a career?  The newly trained reservists, who had been drafted, can't/won't be the new trainers.  There are probably ways to finesse this and figure out how to do both--train the professionals and train the drafted future reservists--but it is a real problem and should be addressed by anyone advocating conscription.

Another funky implementation problem is that MM includes in his proposal "Those selected would enter training and take courses on civics and Canadian history."   Who would be doing that?  Pointy headed profs who are stuck in ivory towers?  If not them, then who?  And what material do they use?  Given that Maisonneuve has denigrated scholarship in his past writings, I am unclear about where the civics/history would come from.  What would count as the good and necessary history that would be taught?  Would it be the anti-critical, Canada did everything great, we have nothing to apologize for stuff that he mentioned during his Vimy Gala speech?

A pet peeve: he also joins the chorus of threat inflation: "If anyone wanted to come into the North and seize our natural wealth right now, there would be little we could do to stop them, short of a strongly worded diplomatic protest."  Please.  There is no risk of that because it is really, really hard to operate up there.  If the Russians can't get the logistics right for invading a country right next door, how are they going to do it over the Arctic?  I learned this summer at our Institute that this threat inflation, while handy for getting the Canadian public to be willing to spend more on defence, is really scary to the people of the North.  We aren't doing them any favors with this threat inflation. 

Finally, MM is wildly exaggerating the impact of a draft.  He mentions a lottery along the way, but then concludes by saying:  "Once every young Canadian has worn a maple leaf on their shoulder, I think they’ll feel pride for their country [my emphasis]."  This ignores the fact that his proposal actually would only bring in a small percentage of the youth into the military as (a) many would choose other forms of national service that probably wouldn't involve uniforms with flags on the shoulders and (b) the lottery would mean that only a portion of the population would serve at all. It also ignores the fact that more than a few people might hate their experiences as a draftee.  But a flowery ending is probably best for an op-ed, rather than something that is internally consistent.

We are left with only one question: who edits these things at Macleans?  I am not saying that Maisonneuve can't submit stuff to Canada's various publishing outlets.  I am not even saying that Macleans shouldn't publish his stuff even though he has been essentially a far-right actor pushing out mis and disinformation.  I am saying that someone should have edited the piece so that it had more facts, less unsupported generalizations, and greater consistency.