Forced to Change: Crisis and Reform in the Canadian Armed Forces
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Stripped by the government of the right to regulate itself, the Officer Corps, which represented the nation’s stewards of the profession of arms, was forced to reform itself. Key to this transformation was education. However, the road was not easy, as cultural change rarely is.
Forced to Change tells the story of how the Canadian Armed Forces found itself at its lowest point in history and how it managed to reform itself. The question is whether it was a fundamental transformation or just a temporary adjustment to weather the storm.
Bernd Horn
Colonel Bernd Horn is a retired Regular Force infantry officer and military educator. Dr. Horn has authored, co-authored, and edited more than forty books, including A Most Ungentlemanly Way of War: The SOE and the Canadian Connection and No Ordinary Men: Special Operations Forces Missions in Afghanistan. He lives in Kingston, Ontario.
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Forced to Change - Bernd Horn
Table of Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
About the Authors
Foreword
When I returned from Rwanda, I was convinced that our officer professional development system was failing the Canadian Forces, the government, and therefore, the Canadian people. This, I believed, was especially the case for senior officers and General and Flag officers. I had served my whole career during the Cold War but was woefully unprepared for what transpired afterward in places like Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and beyond. The new strategic and operational environment, unlike the period 1949–89, was not linear; it was far more complex and ambiguous, and unpredictable concurrent actions by these diverse disciplines, from humanitarian to combat/security, did not fit with our classic manoeuvre attrition warfare background. I realized that this environment called for a new kind of leadership and a much greater focus on the intellectual development of our officer corps. The old emphasis on the experiential and training dimension of professional development had to be reoriented to include a much greater educational component. But what is the right balance between these two dimensions of development of our officer corps? The warrior ethic is fundamental, but it is not enough to achieve mission success.
Fortunately, in the wake of the controversial report of the Somalia Commission in 1997, entitled Dishonoured Legacy, and led by the very dynamic minister of defence, the Honourable Doug Young, the system slowly began to change. I was directly involved in the first stages of this much needed reform, first as assistant deputy minister human resources and then for over a year as the Special Advisor to the Chief of the Defence Staff on Officer Professional Development (with emphasis on the officer corps).
After my medical retirement in April 2000, others took up the challenge against ongoing resistance. Bill Bentley and Bernd Horn were also involved from the beginning and, in fact, remained involved up until the present. In Forced to Change: Crisis and Reform in the Canadian Forces, they have provided a comprehensive and insightful account of the whole period, supported by the testimony of virtually all the key players. Part study of Canadian civil-military relations, part study of intra-organizational cultural change, and related as contemporary history, it is a salutary story of an institution struggling to adapt and come to grips with the national security and military issues of the 21st century and how to prepare officers for them.
It is, however, an ongoing story, and if the past is prologue, the lessons drawn out in this volume will prove very useful moving forward. And we must continue moving forward because I am not convinced that we are yet adequately preparing our senior officers for the myriad challenges they will face at the operational, strategic, and political/strategic levels in defence of Canada. Are they meeting the challenges of a multi-disciplinary arena when integration of capabilities is the norm in the face of ever more complexity and ambiguity?
Lieutenant-General (Retired), The Honourable Roméo Dallaire
Acknowledgements
We believe that the subject of this book has deep meaning for many military and civilian individuals who believe in a strong national profession of arms. Those who are concerned that their men and women in uniform, as well all those who belong to the larger Defence Team, be properly trained and educated so they can meet the challenges of both today and tomorrow. They are the ones who believe in a robust professional development program and a strong learning organization mentality that encourages taking lessons from both successes and failures. As such, we owe a great deal of gratitude to all those who shared their experiences, thoughts, insights, and reflections with us. Their willingness to discuss events, motives, and beliefs goes a long way to providing insight that will help others. It also demonstrates their deep respect and attachment to the profession of arms in Canada.
We would also be remiss if we did not thank Lieutenant-General (Retired), the Honourable Senator Roméo Dallaire for graciously writing the foreword to this book. Lieutenant-General Dallaire has been, and remains, an impassioned champion of a highly educated officer corps. He has done much to blaze a trail in this regard, and we are honoured for his support of this project.
In addition, Cathy Sheppard has our thanks for her continual willingness to dig up key documents and assist with the myriad tasks that make a project such as this possible. Finally, but by no means least, we wish to thank our wives Kim and Rebecca for their unrelenting support. Their strength and assistance allows us to continue to work on projects such as this.
Introduction
The Canadian military was in crisis. Divorced from the population and being used as a punching bag by the government.¹
— General Rick Hillier
There is no doubt that there was a crisis in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) in the period 1992–2000, with ramifications that have extended up to the present.² The crisis was centred around the Somalia Incident, beginning with the torture and killing of a Somali teenager in 1992 by Canadian troops deployed on a United Nations mission in Somalia. It developed into a crisis in Canadian civil-military relations as well as a crisis in terms of military professionalism. At its core were issues of military ethos and leadership, which were all bound up with the professional development of CAF officers. The proximate causes of the crisis can be readily traced beyond the deserts of Somalia to much broader issues such as the end of the Cold War and the rapidly emerging new security environment globally in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for which the CAF officer corps was woefully unprepared. These considerations are covered in Chapter One. However, deeper roots can be found in the ambivalence concerning officer training, and especially education, going back to the end of the Second World War.
Canada was never central to the major political and strategic questions that were the preoccupation of the U.S., Russia, and the U.K. from 1939–45. By war’s end, nonetheless, politicians and many senior officers were well aware that the challenges of the postwar era were daunting. For a short period it was taken for granted that the preparation of the officer corps to meet these challenges should be a priority within the defence community. But this concern was not sustained, and the important issue of officer development was dealt with only intermittently over the succeeding decades.
As early as 1947, Brooke Claxton, the minister of national defence, asserted that officer training was one of the most important matters to be dealt with in the organization of the armed forces.³ In the same year, the Inter-Service Committee on Officer Training recommended that a university degree be the entry standard for any officer. This recommendation would appear several more times over the years before it became policy in 1997. In addition, the committee suggested that the Royal Military College of Canada and Royal Military College in Esquimalt be established as tri-service military colleges where aspiring officers would receive their university education. By 1952 this had been accomplished, along with the establishment of a third service college, le Collège Militaire Royale at Saint-Jean, Quebec, to ensure Francophones had an equal opportunity.
In 1948 the National Defence College (NDC) was opened in Kingston, Ontario. This was designed to give civil servants and senior officers of all three services a broad perspective on national policy and international relations. The NDC continued to operate until it fell prey to the severe budget cuts of the early 1990s. It must be said, though, that relative to the theme of this book, it gradually lost its intellectual rigor, and by the 1980s, although it would be unfair to call it party central,
it had evolved into a course heavily oriented on extensive field
trips around the globe.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Canadian officer corps was highly credible and well respected by its allies as a competent tactical force, but it was becoming more and more evident that intellectual development, mainly through advanced education and the study of strategy and political/strategic issues, was being neglected. In spite of three service colleges and a subsidized Regular Officer Training Plan (ROTP) at universities across Canada, only a third of all serving officers actually possessed university degrees.
And in reality, Canada’s national security posture had changed. During the period 1949–68, Canada’s role in NATO had been static, and in some sense, simple. Tactical-level land and air units occupied front-line positions in Germany within the context of the doctrine of Massive Retaliation. This changed dramatically during the 1960s. NATO officially adopted a new strategic concept, that of Flexible Response, which was considerably more challenging at the political, strategic, and even operational levels of potential war. At the same time Canada reduced its contribution to Central Europe by half and took on the Canadian Air-Sea Transportable brigade group mission in North Norway. It was clear that the good old days of the 1950s were gone and officers had to be prepared for the more complex environment of the 1970s.
As a result, in 1969, an Officer Development Board (ODB) was created under Major-General Roger Rowley. The report, 323 pages in length, was indeed an impressive piece of work.⁴ Rowley determined that an Officer Professional Development (OPD) system had to satisfy three imperatives. First, all officers had to fully understand the philosophy and ethic of their profession and be able to devote themselves spiritually and rationally to its services. Second, all officers had to master an effective level of expertise. Lastly, he believed that all officers had to be given the opportunity to fully develop their intellectual potential. Concomitantly, he explained that the OPD framework had to be rooted in a clarity of mission and a set of moral imperatives that OPD called the Canons of the Military Ethic.
These canons were Duty to Country, Duty to Service, Duty to Other Members of the Profession, Duty to Subordinates, and Personal Responsibility.
The ODB also recognized the university degree as the foundation of professional expertise and reiterated that it had to be the academic threshold for entry into the officer corps. The Board also noted that OPD had to be provided through an integrated and holistic system of education and training that would take an officer from the pre-commissioning stage through the most senior rank levels. The critical component of the envisaged framework was the Canadian Defence Education Centre (CDEC), where the intellectual and spiritual core of the officer corps would reside. It was from this institution that the concepts of military professionalism and officership, essential for the future effectiveness and well-being of the armed forces, would be developed.
Not surprisingly, the OPD system recommended by Rowley never came to fruition. The report was published in the midst of the turmoil occasioned by the dual processes of Unification and Integration of the CAF. In addition, the government, led by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, released a foreign policy review and a Defence White Paper over the period 1970–71. These developments clearly distracted the senior leadership of the CAF, who were not, in any event, routinely focussed on officer professional development. Consequently, the Rowley Report never received the attention it deserved from the senior leadership of the CAF.
The next major focus on professional development occurred in the 1980s and was focussed on the requirement to address OPD for senior officers. The crux of the matter was the fact that the Canadian Armed Forces Command and Staff College was the last formal training for the vast majority of senior officers. Although the National Defence College existed, its enrolment was limited to an annual military course load of twelve individuals. This was insufficient, particularly in light of the increasing complexity of national security issues and the strategic environment at National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ).
As a result, in 1985, Major-General C.G. Kitchen was assigned the responsibility of addressing the issue. Kitchen’s analysis emphasized the social-political dynamic he believed the military profession, as part of society, had to be capable of participating in. Therefore, he believed this required the CAF to furnish its officers with more and better opportunities for university studies, especially at the graduate level. The Kitchen Report recommended that senior officers pursue graduate education in civilian universities. This idea was, however, quickly torpedoed by another study conducted by Colonel David Lightburn, who deemed the concept impractical. The Lightburn Study, tabled in 1986, argued that the answer to senior officer OPD lay within a more structured yet flexible framework centred on national security studies conducted at the Staff College and NDC.
Ongoing concerns in regard to the shortfalls of senior officer OPD fuelled additional work on the subject. In 1988, Lieutenant-General Rick Evraire tabled a paper on general and senior OPD that made three important recommendations. First, he noted that a special course applicable to each Service should be developed for senior commanders. Second, job-related short courses and seminars should be created. Finally, he argued for the establishment of a centre for national security studies. Evraire also emphasized the necessity of CAF policies that directly supported officer education and training.
None of these initiatives gained much traction. In fact, with the end of the Cold War and the severe budgetary cutbacks of the 1990s, OPD took a major hit. The National Defence College, the CAF Staff School, and two of the three military colleges (Royal Roads and CMR) were closed. In 1994 General John de Chastelain, the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), commissioned the Officer Development Review Board (ODRB) under the chairmanship of Lieutenant-General (Retired) Robert Morton to … review the education and professional development required by CAF officers during their careers and recommend a program which meets the requirements of a professional officer corps of the future.
In all, Morton’s committee made 280 implicit and explicit recommendations. They insisted that the weak officer development process in the CAF was rooted in a defective and inadequate Officer General Specification (OGS). They also argued that there were major gaps in OPD philosophy, including a need to develop a regime of professional development that has a military ethos woven into all aspects. The major failing of the OGS was to define all elements of the military profession, particularly the importance of the military ethos. Furthermore, it did not define the specific training and educational requirements for the four stages of officer development. In essence, the ODRB reiterated to a large degree the same conclusions and recommendations of the Rowley Report 25 years earlier.
Throughout, education as a cornerstone of an OPD system was consistently stressed. The Morton Report maintained the minimum education standard for officers be set at post-secondary school qualification, with the ultimate objective for all officers being a university-level baccalaureate degree. Integral to the officer’s commission and throughout an officer’s service was the requirement for an exemplary understanding of the ethos of the CAF, a commitment to duty, a high standard of leadership, and the specific knowledge base and critical thinking abilities demanded of a military officer.
The ODRB insisted that military ethos and ethics were core elements of OPD. They formed the framework within which officers accomplished their tasks. They also set the officer corps apart from civilian professions. As a result, each developmental period (DP) of an officer’s career (there were five DPs) was designed to provide for these requirements. While DP 1 was the formative component of the system because of its critical role in shaping the professional character of newly joined officers, the remaining DPs were tailored to reinforce, mature, and emphasize leadership, ethos, and knowledge attributes of officership.
However, any OPD framework would be hollow