A Sow's Ear from a Silk Purse

Abstract

All history is a tale of 'slights and fights and spirits vexed,' and we must expect such unpleasantness as an assured thing, whereas peace is a good unguaranteed - dependent upon the unknowable interior dispositions of our friends. St Augustine, The City of God, 426 ADCANADA TODAY IS AN UNMILITARY NATION BY CHOICE, not by character. Political leaders habitually abandon military power as an instrument of national security and defence policy. No one should be surprised that Canada's security now depends 'upon the unknowable interior dispositions of our friends.' Military power, measured as capabilities, is occasionally recognized as necessary and important for Canada's national ends. But more often governments adopt defence policies that result in an irregular, but continuing, loss of military capabilities because they discount the utility of national armed forces.Abandonment as policy, though never announced as such, operates in two related dimensions - budgets and ideology - depending on the disposition of governments. Since 1945, military capabilities in Canada rose and (usually) fell according to a cycle of retrenchment and shifting ideologies. After the Second World War, Liberal governments cut defence budgets, then spent hugely from 1949 through 1953. Both Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments in the 1950s and early 1960s acknowledged the role of armed forces but still cut budgets, although they tried to control the rate of the descent. Nevertheless capabilities began to suffer. The arrival of Pierre Elliott Trudeau as prime minister in 1968 marked an ideological change in defence policy and with it a major cut in defence allocations. In 1974 Trudeau attempted to counter the adverse effects of this ideologically based policy, but without much conviction or success. Capabilities continued to decline. The Conservatives in 1983 practiced retrenchment while preaching 'honest funding' for the 'tools to do the job.' Capabilities eroded further. Today, the Canadian Forces struggle under a duel challenge: the code of 'financial responsibility' of Paul Martin, the minister of finance, and the ideology of 'human security' through 'soft power' of Lloyd Axworthy, the minister of foreign affairs. There is little room for military capabilities in this environment; consequently, Canada's military power is simply drifting away. This is no accident; it is government policy.Many commentators today see the withered and increasingly atrophied state of the Canadian Forces as an unintended consequence of retrenchment in government expenditures. Retrenchment undoubtedly contributed to the decline and will continue to do so, even if current policy were reversed immediately. However, Canada's armed forces have little value today as instruments of national policy because governments, especially after 1969, decided Canada had little need of them. This idea stumbled along to its own conclusions until 1993 when security and defence strategy shifted away from military power and military capabilities and towards the notion of soft power.Typically, defence expenditure bears little relevance to declared objectives. Funds are usually spent according to the pressures of the day on personnel, operations and maintenance (O&M), and capital. Because personnel and O&M costs are more or less fixed in the short term, capital to sustain capabilities and fund new ones almost always is a residue of these other expenditures. Defence allocations are often used to support domestic projects that serve the partisan interests of the government of the day. In the absence of government preferences, the budget is distributed to the institutions and capabilities that interest senior officers and officials in power. Defence policy is then merely the ad hoc ends of domestic partisan politics and of bureaucratic politics within the defence establishment.When governments reduce defence budgets, capital expenditures on capabilities decline and military power is lost. …