DND Refuses to Discuss Combat status of Canadian Exchange Officers

By: Murray Brewster, CBC News 

New figures show there are 104 members of the Canadian military serving with other nations on exchange programs, but National Defence has refused to say how many of them are deployed in front line operations.

Officials are withholding the information even though internal government documents show at sometime in 2015 several Canadian fighter pilots — flying with an unidentified allied nation -—were engaged in combat against the so-called Islamic State.

The heavily redacted records, obtained by CBC News under access to information legislation, are dated April 15, 2015, and asked permission of former defence minister Jason Kenney to deploy a non-commissioned officer with a partner nation.

The Department of National Defence refused to discuss that case, but it was likely a dangerous assignment as a spokesperson said asking for ministerial approval was an "infrequent" occurrence.

When asked for up-to-date information about current exchange deployments, the department refused to provide any detail, citing a blanket of operational security.

"Due to force protection and operational security considerations, we cannot provide identifying information of our members who might be deployed while on exchange," said spokesperson Dan LeBouthillier.

The documents show the vast majority of Canadian exchange troops — 66 — are embedded with U.S. forces.

There are also more than two dozen attached to the British military, and a handful of others occupy positions with Australian, New Zealand, French and Dutch forces.

The exchanges, which are a long-standing practice meant to give Canadians practical experience with other countries, involve all branches of the military — the army, special forces, the air force and the navy.
Combat vs. non-combat

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair says it's unacceptable that the Liberal government, which promised transparency, is refusing to answer the pertinent question of how many Canadians are in harm's way in the service of other nations.

U.S. Army Sgt. LeRoy Bierfreund works with a Canadian instructor during an exchange program and live-fire training exercise at the Canadian Forces School of Military Engineering at CFB Gagetown, N.B. (U.S. Military Photo/Master Sgt. Benari Poulten)

"If Canadians are involved in the military missions of other countries, Canadians have to know that," said Mulcair. "We know what the Americans are doing there. We know what the British are doing there."

Mulcair said if Canada is sending troops to be embedded with those forces "how can Mr. Trudeau continue to pretend this is not a combat mission?"

Canada has up to 850 troops in Iraq, including 200 special forces operators, on its own mission in Iraq. The Liberal government recently extended the deployment until the end of March 2019.

Both the current Liberal government and the previous Conservative government have said the elite soldiers on the ground are advising and assisting Iraq's forces, and open fire on extremists only to protect civilians and allies.

The NDP say that constitutes a combat mission.

Steve Day, a former special forces commander, says he doesn't understand why the government simply doesn't come out and say the country is involved in a "low-intensity conflict" alongside its allies.

"Politicians do not give the Canadian public enough credit on why we have to do certain things," said Day, a retired lieutenant-colonel and head of the private security firm Reticle Ventures Canada.

"I think if they gave the Canadian public a bit more credit, they wouldn't be afraid to say combat. They don't have this debate in any other leading Western democracy."

Washington, under former president Barak Obama, parsed its words carefully when it came to military operations in Iraq, sending in special forces and using similar language about advising and assisting local forces.

Since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump that rhetoric has largely been jettisoned and the U.S. has openly acknowledged deploying troops in Syria to aid in the campaign to unseat ISIS from its de facto capital in Raqqa.

National Defence acknowledges Canadian special forces are eligible to serve "where opportunities exist" with other militaries on exchange, but refused to disclose how many, if any, are involved in U.S. operations in Syria.

And spokesperson Dan LeBouthillier, who declined to offer specifics about the current exchanges, recently drew a sharp distinction between the activities of Canada and its allies.

"Canadian Armed Forces personnel on exchange with other allied countries staff may be deployed by their host nation," he wrote in an email. "This can include a wide spectrum of activities, from humanitarian assistance to dynamic operations. In these instances, it is not a Canadian mission and Canada is not deploying these personnel. The host nation is."

The documents noted, however, that the federal government has discretion on whether to allow Canadians to serve in another nation's combat unit, noting "each situation is unique."
Political legacy

Mulcair argues the secrecy is more to do with politics than security.

"Justin Trudeau owes it to Canadians to come clean," Mulcair told CBC News. "For our troops to be in harm's way; Canadians have every right to know what's going on."

There was a political uproar in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq when it was discovered Canadians were serving in an exchange capacity, even though the government of former prime minister Jean Chrétien had decided to sit out the war.

During that time as many as 100 Canadians served in Iraq with U.S. and British forces.

Former chief of the defence staff, retired general Walter Natynczyzk, served as a brigadier-general commanding 35,000 U.S., British and Australian troops in Baghdad.

Retired lieutenant-general Peter Devlin, who later commanded the Canadian Army, also served in Iraq.

Internal government documents from 2008 show as many two dozen Canadians soldiers worked in the plans division of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in the run-up to the invasion and a further 35 were under U.S. command in an exchange capacity participating in the 2003 ground campaign.

The former Conservative government, with little fanfare, chose to acknowledge Canadians who fought in those campaign when it approved modifications to the existing General Campaign Star medal. The change meant campaign bars, which used to be attached to the medal, were replaced with theatre or service specific ribbons.

Why Canada refused UN’s request to go to the Congo in 2010

By: TONDA MACCHARLES, Toronto Star 

OTTAWA—Canada took a long hard look at sending a military commander and soldiers to lead international peacekeeping troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo at the request of the United Nations.

It was early 2010. And the Canadian government was angling — in vain, it would turn out — for a rotating seat on the powerful UN Security Council.

By May, the former Conservative government of prime minister Stephen Harper had turned down the request.

Canada would not send soldiers to lead or boost a UN mission that was struggling to stabilize a massive country where government and army corruption was endemic, rebel attacks rocked the east, and violence to control Congo’s vast mineral riches flared.

The government offered only a brief explanation: “Canada is fully engaged in Afghanistan until 2011. That is what we are concentrating on for now.”


However, with Africa back on the radar, the Star conducted interviews and reviewed nearly 1,000 pages of heavily redacted documents obtained under the Access to Information Act to put together a picture of why Canada gave the UN the cold shoulder, and to shed light on the looming decision facing the current Liberal government.

It’s clear that in 2010 it wasn’t simply a question of military resource constraints. The military said it had enough.

Instead, it came down to a political decision by Harper to avoid what looked certain to be a military and political quagmire for years to come.



Sources say Harper and his cabinet took the view that Canadian soldiers should not be sent to function as domestic or counterterrorism police in countries that were effectively at civil war where there was no end in sight.

Another source puts it differently. Deepak Obhrai, parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs at the time, said: “Let me tell you, the Harper doctrine was very clear on these things — if you’re not effective, he does not see why we should be going out there.”

Six years later, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau boasts that “Canada’s back” on the world stage.

He, too, is angling for a seat on the Security Council, but he has decided to recommit Canadian troops to UN “peace operations.” Ministers and public servants are analyzing where to deploy up to 600 Canadian soldiers and 150 police.

Three ministers say a decision has not yet been made. But it seems several African hot spotsbeckon: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, South Sudan, or the Central African Republic.

All present opportunities, challenges and risks from Canada’s perspective.

Last time around, that is exactly what the public servants, deputy ministers, military leaders and government officials analyzed.

There had been at least three requests from the UN for Canada to contribute a commander to the Congo mission, according to the documents. The UN also indicated it needed 13 helicopters, “intelligence assets,” and a C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft for a mission that was — and remains — the largest deployment of peacekeeping troops in the world, where some 20,000 military personnel wear blue helmets.

The UN asked Ottawa to send a deputy police commander for its police mission in Congo. In addition, the European Union, which also had a police operation there, asked Canada for a police commander and officers.

At least one senior Mountie, who had previously worked with the EU’s mission, urged the RCMP to accept.

However, an RCMP briefing memo was grim:

“The conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been one of the bloodiest, longest-running struggles in the world, with a death toll surpassing that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

“Belligerents on all sides commit horrific human rights violations and use sexual violence as a weapon of war. The front lines of the conflict are blurred, with many actors with varying loyalties.”

The RCMP called the overall security situation in the country “stable, but unpredictable, particularly in the east”



Then, as now, Congo President Joseph Kabila faced elections and was fighting to keep power. He demanded the UN reduce its troops and he strong-armed his opposition critics.



Today, Kabila is defying a constitutional two-term limit and vying for a third. The UN reported last week that Congolese police, armed forces and the Republican Guard had used excessive — including lethal — force to quell demonstrations in September when at least 53 people were killed and 143 injured over two days, and more than 299 were unlawfully arrested.

The assumption in 2010 by military and foreign affairs officials was that a Canadian commander would need Canadian troops under his direct command. The lesson of retired lieutenant-general Roméo Dallaire’s 1994 experience in Rwanda had been learned.

Officials urged that the request for a force commander and the possibility of a larger troop contingent in 2011 be considered separately.

According to Andrew Leslie, who was then the commander of Canada’s army, the Department of National Defence believed the deployment was not only doable, but easily managed and worth doing.



Now an elected Liberal MP and government “whip,” Leslie said the military had ample capacity to take on a new deployment, putting the skills honed in Afghanistan to work in another country that needed stabilizing. It could show allies that Canada was prepared to help in other global hot spots.



At first, Michael Kaduck, director of peace operations and fragile states policy at Foreign Affairs, wrote that the mission was “potentially an attractive offer” in line with Canada’s priorities in the region.

In a widely distributed memo, he nevertheless urged “a hard look” at what civilian, military and police support Canada could offer, what impact it would have on Canada’s engagement in UN missions in Haiti, Darfur and South Sudan, and what kind of political support such a mission would require and for how long.

“We need to consider the overall question of whether this is the right UN mission for Canada, now and in post-2011,” wrote Kaduck.

At that time, Canada had just 12 soldiers posted to the UN in Congo, mainly as legal advisers to improve the military justice system and the Congolese capacity to investigate and prosecute the rampant sexual violence.

For months, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade analyzed the UN request under criteria for when Canada should intervene in fragile states and conflict zones. It sought input from its many branches, Canada’s international development agency CIDA and from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Candice Dandurand, a civilian deployment officer at foreign affairs, “firmly” supported sending Mounties to the EU mission, according to a March 17, 2010 email. She said it dovetailed with Canada’s support of the UN mission to fight rampant sexual and gender-based violence, and had the backing of the department’s Africa branch and the Canadian embassy in Kinshasa, the capital.

Other advisers identified challenges: Canadian allies were represented at mission headquarters, but there were no “formed contingents” of allies on the ground. The bulk of the UN forces came from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uruguay and South Africa.

Canada had already contributed more than $250 million on the Congo mission since its start in 1999, and had spent $124 million over the previous decade in humanitarian and development aid, and could build on its work.

There had been “progress” as a result of Canada’s efforts, but advisers said “much more is needed.”

“The DRC is a fragile but not a failed state.”

The analysis weighed more questions: whether Congo was a direct and/or indirect threat to Canada or its allies, whether it was a source of organized crime or terrorism, whether Canada had a major strategic interest, such as a key bilateral relationship, at play and whether engagement carried “implications under international law, including tribunals such as the International Criminal Court.”

The answers to those questions and others are blacked out.

Andrew Leslie fills in some of the gaps.

He says the Canadian Forces saw the region’s instability as a potential recruiting ground for Al Qaeda and were keen to help stabilize it. He says government officials also considered the extensive business interests of the Canadian mining industry, and the fact that China was increasingly influential in the country.

Leslie was dispatched in February 2010 — before the UN’s request was formalized in March — on a reconnaissance trip.

Leslie says the military had boosted its ranks of reservists and regular members by 3,000 members in the three years up to 2009. “I knew, and we knew, that we would have had capacity in 2010 . . . to launch into the DRC — not in the same scale as in Afghanistan but in a meaningful way . . . and we could have sustained it, of course.

“It was viewed as a mission that was definitely interesting. If the government of Canada wanted us to do it, we would do it.”



The military’s enthusiasm didn’t impress the Harper government.



In the view of two former senior Harper government officials, the military was always keen to deploy, no matter what.

The government insiders spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about cabinet-level discussions at that time.

One told the Star that the UN’s request, like many that came to the Harper government, amounted to a dangerous mission that threatened to put Canadian lives on the line in a country where there was little peace to keep, and no clear end in sight.

The Conservative prime minister’s skepticism was a big change from 2006 when Harper first travelled to Afghanistan and told Canadian troops that they were, “serving in a UN-mandated, Canadian-led security operation that is in the very best of the Canadian tradition, providing leadership on global issues, stepping up to the plate, doing good when good is required.”



Others explain the government’s thinking differently.



Obhrai said in an interview the government had “no appetite” for the mission because it had concluded Canadian troops could not be “effective” in achieving Canadian goals. It was thought the “more appropriate” intervention would be to offer logistical support to African Union forces, which the Conservatives did. As well, given widespread human rights abuses, including by government forces, “it would have been absolutely disastrous,” said Obhrai.

“Who are you supporting? Which side are you going with? The side that you want to go with are (sic) also being accused of human rights abuses.”

Whatever misgivings Harper had were soon underscored.

At Foreign Affairs, plans for a team of department and RCMP officials to travel to Congo were put on hold because Canada’s then-governor general, Michaëlle Jean, was on an official four-country visit to Africa, including Congo and Rwanda — at Harper’s request.

Jean’s mid-April trip revealed just how much displeasure had been generated by the Harper government’s decision to reduce the number of African countries eligible for aid, and how little enthusiasm there was for Canada’s attempt to win a Security Council seat.

While she was there, a senior UN official in Congo made a direct public appeal to Canada to help. Soon after Jean returned to Ottawa, it was rebuffed. The government decided to turn down the request for a commander.

Late on April 29, 2010, Canada notified the UN of its decision, and Defence Minister Peter MacKay reassigned Leslie to lead a study of how to transform the Canadian Forces.

“I think they (the former government) were tired of the Afghan war,” Leslie now says. “That they were tired of either soldiers going overseas and getting hurt . . . or even worse. I think they were tired of spending money on these missions, and they were a tired team.”

Yet even after refusing the UN’s request, officials continued to study the possibility of deploying to Congo in the following year. The Foreign Affairs and RCMP team finally travelled to Congo in mid-May.

What the group saw there was eye-opening.

Handwritten notes from one unidentified official documented “a lack of infrastructure, starvation deaths in prison” and a dismal judicial system unable to keep pace with sex-crime investigations. Goma’s one judge faced a “backlog of 8,000 cases.” The country had fewer than 1,200 judges and needed “at least 5,000.”

It’s difficult, due to redactions, to say if the final recommendation to cabinet was in favour of a deployment of more Canadian military and civilian resources.

But Leslie believes the bureaucratic analysis shifted to accommodate the political signal that the government was averse to the mission.

Today, he still believes Canada should engage in an African mission, although as a member of the Privy Council, he will not say where he thinks Canada can be most effective.

Obhrai, one of the Conservative party’s leadership contenders, says the problems that were obvious in Congo in 2010 are evident to this day, and the same risks exist no matter what troubled nation in Africa Trudeau might be looking at.

He said his advice to Trudeau: “Don’t do it.”

Harper government ‘messed up’ jet-replacement process: Sajjan

By CHRISTOPHER GULY, and RACHEL AIELLO, The Hill Times

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan says he’s moving as fast as a he can on finalizing a plan to replace Canada’s fighter jets but that the previous Conservative government “messed up” the process and that’s why things are taking so long,

“We’ve been moving on that as quickly as possible, but this file is extremely complex and it had been thoroughly, if I can say, messed up from the previous government and it has slowed things down,” Mr. Sajjan (Vancouver South. B.C.) said in an interview with The Hill Times last week. “We should have replaced our fighters a long time ago, and now we’re dealing with another potential capability gap for our Air Force.”

He said something would happen on this file “sooner rather than later” in terms of deciding on a process for picking a replacement to Canada's aging fleet of CF-18s.

Last week, the House of Commons National Defence Committee recommended that the government decide on a CF-18 replacement within the next 12 months.

Mr. Sajjan the government has to “make sure we have the right aircraft for our men and women. And it was only last November since we formed government, but replacement of the fighters was something we knew is a necessity.”

Meanwhile, man who once saw oversaw the lifecycle management of Canada’s CF-18 fighter jets says the Liberals should stick to their 2015 campaign commitment and not purchase the F-35 stealth fighters the former Conservative government wanted.

“We do not need the F-35,” said Paul Maillet, a retired Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) colonel who as an aerospace engineering officer was responsible for the military’s fleet of CF-18 Hornets.

He said that Canada would “pay far too much and get far too little” for Lockheed Martin’s F-35A Lightning II at a time when Justin Trudeau’s government is shifting the country’s military focus to peace operations.

The results of an independent audit by accounting firm KPMG, released in late 2012, pegged the cost of buying and maintaining 65 F-35s at $45.8-billion over a 42-year period. Mr. Maillet said the price tag is a lot higher in the U.S., which now considers the F-35 the standard for fighter jets.

“It will cost the Americans more than a trillion dollars, and it’s the most expensive military project ever,” he explained. “Yet we’re nearing the end of an era of manned fighter aircraft, and there’s a lot of overlap going on with unmanned drones right now.”

Mr. Maillet, who before his 2001 retirement from the military served as director of defence ethics at DND, said Canada doesn’t need stealth fighter jets to protect national sovereignty or contribute to United Nations or NATO peace missions.

“If we are no longer doing bombing campaigns in the Middle East, our money should be better spent elsewhere.”

Vimy Paper: The F-35 Program, Defence Procurement, and the CF-18 Replacement Debacle

The Conference of Defence Associates has published it's latest Vimy Paper. In it, Richard Shimooka outlines the troubled history of the RCAF's CF-18 replacement. Shimooka starts as early as 1997, but mainly focuses on the Harper Era in his paper, tracking the procurement of the CF-18 Replacement from 2006 to 2015. While Shimooka does not make a direct appeal to purchase the F-35 JSF; I believe there is a fair amount of bias in the article to indicate that he is calling for the government to learn from past procurement, and move forward with the purchase. 

Decide for yourself: 

"The Fourth Dimension: The F-35 Program, Defence Procurement, and the Conservative Government, 2006-2015"

 Executive Summary:

Since 1997, the Government of Canada has engaged in a process to replace its tactical fighter fleet of 122 CF-18 Hornets, which were acquired in the 1980s. Much of that history has been intertwined with a single aircraft: Lockheed Martin's F-35. The public discourse has largely been dominated by criticism of the selection process, as well as the aircraft's capabilities, cost, and attendant industrial benefits.

Inside of government, a very different view emerged. The federal bureaucracy, initially led by the Department of National Defence worked to undertake a proper evaluation of the CF-18 replacement program. Far from being exorbitantly expensive or technologically defective, it discovered the F-35 was the best option for Canada and recommended a sole source selection in 2010. Program troubles in the United States, two deeply flawed oversight reports by the Parliamentary Budget Officer and the Office of the Auditor General, as well as a series of errors by the government resulted in a loss of support for the project. Consequently, a new assessment process was launched in 2013, known as the Seven-Point Plan. However, it too endorsed the sole-source selection of the F-35, resulting in a series of culminating events leading up to the 2015 federal election.

This study is a history of these events. It is a story not of bureaucratic mismanagement or military bias, but one of civil-military relations and political dysfunction. The Liberal victory in the October 2015 election might have initiated a new phase of the CF-18 replacement program history. Yet the preceding several years should provide a number of lessons going forward. Few, if any, of the program's fundamentals have changed. Many of the considerations that underpinned the original analysis are still valid. The current government would do well to take heed of what occurred before.

To read the full Vimy Paper, see link below.

http://www.cdainstitute.ca/images/Vimy_Papers/Vimy_Paper_33.pdf

Harper government funded Seaspan Shipyard to help with Contract

BY MARIE-DANIELLE SMITH

OTTAWA — The former Conservative government quietly helped fund improvements for a Vancouver shipyard that was scrambling to get ready for shipbuilding, despite saying it would not do so.

Seaspan’s Vancouver Shipyards received about $40 million in 2014-15 to get its engineering systems up to speed as it prepared to build non-combat vessels for the Canadian Coast Guard, documents suggest.

But one of the premises underlying the Conservative government’s enormous National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy (NSPS) — lauded by prime minister Stephen Harper’s government as the biggest defence program in Canadian history — is that shipyards would have to fund improvements to their shipbuilding infrastructure at no cost to Ottawa.

The existence of a government-funded program to help Seaspan, an association of western Canadian marine transportation companies, was revealed at a House of Commons committee meeting in December 2014.

Marty Muldoon, assistant deputy minister and chief financial officer at Fisheries and Oceans, told committee members $9.5 million of his department’s money was going to the “horizontal engineering program plan,” an initiative shared with the Department of National Defence.

That money was to help Seaspan “hit full stride in manufacturing capability or construction capability for our vessels,” he said.

“Basically, what we’re doing is investing in the shipyard’s capability to get itself up to capacity, to start churning out vessels.”

(Seaspan) went from a very small shipyard to a very large shipyard in a very short amount of time.

Though Public Services and Procurement Canada admits the contract is being used to help Seaspan create “material, engineering and production standards” for its yard, making systems consistent across “multiple projects,” it says this doesn’t count as the type of shipyard improvement forbidden under the agreement governing NSPS.

Jessica Kingsbury, a spokeswoman for PSPC, said this contract is “clearly distinguished” from capital investments Seaspan made to ready its yard for shipbuilding.

The horizontal engineering program plan is “in no way related to the criteria which the shipyards were required to meet, at their own cost, to achieve target-state,” she added.

Rather, it aims to co-ordinate and manage Seaspan’s non-combat package “more strategically,” through building a “program management capability.”

All three bids for NSPS contracts — from Halifax-based Irving, Seaspan and Quebec-based Davie — orginally included the guarantee that Ottawa wouldn’t pay to help the shipyards get ready for shipbuilding. Federal money would only go towards the shipbuilding projects.

But successful bidders Irving and Seaspan lacked capacity to start building ships when umbrella agreements were announced in 2011. Both negotiated to include clauses in the agreements, saying Ottawa would reimburse them for shipyard infrastructure if it decided to spend less than promised on new ships.

Irving and Seaspan also went to the provinces for money. Irving got a $304-million loan from Nova Scotia, $260 million of it forgivable, while Seaspan got only $40 million, for training from British Columbia.

No federal money was officially announced for either shipyard.

The agreement between Ottawa and Seaspan, dated Feb. 14, 2012, obtained by the National Post, says Seaspan agreed any improvements to shipyard capacity would be “paid for by the company entirely at its own expense” — unless Canada reneged on its commitments.

In November 2014, Seaspan announced a two-year, $170-million project to modernize its shipyard had finished “ahead of schedule and under-budget,” according to its website.

Still, recent job postings show it has continued hiring people to work on the “horizontal engineering program plan.”

The plan does not include improvements to physical infrastructure, but focuses on improving engineering systems, technical programs and management, says a consultant who worked for Seaspan from April to October 2014.

“It covered the whole spectrum of trying to stand up an engineering organization that was robust enough to support the overall shipbuilding objectives,” said Matt von Ruden, now director of vessels at Washington State Ferries.

Employees believed Ottawa was helping fund this work, he confirmed. “The government understood the need for this program, as far as I understand,” he said.

“(Seaspan) went from a very small shipyard to a very large shipyard in a very short amount of time.”

The fact government money was used for “systems” and “programs,” not physical infrastructure, may have made this a grey area under NSPS guidelines.

Several unusual contracts posted on the government’s Buy and Sell website from June 2014 to October 2015 appear to show money flowing into such programs.

For example, Public Services and Procurement Canada sourced just under $40 million in “engineering services” from the Vancouver shipyard.

Contracts are labelled as noncompetitive, representing the “best interests” and “value” to government. They differ from other contracts held by Seaspan, which are usually identified as being tied to a shipbuilding project.

The NSPS has an official budget of $39 billion, with $8 billion set aside for non-combat vessels.

Construction is expected to take at least 20 to 30 years, says the procurement department.

Seaspan began building the first of three offshore fisheries science vessels in June 2015 and the second in March. The three vessels, the first NSPS ships to come out of the improved Vancouver shipyard, are scheduled to be delivered by the end of 2017.

• Email: mdsmith@postmedia.com |
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