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UNSUSTAINABLE AT ANY PRICE: The Canadian Armed Forces in Crisis
UNSUSTAINABLE AT ANY PRICE: The Canadian Armed Forces in Crisis
By Wolf Riedel Available at Amazon.com
By Wolf Riedel Available at Amazon.com
CHAPTER 1
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
“Our defence policy is predicated on the kind of asymmetric warfare we have faced since the end of the Cold War and it really ignores the looming strategic threats that Russia, China and maybe some others pose as well.” Richard Cohen[1]
Introduction
“Paradigm Shift - a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing the former way of thinking or organizing with a radically different way of thinking or organizing”[2]
Are the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) ready for the next conflict? Do they project a credible deterrence? Are they value for money? This book argues that the answer is, clearly, no. Canada has built an ineffective force structure that is quickly becoming unsustainable both as a combat force and as a line item in Canada’s budget. As a consequence, Canada must re-assess what the CAF’s structure ought to be, and, in particular, critically examine the role and organization of its various components. To be blunt, the Department of National Defence (DND) and the CAF are in a crisis but refuse to face the issues involved.
The United States has recognized the threat and is doing something about it.
The most recent US National Defence Strategy (NDS), issued in January of 2018[3], recognizes that the US is “emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding.” It identifies China as a “strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea” and states that “Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors.”[4] At the time of the writing, Vladimir Putin and his parliament are taking steps to change the Russian constitution in such a way as to allow Putin to stay in power until 2036. Clearly Russia’s fundamental approach to its neighbours is not about to change in the short term.
In response to this threat the US Department of Defence (DoD), in its progress report of September 26th, 2018[5], stressed the adoption of three lines of effort: Lethality—Build a more lethal force; Alliances—Strengthen alliances and attract new partners; and Reform—Reform the Department for greater performance and affordability.[6].
Congress’s Commission for the independent review of the NDS (NDSC)[7] found, on November 13th, 2018[8], that the “security and wellbeing of the United States are at greater risk than at any time in decades. America's military superiority ... has eroded to a dangerous degree ... (it) might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia. The United States would be particularly at risk of being overwhelmed should its military be forced to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously.”[9]
According to RAND,[10] “the US keeps losing, hard, in simulated wars with Russia and China” notwithstanding that the US had a 2019 defence budget of US$716 billion[11] against China's US$228 billion and Russia's US$66.3 billion in 2017.[12] The problem is that the current US Full Spectrum Operations strategy is vulnerable to its adversaries’ Hybrid War and Anti-Access Denial strategies. In response the US is developing new strategies under the rubric of Multi-Domain Operations.[13]
Canada has recognized the threat but has done little to respond to it
Canada's current defence policy—Strong, Secure, Engaged (SSE) issued in 2017[14]—concedes that:
Recent years have witnessed several challenges. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea is an example that has carried grave consequences. Activities in the South China Sea highlight the need for all states in the region to peacefully manage and resolve disputes in accordance with international law, and avoid coercion and other actions that could escalate tension.
The re-emergence of major power competition has reminded Canada and its allies of the importance of deterrence. ... A credible military deterrence serves as a diplomatic tool to prevent conflict and should be accompanied by dialogue. NATO allies ... have been re-examining how to deter a wide spectrum of challenges to the international order by maintaining advanced conventional military capabilities that could be used in the event of a conflict with a “near-peer.”[15] (Emphasis added).
Canada, however, has done little since 2017 to confront the situation. It neither maintains credible “advanced conventional military capabilities” nor can it be considered as having a military that is capable of “near-peer” combat with either Russia or China.
While the SSE requires the CAF to be prepared to provide, simultaneously, several small sustained and time-limited deployments there are no requirements to provide any one contingent larger than 1,500 personnel; basically a single battle group.
Is that enough? The answer has to be no.
The gold standard of deterrence and assurance is a defensive posture that confronts the adversary with the prospect of operational failure as the likely consequence of aggression.[16]
At the end of the day, 450 Canadian troops and their assorted brothers-in-arms in Latvia are not going to deter Vladimir Putin’s newly equipped armoured divisions and missiles unless they're backed up by substantial and immediately available combat forces. Canada's ambition of ‘two sustained deployments of 500-1500 personnel’ and ‘one time-limited deployment of 500-1500 personnel’ will probably not impress Mr. Putin.[17] (Emphasis added).
According to RAND, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) needs at least seven brigades—three of them heavy—to keep Russia from overrunning the Baltic states in sixty hours.[18]
The Canadian Army’s transformation to light and medium-weight forces[19] has made it an army with few teeth. It has stripped itself of the capability to fight a modern war in Europe.
As Chief, Hillier sought to transform the Canadian forces “from a Cold War-oriented, bureaucratic, process-focused organization into a modern, combat-capable force, where the three elements – navy, army and air force, enabled by special forces – all worked together as one team to protect Canada by conducting operations effectively at home and abroad.” Like countless military visionaries before him, he advocated an agile and flexible military that could field the right kind of force for assigned missions, whether to deal with natural disasters such as a tsunami or ice storm, or counter an insurgency in southern Afghanistan. The charismatic and personally likeable Hillier promoted his brand of transformation with the evangelical fervour of a latter day Elmer Gantry, effecting the closest thing ever to a personality cult within the Canadian Forces. In fact, Hillier was able to do what was institutionally impossible in America and Britain for three reasons: the military inexperience of Canadian politicians, the relatively tiny size of the Canadian Forces, and the overly powerful position of the Chief of the Defence Staff.[20]
Deliberately missing from Hillier’s vision was the heavy capability needed for Europe as well as other theatres. Heavy forces played a major role in Iraq in 1990/1, in the Chechen wars, and again in Iraq in 2003, all well before Hillier started his tenure as CDS. In fact these conflicts occurred even before the Army planned the divestment of its heavy tanks and self propelled guns while he was Chief of the Land Staff.
Even more important, Canada’s military has neither a real plan nor an ability to expand its standing forces into something larger in a crisis. As J.L Granatstein and LGen (ret’d) Charles Belzile stated when discussing mobilization (or “activation”) of the reserves in their ten year review of the Special Commission of the Restructuring of the Reserves 1995:
... Another way of putting this is that no planning is being done for a major war.
This is shortsighted in the extreme. A military that thinks in terms of turning itself into a great host in a crisis is very different from one that is small, thinks small, and plans for very little.
The Canadian Forces needs a plan.[21]
The situation has not changed and in fact has grown much worse. The CAF has numerous, critical, capability gaps[22] the most significant of which is the absence of heavy-weight armoured formations.[23] Canada’s Navy is rusting out and unable to crew the ships that it can float. Its Air Force has been substantially delayed in replacing its current fighter fleet with aircraft capable of full participation in a major conflict together with its allies. Its capital acquisition programs are deeply flawed and, with a few key exceptions, incapable of providing major equipment and ammunition production and sustainment. In the NATO and rejuvenated Russia[24] context, Canada’s commitment is, at best, a trip wire—but a trip wire with nothing behind it is merely cannon fodder.
The purpose of this book is to look at how the CAF can build a more lethal, more credible force and how to reform the department for greater performance and affordability. In doing so, it will be guided by the government’s current financial commitments.
Observation 1.1: Canada recognizes Russia as a threat and recognizes the value of deterrence. The SSE requires the CAF to have advanced conventional capabilities in the event of a conflict with a near peer.
Defence Spending: What Is Enough?
Critics of Canada’s defence posture frequently point to its failure to meet the 2% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) guidelines as set out in the 2014 Wales Summit Declaration.[25] Despite criticisms that Canada is in default, it should be noted that countries only need to meet the spending guidelines by 2024. While technically not “in default” at this time, Canada’s current budget projections indicate clearly that it will not meet the target. The real question, however, is: do the guidelines actually provide a useful measure of a nation’s contributions to the alliance?
In one of his papers[26], defence management consultant John Dowdy argues that the 2% guideline needs replacing:
“There is too much focus on the ‘input’ (how much the member states spend) and too little focus on the ‘output’ (how much they get out of it),” says Magnus Petersson, the head of the Centre for Transatlantic Studies at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies. The Center for a New American Security argues that what matters is not just how much a nation spends on defense, but what it spends it on, and—critically—its willingness to use it.21 Jan Techau, former director of Carnegie Europe, says it all: “Spending at 2 percent says very little about a country’s actual military capabilities; its readiness, deployability, and sustainability levels; and the quality of the force that it can field. It also is mum about a country’s willingness to deploy forces and take risks once those forces are deployed. It does not assess whether a country spends its limited resources wisely.”[27] (Emphasis added)
and states:
What particularly skews the equation is the amount a country spends on pay, allowances and pensions. “In fact, more than 50 percent of European spending goes to salaries and pensions. Roughly speaking, an optimal mix is no more than 40 percent on personnel and a quarter on major equipment. Yet NATO Europe forces spend only 15.2 percent of their budgets on equipment, versus a much healthier 25 percent in the United States (and 24.5 percent in France and 22.6 percent in the UK).”[28] (Emphasis added)
Like much of Europe, Canada’s Department of National Defence spends in excess of half of its annual budget on salary, employee benefits, and professional and special services.[29] In 2015, Canada spent an additional one third for operations and infrastructure and the last one sixth on capital equipment; costs which the Parliamentary Budget Office at the time considered unsustainable.[30] DND/CAF headquarters continue to add General and Flag Officers at an alarming rate creating ever expanding bureaucracies at the expense of war-fighting elements. Canada's military and associated civil servant salaries are amongst the highest paid in NATO while the percentage of it's expenditures on equipment are a fraction of that of its allies.[31]
The question is: what outputs does the CAF deliver to the Canadian people for the $23 billion they spent? While comparing defence spending and military organizations from country to country is often like comparing apples to oranges, one can draw some general conclusions. The table below sets out some rough statistics comparing several NATO countries to Canada.
What is particularly noteworthy is that Canada’s GDP is the tenth largest in the world falling behind the UK, France and Italy but ahead of that of Spain and Poland and, for that matter, just ahead of Russia. While Canada could certainly afford to up the percentage of it’s GDP that it spends on the military, it is also quite clear from the above table that the significantly large amount that Canada does spend is not delivering the combat capable outputs that it should. France and the UK spend approximately 2.5 times what Canada does overall and while their respective navies and air forces deliver approximately that ratio, their army outputs are approximately fourfold that of Canada’s army (particularly in the field of support brigades needed to sustain operations). Canada spends significantly more than Poland and Spain, who have similar populations, but Canada has substantially less defence outputs. Why is that?
Output Inhibitors
Dowdy points to three deficiencies amongst NATO’s European allies which explain in part their low output rate compared to that of the US.
Personnel A big part of the problem of spending too much on personnel is the way many forces waste precious resources, maintaining Cold War bureaucracies rather than prioritizing frontline forces. The people and infrastructure supporting the fighting force (the tail) has failed to shrink as fast as the fighting force itself (the tooth), resulting in an ever-deteriorating tooth-to-tail ratio (Exhibit 3). The force is at the same time too large, with too many non-deployable forces, and too small, with too few deployable fighting forces. ...
Equipment Compounding the problem of too few euros going to equipment, the purchasing power of European governments is dissipated by an inefficient industry structure. Alexander Mattelaer at the Institute for European Studies argues: “The present degree of fragmentation in the European defense markets and organizational structures virtually guarantees a poor return on investment.”30 McKinsey’s analysis shows 178 different weapon systems in service in Europe, versus 30 in the US.31...
Operations and maintenance Many forces have failed to spend enough to maintain what equipment they do have, and their overall maintenance productivity is low. In 2014, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen revealed major deficiencies in the operational capability of important German weapons systems. For example, only 42 of 109 Eurofighters, 38 of 89 Tornado fighters, and 4 of 22 Sea Lynx helicopters were ready for service, mostly due to a lack of spare parts.32 Much new spending, in Germany at least, will have to go towards repairs of existing equipment that is no longer deployable due to cuts in spending on maintenance since 2010.33”[32] (Emphasis added)
Like Europe, Canada suffers from all three of these issues.
Observation 1.2: Canada needs to focus on the outputs generated by its defence dollars and control the inordinate amounts committed to personnel costs, inefficient equipment procurement and maintenance of aging equipment.
In the next chapter, we will examine how these, and other, inhibitors are at work within Canada. Then we will look at more useful measures of output and examine how to build a more lethal Canadian military.
Notes:
[1] Brewster, Murray “Why the US could lose the next big war - and what that means for Canada” CBC News November 18, 2018 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/defence-policy-trump-china-russia-1.4910038
[2] “Paradigm Shift” Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Other_uses
[3] The NDS is classified. For an unclassified version see: Department of Defense, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge, Washington, 2018
https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf
[4] Ibid at p. 1
[5] Department of Defense, Providing for the Common Defence - A Promise Kept to the American Taxpayer, 2018
[6] Ibid at pp. 1-2
[7] US Congress, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 s. 942 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-114publ328/pdf/PLAW-114publ328.pdf
[8] NDSC, Providing for the Common Defence - The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defence Strategy Commission 2018
https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/2018-11/providing-for-the-common-defense.pdf
[9] Ibid at pp. v-vi
[10] Freedberg, Jr, Sydney J, “‘US Gets Its Ass Handed To It’ In Wargames” Breaking Defense March 7, 2019
https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-gets-its-ass-handed-to-it-in-wargames-heres-a-24-billion-fix/
[11] “2019 Defense Budget Signed by Trump”, Defense Benefits 2018 https://militarybenefits.info/2019-defense-budget/
[12] “Global Military Spending remains high at $1.7 trillion” Stockholm International Peace Institute, May 2, 2018.
https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2018/global-military-spending-remains-high-17-trillion It can be argued that both receive more bang for their defence dollars. See e.g. Harshaw, Tobin “China Outspends the US on Defence? Here's the Math.” Bloomberg, May 25, 2018,
[13] Udesen, Major Kristian, “The Multi-Domain Battle: Implications for the Canadian Army” Canadian Forces College 2018
https://www.cfc.forces.gc.ca/259/290/405/286/udesen.pdf. See also: TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1 US Army Multi-Domain Operations 2028 https://www.tradoc.army.mil/Portals/14/Documents/MDO/TP525-3-1_30Nov2018.pdf
[14] National Defence, Strong, Secure, Engaged Canada's Defence Policy Ottawa, 2017
http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/mdn-dnd/D2-386-2017-eng.pdf and http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/mdn-dnd/D2-386-2017-fra.pdf
[15] Ibid at p. 50
[16] Ochmanek, David et al. “U.S. Military Capabilities and Forces for a Dangerous World” RAND Corp 2017 at p. 45 https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1782-1.html
[17] Cohen, Richard “Strong, Secure and Engaged - More of the Same?” Mac-Donald-Laurier Institute, June 12 , 2017
[18] Shlapak, David et al “Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank” RAND Corp 2016
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1253.html See also: https://www.rand.org/pubs/testimonies/CT467.html
[19] Canadian Army Land Warfare Centre, WayPoint 2018 p. 29
http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/assets/ARMY_Internet/docs/en/waypoint-2018.pdf
WayPoint 2018 is a status report of the CA’s transformation under Land Operations 2021
http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2009/forces/D2-188-2007E.pdf which itself is being replaced by Close Engagement: Land Power in an Age of Uncertainty Canadian Army Land Warfare Centre which is in draft form.
[20] English, Jack, The Role of the Militia in Today’s Canadian Forces, Canadian Defence and International Affairs Institute, 2011 p. 9
[21] J.L. Granatstein and LGen (retd) Charles Belzile, The Special Commission on Restructuring the Reserves, 1995: Ten Years Later Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, Calgary, 2005 p. 12
[22] See for example Peterson, Maj Cole, “Organizing Canada’s Infantry” Canadian Army Journal 16.2 2016 p. 54
http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2016/mdn-dnd/D12-11-16-2-eng.pdf
[23] See for example Halton, LCol Philip, “The Re-transformation of the Armoured Corps” Canadian Army Journal 17.3 2017 p. 65
http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2018/mdn-dnd/D12-11-17-3-eng.pdf
[24] Giles, Keir, “Assessing Russia’s Reorganized and Rearmed Military” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2017
[25] NATO Wales Summit Declaration 5 September, 2014
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_112964.htm
[26] Dowdy, John, “More tooth, less tail: Getting beyond NATO’s 2% rule”. The World Turned Upsidedown: Maintaining American Leadership in a Dangerous Age Aspen Strategy Group, Nov 2017 https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/more-tooth-less-tail-getting-beyond-natos-2-percent-rule
[27] Ibid
[28] Ibid
[29] National Defence, Consolidated Departmental Financial Statements 2017-2018 (unaudited) Ottawa Ontario, 22 August 2018
[30] Parliamentary Budget Officer, Fiscal Sustainability of Canada’s National Defence Program, Ottawa, March 26, 2015, p. 1
http://www.pbo-dpb.gc.ca/web/default/files/files/files/Defence_Analysis_EN.pdf
[31] Blanchet, Jean-Nicolas QMI Agency, “Canada's Military among highest paid in the world,” Toronto Sun, November 3, 2014
[32] Supra Note 26
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