[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Wednesday, November 29, 1995
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[English]
The Chairman: Order, please. Gentlemen, I'll open the review again. This is pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), a study of the report of the Special Commission on the Restructuring of the Reserves.
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Today we have with us Mr. Brian MacDonald and Mr. Paul Mitchell. I should note that although we have panelled our witnesses their presentations are not related and each is appearing on his own behalf.
Mr. MacDonald is well known to us from previous appearances at our committee and from his television commentaries. A retired career officer, he is currently a consulting editor of Militia Monitor magazine and a contributing editor to Defence Policy Review.
From 1984 to 1986, Mr. MacDonald was the commanding officer with the Toronto militia district. He has written widely on matters of Canadian defence and security policy. We welcome him here today.
Mr. Mitchell, representing a somewhat younger generation of defence analysts, has been with the Centre for International Relations at Queen's University and is currently with the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie University.
It is my understanding that Mr. Mitchell has recently completed his doctoral studies in defence and strategic analysis, and in welcoming him, I would like to add both my congratulations and those of the committee in that regard.
Gentlemen, each of you will make a presentation. Presentations are usually ten minutes long. Then we'll have questions from the members.
You'll notice our numbers are small. The Prime Minister is making a speech. The leader of the opposition and the leader of the third party will be making speeches regarding the current situation in Canada. Please bear with us. Hopefully others will show up as we go along.
Whoever wishes to start the presentations may do so.
Colonel (Ret.) Brian S. MacDonald (Consulting Editor, Militia Monitor): Thank you,Mr. Chairman.
As I indicated to the clerk of the committee, I intended simply to read the executive summary into the record and then to make one or two remarks with respect to the approach I've taken through the paper itself. I shall begin with the executive summary.
The report of the commission contains many non-controversial, useful and even praiseworthy recommendations for improvements in the administration of the reserves. For example, its comments about the complete incompetence of the militia pay system is but one of these. However, in my view the report suffers from certain crucial shortcomings which damage its credibility.
First among these is its failure to provide any estimate of the dollar savings to be achieved through the adoption of its proposed structural changes or, perhaps even more importantly, of the one-time and continuing costs to the Government of Canada of instituting its proposals.
It would be unheard of in the private sector for a management consulting firm, hired to investigate and make recommendations with respect to improving the cost-effectiveness of a client's operations, to submit a report without estimating the financial consequences of its recommendations and without providing a technical appendix that shows the basis of its calculations and the modelling assumptions employed so the client could verify the validity and accuracy of its assumptions.
In the private sector, clients are bottom-line oriented and expect bottom-line conclusions to be highlighted. In my view it is not too much to expect the same of a public sector consulting report.
It may very well be that the underlying reason for this lack of financial detail lies in the observations made by both the Auditor General in 1992 and the chief of the review services program evaluation team in 1995: the department's management information system is incapable of providing an accurate costing model of the true cost of the reserves. Those are the statements that have led to the charge of voodoo accounting in such publications as Militia Monitor.
If such is the case, one might have expected a management consulting team to have noted such deficiencies as rendering their conclusions subject to severe reservations, a form of the limited or qualified opinion provided by reputable auditing firms who cannot attest to the full accuracy of a client's financial statements.
The second shortcoming is the level of detail of the organizational model provided. Sweeping changes of the nature of those that seem implicit in the general model provided, which suggests the elimination of a very large number of militia units and locations, have both social and financial implications. The failure to provide a detailed model leads to high levels of multiple stakeholder anxiety and political resistance. This concern is exacerbated by the absence of the financial models already noted.
A ``thought-experiment'' model is included in this paper, which is consistent with the commission's recommendations and illustrates some of its potential effects, including the potential cost of immediately replacing up to 6,469 trained personnel since the real cuts could be double those planned.
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Third are certain specific organizational anomalies such as the apparent recommendation to eliminate 1,032 militia medical positions at the very time regular force medical resources are to be reduced and privatized, or the elimination of militia air defence capabilities that were originally transferred to the militia when they were eliminated from the regular force.
Now, it may be that the restrictiveness of the commission's terms of reference is preventing them from making critical cost-efficiency comparisons between proposed changes in reserve structures and possible alternate changes in regular structures. Indeed, the commission commented in the afterword that ``at times we felt that we were studying only one slice of a bigger and costlier apple'' and the commission urged the minister:
- to consider the creation of a special commission with the widest possible mandate to examine
the administration and structure of the Canadian Forces and the civilian component of the
Department of National Defence.
Now, if I may simply speak on the model I developed. I was quite fascinated when I first read the report of the commission and began to pose to myself the question of what this would actually look like if one sat down and did a model to see some of the implications. The approach I then took was to take the commission's model of a brigade group and, instead of including two infantry battalions, including three infantry battalions to make it consistent with the regular counterparts. This, of course, was possible within the commission's recommendations.
I then looked at the set of militia strengths, which the commission had so usefully provided in its report. I selected from those the units with the largest strengths in a single location to be the surviving units. Then I simply did a calculation to redistribute the establishment line serials or vacancies from the cut units to the surviving units.
Having done this, I was then able to look at the implications of this process. I was quite fascinated when I looked at the number of units and locations to be eliminated that this model, built upon the commission's principles, would substantially have degraded the footprint, which many of the witnesses to the commission held to be critically important to the cause of defence in Canada, from approximately 109 communities to 22. This is a reduction of 87 Canadian communities, or 80% of the current total.
I then listed those communities affected on page 4 of the report and included as well some personnel statistics in terms of those who did not appear to be affected by this model. I included those who would be lost completely to the system because, for example, the militia sergeant of artillery in Kenora, who is a trained artillery technician, has a civilian job in Kenora and is not going to move to Vancouver where the surviving regiment is. Similarly, in some of the larger cities, there is the question as to whether individuals will be prepared to retrain in a new classification to transfer to another unit or indeed to even transfer to a new unit of the same classification.
This, then, produced the sense of personnel turbulence in the system, which I found to be astonishingly high. According to the model I had produced, it ranged from something in the order of 43% in Quebec to as high as 66% in the Atlantic area.
Moving forward from this, I then simply looked at the problem of reconstituting within the reformed militia those skill packages cut in Kenora and various other small communities across the country.
It seemed to me instead of looking at a reduction from 18,400 to 14,500, we could conceivably be looking at a reduction to somewhere between a final state of 8,000 and 10,000. This would then, of course, require us to immediately gear up the training system to replace all of those people.
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This of course brings us to a further problem in that many of the individuals who would be replaced are not capable of replacing those packages because they enter at the entry level. You cannot, for example, in the case of the artillery, train a gun sergeant or a technical assistant sergeant in a matter of the ninety or so days of basic training. A combination of training courses and successive experience is required in order to be able to achieve that particular skill package.
This also led me to some other observations. We need to be more careful about doing comparative analysis. This brings me back to the very apt comments of the commission that we are dealing with one slice of a much larger and much costlier apple. It is critically important that we begin, in terms of cost-effectiveness, to compare various alternatives and to not focus simply upon the reserves.
Indeed, I've argued that if one takes the issue of the pay budget alone, the militia accounts for approximately 5.7% of the total force, and yet at times that 5.7% of the pay budget has delivered 40% or more of the deployed peacekeepers in former Yugoslavia. That struck me as a rather cost-effective ratio and led me to the somewhat wry comment, ``So what's broken? So what needs to be fixed?'' Perhaps we should be looking at other components of the entire structure to focus upon the economies that are required.
The final comment I would like make is with respect to the job protection legislation concept. I have long felt this is almost a mantra - we must have it without really looking at its consequences.
Let me put it in personal terms. My oldest son has recently graduated from York University with a dean's list masters degree in business administration. He found it difficult to find employment. He has his employment finally, and I occasionally see him around the house when he comes home to go to bed and before he leaves to go to work in the morning. He is simply an example of the constraints that young managerial and professional people are experiencing in this country: in order to keep a job and in order to be considered for promotion, one must be prepared to devote enormous amounts of time to the employer's interests.
Let us then take an alternative case of the young managerial professional person who is again competing for a promotion and indeed competing to retain his employment, is also actively serving in the militia and is in theory about to take advantage of job protection legislation. It strikes me that when the time comes to choose between promoting the militiaman and promoting the civilian, in terms of the bottom-line impact upon the firm, his employer will be inclined very much to promote the civilian rather than the militiaman, and indeed would be reluctant to hire the militiaman in the first place.
It seems to me that if you are really interested in pursuing the job protection legislation concept, you must recognize that you must also be prepared to try to build in an affirmative action program to ensure that militia service will not be a barrier to being hired, that it must in fact be given the same protected status as many of the other protected categories are in affirmative action legislation.
I have some reservations about the constitutionality of the job protection legislation concept, given that a very large number of employed persons in this country are employed in public sector organizations. There is the interesting question as to the ability of the Crown at the federal level to enforce its rules on the Crown at the provincial level, or indeed the municipalities and crown corporations that are creatures of the provincial authority.
To put not too fine a point upon it, given our current delicate situation coming out of the referendum in Quebec, I would pose the question as to whether one really wants to take on the Government of the Province of Quebec on such an issue.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Mr. Mitchell.
Dr. Paul Mitchell (Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, Dalhousie University):Mr. Chairman, thank you for that warm welcome. It is an honour and pleasure to appear before this committee. I would also like to convey the sincere appreciation of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies for inviting one of its members to testify here.
The commission's mandate specifically notes the pressing need:
- to restructure Canada's Reserve Force, notably the militia, with the aim of enhancing their
ability to respond to the requirements of the new global strategic environment.
- Strangely enough, nowhere does the report actually specify what this new global strategic
environment is, nor how the reserves will relate to it.
Nevertheless, the report does make extensive recommendations on the reserves and their use in the support of Canadian foreign and defence policy. For example, it recommends that mobilization plans be drafted and particular attention be paid to the reserve's role in stage three and stage four mobilization, which is recommendations 4 and 5. It also recommends the reorganization of the current district structure of the militia into seven brigade groups and the reorganization of the land force areas into divisional HQs: recommendations 6 and 7.
These recommendations illustrate several things about this report. First, it indicates a degree of magic accounting, whereby the Canadian army suddenly increases from one under-strength division to three full ones. Secondly, it suggests that these divisions are capable of operating as undifferentiated units, both within and amongst themselves. Last, it suggests that they are all expected to be effective on the battlefield; otherwise, why make the recommendation for change at all?
At its core, the report has an unstated assumption that warfare in the future will resemble World War II; that is, it will be a global conflict fought with regular combatants to a decisive conclusion. Society and industry would be mobilized to support the war effort and the reserves would take their place alongside the regular force, as they have in every conflict Canada has involved itself in. Most importantly, it suggests that there may be an element of time we can again rely on in preparing our forces for combat, as we have in every past conflict.
If one accepts that a future war is likely to resemble World War II, then recommendations 4 through 7 make perfect sense. Unfortunately, this is not what warfare is likely to resemble. Even the most recent strictly conventional conflict, the Gulf War, did not resemble the World War II style of fighting.
Predicting what the future is likely to be is a risk-filled endeavour, usually best left to psychics and other charlatans. In questions of national security this risk must be taken if adequate planning is to occur.
Luckily, there are several good indicators that allow us to speculate on the nature warfare is likely to adopt in the next century. Conflicts as diverse as the Gulf War, the Balkans, and ongoing disruptions in Europe and elsewhere allow us to make a sketchy picture of the role of force in the future.
Some wars will likely adopt many of the characteristics that began to emerge during the Gulf War. These are high technology, selective lethality, and speed.
Advances in command-and-control technology allow military commanders to know exactly, sometimes down to the square metre, where their forces are, as well as where their enemy is. Such technology will also allow them to deny similar knowledge to their opponent.
Economy of force is afforded by allowing greater efficiency in the use of destructive power. Where an entire wing was required to destroy a target in World War II, and a squadron in the Vietnam War, a single airplane is now capable of achieving the mission, with far less attendant collateral damage to the target.
The same technology as is achieving leaps in the management of military force will also speed up conflict. Smaller units, able to achieve their mission more effectively, will mean military forces will move much faster on the battlefield. The ``fog of war'', while always present, will have been lifted to a considerable degree by this technology, allowing rapid and decisive engagements to take place.
Because of this, states, when using military force in this manner, will no longer need to mobilize their industries and populations for war. Reserves may not be necessary. Furthermore, forces capable of surviving and operating on such battlefields will have to be highly trained, highly motivated, and highly professional. To get reserves up to such standards will take a prohibitively long time.
Lest I sound like too much of a technological revolutionary...warfare will adopt other forms that are likely to be just as nasty as the wars in the past that we are familiar with. As we have seen in the Balkans, warfare can degenerate into long, drawn-out affairs with low levels of technology and a high degree of lethality and be interminably slow: the exact antithesis of what I've just laid out.
Reserves would be ideal in such a conflict, through the augmentation of regular forces. Such conflicts would allow our nation to prepare the reserves for conflict. In any case, only small units of them may be required, fleshing out platoons or companies, roles the reserves could easily take on without too much difficulty or disruption to the regular force.
Uncommitted parties in conflicts like these will face particular constraints in the use of force, constraints that will be exploited by opposing forces. We have seen this in the Balkans, where forces on all sides have exploited the west's fear of accepting casualties through the taking of hostages. We also saw this in Somalia, where General Aidid's forces effectively utilized the same fear, in conjunction with modern information technology, to drive the Americans out of Somalia. Nineteen dead Rangers and one body dragged through the streets before television cameras were all that it took.
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Our nation would have to be prepared psychologically for these types of conflicts. Other than in conflicts that directly affected our survival, it is difficult to see an unlimited commitment arising from Canadian society to accept prolonged casualties from a distant battlefield, especially one where the goals sought were abstract, like international order or stability.
Finally, we see an even more horrifying vision of the future of conflict in places like Algeria, and ongoing disturbances in France and elsewhere, where shadowy non-state forces inflict chaos and destruction on society at large. Not warfare in the technical definition of the term, it is still a form that is likely to recur with increasing frequency and will probably be its dominant form in the next century.
As we have seen recently in the United States, this continent is not immune to the use of political and military terrorism, whether we pick Oklahoma City or the New York World Trade Centre as our example.
Our diverse cultural make-up suggests that conflict may be imported from abroad into this country, as has already happened with the Air India disaster and several other lesser disturbances.
However, as Oklahoma City demonstrates, what many would consider ``the True North'' - i.e., white Canadians - may also pose a substantial threat to order in this country. The growth of extremism and the willingness to use force is not limited by ethnicity. In conflicts like these, reserve forces are likely to offer considerable utility due to their dispersion throughout the country and thus the lower response time time needed to get them on station. Because of their connection with the community, support for reserve operations in these contingencies is likely to be high. Indeed, this connection may make them more useful than the regular forces.
The commission appears to have fumbled the ball by blithely making some unexamined assumptions on the nature of conflict. As I have noted, reserves are likely to retain considerable utility in the future, but only for very specific operations.
Were this an academic paper, I would suggest that more research needs to be conducted on recommendations 4 through 7. It is simply not clear that the reserves will have the role foreseen for them by this commission on future battlefields. There may be no need to flesh out stage three and four mobilization plans for the reserves, for to commit them to that sort of warfare would be to ask Canadians to sacrifice their lives for symbolic purposes only, a tragic waste.
While changing the district structure to a divisional one will undoubtedly save resources through the elimination of headquarters, reserve brigade groups are likely to be a distinct liability to regular force units on the modern battlefield. Some conflicts are likely to require augmentation, a role the reserves can play well. However, this will require some degree of commitment on the part of the country, which, again depending on the circumstances, may not be forthcoming.
In the decentralized conflict that is likely to afflict many states in the next century, perhaps even our own, reserves will continue to retain considerable utility. However, to restructure the reserves based on the simple and hidden assumptions made on warfare contained within this report may be to hamstring our regular forces and sacrifice those members of our civil society who show its greatest commitment, volunteering their lives for its defence.
Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Mitchell. Those were two very good documents.
Now I'll go to our questioners. We'll start with Mr. Hart.
Mr. Hart (Okanagan - Similkameen - Merritt): I feel very much alone on this side of the table today.
Mr. MacDonald, you talk about shortcomings in the cost analysis and what seems to be lacking in this. What would you suggest? How should it be done?
Col MacDonald: The fast answer is that what is required is a system of information processing within the Department of National Defence so they can actually capture the costs of the reserves instead of simply alleging the costs. Let me give you some examples.
One of the problems we have in public sector management accounting is the fact that capital purchases are, from an accounting standpoint, expensed entirely in the year in which they are purchased. This is very different from the process used in the private sector, where they are depreciated and in effect then are expensed over the actual life of the piece of equipment.
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Take, for example, as a case in point, the capital expenses of putting the militia training centre in Meaford. Say you expense it in this year. You can say we have now spent all of that money on the reserves, therefore the MTC is to be charged entirely to the reserve account.
You missed the fact that the MTC will be operating over a series of years. In any given year, it will be used independently by militia units and regular units.
As a consequence, a significant portion of the cost of that militia training centre has, in fact, been used for regular force purposes. To then throw that into the pot and say that this is part of the cost of the militia from a management accounting standpoint is perfectly wrong and misleading.
In the same way, one could look at the question of - the commission is quite useful here - looking at the slices that come out at various levels from NDHQ, through land forces command headquarters, through the area headquarters, and down to the actual armoury floor. You could pose the question as to whether, for example, the expenses taken out in NDHQ are all related to reserve purposes or whether, in fact, some of them are directed toward non-reserve purposes, which, of course, has been identified in the program evaluation team of the chief of review services.
These are some examples of how the existing accounting structure produces answers that are not reliable. If, in the civilian sector one were faced with this sort of a problem, the first thing one would do would of course be to fire your vice-president of finance and bring somebody in to clean the place up. If necessary, you would hire outside accounting firms, specialist consulting firms, to assist you in the development of a proper management accounting model that could then give you some surety as to the actual costs of the various components with which you're dealing.
The Department of National Defence's director of costing services has done much very fine financial modelling with respect to regular forces, but that particular office as well admits that it has not been able to capture the nature of the true costs of the reserves and militia.
Mr. Hart: Should that be done prior to making any suggested moves?
Col MacDonald: I don't see how you can possibly propose cost-effective changes if you are tasked to improve cost-effectiveness but you don't have any reliable measure of the cost.
Mr. Hart: Where do you imagine that the minister or the government has come up with the 14,500 figure for the paid ceiling?
Col MacDonald: You would have to, of course, ask the minister that specifically, but I am told that was based not upon any operational requirement, but rather a financial number. At the end of the budgeting process, the number of dollars was estimated to be that which could be spent on the reserves and on the militia. That amount of dollars was then translated into this number of personnel. I do not know if that is the case, but that is how I was informed.
Mr. Hart: With regard to the numbers, what would you suggest should be the number or ratio between the regular and the reserve force structure?
Col MacDonald: If you examine other countries around the world, the normal pattern is that reserves are considerably larger than regular forces on the basis that they are, among other things, much cheaper.
One must, however, be careful to draw the distinction between volunteer forces and conscript forces. The reserve forces that are shown for European states are very substantially larger than ours, but those come out of the conscript model. In fact, those are not activated on a routine basis.
If one is then making the comparison with respect to our reserves, which are volunteer reserves, then I think you would be better to use the British, American, and Australian models.
Here again, I think one should as well be prepared to look at the way they have actually been used in operations, because there is some useful guidance there.
Take, for example, the Persian Gulf War. It's quite interesting to note some of the following statistics.
A total of 1,050 U.S. army reserve and national guard units were activated during the course of that war. That included some 165 port and transportation units, both in the United States and the gulf; 40 engineer units; 11 chemical warfare units; 50 combat support units; 3 combat service support headquarters; 9 ordnance units; 20 water handling units; and 9 petroleum handling units.
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Reserve and national guard units contributed 17% of the total engineer missions; 21% of all maintenance units; 31% of all transportation units; 33% of all chemical defence units; 39% of field medical units; 59% of the water handling capacity; 63% of psychological operations units; 65% of the petroleum handling capacity; 69% of postal handling and administration units; 89% of prisoner of war handling units; and 94% of civil affairs units.
One can, I think, reasonably advance the thesis that had it not been for the reserve line of communications troops, the Persian Gulf War would not have been won.
If one looks at the question of how much there should be, one has to look in terms of usage scenarios. One must then say, in this particular context, how would it work out? Once one has gone through a series of these scenarios, then one begins to move toward, for example, a more reasonable distribution in terms of numbers, and also of classifications.
It's interesting, for example, that during the course of the special joint committee hearings and in its report, there was an increased focus upon the use of increased numbers of service support units to be drawn from the reserves, in which you have civilian skills that are comparatively readily translated into military specialities.
So I'm sorry that I cannot give you a number. But I'll simply, in a sense, point to a variety of the factors that one should begin to look at in terms of coming to a number. Base it, in other words, not upon a dollar figure but on some sort of a coherent operational requirement structure.
Mr. Hart: So it's more strategic.
I was looking at the model you presented. I was quite shocked when I looked at my area and saw areas to be affected in British Columbia: Kelowna, Vernon, Kamloops, Salmon Arm, Nanaimo, Port Alberni, Trail, and Richmond, in British Columbia. For the reserve to be effective, I think everybody can agree that you have to have a presence in communities. This would be a devastating effect for the Canadian Armed Forces as far as having no presence is concerned.
Col MacDonald: That would certainly be my view. I remind you that this is a thought-experiment model.
Mr. Hart: Yes.
Col MacDonald: It's designed to maximize the savings you get from reducing the number of armouries and reserve commanding officers. You could produce a different model, with a presence in a number of those small communities, but the savings you would get from that would, of course, then be smaller.
By the same token, by not cutting as much, you do not eat away the human capital that the more stringent model would appear to be directed toward removing.
Of course, the other dimension is simply the political one. It certainly hits the interior of British Columbia. But what it does to the Maritimes is even more devastating when you see the number of small communities in which you have a small section of very, very good soldiers.
Of course, this impacts upon you, as parliamentarians, because when you get these results, you're going to have to explain them to your constituents.
I guess my recommendation to you would be for you to be careful not to buy a pig in a poke and insist that the department put on the table its plan before you give it blanket approval.
Mr. Hart: Regarding B.C. again, do you feel that the closure of CFB Chilliwack is going to have an effect on the reserve and militia structures?
Col MacDonald: Part of the problem here is the amount of base support that is going to be available at a reasonable distance from militia units. Of course, as you know, once Chilliwack is gone, the bases, in effect, are in Victoria and Comox, which are certainly pretty far away from all the units in the interior and, indeed, even those of Vancouver.
Again, when one looks at the proposal in Ontario to administer the militia out of CFB Kingston, which is an army base, it makes sense from the standpoint of it being army, but it's a lot farther from there to Toronto, Hamilton, London and Windsor than it is, for example, from CFB Borden, which is a base that belongs to a different command.
It's strange, I suppose, that in this unified force we seem to be moving away from certain of the benefits of unification, which allows a base to support units of a different command.
Mr. Hart: Do you think the Canadian Armed Forces or the government should be able to find cost-efficiencies other than singling out the reserve and using it as the target?
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Col MacDonald: Well, certainly there are many of them. For example, I found it quite fascinating to look at the regional structure. For some twenty-odd years during the Cold War we were able to keep the Russians out of Canada through the use of militia brigadier generals to handle, in effect, this force generation requirement. But since we have come to the end of the Cold War, we now require a regular force major general plus the militia brigadier general, plus vastly larger headquarters to carry out the same role.
It seems to me that one should perhaps look at the prospects of going back to cheaper headquarters with a lower number of individuals on a full-time employment basis located in them, and perhaps looking at some of the things that we've done more cost effectively in the past.
One could also look at the criticism that has been made by the Auditor General, among others, that the reserves are too top-heavy in officers; the figure quoted by the Auditor General is in the order of 15% to 15.5%. At the same time, I think one must fairly ask what is the proportion of officers in the regular force. One sees that it's something in the order of 23%.
Now, it's very interesting to recall some models I have done in the past, suggesting what would happen if you brought the officer proportion in the regulars down to the same as the officer proportion in the militia. You could save several hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis.
Of course, there is the question of whether 15% is appropriate to begin with. Certainly the Americans and the British have been working towards trying to reduce that. The marine corps seems to get along quite nicely with about 10% officers.
Mr. Hart: Regarding the legislation for job protection, do you think that instead of proposing legislation for job protection at this point, maybe the government should be looking at showing some leadership by example? This committee and the special joint committee have heard witnesses saying that the government is probably the worst offender in allowing their reservists time off for exercises and for actual participation in reserve activities. Don't you think the first step we should take would be to have the government look at their own departments?
Col MacDonald: That is certainly a comment that many interveners have made. I have a couple of responses to that.
In the first instance, I would suspect that the career-chilling effect of that might be as evident in the public service as it is in the private sector. If someone is identified as a militia person who goes trotting off when he or she wants to, then that person is less likely to be promoted.
My second response is a question: Is there really a problem here in the first place? Are we in a position to have statistics of some credibility that say we have had operations crippled because individuals have not been able to get out from their civilian or private employment to participate in a variety of activities?
It does seem to me that you can make the comment that the militia has responded surprisingly well to the requirements to provide augmentees to our peacekeeping forces in the former Yugoslavia, for example. It has done it in large numbers and has done it very effectively and has earned the praise of all sorts of commanders, both Canadian and foreign. So in a sense, if the militia has been able to rise to the tasks that have been set it, perhaps we are dealing with a problem that is smaller than it seems.
Let me turn to the other side of things. If I reflect on the times when I was commander of Toronto's militia district, I had individuals who managed to acquire their leave in order to correspond to a particular qualification course they had to have. They had negotiated with their employer to achieve it and arrived at the place where the course was to be held to discover at the moment they arrived there that the course had been cancelled. Perhaps the problem is not so much job protection as it is course protection, which is an issue that is certainly within the power of the Department of National Defence.
Mr. Hart: You mentioned that there could be some discrimination, but can't that be handled through any other discrimination laws we have against other people at this particular time?
Col MacDonald: To the best of my knowledge, militia service is not a protected condition under any human rights legislation.
Mr. Hart: Thank you.
The Chairman: Mr. Richardson.
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Mr. Richardson (Perth - Wellington - Waterloo): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I too would like to welcome Colonel MacDonald and Mr. Mitchell to our committee.
I had one question for Colonel MacDonald, and that is essentially what do you find right about the commission's report? What do you see right about it, what do you see wrong about it, and do you have an alternative to the wrongs? Could you précis the answer.
Col MacDonald: There are, as I said, many very good elements to it. I would certainly approve of the move from districts to brigades as a structural basis. I have always had the view that districts are not a military organization and therefore the shift to a brigade structure is very much to be praised.
I have the same reservations, I suppose, as my colleague with respect to the area structure that has been created being turned into what is called divisions, because as you know, divisions come with a somewhat different organizational structure from brigade groups. A division consists of brigades, not brigade groups, and the specialized forces, artillery, engineers, combat service support, are controlled and centralized at a divisional level. So if one is going to shift to a divisional model, then one would hope that you would take the doctrinally correct model that is taught in the staff colleges as the basis of the model that you're going to be using across the country.
In terms of a variety of the housekeeping recommendations that are made, such things as improvement in administration, improvement in the pay structure, things of that nature, these are all eminently sensible suggestions and ones that I would heartily endorse.
Mr. Richardson: I'm going to pick up on something else. Thank you for the answer.
You mentioned the 14,500 as being found first in the budget, and that was to represent some dollars. You also talked about some concerns of the regional headquarters cum divisional headquarters that these headquarters from their original conception were to be within 60 to 80 personnel. Some of the initial plans had it in the 150 range.
If savings could be found in areas like this and savings could be found in the reduction of district headquarters, do you think then that we could save more of the units, as suggested by Mr. Hart, that are not near major urban centres and then that rural and small-town Canada could participate in this?
Col MacDonald: An alternative model, for example, would be to take one of the army major general appointments and make him a divisional commander of the three regular brigades with a proper divisional headquarters structure located in Kingston where the signals regiment is located, which provides the basis of the headquarters and signals squadron.
You then would be able to quite easily give up three regular force major general appointments as being superfluous and go back to a much simpler structure on the militia side. This would generate very significant savings, which could then easily be used, for example, to take this model that I have developed and adjust it so that you're able to retain the Hastings and Prince Edward regiment, or you're able to maintain the British Columbia regiment or whatever other regiment you wish.
It seems to me that if I had my druthers, I would rather have the Hastings and Prince Edward regiment on the order of battle than a headquarters whose purpose I really question.
Mr. Richardson: Thank you, Col. MacDonald.
I'd like to go to Mr. Mitchell. I really liked your insights into future wars and the concepts, but I'm going to take you a little bit back into the future past, into what I thought was the future at the time, when I was probably about your age.
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I was serving in Germany, and we were working with the first of the Honest John missiles, which were attached to the artillery regiment as a squadron. We trained on the forces-in-being concept. That concept denied the requirement of reserves. It held that the war would be fought quickly and there would be a winner quickly. The missiles were in place, both sides had capability, and targets were as small as an armoured squadron, artillery batteries, battle group squadrons, an infantry company and a squadron. These were wrung out, all our tactical exercises. These were all nuclear targets, so we were throwing these bombs around quite easily, readily.
We were thinking exactly as you were thinking in your forecast: that was the end, and then there was a drawback from that position. But the reserves never recovered from the national survival role that was given to them at that time, flowing directly from the forces-in-being concept, because at that time there was thought to be no need.
Why is it that we're so bright here in Canada? We're at the leading edge in our military thinking; no one feels there's a need for reserves. We have a small regular army and an even smaller - the smallest, I would say in the G-7 - reserve force. The United States is almost on parity with our regular and reserves. France and the British have more reserves; the Germans have more reserves than regulars, but it's not a two-to-one situation any more. Why does everyone who looks at this, and why do other leading countries, differ with what we hear from think-tanks?
Dr. Mitchell: I'd like to speak to the U.S. example, if I may.
I was interested in what Colonel MacDonald had to say about the reserve units that were participating in the Gulf War. You'll note that the majority of the units that he listed were combat support units: port handling, transportation, engineering, chemical warfare, combat support, ordnance, water-handling, oil-handling, and some intelligence functions. These are the reserve units that are most effective in the United States' reserve organization. In regard to the reserve combat divisions, if I can quota Jane's Defence Weekly from March 14, 1992, they state:
- A reserve US Army combat division takes up to one year's training after mobilization before it
is ready to deploy. ... Each brigade requires up to 90 days post-mobilization training. Army
officials say training sites can only handle one brigade at a time, so each of a division's three
brigades must train in rotation.
When I say that the reserves are not likely to have a role, I mean that on a high-technology battlefield between two combatants similarly armed, they are not likely to have a role. They are likely to have a role in lesser conflicts, in a Balkans-type scenario, in a civil disorder-type scenario, where you can take the time to train them to get them up to par. However, I don't see that they are likely to have a role in the sort of high-technology warfare that may occur in the future. I believe that the U.S. army's experience recognizes this fact. The U.S. army is currently into a great deal of intellectual ferment following an initiative called Force 21, which is looking at the various means by which it may modernize its forces for the 21st century.
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I have communication from a member at training and doctoring command who states that basically the opinion of the U.S. army is that the guard and army reserves take too long to get ready and there hasn't been the resources in integrating them into this Force 21 initiative.
It's like I said - even though there is a large U.S. army reserve, I don't think the combat role is there, even in the U.S. army.
Col MacDonald: During the Gulf War five national guard combat brigades were mobilized for the war: two artillery brigades, the 142nd and the 196th; one armoured brigade, the 115th; and two mechanized infantry brigades, the 48th and the 256th. Of these, the two artillery brigades completed their training and deployed to the war with the multiple rocket launcher battalion of the 142nd, firing over 900 rockets through the course of the war. The 48th, the round-out brigade of 24 Division, reached its combat-readiness standard in 91 days of training and did not deploy, of course, because the war had ended or was about to end at that particular point. The other two brigades did not reach their combat-readiness standards at that particular point.
Now, the criticism has been made of the manoeuvre brigades, but the people who criticize cheerfully ignore the fact that the two artillery brigades - not batteries, not battalions, but brigades - completed their training, deployed, and fired very efficiently throughout the course of the war.
I think it's important to criticize the criticism and to analyse why it is that, for example, the manoeuvre brigades did not reach their readiness standard. One of the critical differences was that they held different equipments from their regular force counterparts. The tank battalions held M60 tanks as opposed to M-1s, and as a consequence they had to convert from 60s to M-1s, which is not only the problem of the tank gunners, drivers and crew commanders, but also the problem of the logistics and maintenance system, which has to, for example, change its entire inventory of spare parts and bring the maintainers up to speed on a particularly different form of equipment.
One has to look somewhat askance at the claims that the Persian Gulf War demonstrated that the national guard was not a very effective mechanism. Indeed, given the current practice of the Canadian forces of expecting our own regulars to take 90 days of work-up training and reorganization to go to war, it seems to me that the Canadian forces and the American national guard are about the same level of deployment capability. So once again, I say what is the problem with a well-managed reserve?
Mr. Richardson: Well, I think you can take that argument down...but most of the time we hear the kind of arguments you've been making, Mr. Mitchell, from people who are in think-tanks but not close to it.
I'll just throw in the Force 21 with it. Force 21 talks right from the concept of its operations, its doctrine. First of all, regarding quality requirement, both at the regular and reserve level, it talks about quality leadership training, spending a lot of money on leader development; but more particularly, the heart and core of it is the development of a doctrine, a doctrine that could be spoken at all levels and people are aware of it, whether it's naval doctrine, land force doctrine, or air force doctrine. But force mix is in there in a big way, and they state clearly that they rely heavily on their reserves and will require that, and their training will be stepped up to meet some of those requirements - the technical training, the other training.
So they're spending big money to say that they're in tune with the operational doctrine. They're going to be equipped, they're going to train them to be ready, but they won't be as ready as the regular. I don't think anyone can say that they're going to be stand-up brigades as quickly as a regular brigade.
The big thing when I was briefed in Washington after that was that the marine corps was so thrilled with their armoured component. It made the most kills in the war and, on entry to Kuwait City, made the rout of the Iraqi armoured.
You can take one side or the other on that. I appreciate the intricacies of modern warfare, but there isn't a major army that's cutting back on its reserves.
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Dr. Mitchell: I would just say that from what I understand of Force 21, the major emphasis is on the exploration and the development of new technologies and its effect on combat organization with the United States army.
Secondly, the information I have from doctoring command is that.... Well, I'll quote from the message that I got from them over the Internet:
- The current thinking is that guard and U.S. army combat units take too long to get ready and take
too much active duty resources to train, including people.
Mr. Richardson: From the rest of the statement, they have already instituted a plan. I've read General Sullivan's report as published and it says they know that and they are taking action to correct that.
Dr. Mitchell: Yes.
Mr. Richardson: You have to tell the rest of the story.
Mr. O'Reilly (Victoria - Haliburton): Every time footprint is mentioned, you'll notice that everyone looks at me because I have made it a point to say that footprints are something that's left, not something that's there. If there's something there, then there's a boot in it.
I've accomplished something. Mr. Hart, in his whole presentation, used the word ``presence''. So I think I've actually accomplished something on this committee: I've eliminated the footprint. It's sanded over, I guess.
I've known Mr. Mitchell all his life and I've never won an argument with him, so I won't try to accomplish that.
When you did your contemporary warfare analysis, did you consider the role of the reserves in peacekeeping in this report?
Second, when you refer to the Balkans, that was really a war zone into which we sent people for peacekeeping, which was contrary to what we should normally have done. Could you comment on that?
Dr. Mitchell: Peacekeeping would fall under the Balkans example that I gave in the report, where reserve units could be used to augment the regular force units, and have done so quite effectively in Yugoslavia.
Mr. O'Reilly: So in trying to analyse this report that we've been given on the restructuring of the reserves, on which you are basing your analysis and we have to report to Parliament on and then have 150 days, I believe, before the Minister of Defence gives us an answer on it or tells us whether he likes it or not...in your analysis would you consider this report to be good or bad under peacekeeping being a role of the militia?
Dr. Mitchell: The problem I see with the report is that it does not specify what it means by ``new strategic environment''. What I have extrapolated from it is that when it says ``new strategic environment'', it's just hearkening back to old World War II roles for the reserves, that they will be mobilized as they were in every past conflict.
What I think needs to be done is, as Colonel MacDonald has suggested, that usage scenarios have to be specified in the report, as to what the reserves will be used for in the future.
We have disagreed in the past few minutes as to whether or not they will be of any use on a high-technology battlefield. I still am not convinced that they will be.
In peacekeeping functions, however, because you have the time to train and equip the members of the reserves and bring them up to the standards of the regular forces, I can see that they would have considerable utility.
Again, though, I would say that their usefulness is dependent upon the commitment of the country to any particular conflict. If that commitment is not there, you're not going to get volunteers to go to these various peacekeeping commitments that the country enters itself into. So again we get back to messy questions of usage scenarios.
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I think the problem with the report is that it doesn't recommend itself easily to discussion on how the reserves are going to be used in the future. Their utility will be dependent upon the scenario that exists. In some scenarios they'll be extremely useful, while in others they will be of no use whatsoever.
Mr. O'Reilly: So in your analysis, you're basically saying if they can't fix their pay system, they can't train people to....
Dr. Mitchell: I suggested that if the reserves can't get a modern computerized pay system, we can't expect them to operate on a modern computerized battlefield.
A voice: That's the negative force
[Inaudible - Editor] pay system.
Dr. Mitchell: That begs a larger question, I would think.
A voice: That's right.
Mr. O'Reilly: Colonel MacDonald, in looking at your analysis on this model, you use the hit-list basis in your analogy. Is this strictly your model?
Col. MacDonald: Absolutely. As I say, this is a thought experiment in which I simply took what I believed to be the commission's principles, constructed a model based upon that, and looked at what fell out of it.
Obviously, we know perfectly well that this model has, for example, no militia presence in the province of Saskatchewan. Now, this is politically not acceptable. In all likelihood, there would then be the question of which of the two battalions in Winnipeg would in fact be closed down, with a battalion then opened up in Saskatchewan. Or there might be, for example, concern in the Maritimes about the fact that both the battalions of the Nova Scotia Highlanders and the West Novas will disappear, and whether or not that is politically acceptable. If you decide to keep the Nova Scotia Highlanders, you then have to close down somebody someplace else. It's either that or, alternatively, you have to then shift away from the single location concept. These matters get you into the question of the costs and benefits of this particular subset of the model as opposed to this particular subset.
So in effect, I created the model for the purpose of seeing what would fall out of their recommendations in a practical sense.
Mr. O'Reilly: So you didn't use any political influence in this model?
Col MacDonald: None whatsoever. I simply took the numbers that they showed by each location in their report and constructed on the basis of those numbers.
Mr. O'Reilly: So in your model you would have nothing between Toronto and Ottawa, or Toronto and Montreal.
Col MacDonald: There's nothing from Toronto to Windsor.
Mr. O'Reilly: If I look at this on a political analysis -
Col MacDonald: It makes no sense.
Mr. O'Reilly: The deputy minister's going to lose two of hers. Two cabinet ministers are losing theirs. This just makes no sense to me at all for a politician.
Col MacDonald: For a political system.
Mr. O'Reilly: Yes.
Col MacDonald: That's right. And this is why I say it would be awfully useful to you, I think, from a political perspective to insist that the department put its model on the table before you approve it.
Mr. O'Reilly: Okay. I'm not familiar with Militia Monitor, although I have read it. You indicate the editorial board is in complete support of this. How many people are on the editorial board?
Col MacDonald: Three.
Mr. O'Reilly: Three. And you're one of them?
Col MacDonald: I'm one of them.
Mr. O'Reilly: Okay. Do the Friends of the Militia and Reserves have anything anything to do with Reserves 2000, or is that a different...?
Col MacDonald: No.
Friends of the Militia and Reserves is headquartered in Toronto. It has a national membership, although I don't know the exact number of members in the organization - they have my $25 cheque. They have their own executive, which has reviewed this model and agrees with it as well.
Mr. O'Reilly: Reserves 2000 used a cost model based on numbers. The model we have is based on a budget. Do you connect the two, or would you separate numbers from budget and go strictly to numbers, trying then to fit the budget to that? Or would you look at setting the budget for the military and the militia and then try to work around it in the way that this report suggests?
Col MacDonald: The way it does in fact work, as the commission points out, is that you have a paid ceiling established. Each of those individuals is then viewed as drawing an average pay rate, which is multiplied by a number of days. That then produces a dollar figure.
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I'm not sure I would go about things in exactly that fashion. Once again, if you go back to the question of what is your operational requirement, you can then produce some sense of the numbers you require. That gives you then the basis, in terms of the training requirements, to produce some sort of budget number that falls out of that.
So my instinct is to go to the operational requirement first, translate that into a number of people, and translate that into a dollar figure.
Mr. O'Reilly: That would fit more within the line of my thinking, coming out of private industry. If you go into a factory and everybody's in the office, you know they're producing nothing. Therefore, in order to analyse, you analyse the whole operation and not just a small segment of it. When setting a budget, you would first of all look at where your costs are and then set your a budget according to what you could afford to deliver the products. I think we agree on that.
Col MacDonald: Sure. Again, the management accounting approach is that you look at what your output is and at what it would cost to deliver that output.
The commission's report is quite fascinating in terms, again, of the so-called 100-odd days of looking at the actual amount that is expended on the armoury floor, which seems to be the source, for example, of the young men and women who were deployed ultimately into former Yugoslavia. This raises the interesting question as to whether there are adequate cost efficiencies in all the other intervening layers of headquarters, which seem to take large chunks off.
Of course, in fairness to those higher-level headquarters, they wind up paying for summer collective training, national rank and trade school courses and things of that nature, so I don't think one can make a sweeping demonization statement with respect to the whole hierarchy.
Mr. O'Reilly: In reading this report, do you have any comments on the lack of medical units? That's a problem for me.
Col MacDonald: Well, this is in fact in the paper I presented. It seems to me that all 21 medical companies have been wiped out and 1,032 trained medical personnel have disappeared at the same time as they were proposing to cut back the amount of medical resources in the regular force, even though at other places the report seems to talk about using reserve medical people.
I'm not quite sure whether this is simply a slip of the finger in drafting a model, but it does seem strange that they would include medical platoons but leave medical companies. This certainly was one of the issues of concern to me, as was the issue of the three militia air defence artillery units, which have been very carefully constructed in order to maintain the air defence capability required by the regular brigades. That seems to have slipped by the commission as well, which left me scratching my head.
Mr. O'Reilly: My first question, actually of anyone in these hearings, was on why that was left out. The first people said it was a slip of the pen and the second group took the fifth amendment, so I still don't have an answer on it. I didn't know if I could....
Col MacDonald: I do not know the answer to that. It does seems to me curious that such a slip would have taken place, given the fact that the chief of force development was an adviser to the commission, and they obviously had access to the staff resources of land forces command headquarters.
Mr. O'Reilly: So would you suggest that this committee look into that as part of their report?
Col MacDonald: I would think so. It seems to me that an army, a navy and an air force require doctors, nurses and all the other medical resources as well.
Mr. O'Reilly: Thank you.
I have another question, Mr. Chairman, but I'll come back to it in the next round if I've run out of time.
The Chairman: Do you have one now?
Mr. O'Reilly: No. I had it written here somewhere. I'll find it and come back to it.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Mr. Bertrand.
Mr. Bertrand (Pontiac - Gatineau - Labelle): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I have a question first of all for Mr. MacDonald.
You talk about your model. I was just looking over the model you've made for Quebec, and to me it seems you have closed all the units east of Quebec City.
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Col MacDonald: And west of Montreal. The Régiment de Hull also disappears. The Régiment de la Chaudière and Les Fusiliers du St-Laurent disappear in that particular model.
Mr. Bertrand: Why would you come to such a conclusion? To my mind you want a military presence in all major parts of the province.
Col MacDonald: I agree entirely. As I said, this was simply a thought experiment using what appeared to me to be the commission's principles to select the unit with the largest strength in a single location.
Indeed, if I may elaborate, when I first did the model I did it on the basis of the two battalions of infantry suggested by the commission. I was then absolutely astonished to discover that in the municipality of Montreal that meant the Canadian Grenadier Guards survived and the Fusiliers de Montréal and the Régiment de Maisonneuve did not.
So I said to myself, ``Well, maybe I'll just go back and argue on a three-battalion model.'' That allowed me to bring in the francophone units. Certainly from the perspective of the militia presence, I would indeed argue, as I have argued of the federalist presence in eastern Quebec, that it makes no sense to me whatsoever to do away with the Régiment de la Chaudière.
In fact I've done an analysis of the referendum results and I was quite struck by the fact that there is a statistically discernible difference in the voting pattern between those provincial constituencies that had a militia unit in them and those that did not, outside of Montreal. In fact it was clearly the case that the constituencies with a militia unit had a higher federalist vote than the non-militia communities.
Again, to do away with it makes no sense to me. This is the point of doing the model: to see if it makes sense.
Mr. Bertrand: In most of these cities or towns is it the upkeep of the armoury that costs the most?
Col MacDonald: Again, this is a question I think one should ask of the department.
Mr. Bertrand: What is your opinion?
Col MacDonald: In my opinion, I think the amount of money you spend on maintaining an armoury is relatively small in the larger order of things.
Mr. Bertrand: I was going to ask you this: if, for instance, we were to close armouries in order to save money and were to rent facilities, would that...?
Col MacDonald: It depends, because you're making the assumption that you would then, for example, sell the property. In some cases you're dealing with historic buildings subject to local constraints, which in effect means that those properties have a limited commercial value.
If you were going to start up a new unit in a community, I would certainly be much more inclined to rent space rather than to buy property and erect a building.
Mr. Bertrand: My next....
A voice: It's okay. You can ask another question. There's no chairman here.
Mr. Bertrand: My next question, if I'm allowed, is for Mr. Mitchell.
In your paper, Mr. Mitchell, you say that in conflicts close to home, the reserves would have better community support and would be better positioned to answer the call. This is on page 4 of your brief. Do you see the reserves being used in cases of natural disasters, like floods or forest fires or for finding people lost in the forest?
Dr. Mitchell: I'm not certain what the current doctrine is on that and I'm not certain that would be a popular role as the reservists today would see it. However, I don't see any particular difficulty with the reserves taking on such a role and in fact the national guard in the United States quite frequently assists in natural disasters and civil disorder and such.
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It would seem to me that reservists would be supremely suited to taking on such roles, particularly given the familiarity with the area that they would be in - a familiarity with the community, familiarity with the people within the community. That seems to me an idea role for the reserves to take on.
Mr. Bertrand: As you know, right now in order for the militia or the regular forces to be called out, the request has to come from either the solicitor general of the province or the minister of justice of the province to the defence minister.
Mr. Mifflin (Bonavista - Trinity - Conception): Chief of the Defence Staff.
Mr. Bertrand: Yes - depending on what demand is for.
Would you see this criteria being changed so that maybe more regional demands could be accepted, not only from the ministers of justice, but for instance from a town, a city or a regional government asking for help from the reserves or the regular forces?
Dr. Mitchell: Again using the American example, I think it would make sense for provinces or for cities or regions to ask for assistance from the reserves. However, I would imagine that this is a political question to be decided; some amendment to the National Defence Act would need to be made in order for this to occur.
Mr. Bertrand: Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Mr. Hart.
Mr. Hart: Thank you very much.
Dr. Mitchell, are you suggesting that the reserve then is only capable of participating in peacekeeping missions and couldn't be used as augmentation for any other type of mission?
Dr. Mitchell: It's my belief that in the event of a major war or a major global crisis as it is specified in the report, a conflict of this nature probably will not be a conflict akin to World War II; it will be a high-tech battle and very likely be a very fast battle.
I think that such a conflict may be over before the reserves could be fully mobilized so that they could participate in such a conflict, and also that the level of training and the level of equipment of the reserves would be insufficient for them to survive on such a battlefield.
Mr. Hart: But shouldn't a person in the artillery in the reserve be trained to the same capacity as a person in the artillery in the regular force? Shouldn't they be interchangeable?
Dr. Mitchell: Yes, they should; theoretically they should be completed interchangeable. However, with the amount of training that is available to a reservist in any one year, they are simply not going to be up to the standards of the regular force. They are going to have to be brought up to those standards. I believe they are given 60 days' training per year. You're simply not going to be able to maintain a high level of training with such a limited amount of time.
So, yes, I agree, theoretically they should be on par. Practically speaking, they're going to have to be brought into places like Gagetown to be brought up to the standards of the regular force. If you're going to mobilize the entire reserve to fight a war, it's going to take a prohibitively long time to do that.
I just don't think that in a future high-tech conflict you're going to have the time to mobilize the entire reserve. Secondly, the kit is just not going to be there for the reserves to use on the battlefield once they are brought up to that standard. The kit is barely there for the Canadian regular forces.
Mr. Hart: But that certainly is not the reserves' fault; it's basically the training system and the training -
Dr. Mitchell: It's not only the training system, it's the fraught financial constraints that the defence department is under. I'm just looking at it from a practical standpoint.
Mr. Hart: Okay. One of the stories that comes to mind took place back in 1973 when I was going through recruit school. A young recruit was asked by his warrant officer what this bayonet was for, and he put it up in front of his face and held it very close to him. The beads of sweat were dripping off the young recruit, and he said, ``Ceremonial parades'' - which was the wrong answer.
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All of our troops have to be combat-capable, and of course the correct answer is: to kill the enemy in close quarters. That's what a bayonet is for, and that's what we train all our troops for, and it should be that the reserve is trained in that capacity as well as our regular force, to a combat-capable standard.
If they can only compete, or be trained, or be useful in peacekeeping scenarios, then we really do have a problem, because the answer to the question is the wrong answer. It should be that they are capable and are able to be mobilized, and that's what we have a reserve structure for - to mobilize.
Dr. Mitchell: The problem is, what do we mean when we say ``combat-capable''? There's a good deal of range in that term. What sort of opponent are we capable of meeting on the battlefield? Clearly, forces such as those that were operating in Somalia...you would need combat-capable forces to take the gangs of thugs that were running around Mogadishu and that.
However, to take on the Iraqis or to take on, say, in a hypothetical conflict, the Soviet Union would require different standards of combat capability. So I'm a little bit unclear when people, the white paper in particular, start talking about combat-capable forces. It really doesn't say a heck of a lot because there's such a range that can be contained within that.
Mr. Hart: It's too wide a range?
Dr. Mitchell: It's not specific enough, what is meant by combat-capable. I support the need for combat-capable forces. However, recent developments in military technology point out that it is going to be increasingly difficult to keep pace with militaries like the United States, like some of those that may emerge in the Asia-Pacific region, like some of those that may be on the European continent. It will be increasingly difficult for the Canadian forces, the regular forces, to keep pace with those militaries, much less the reserves. The reserves are going to be even harder pressed to keep pace with those forces.
Mr. Hart: Is this something you feel is just applicable to the militia, then, and not necessarily the naval or the air reserves?
Dr. Mitchell: Yes, and in fact I would say that even the communications reserve probably is not as affected by this, because you're taking people in their civilian positions and basically putting khaki onto them - taking their occupations and using them in a military function.
With the naval reserves, they have very specific goals that they are suppose to achieve. They're not going to be going out with the carrier battle groups. They're going to be doing sovereignty patrol, fisheries patrol - that sort of task. They're not going to be required to have the level, the high-tech capability that the navy needs in order to deploy to foreign shores.
So, yes, I would agree with you on that, that in particular the combat arm of the militia is going to suffer great difficulties if it tries to keep pace with modern military technological developments, and that's where I see the problem with the report.
Mr. Hart: Do you have any comments on that, Colonel MacDonald?
Col MacDonald: I would like to address this issue of high technology and simply make the comment that there's a lot less high technology than we like to make out.
My own background is in artillery. We have recently - I'm not sure how many years ago - acquired a piece of high-technology equipment called a laser range-finder, which an OP officer is able to use to point at a target and press a little button, and the laser range-finder gives him, in effect, the location of that target. You're able to get a 95% probability of a first-round hit and a 100% probability of a second-round hit. Now, that's high technology.
The user uses it in a very low-technology fashion. He doesn't have to have a graduate degree in physics in order to use that technology.
Mr. Hart: As long as he can see and pull a trigger.
Col MacDonald: As long as he can push the button to use it.
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Let me also make the point that if you actually take a look at the military occupation classifications of the Canadian forces, or any force, you discover an awful lot of them are low-technology classifications. There's nothing high-tech about being a truck driver. There is about being a CF-18 driver, and you do need 180 hours of flying time in that CF-18 if you're going to meet the NATO standard. But there are a whole bunch of low-tech and middle-tech applications that use high technology, but use it at the user level.
Mr. Hart: So the reserve should be capable of doing it.
Col MacDonald: Yes. As I say, my background is in artillery. We produce forward observation officers who are trained to the same standard as regulars. They don't have as much bullets time behind them, but they certainly know the procedures. Being a forward observation officer for a 105 howitzer is exactly the same as being a forward observation officer for a medium howitzer. It's just that the bang is bigger.
Again, if we look, for example, at the Persian Gulf War, and pose the question of whether we could have deployed a component of the Canadian army, with all its alleged equipment failings, into that operation, the answer is yes. We could easily have deployed an artillery brigade, driving exactly the same M-109 self-propelled howitzers as the Americans were driving, and we could have done exactly the same things as the Americans were doing with their self-propelled howitzers in that war. As a matter of policy we chose not to do that, but we certainly could have.
I would not have wanted to have gone into that high-tech battlefield driving our wheeled armoured personnel carriers. I would have wanted to have a Bradley with my infantry sitting in it. This relates to the fact that some parts of our army have equipment that is not up to a high-intensity battlefield and other parts of our army do.
Dr. Mitchell: I would like to make a rejoinder to that. One of the significant developments in this revolution in military affairs, as it's come to be known, is not only in the sensor-to-shooter relationship but also in the command-and-control technologies. As I said in my statement, military commanders know, sometimes down to the square metre, not only where their own forces are but where the enemy forces are. They also have the ability to deny that information to the enemy. It is these sorts of developments which I think are even more critical than some of the sensor technologies, the technologies that allow greater efficiency in the targeting of weapons. It is these command-and-control technologies, the developments in there, which are going to be critical on the future battlefield.
These sorts of things are national assets. They are not assets that are going to be within a particular unit or part of an individual soldier's kit. It's training in these things, it's access to this sort of technology, that I see the reserves are just not going to have.
I would agree with Colonel MacDonald that a laser range-finder is a particularly easy piece of equipment to use. But the sort of advances in command-and-control technology that are on the horizon are the sorts of things that are going to enable military forces to be used far more efficiently in the future and pose greater threats to soldiers on the battlefield.
Mr. Richardson: Albeit what you say is absolutely right, the developments in the command-and-control technology, particularly in the American army, are there. They pursue it and they're resting on that, and they're doing a good job at it.
How much command-and-control technology do you think the regular force in Canada has? Do you know?
Dr. Mitchell: I will defer to your experience, sir.
Mr. Richardson: They don't have it. I don't think the TCCS program ever got implemented. It was on the board. We're still working with technology from the Second -
Mr. Mifflin: Alexander the Great.
Mr. Richardson: Well, almost. We're just not there.
Dr. Mitchell: As I said to an earlier question, this begs a larger question.
Mr. Richardson: The regular force needs some help in getting that kind of technology too. But to say the reserves don't have it.... We're trying to....
I'm sorry to cut in, Jim. I just wanted to make it clear the regular force doesn't have this technology either.
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Dr. Mitchell: I entirely agree with you, but to respond to that, I would say that if the regular forces can't get access to this sort of thing, then it's illogical to expect that the reserves are going to have access to it.
As for the ability of Canada's armed forces to participate on a high-tech battlefield, as mythical as that may be, it begs a larger question. I think it goes back to my earlier comments on the hazy notion of combat capability.
Mr. Richardson: Of the three environments, I think the navy is probably closest to having that capability.
Dr. Mitchell: I completely agree.
Mr. Richardson: I'm sorry, Mr. Hart; I just wanted to get that comment on the table.
Dr. Mitchell: I know the colonel wants to make a comment.
Col MacDonald: Let me simply make the point that on the modern battlefield you can have all the most wondrous [Inaudible - Editor] in the world giving you the details down to the last square millimetre in the command cell, but it still requires human beings to issue commands to other human beings, who have to relay those commands to somebody else, who has to start trucks and get things moving.
The ancient Clausewitzian concept of friction on the battlefield still applies. Having wondrous command and control doesn't mean that things are going to be as instant as what we see in the Star Wars movies.
Mr. Hart: You had mentioned, Mr. Richardson, that the navy has probably the best handle on this. I was quite shocked actually to learn that with the new MCDVs, we're putting on the guns from the Bonaventure.
I did want to ask a question about recommendation 25 in the report, where the commission recommends that the regular force first attempt to meet its specialist needs by considering the availability of such individuals from the reserve force and that it contract directly with civilians only if it has been determined that an appropriate person cannot be found in the reserves.
It's my understanding that this recommendation may be redundant because we already have that. We have the NDHQ primary reserve list, which consists of specialists. I was quite shocked to find that the commission didn't really report on that particular aspect of the reserve structure. There are some 600 specialist reservists on that list. That includes doctors, social workers, public affairs officers, lawyers, and chaplains. Did you find that odd?
Col MacDonald: It seemed to me that the recommendation made a great deal of sense when we were looking at the area I was most concerned about when I read the commission report, which was the medical dimension of it. If in fact you have medical officers who are socialized to the military and who understand how the military operates, my choice to take a medical officer from that to go into an operation in former Yugoslavia makes a lot more sense than trying to hire a general practitioner with no military experience whatsoever.
Mr. Hart: Should those people be attached to NDHQ, as they are now, or should they be attached to units?
Col MacDonald: I commanded a district that had a medical company in it. It seemed to me that by having that structure in the community, you had a focal point for the members of that structure. For example, you would have a commanding officer of a medical company who would be interested in going out and finding additional medical officers or nursing officers and such and convincing them to come in and be part of that structure, to be in effect part of a community social structure.
It strikes me that is a more effective way of guaranteeing their availability than to have a laundry list in a remote headquarters which is updated every year at best. As a member of the supplementary ready reserve myself, I have seen the updating procedure in action; now that it has gone to zero funding, it leaves me even more skeptical of the supplementary ready reserve than I've been in the past. Certainly I am totally skeptical of the supplementary holding reserve.
It seems to me that the structure in existence, which meets once a week or twice a week or whatever, gives you a resource that you know is there. I would like to have that guarantee.
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Mr. Hart: Through talking to a few people who are on this list, I found that sometimes the other units don't even know they're available. That's a real problem because about 600 specialists can be used on a call-out basis, but they're not being effectively used right now.
Col MacDonald: And they drift away. We're talking about a social organization, and social organizations depend upon a continuity of human contact. I think having the structure there makes a great deal of sense.
Mr. Hart: I'm probably running out of time again, so I have a short question. I want to ask about the recommendation in the report regarding CIC and the non-commissioned officer component of that. I've been trying to wrap my own personal experience around that recommendation, and I'm starting to feel that's probably not a good recommendation. A senior non-commissioned officer who goes to a cadet unit may find himself with a commanding officer who is 21 years old. You would need a special person to leave the regular force with 30 years service as a senior warrant office and come in to that type of situation. The other problem is that the cadet unit has a rank structure with the cadets. A non-commissioned person coming into that structure would almost be filling the spot of a position that should be taken by the cadets.
Col MacDonald: I have had comparatively little direct personal experience with the cadets, so I will take no position on your question.
Mr. Hart: Okay.
Dr. Mitchell: I'm a civilian instructor with 342 Squadron in Bedford. We have two non-commissioned officers in our squadron. One is an army private and the other is a leading seaman. Both of them, but particularly the leading seaman, are effective members of that squadron. The leading seaman, who is in charge of maintaining drill standards within the squadron, does not have a problem in interacting with the cadets. He is clearly senior to the cadet warrant officer in the command structure of that squadron. He's a valued member.
That is an interesting proposal within the commission. I think bringing some NCOs from the regular forces into the cadet structure would be a valuable addition.
Mr. Hart: But I'm not sure it's recommending that. The scenario you're giving us is where you have some regular force members who are volunteering to come into a squadron on their off time. But if you're looking at bringing in people to be a part of the structure of the squadron, it doesn't -
Dr. Mitchell: I was referring to your example about a senior warrant officer who is coming into a cadet organization.
Mr. Hart: My experience has been that non-commissioned officers in the regular force who left the regular force and are coming to a cadet squadron - 99% of them that I've run across would want to take their commission and be part of the commissioned officer structure in the cadet organization.
Dr. Mitchell: I can only comment on my experience with the two NCOs in 342 Squadron. They're extremely effective members.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Mr. Mifflin: Colonel MacDonald, welcome back. You were very helpful in our special joint committee. It's good to see you back again.
Dr. Mitchell, I know some of the people you operate with down in Dalhousie, so I was pleased with your presentation.
I have a couple of technical comments or questions or discussion points.
Colonel MacDonald, in your model, did you use the random sample generator or did you less objective criteria?
Col MacDonald: They were very simple criteria. It was simply to go to the annex in the commission's report, where they show strength by location, and select the units that had the largest strength in a single location.
Mr. Mifflin: And kept them and got rid of the rest.
Col MacDonald: Yes.
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Mr. Mifflin: Okay, fine.
Dr. Mitchell, if somebody who was looking at the nature of war 10 or 15 years ago had said there would be a battle in the near future in which the leading media crowd of the attacking country would be in a hotel room in the centre of the country being attacked, commenting to a global public on the nature of the attack - I think they would have said no, this is not credible.
I agree with the concepts that you've espoused, and I think we're in for a lot of surprises in the next decade. I believe that is the point of your presentation, and I think it is something we would all agree with. Regrettably, the only thing we can do about uncertainty is hedge, and I got the impression from both of the presentations that you feel the hedging in this report may leave something to be desired.
I have one other comment before I get to specific questions. It is my understanding, certainly from Colonel MacDonald's view, that you wouldn't want to go much further with this report without doing some form of impact analysis.
Col MacDonald: Precisely.
Mr. Mifflin: Okay. Having put that away, let me ask a couple of specific questions.
We are faced with the rather daunting prospect of taking this report and giving it to the minister with recommendations. Our recommendations could be anything from implement it now because we think it's great, or we're really not sure about this report, you need to have another look at it. Of course we haven't decided that yet because we're only midway in our deliberations.
Let's look at the recommendation that talks about the organizational aspect of the change, and that is moving from the 14 districts to the 7 brigades. Let's forget about numbers and costs for the time being. As a soldier, would you support that?
Col MacDonald: I would support the move from a district structure to a brigade structure.
Mr. Mifflin: On the basis that it makes a lot more sense?
Col MacDonald: On the basis that you have shifted from a static civilian-type organization to a military organization. It strikes me as being reasonable to expect military structures to be organized on the basis of clearly military models.
Mr. Mifflin: Okay. I believe it was in recommendation 8 that the commission set out a set of criteria for judging which units should stay. Did you have a close look at those?
Col MacDonald: I did, and on a number of occasions I found myself asking what exactly was meant by a particular term. If you're going to talk about the effectiveness of a unit in recruiting and retaining, then what factors are and are not under the unit's control?
One factor not under a unit's control, for example, is the stability of the pay budget that it is assigned. If through decisions at a higher level the pay budget or the training time is to be cut back, that will have a direct impact on the attrition in that unit. We draw the bulk of our young soldiers from the high school student mob who are looking to that as their part-time income, as well as for the psychic enjoyment derived from participating in a military environment and patriotic dedication to the country. But if you cut back the pay, they leave.
If you then suggest to the unit that it is at fault because its attrition has gone up, and it is not the unit's doing, then I think you are beginning to draw wrong conclusions as to who is effective and who is cost-effective and such. In this sense I think one has to look closely at those questions of cost-effectiveness and ask what effective means in this circumstance.
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What worries me is a political process in a smoke-filled back room in which somebody on the staff belongs to a certain regiment and is determined to have his regiment stay and then somehow questions some other regiment as obviously not cost-effective because it had attrition last year.
What I would like to see is everything out in the open in a clear model so that one can see the implications of it. Indeed this is what I've done with this thought experiment, just simply cast up a model and see what it looks like. I like to get the bunnies smoked out of the woodpile.
Mr. Mifflin: On the numbers, I think somewhere in our deliberations somebody made it clear to us that the 14,500 is militia, not reserves. So on top of that you have to include the naval reserves, the communications reserves and the air reserves.
Col MacDonald: That's correct.
Mr. Mifflin: That I think gives you a tidy number of 20,000, which is what the white paper said.
Col MacDonald: It's 23,500, I believe.
Mr. Mifflin: So if we're going to adhere to the white paper, we still have to find 3,000 more people.
The Chairman: We're all right by the numbers we have.
Mr. Mifflin: What I'm saying is the 14,500 is nicely parallel with the white paper of last year, as I understand it.
Col MacDonald: Yes, although the commission again very correctly pointed out that a paid ceiling is not necessarily the same as the actual number of people in the system.
Mr. Mifflin: We understand that, and you can trade off ranks, with five privates for a general and all the rest of that stuff.
Mr. Hart: [Inaudible - Editor]
Mr. Mifflin: We don't have a problem in the naval reserve. That's what the report said.
A voice: Get rid of the admirals.
A voice: They're all here.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Mifflin: I have a comment on technology, and I'll make it as quickly as I can.
One of the reasons the navy went the way it did was that we couldn't expect the reservists to come and perform in one of the DDH280s a job that took a petty officer two years to do. So we had to go right from the very start.
Not only did we have to redesign the roles, responsibilities and trade standards of naval reservists, given the time they had or were likely to have, but we had to then go and get special ships for them, because their role, as Dr. Mitchell pointed out, was not on the seven seas taking on the Russian navy, but was basically chasing rum runners, poachers, drug runners and that sort of thing.
I'm not sure myself how this applies to the militia. I know how it applies to the infantry. But we have to think about the specialized trades. Whether the sixty-day training for a militiaman, an infantry soldier, makes him as good as or at least close to the capability of a regular soldier is something that I think is open for judgment. I'm not sure.
Colonel MacDonald, you say you had a company that served in a peacekeeping mission. What was your real gut feeling for how effective they were?
Col MacDonald: I've never commanded a company in a peacekeeping environment.
Mr. Mifflin: No, but I understand in your district you had a company that -
Col MacDonald: Oh, this of course was much after I left the command of the district.
Mr. Mifflin: Yes.
Col MacDonald: Let me come back to the point you raised with respect to the naval reserve. There is of course the other dimension, and that is the naval control of shipping, which the navy has defined as a requirement that exists in wartime but not in peacetime. Therefore this is a requirement that can be handed over to the naval reserve as a cost-effective alternative to having it cast in the regular navy.
Indeed, so much of the naval approach to its own reserve is to me very sensible. They have defined high-technology, long training requirements as something that requires a regular naval person to do, and a lower technology, which does not require as long training, as something that quite easily a reserve naval person can do. There are certain other war-only activities that can be left safely to the reserves.
There is a potential parallel there to what might be approached in terms of the army. There are dimensions, for example, of mobilization that do not have to be active at this point in the regular army, but would be required there in a wartime scenario. In a sense there might be a parallel there to the naval control of shipping roles.
Mr. Mifflin: Indeed.
Col MacDonald: I would also make the point that in much of the army, the technology level in terms of the requirement placed upon the user is lower than in a 280 or a CPF. Much of this technology in fact can be developed by people who are operating on a part-time basis.
Strangely enough, I would not necessarily say this is the case with infantry, especially light infantry. Light infantry is a very, very complex set of skills. They have to be trained, I would argue, to a higher level of training than heavy infantry or sitting in a mechanized armoured personnel carrier.
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In many ways the level of training required to create a member of an artillery gun detachment is less complicated than that to train trained light infantry, because you are dealing with a whole series of repetitive motions and drills, and once you learn the drill, they're with you.
It takes a bit of time to convert an artillery man from one gun to a different gun. I would say two weeks, probably, can convert a 105 TOWed gun detachment member to being a member of a self-propelled gun, apart from the role of the driver or the number one. The transfer of skills is comparatively straightforward.
In all these dimensions we have to look at the actual skill requirement package and say, now, how much of this in fact requires 8,000 hours of training? Sometimes it doesn't. Very frequently you will find peacetime armies have a tendency, when they look at a course, to say, well, let's throw in some more of the could-knows, or some of the should-knows; and the course gets away from the must-knows and becomes longer and longer and longer. At the outbreak of war, of course, it's shrunk back down to the basics of must-knows, because you have to produce reinforcements. That has to be borne in mind as well.
Mr. Mifflin: That's a very good point, and I appreciate the dimension you have brought to bear on this.
I see I'm running out of time here, so I'll have to pick and choose here. I won't talk about legislation, because I know your views on that. You have made them very clear.
What we're really faced with here, from the witnesses we've heard so far, is it seems to me how we handle the militia in the future is a trade-off between making them more effective, on the basis that effectiveness can always be improved, and trading them off with having a presence in all the small Kelownas and Corner Brooks and Stephenvilles. Maybe I'm over-simplifying it, but that's the trade-off. I believe it's a conscious trade-off. It's a political trade-off too, and I think we're going to be faced with it.
What kind of criteria would you suggest we apply if we're looking at that? I'm not even sure you agree with my premise, but if you do, how would you suggest we go about it?
Col MacDonald: Again, as you say, I'm not sure I agree with the premise, because I prefer to look at it in terms of cost-effectiveness, and I want to see what it costs you to run that platoon and a half or company in Kelowna, and what you would in fact save by closing it down and moving it to the city of Vancouver - because of course in closing it down you waste the investment in human capital that is already there and you may find the amount of dollars you save in doing that is comparatively slight. What I would really like to see is the hard numbers in front of me to give me the cost-effective comparisons. Being a suspicious Scot, one who likes to make sure he knows where the objects in his purse are all the time, I want to see the numbers that prove to me that this is in fact a cost-effective alternative.
Mr. Mifflin: This is where the impact analysis comes in.
Col MacDonald: That's exactly the point.
Mr. Mifflin: That's fair enough.
The Chairman: Thank you, gentlemen.
I just want to follow up now by closing out on Colonel MacDonald.
In your last paragraph, when you're dealing with the commissions afterward, one of the special commissions, you say they should be provided with experienced auditors, forensic accountants, and these people. As the admiral and others have said, we have a period during which we have to come to a conclusion on this, and on what we're going to do with it.
Do you see the possibility that if, for instance, we made a recommendation that the implementation of this report, in whatever sequence it's going to take place, be done by a group of people recommended by us to report back to us at intervals...? Do you believe this part could be included in that, to look at that, what you and the admiral were talking about - the analysis that needs to be done? What timeframe do we have to look at? Are we in a hurry to see this thing concluded, or do we want to see it concluded right and therefore it's going to take longer? Do you believe we could include this and make it realistic - we could do this from this perspective, with a group of people implementing it?
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Col MacDonald: First of all, let me make the statement that it is more important to do the thing right than it is to do it now. In my view, Canadian defence policy has too often lurched off in a direction without inspecting the direction very carefully, then after a while it has lurched back to the starting point again.
I think the defence of our country is so critically important that it has to be done right. Doing it right means you have to do the impact analysis. You have to sit down and say, ``Now, just hang on a minute. This isn't good enough. Let's go back to square one and make sure we've got the damned thing right.''
Whether or not this committee could do it is obviously something for you to judge, because you know the workings of your committee and I obviously do not. But I certainly think we have to have a check and balance structure, in a sense. We have to recognize that the department, left to its own devices, will continue to do the things that it has done in the past. Some will be done extraordinarily well - and the operation in the former Yugoslavia is a marvellous case in point - and others not so well, and we know what those things are.
So from that perspective, I would again encourage that you sometimes make haste slowly.
The Chairman: Thank you.
Dr. Mitchell, do you have anything you want to conclude with?
Dr. Mitchell: No, I don't.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, both of you, for coming here. You've given us some very great and, in some cases, different ideas as to what we should be looking at as we go down the road toward making our recommendations to the House, whatever the end result will be.
I will hit the hammer and we'll call it a day.