Lt.-Gen. Jon Vance, above, will take over Canadian Joint Operations Command from Lt.-Gen. Stu Beare following a handover ceremony Tuesday in Ottawa. Photo: John Lucas/Postmedia News Files Lt.-Gen. Jon Vance becomes responsible for all Canadian troops deployed at home and abroad during a handover ceremony to take place Tuesday afternoon in Ottawa.
The outgoing leader of Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC) is Lt.-Gen. Stu Beare. Both he and Vance served with distinction in Afghanistan — Vance during two combat tours in Kandahar and Beare with NATO in Kabul.
Beare was muzzled by the Harper government a couple of weeks ago, preventing him from talking to journalists about the challenges that CJOC and Canada face during this period of global tumult. The general deserved better than this parting order after 36 years of service. During his Afghan and CJOC years he has been responsible for the lives of thousands of Canadians in dangerous places, as well as for spending billions of dollars.
Forbidding Beare to speak was an example of the mindless messaging micro-management that has become one of the Harper government’s least appealing hallmarks. Such orders — and this was hardly the first — have long left the brass scratching their heads. After all, the government is constantly braying about Canada’s glorious military heritage and famously fond of talking as if nobody in the West is tougher on Russian President Vladimir Putin and terrorism.
Canadians need to hear from their top generals and admirals. No Canadians are better informed than they are about the new world disorders and the capabilities of enemies and potential enemies. Nobody knows better than they do how to manage and explain the complex matrix of relationships and our capabilities and those of our closest allies.
The job that Vance inherits is arguably the most powerful in the Canadian Forces. It may also be the toughest. Vance comes to CJOC from Canada’s most senior post with NATO in Europe at a time when new missions are looming in Iraq and near Ukraine.
Beare’s task has become trickier during his three years at CJOC. His command — and the generals and admirals who generate troops and provide matériel for it — has been flying, sailing and driving on fumes for some time because of the steep cuts that the Harper government imposed on the military in order to produce a hefty budget surplus to crow about during next year’s federal election.
Someone who provides high-level financial advice to several key government ministries told me the other day that, in order to produce the desired federal budget surplus, the Department of National Defence may have suffered the worst cuts of any department. This was, he said, because the government knows that the military, unlike some other departments, will always find a way to muddle through.
It has often been a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul to meet the growing number of duties that the Harper government has signed the troops up for. This cannot go on indefinitely if ground troops, sailors and airmen are to be sufficiently well trained so they are combat ready for contingencies in the current, tumultuous geopolitical environment.
Under-spending on defence is a habitual problem in Canada, although complaints about this have been receiving unprecedented attention from the usually defence spending-adverse commentariat. Estimates bandied about last week put defence spending at around one per cent of GDP. This figure may actually flatter the government. It could be less than one per cent, especially if DND is not allowed to spend all the money it has been allotted this year, which seems likely.
As one of the wealthiest countries, Canada could easily afford to hit NATO’s target of spending two per cent of GDP on defence. But that would require an additional $20 billion a year, which would be political suicide for any Canadian government. Voters are used to letting Americans pay for their defence while often complaining about what the U.S. does, rather than thanking them.
However, if Canada was to match Germany, whose economy has been struggling lately but still spends 1.3 per cent of its GDP on defence, that would mean several billion dollars a year more to defend the country and the international system that Canada depends on for its prosperity.
The prime minister has resisted sharp demands from Washington and NATO for Canada to pull its weight, claiming that it has increased defence spending by 27 per cent since taking office in 2006. But as David Perry of the Conference of Defence Associations tells me, in real terms, using the GDP deflator, the real increase has been seven per cent.
“We go out and figure out what it is we need to do, and then we attempt to get a budget as frugal as possible to achieve those objectives,” the prime minister said last week in Britain.
The reality is that the government has had months to figure out how it might respond to both the situation in eastern Ukraine and the terrorism file and how much money that might cost.
The upshot is that Canada appears set to maintain its pathetic position near the bottom of the NATO spending table — well behind such economic basket cases as Albania, Italy and Portugal. Until now it has expected the military to find money for new missions from within its own much-diminished budget.
It would have been fascinating to hear Beare explain to Vance in recent handover briefings how he, chief of the defence staff Gen. Tom Lawson and the commanders of the army, air force and navy are trying to shuffle this still-shrinking deck of cards.
No comments:
Post a Comment