Bercuson: The challenge of Recruiting Women to the Canadian Armed Forces

By: David Bercuson, iPolitics 

One of the innovative programs that grows out of the Strong, Secure and Engaged defence policy statement released a year ago is the Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) project launched by the Department of National Defence in April this year. The project promises $1.3 billion over ten years to be distributed to scholars, businesses and researchers generally who undertake competitive endeavors to help the government solve 16 defence and security challenges in many domains. The majority of the proposals the government is seeking help with are highly technical challenges but one – to achieve 25 per cent female participation in the Canadian forces within ten years – is most decidedly not.

In this undated photo provided by Canadian Armed Forces Capt. Ashley Collette, poses for a photo with children during a patrol in Afghanistan. During her 10-month deployment, Collette led a 50-strong all-male infantry unit providing security to villagers. The Department of National Defence has set the goal of 25 per cent of the Canadian forces being women in the next 10 years. (AP Photo/Capt. Ashley Collette)

Since 2000, women are eligible to serve in any branch of the Canadian Armed Forces in any capacity. Today about 15 per cent of Canada’s soldiers, sailors and air personnel are women. That number has been relatively static for some time. The government wants to see more women in the CAF for very good reasons, namely that female perspectives in the entire range of armed forces activities and defence-related matters is crucial and that any nation, company or military force that either excludes or does not encourage full participation of one half of humanity in its endeavours will be outpaced by those that do.

"But ‘manliness’ today is a concept much in dispute, as evolving gender roles have opened up large areas of society to female participation. Remember when the doctor was a kindly older man? Today there are more women than men in medical schools."

So what is the problem? The CAF offers a good career for young men and women who crave adventure in their lives, are physically and mentally fit, and who want to step out of the confines of an office or a factory assembly line. Benefits are generous, pay is at least equal to that in the private sector and Canadians today pay a great deal of honour and respect to those who serve.

There is really no secret to increasing the number of women in the Canadian armed forces and it begins with security of the person. From time immemorial, soldiering was seen as a male endeavor. In historian Geoffrey Hayes latest book Crerar’s Lieutenants: Inventing the Canadian Junior Army Officer, 1939-45, much emphasis is placed on that quality called “manliness” that dominated thinking about what would make a good junior officer in the Second World War. The concept itself is not new and other historians have written about “manliness” as an essential quality going back to the days of the Canadian militia. But “manliness” today is a concept much in dispute, as evolving gender roles have opened up large areas of society to female participation. Remember when the doctor was a kindly older man? Today there are more women than men in medical schools.

If women do not feel secure, at ease and totally comfortable as themselves, in uniform, why would they think of a career in the military forces? It’s hard to say if sexual harassment is any more prevalent in the military than in industry, broadcasting, entertainment or education, but those fields have become as traditional for women as they once were for men. And within those areas of employment, women are increasingly vocal in their fight to be treated as human beings. In the military, with its hierarchical chain of command, fighting city hall is much harder.

The other task, no less important, is to fight that still prevalent belief among males that women may be good civil-military relations folks, but poor trigger pullers, by ensuring from the word go — in training at all levels — that the female person standing beside you is just as qualified in her field of military occupation as you are and will have your back, as necessary.

Easy to say, but the challenges, even in the early 21st century, are immense.
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David Bercuson is Director of Programs at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and Director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

Bercuson: A Somalia Retrospective

By: David Bercuson

March 2018 was the 25th anniversary of the killing of Somali teenager Shidane Arone, which began the “Somalia Affair” that racked the Canadian military – primarily the army – for much of the next 10 years, and led to substantial changes in military education and leadership the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF).

By any standards, the government of Somalia was a mess in the early 1990s (it still largely is), and that disarray was compounded by widespread famine that left many thousands dead and starving. Television coverage was unsparing in showing starving children in refugee camps and the almost pitiful effort of international aid agencies to fight the scourge. The main problem was that Somalia had virtually no operating central government and different warlords in various parts of the country were using armed militants to impede and sometimes to completely block food aid arriving by sea.

Donations of food aid were sold on the black market instead of reaching the starving population and no military force existed that could take out the warlords and restore order there.

Led by the United States under newly elected president Bill Clinton, the Unified Task Force (UNITAF) was authorized as a United Nations Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission in December 1992 – with individual countries donating military forces to bring order to different key parts of Somalia such as ports and major transportation routes.

Canada chose to contribute a Canadian Airborne Regiment Battle Group (CARBG) to the mission, and was eventually assigned to the area of Belet Huen, a city in south central Somalia. In December 1992, CARBG, along with elements of the US 10th Mountain Division, established a base north of the city. When the Americans later withdrew, the Canadians ran the base, which quickly became a major supply depot to be used to send Canadian patrols through the area to challenge the local warlord and his troops.

The Airborne largely succeeded in its mission (a fact later forgotten by many) but Number 2 Commando (equivalent to a battalion) had become dominated by bullies way before it left for Somalia, and continuous morale and discipline issues plagued the Commando during the mission. Some members seemed to believe that the local population were the enemy, and acted like it – setting ambushes, killing at least one person for no reason, and torturing Arone to death after he crept into camp, presumably to steal helicopter parts.

Arone’s death was reported by the press, beginning a long chain of events, which quickly uncovered significant flaws, particularly an attempt to cover up the affair, and the many incidents of indiscipline that had occurred in Canada. Many Canadians concluded that the Airborne should never have been sent to Somalia and the government began a thorough examination of the entire mission to determine what went wrong. Evidence of despicable hazing procedures emerged in the Airborne and the government eventually concluded that the regiment could not be saved – it was disbanded in January 1995.

An official commission of inquiry – the Letourneau Commission – was later established, and its hearings were televised almost every day for months. Morale sagged across the armed forces and many Canadians concluded that the CAF had gotten out of hand. The Liberal government was faced with a real possibility that its military was dissolving before its eyes.

When Doug Young became Minister of National Defence in 1996, he closed down the Letourneau Commission and initiated a series of steps to initiate sweeping reforms of the CAF. University degrees became required for commissions, the education system was revamped, training for deployments was ramped up, a National Investigation Service was founded, and Canadian soldiers were drilled in the laws of war. Racism was rooted out. Efforts were made to integrate women into the military in a more meaningful way, and reform of the relationship between the reserves and the regular forces was initiated.

Young was defeated in the federal election of 1997 and replaced by Art Eggleton who drove the reform process forward by forming the Minister’s Monitoring Committee on Change, which monitored change in the military and DND for six years. The concept was revolutionary. In effect, the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Deputy Minister were directed to aid the Monitoring Committee in its allotted task – to ensure that all the recommendations for change that had been set out by the Somalia Committee, the Commission on Military Justice, the Commission on the Reserves, and other bodies, were implemented (except for those which the government itself had rejected, such as, instead of instituting an office of Inspector General, the government favoured an Ombudsman).

Between 1997 and 2003, the Monitoring Committee watched over the process of change and reform. It reported regularly to the Minister of National Defence, and issued quarterly reports. Chaired by former Speaker of the House, John Fraser, it made plain that it was not a committee of inquiry but a group of people who wanted to modernize the military and bring it back in line with Canadian values. If effect, for six years, the self-governing professionalism of the military was suspended while the government, through the Monitoring Committee, led the change process.

When the Monitoring Committee was disbanded in 2003, the Canadian Armed Forces was a different institution and reflected to a much greater extent the values and mores of Canadian society as a whole.

The events of March 1993 are not much talked about today, but the “Somalia Affair” produced a Canadian military that is in tune with the desires and aspirations of the Canadian people.

– David Bercuson, Research Director, Canadian Global Affairs Institute

Bercuson: Canada Should Not Return to Afghanistan

By: David Bercuson, Canadian Global Affairs Institute 

The reversal by U.S. President Donald Trump of his position on Afghanistan, and his commitment to send an additional 4000 soldiers there to “kill terrorists” and not to “nation build”, should not move Ottawa to change its position not to send any more Canadians to Afghanistan.

Between the late fall of 2001 and the summer of 2011, Canadians served in Afghanistan, suffered more than 165 killed, and kept their fingers in the dyke in Kandahar province – barely – but could accomplish little by way of “fixing” Afghanistan because Afghanistan is probably unfixable by outsiders. We in the west don’t like to believe that some of the world’s greatest and most persistent geo-political issues do not lend themselves to Western forms of resolution. Unfortunately, that is the reality we must accept.

The Israeli-Palestinian problem is one example. If we look at the micro level in places such as Kashmir, or northeast India, or the southern Philippines we will see conflicts that have been ongoing for years if not centuries because the long-ago movement of peoples, religions, ideologies, and so on, have pushed some outside their “natural” boundaries and sloughed over into nearby territories where they ran into conflict with indigenous peoples, ideologies and religions who were not compatible or didn’t want to be compatible.

Afghanistan is such a place. As long ago as Alexander the Great – long before the arrival of Islam – the different tribes who lived in that essential power vacuum between Persia and India, and later between India and Russia, provided foreign invaders with a less-than-warm welcome. It is not true, however, that Afghanistan is the place where empires go to die. In fact, Britain won the second Anglo-Afghan war quite handily. But victory, as defined by the then developing western concept of statecraft, was intended either to occupy, hold, colonize and assimilate the indigenous, or to hold on as long as politics made it necessary, and then give it up in return for other concessions elsewhere.

Such practices didn’t work in Afghanistan because it was, and is, essentially “too far up the line” and its people too independent to allow either forms of occupation to work. Over time, the Greeks, the Persians, the Indians, the British, the Russians simply had to decide at some point that Afghanistan was simply not worth the effort. They all fought in Afghanistan with one hand behind their back, and it wasn’t enough. Then again, two hands was not worth the price. That was as true of the United States and NATO as it was of any of their predecessors.

It is true of Canada, and also true of Donald Trump.

The renewed effort of the United States in Afghanistan will fail because it is not a serious effort to defeat the Taliban and win the war. Such an effort would mean a half a million troops and a ready willingness to end Pakistan’s role of continuing to this day to be the Taliban’s number one supporter and haven.

Why then should Canada go there? To support the Americans? To show the flag? That is what we did the first three times we were there. Yes, we were there once, but this time we have neither the troops nor the treasure to do anything even in a token way. We have deployed a handful of troops to the Baltic, another handful to the middle east, and we are running the danger of fracturing our military as we did continuously during the peacekeeping operations of the Cold War and post-Cold War period.

If we are serious about projecting Canadian power where it matters, and where our most important ally – the United States – takes notice, we should resist the temptation to send a few hundred Canadians hither and thither without any mass and with no chance of making any tactical or strategic difference.

If the Afghan government and the bulk of the Afghan people don’t want to be ruled again by the Taliban, they will find a will and a way to avoid it.

Militarily, Canada is a small country and must pick its military engagements with great care and with an eye firmly fixed on serving its own national interests.
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– David Bercuson is Research Director of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Bercuson: Peacekeeping & Promises

By:  David Bercuson, Canadian Global Affairs Institute

The Liberal promise to re-engage Canadian troops in United Nations peacekeeping ventures seems to have gone the way of most of their defence promises – unfulfilled, delayed or just plain forgotten. And like some of the other Liberal defence promises – such as to rule out any consideration of the F-35 stealth fighter to replace the CF-18 – it was only half thought through in the first place.

In the 2015 federal election, the Liberals fought tooth and nail against the NDP for the left-centre vote in places such as the Greater Toronto Area, Quebec and British Columbia’s lower mainland. Stephen Harper’s government had already withdrawn Canada from Afghanistan – and had begun to levy deep cuts on the national defence budget – but it had thrown Canadian aircraft into the bombing campaign in Libya and committed Canadian fighter jets to the bombing of ISIS targets in Syria.

So, although the Conservatives were not doing much to follow through on major defence promises – such as the national shipbuilding program, the completion of the F-35 purchases and other necessaries – they did have the smell of war about them. Why? Because Harper had made it a point to visit Canadian troops in Kandahar on his first foreign visit, he had proclaimed that Canadians were not going to “cut and run”, and he had augmented the Canadian contingent in Kandahar with helicopters and other additional kit. Those of the public who had supported the military mission in the first place soon largely forgot why we were there, and those who had opposed the mission kept hearkening back to the good old days when “neutral” Canadian peacekeepers had tried to keep the peace in some of the world’s most difficult battlegrounds, instead of making war in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Forgotten in all this was the crucial role the Liberals had played in the very beginning of the mission. It was then-prime minister Jean Chretien who had first deployed Canadian troops to fight under American command in Kandahar in early 2002 and who sent Canadians back to Kabul to lead ISAF in 2003. And it was again the Liberals, this time under Paul Martin, who committed Canadians to Kandahar in late 2005.

It was also former Liberal deputy leader John Manley who led a panel in 2008 that called on the Conservative government to stay in Kandahar, though with a number of important conditions, such as the procurement of helicopters and the addition of at least 1,000 troops from other NATO countries to help the Canadians in their mission.

But the Liberals began to play politics with the Kandahar mission as early as 2006 when, in the midst of the leadership race to replace Martin, many of the front bench decided to vote against the Tory motion to extend the Afghan mission. And bi-partisanship over Afghanistan broke down right there.

The NDP was never unequivocal about the mission: they were against it from the beginning and they and their supporters in the press, in academia, and in the left-wing intellectual elite of the country attacked not only Canada’s participation in the mission, but called time and again for Canada to return to good old Lester Pearson-style peacekeeping. They decried the “militarization” of Canada under the Tories and the creation of the myth of Canada as a fighting nation, rather than a nation which always stood for keeping the peace.

Thus the Liberals in 2015 had to “out-peace keep” the NDP and promise Canadians that the bad old days of Canada actually fighting in a war were going to end under a Trudeau government. Canada would withdraw from the air mission in Syria and would once again put its troops in blue helmets, just as they had been from the 1950s to the 1990s.

The only problem was – as they discovered after they had assumed office – that there simply aren’t any “neutral” peacekeeping missions out there anymore. Those soldiers engaged in blue-helmet operations were, in many cases, fighting as hard for their lives as the Canadians had done in Afghanistan.

As of this moment (end of May), the Liberals haven’t found their idyllic peacekeeping mission, and they probably won’t. The world is much different today than it was in the 1950s or 1960s and many of the blue-helmet troops out there – not all, but many – are there to earn hard currency for their national treasuries. Seeking out another war – this time wearing blue helmets – would finally shatter the peacekeeping legend in Canada once and for all. That would not serve the Liberal legend well in the next campaign in 2019.
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– David Bercuson is Research Director of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Face to Face: Should Canada Send Ground Troops into Syria?

Published by: The Legion Magazine, March/April 2017 

The opinions in this article belong to Stephen J. Thorne and  David J. Bercuson

On its Global Affairs website, the Government of Canada describes the conflict in Syria as “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.” It quotes UN figures: 13.5 million people inside Syria in urgent need of help; more than a quarter-million dead, hundreds of thousands wounded; some five million-plus refugees.

It’s a catastrophe that is spreading by the day. Efforts to contain it are like putting the proverbial genie back in the bottle. But, bless its big heart, Canada is trying.

“To date, Canada has committed almost $1 billion in humanitarian, development and security assistance in response to the Syria crisis,” says Global Affairs.

Trouble is, Canada—and the international community—are a day late and a dollar short when it comes to responsible action in Syria and elsewhere in the region. The genie is out and what more havoc he has yet to reap is anyone’s guess.

There is no doubt Canada should contribute what it can to alleviate the refugee crisis and assist humanitarian efforts in Syria. But the need for such measures could largely have been prevented had Canada and its allies acted early and decisively to stop the excesses of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the rise of ISIS and the involvement of Russia.

That said, opportunities still exist to stem the tide of misery and destruction. And so, as co-ordinated efforts to defeat ISIS gain momentum, Canada needs to be there, wherever the fight may take it, for ISIS is the enemy of us all.

Arising out of peaceful anti-government protests in 2011, the Syrian conflict is no longer a civil war. It has become an insurgency involving a complex entanglement of diverse combatants whose motives and goals comprise conflicting ethnic, religious and political factors that threaten to plunge the entire region, unstable as it already is, into chaos.

Virtually all principle combatants have a common enemy: ISIS, soldiered by international fighters whose stated aim is nothing less than to rule the world. An offshoot of al-Qaida, there is no negotiating with its fanatics.

Their methods, from videotaped beheadings to enslavement to burning captives alive, are more ruthless and barbaric than al-Qaida’s. Their goals, which have nothing to do with true Islamic beliefs, are uncompromising.

Eliminate the jihadist extremists and there is surely a road to peace, albeit a bumpy one. Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the lack of commitment among Western allies and, under the pretense of contributing to the solution, rushed to fill the void. His indiscriminate bombing has killed and injured thousands of innocent civilians while willfully undermining Western aims. He has advanced the interests of Assad, a dictator who has used chemical weapons on his own citizens.

To be part of the solution, Canada must contribute more to the fight. We are currently addressing the results of the widespread unwillingness to get involved. But you can’t claim to be a leader and humanitarian, as Canadians so proudly believe their country to be, while turning your back as a preventable tragedy unfolds.

Decisive military action will save the lives of innocent people, preserve antiquities, discourage Putin’s opportunism and help stabilize a volatile and escalating situation.

Canada’s military is far from the biggest or the best-equipped. But its troops are second to none and regularly punch well above their weight in areas of conflict.

Canada has already gotten its hands dirty in the region. While it has ended bombing sorties in Iraq and Syria, its special forces are training, advising and fighting alongside Iraqi troops in military operations against ISIS.

It’s also providing small arms and ammunition to Iraqi forces, Canadian helicopters have been evacuating wounded, and Canada is helping pinpoint ISIS targets.

It can and should do more.

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Stephen J. Thorne is an award-winning journalist, editor and photographer. He has reported on the downfall of South African Apartheid and from war fronts in Kosovo and Afghanistan. 

anada ought to withdraw the army from the Syria/Iraq theatre and stop deploying our troops in penny packets to selected trouble spots around the world. With virtually no danger anywhere near our borders, we have sent troops to fight foreign wars since the South African War of 1899 to increase our international presence, aid our allies and fulfill alliance responsibilities. When we do so, however, we ought to ensure that our military commitments—mainly our army—are large enough to make a difference to whatever campaign we are joining and that Canadian political and economic interests are served by our actions. That does not happen when we thinly spread our tiny regular force army of just under 22,000 men and women hither and yon for purposes that are far more tokenistic than substantial.

Since its election in October 2015, the Liberal government has ended Canadian participation in the air attacks against ISIS but has deployed about 600 soldiers, including special forces, to “train” Kurdish forces fighting ISIS. In addition, the government has announced that 400 Canadian soldiers will be deployed to Latvia and another 600 are expected to go to Africa. So far, that’s about 1,500 soldiers and perilously close to the 2,500 or so trigger pullers that constitute the fighting edge of our army.

During the Cold War, the bulk of our forward deployed army was represented by the 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group stationed in Germany. Canada’s other three brigades were not expeditionary—they were not designed to be “mobilized” and sent abroad.

The deep budget cuts of the early 1990s eliminated the 4th Brigade while cutting the army back by about 5,000 troops. When Canada deployed troops on peacekeeping missions such as UNPROFOR to the Balkans in the early 1990s or UNOSOM to Somalia, battle groups were sent which were essentially battalions with combat engineers, communications troops and other auxiliary but necessary military occupations. All those deployments stretched the army to the breaking point.

When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, with Art Eggleton as minister of national defence, stuck to the idea that it would not send small groups of Canadian soldiers as Canada’s contribution to the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban. It was for this reason that they refused to join a British-led mission to police the Afghanistan capital of Kabul after the Taliban were pushed out later that fall. The British wanted a few hundred Canadian specialists but Ottawa would not agree. If Canada was going to join other NATO nations in the fight, we would send a large formation or none at all. Canadians wanted to take part and the government sent the 3 PPCLI Battle Group to operate under U.S. command in Kandahar province. All subsequent deployments to Kabul in 2003 and to Kandahar in 2005 were battle groups.

Why then is this new government doling out Canadian troops with a soup spoon? It is tokenism of the worst kind which will avail Canada little influence but put Canadian troops at risk. In the fight against ISIS, for example, a relative handful of Canadians are daily engaged without Canada having any international profile at all. The world is a very dangerous place these days with tragic and bloody conflicts taking place in Africa and potential full-blown wars elsewhere. Should we not, instead, prepare to make a significant contribution to NATO, rather than try to save the world with fewer soldiers than would fill a small-town hockey arena? The Canadian people and the Canadian government have a choice to make. If we are to embark on saving oppressed peoples or make war in concert with our allies in a meaningful way, let us increase our defence spending and enlarge our military—particularly the army—or stop kidding ourselves about how far our capabilities will stretch.

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David J. Bercuson, author of the "Eye on Defence" column in the Legion Magazine, is director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.