NDVA Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON NATIONAL DEFENCE AND VETERANS AFFAIRS

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE LA DÉFENSE NATIONALE ET DES ANCIENS COMBATTANTS

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, October 25, 2001

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[English]

The Chair (Mr. David Pratt (Nepean—Carleton, Lib.)): I'd like to call to order the meeting of the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs.

Before we hear from our witness, Mr. Thompson, I would like to make a number of announcements.

First, next Monday, October 29, we have Mr. Keith Coulter, who is in charge of the Communications Security Establishment. He'll be appearing before the committee, and the meeting will be televised.

On Tuesday, November 6, we will have the “Clothe the Soldier” presentation, which I think we're all looking forward to. That's between 3 o'clock and 3:30. I was suggesting that we send invitations out to all MPs to attend, so that they can have an opportunity to look at the new kit. It will be in room 253-D in the Centre Block, and that meeting will also be televised.

And on Thursday, November 8, we have the International Association of Firefighters. They'll appear before the committee from 4:45 to 5:30, after the appearance of the assistant deputy minister for human resources from DND, and that meeting will be televised as well. The thinking here, in having the firefighters before the committee, is that they are amongst the first who would be responding to a nuclear, biological, or chemical incident.

Yes, Mr. Wilfert.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert (Oak Ridges, Lib.): Mr. Chairman, can you just clarify the time on Monday, because some of us may have a conflict?

The Chair: We're looking at Monday at 3:30.

Mr. Claude Bachand (Saint-Jean, BQ): This coming Monday?

The Chair: Yes, Mr. Bachand.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: Then I have a conflict. Okay, thank you.

The Chair: Okay.

Now it's my pleasure, on behalf of the committee, to welcome you, Mr. Thompson. It's a pleasure to see you. As many of you know, Mr. Thompson is director of the MacKenzie Institute.

We're all anxious to hear your comments, Mr. Thompson, so you have the floor.

Mr. John C. Thompson (Director, MacKenzie Institute): Thank you, and thank you for the invitation to address this committee.

I've been asked to keep my opening remarks brief, and as brevity is one of the few virtues I possess, you can be sure that won't be a problem.

Without going into a strategic summary of the world today or the way events might unfold over the coming decades, it's reasonable to assume that Canada will become inevitably involved in at least one major conflict and several minor ones in the coming century. The strategic competitions and conflicts of the late 18th century created our country. That process continued in the 19th century. And of course, our participation in the World Wars brought our country to maturity. It would be foolish to assume that our future is going to be peaceful, and we should look to the state of our army in particular.

There are three points I would like to mention briefly by way of opening remarks. One is a brief discussion of the military ethos; a second one is on doctrine and the revolution in military affairs; and the third one's just a simple argument on the need for quality in our military.

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Concerning the military ethos, General Sir John Hackett, one of Britain's more distinguished soldiers and military writers, once observed that a man could be a superb musician or an incredibly gifted physicist, but still be a completely horrible person, but a good soldier needs to be a good human being in almost every respect. Of course, this is important, because the tradition of battle in the western world and the way western nations conduct warfare pushes the limits of human tolerance to extremes. As a result, to be a good soldier you do have to rely on a fair amount of strength. This argument is illustrated more clearly in Victor David Hansen's book The Western Way of War, which describes how the ancient Greeks first did this transformation.

To get people who can go over the top, or stand fast under bombardment, or stick to their guns on a sinking ship, a profound set of special relations is needed. They need to be able to trust each other, trust their leaders, and leaders need to be able to trust their followers. The military ethos concerns the creation and maintenance of this trust. It involves a reciprocal flow of respect and loyalty, and it's essential that this flow of loyalty is a two-way flow between peers and up and down the chain of command. Everyone in a military organization has to be able to demonstrate that they are capable of earning that trust and continuing to keep it. If this condition exists, then people become better able to withstand and inflict the extraordinary violence that characterizes battle.

Guerrillas, terrorists, gangsters, the militias of some warlord or party chief seldom develop these sorts of ties between each other, but good soldiers have to. To help create this condition of trust, western militaries have evolved customs and traditions, and have tailored their training and conditioning of new soldiers. In good units with a strong sense of elan the military ethos is always present.

In Canada this spirit has been diminished in the last few years. We arrived at the state of affairs where, for example, we saw troops on a peacekeeping mission attempt to poison their own warrant officer. We've sometimes seen the mutual distrust that characterizes much of our army. You have career-oriented officers who now hope their men won't embarrass them and thereby damage their prospects for promotion. And you have men who don't trust their officers to help them out when they get into personal trouble.

The military ethos is a difficult one to sustain. Fundamentally, it's illiberal in nature, and a liberal society often has problems understanding or appreciating the conditions that create the military ethos. But for a good soldier concepts like duty, honour, and integrity have to be very real. Sensitivity training, career progression, and management, as opposed to leadership, do no good at all. Worse, the modern ethic of worrying more about the appearance of a problem than actually tackling its substance is pure poison to the military ethos.

The term revolution in military affairs has been used so often lately it's also developed its own acronym—the RMA, as it's referred to in the literature. But at a fundamental level, new developments in technology and in doctrine have made it possible for a modern army to fight more efficiently and more effectively than ever before.

One of the best examples is the 1991 Gulf War, which illustrates all too clearly what happens when two equal sized armies collided, one with the technology and thinking of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the other one tailored for the 1990s. The 1991 Gulf War saw the sort of imbalanced casualty ratios that typified late 19th century conflicts in Africa, when European troops with breech-loading rifles and machine guns confronted African spearmen. In other words, now a 10-year imbalance in technology has become so dangerous it can't be ignored any more.

Another illustration of the change in modern military technology might appear in air power. In 1943 if a factory was to be destroyed, it might receive a visit from a group of 60 bombers. Half of the bombs that dropped—and they would drop about 1,000 bombs—would come within 500 metres of the factory they were aiming at. The bombing rate would probably kill or injure, on average, about 300 civilians on the ground. At the same time, normally, three bombers would be shot down and 30 aircrew would be lost. Today, to attack the same sort of target, one aircraft might drop two bombs, both of which have a 90% chance of detonating within 5 metres of a target. The aircraft attack could be staged at a time when the factory was empty, and civilian casualties would be non-existent, or at least minimal. At the same time, the likelihood of losing the attacking aircraft is also remote. In the Kosovo campaign there were over 12,000 sorties, and only one aircraft was lost to enemy fire.

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For modern armies a technological advantage translates into a very real ability to move and attack faster than an enemy can react, to strike with what now seems an unnatural precision, and to immobilize or psychologically dislocate an enemy without having to kill or maim most of his troops. To achieve this, considerable automation of military intelligence gathering and planning is necessary. More powerful command and control systems and more sophisticated surveillance gear are also vital. But even more important than this are the educational standards for troops and their leaders. They need to have sharp, focused minds that are continually honed throughout their time in the service. Canada has some problems now attracting and retaining educated troops and junior leaders. The U.S. focus on continuing education for its military personnel is not matched here, and the Canadian army has sometimes demonstrated what might be seen as a rather anti-intellectual environment.

Doctrine consists of a set of presumptions that guide equipment purchases, training standards, tactical evolution, and other considerations. The U.S. military is working on doctrine for troops on a continuing basis, and the current doctrinal efforts concern working out how to handle troops that are capable of handling both modern high-intensity combat and peacekeeping missions, especially the complex sorts of peacekeeping missions we get nowadays, where someone might be friendly in the morning, an enemy in the afternoon, and neutral at night.

The Canadian army has not spent a lot of time in recent years examining doctrine. The curricula in our command and staff courses have diminished. Funding to strategic study centres in universities has been reduced, and it often focuses on very esoteric aspects, like peacekeeping and disarmament. Independent journals, for example the Canadian Defence Quarterly, that once served as a focus for new thinking are also diminished or absent altogether. The Masters programs at the Royal Military College and the Staff College in Toronto try to fill the gap, but this is not enough. The continuing centres for development of new thinking in our military have been quite reduced.

And of course, there is the need for quality. The long list of lamentations about our army tends to focus on deficiencies, often in major equipment programs or key weapons systems. There are serious problems here, but they are not as vital as other problems. Weapons systems are tools. The men and women who use them are more important. Besides, in our military history, the Canadian soldier has always displayed a fairly remarkable adaptability, and it might even be one of our national characteristics, something we can rely on for a while.

What's more important is the institutional strength of the army, and also its ability to focus on good quality soldiers and leaders, the professionalism of senior leaders, and the restoration of the military ethos. Good soldiers are the building block for good platoons; good platoons are the building block for good regiments; and good regiments are the building block for a good army.

The primary advantage in the revolution in military affairs concerns training simulators, new communications, and sensor equipment, and we should be investing heavily in these now, preferably buying off-the-shelf American gear, to acclimatize our soldiers to this new style of operations. The demands these will make on soldiers and leaders should also determine our recruiting and retention policies, for both the regular force and the reserves.

If I had a wish list, of course, I'd like to see the Canadian army equipped with modern artillery, armour, helicopters, and everything else, but what is real is our current financial constraints and the fact that good modern troops can adapt to changes and equipment when it arrives. Reserve troops who can adequately handle a 40-year-old 105 millimetre howitzer, if they have modern communications and modern sensors, can easily adapt to a modern artillery piece. Good-quality infantry who can adapt themselves to modern battle can go into battle on foot, in an infantry-fighting vehicle, and a helicopter. What matters is that good-quality infantry come first, and the means by which they go into conflict come second.

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Of course, in the 20th century the Canadian army fired shots in anger in four wars and on a number of peacekeeping missions. In the 1990s our air force fired missiles and dropped bombs in two other wars. That makes six shooting conflicts for our military in the 20th century. We've already deployed some of our military, although a very minor commitment from our army, in our first war of the 21st century, a war that presents a very real danger of becoming a much wider conflict. We can also expect over the next 99 years other conflicts to follow. So the case for reform of our army should be self-evident.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Thompson. For a relatively short presentation, I would say that was very insightful and, in parts, quite fascinating.

So let's get started with the questioning.

Mr. Benoit, for seven minutes.

Mr. Leon Benoit (Lakeland, Canadian Alliance): Yes. Thank you very much, Mr. Thompson, for a very interesting presentation.

Some of the points you raised with regard to military ethos, in particular in the army, have been raised by others. The Conference of Defence Associations in its recent report talked about the progressive demilitarization of the Canadian Forces. Professor Jack Granatstein in a report to the minister in 1997 said “a culture of timidity” was the most serious problem confronting the Canadian Forces. Those are some pretty strong statements. What are your comments on those statements?

Mr. John Thompson: Well, they're quite true.

There's another book. The name of the author is Fehrenbach. He wrote a history of the Korean War called This Kind of War. In the first chapter he talked about the U.S. army in the 1940s, basically how the liberal society affected the army and this resulted in the complete catastrophe that befell the U.S. army soldiers in Korea in 1950, where they were utterly crushed by the conditions that confronted them. It used to be, until I think about 10 or 15 years ago, that a Canadian general officer, on being promoted to brigadier rank, would receive a copy of this book and be told specifically to read the first chapter.

Generally, an army has to be an army. An army has to think differently. Its whole focus is ultimately on standing up to some appalling stresses. An army that can actually handle combat and is geared for it can handle any other mission that comes its way. What's important is that the discipline that creates an army capable of fighting is also the discipline you can use for a thousand other purposes. But if the chain of command disintegrates, because no one trusts anybody else, if soldiers don't trust each other, you really don't have anything much better than, say, a tribal militia, or the sort of hangers-on for some warlord somewhere in the third world.

Mr. Leon Benoit: That hurts, though, because I've always considered that many of the men and women in the forces are extremely well trained and very capable, in top physical condition, that they do have the fighting spirit. Certainly in the past, one of the strengths of the Canadian contribution was having professional, high quality, well-trained, tough soldiers.

Mr. John Thompson: We do have a lot of good people, that's never changed. Fundamentally, we still attract good recruits, sometimes not enough of them. But I've often noticed that some of the really skilled people, the good junior leaders you need to develop new warrants, captains, and majors, leave after a while. They find what they'd been hoping for isn't there.

At the same time we've noticed that a military that does not have a very good sense of itself will tend to fragment under pressure. One of the cases we have to look at is what actually happened to the Airborne Regiment in Somalia. You do find that under the pressures they were facing, particularly the heat, the humidity, the isolation, and perhaps the effect of the malarial medicines they were taking, that chain started to disintegrate. You found people not obeying orders, people covering for each other. Of course, the whole inquiry has subsequently opened up a can of worms, right up to the top. I believe that some of the commissioners who were involved in the Somalia inquiry have found that a number of their recommendations have not come anywhere near to being adopted.

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Mr. Leon Benoit: The lack of spirit to fight, the lack of trust soldiers have towards their leaders, the poor ties between soldiers, and all that kind of thing you mention are things I always considered to be what was there in the Airborne Regiment and was lost in the army when the Airborne Regiment was disbanded. In fact, I've heard from a lot of men and women serving, and those who are leaving in particular. We did a survey out of my office through Esprit de Corps magazine on why people have left. We haven't got that all put together yet, but a common thread was that many left because they had no group to strive for, such as the Airborne was, an elite group that was something to go for. Do you think, maybe, a lot of the reason some of this has been lost is that the elite group isn't there, other than JTF2, which is a very small group?

Mr. John Thompson: That might be part of it, but if you look at your local militia regiment, you get a lot of 17-year-olds joining up because they want to go off and get a good, hard experience. They want to go get dirty, they want to become exhausted, they want to form part of a larger group, they want to feel that sort of comradeship that's often in the military. Then they find they don't get it, and they leave. So very promising recruits have fallen off. All soldiers like to have, especially when they're younger, a good, hard, tough experience, because it adds to their self-confidence and their self-esteem.

Mr. Leon Benoit: Do you think there's too much time spent on sensitivity training and not enough on teaching our soldiers to be tough, well-disciplined soldiers?

Mr. John Thompson: Like a lot of other people, I sometimes dabble in creative writing of my own. I've been actually writing a series of short stories or essays about what it was like in the military about 20 years ago, when I was a lot younger. I noticed then that there was no sensitivity training, but also we didn't need it. The first Muslims, the first Hindus, the first blacks, the first Indians I met were all in the military. There were no problems, because, frankly, it was quite simple: if you were in the same gun crew or the same platoon, you either got along or you didn't. The determinant for getting along was your ability to handle the job.

Mr. Leon Benoit: You knew you were chosen based on merit, or promoted based on merit, that type of thing.

Mr. John Thompson: This is purely anecdotal, but I was a private, an artillery gunner at the time, and I was a new recruit. This was a reserve unit, but we were on an exercise and we were deployed. One of my classmates from the intake course, a Chinese, who was very quiet and kept to himself, was walking by the gun battery, and the two master bombardiers, who were the junior NCOs and in some ways the opinion leaders in the battery, looked it over and said, yes, Chang's okay, he'll do. And that was it, somehow or other, that was a transformation. He suddenly became somebody the gun commanders competed to get on their detachments. The strange sentry details at 2 o'clock in the morning didn't come his way any more. I still wasn't accepted at that time. I was the last man picked for a gun crew or the person notified for a 3 a.m. sentry beat for another couple of months. But it was just on his own merits, as an individual, and the same thing with the Jamaicans and everyone else.

In a wider sense, if you look at the 19th century, when Italy first formed, they used their army to turn Piedmontese and Sicilians into Italians. The Germans did the same, so that Saxons and Bavarians and Prussians became Germans to the military. The German example might not be the best one, because we know they had a few problems with the military and society, but I think you see the point, that often military service unites people in its own way.

The Chair: Mr. Thompson, I have to cut you off there, because Mr. Benoit is well over his time.

Mr. Bachand.

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[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: Thank you, Mr. Thompson, for your presentation. I could say that you are criticizing the Canadian Forces. However, I would like you to tell me whether you have indeed appeared before the special Senate Committee on Security and Intelligence and before the Sub-Committee on Immigration of the House of Representatives of the United States? Did you appear before these committees?

[English]

Mr. John Thompson: Yes, we did.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: Okay.

You have raised many problems. I wrote down a whole page, during your presentation, of things that could be improved upon. You must know that we are presently going through a debate on Bill C-36, which is the antiterrorist bill, and I know that you also have an opinion in this matter.

We have heard last week from Mr. Coulter, from the Communications Security Establishment. You already have criticized the Communications Security Establishment by saying—correct me if I am wrong—that there were problems within that organization. So this will be my first question, Mr. Thompson. Could you tell us to whom you have said that, if indeed you have done so? And if you have said it, could you explain to us what are these security problems, from your point of view?

I will now ask another question while I have the floor, still about intelligence. We, members of Parliament, find that there are many sources of intelligence. The CSIS is one source of intelligence and the RCMP is another source of intelligence, and they both report to the Solicitor General. The Department of Revenue also has its own sources of intelligence, and it reports to the Minister of Revenue. The CSE has intelligence sources and it reports to the Minister of National Defence.

Some witnesses have already told us that perhaps we would need a department of intelligence. One witness told us exactly that last week. The idea would be to go around, coordinate and check all the pieces of information that are coming in the different agencies or departments. That is my second question. I would like to have your advice on the appropriateness of creating a department of intelligence in its own right.

[English]

Mr. John Thompson: With respect to the Communications Security Establishment, I don't know where that came from. I am not aware of any security problems within the CSE. I suspect all of you know a lot more about the CSE than I do. They are, of course, notoriously close-mouthed, but I have no doubt there are no security problems within the CSE.

What I have remarked on many occasions, though, is that the CSE data sometimes are not shared with other Canadian security agencies as quickly as might be useful. I have said in the media on a number of occasions since September 11 that I would favour the creation of, say, a security minister, or somebody else, or some body, to oversee the rapid collection of intelligence on domestic security among all possible sources, including Citizenship and Immigration, customs, local police departments, and so on.

The test I always use for internal security is what I call the Ahmed Ressam test. Would our security arrangements prevent him from leaving the country with a false passport and coming back after having had bomb-making experience in Afghanistan?

I don't know if these are quite germane to what you're prepared to talk about this afternoon, but I hope I've played that point out.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: So you would not be against creating such an organization, or even a department that would be responsible, in Canada, for controlling or collecting and bringing together the various sources of intelligence that are presently scattered in the Canadian scenery.

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Are you considering the contacts as well, because there is also a sharing of information with our partners? Do you consider that we should go one step further in the “interoperability” that we often hear about in the forces? Regarding intelligence, do you think we should strengthen even more the “ interoperability” with our American neighbours, who certainly are ahead of us in the field of intelligence? Would you have any objection to us even trying to pool our intelligence with that of our American neighbours, would you go that far in the field of “interoperability”?

[English]

Mr. John Thompson: When I was in the military, I served for three years as an intelligence officer, a staff posting. I was told the key point about intelligence was that it involved the timely collection, collation, interpretation, and distribution of information, the major emphasis being on time. Of course, this was military tactical intelligence, where time is of the essence, but you can see in the general picture it always applies, and often we're not nearly as timely as we should be.

As for information sharing with our allies, we do a lot of that already, especially, of course, in the military sense. Our military has always been sharing information and intelligence with other allies.

As for the police, the RCMP has very good working relations with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and I know that the provincial police force in Ontario has good working relations with some of the police in some of the bordering states. Our problem has often been our inability to share information between our own domestic sources. Looking at the Ahmed Ressam case, the Montreal police knew something about him, the immigration officers who interviewed him knew something about him, France told CSIS something about him, and nobody really put it together in a hurry.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Thompson. Thank you, Mr. Bachand.

Mr. Wilfert, seven minutes.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm sure you'll be pretty liberal with my time, as you were with Mr. Benoit.

The Chair: I'm interested in fairness.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: Excellent.

I'll recognize the Chairman, so through the Chairman, Mr. Thompson, you made a presentation to the Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims in January 2000, and in that—following up a bit on my colleague across the way—you said that since CSIS was created out of the RCMP, there's been a problem, which is one of sharing of information, wherein we seem to do a better job with other countries, particularly the United States. The fact that we do not have a foreign intelligence agency—I'm going to, if I might, Mr. Chairman, follow that route—was part of those comments. And then there were recommendations made by the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, which suggested that we need to highlight our presence in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, particularly noting our lack of diplomatic personnel in the region, such as in Uzbekistan, which represents 40% of the population. We have just sent troops to a region of the world where we have little or no direct Canadian intelligence. So we are relying on others for intelligence—some would say we relied on CNN.

So the first question is, what do you think of that situation, where we send personnel to an area of the world where we don't have direct intelligence? Who do we rely on for that intelligence?

Second, as regards the sharing of that intelligence at home, do you think the Department of National Defence is getting the kind of information it needs, either from CSIS or other agencies, both at home and abroad?

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And finally, what recommendations would you make to the Government of Canada to ensure that we get the kind of information necessary to assess, for example, the situation in Somalia and in Rwanda, where, although they were UN operations, we did not have the proper intelligence, and therefore it is not surprising what happened, both in Rwanda and in Somalia?

I remember, if I may digress very quickly, when we were sending over armoured personnel carriers to Somalia, it wasn't a peacekeeping mission. The media called it a peacekeeping mission, but it clearly was a war zone. That was not what we were sending them to, and yet that's what everybody was told. So I don't think it's too surprising.

Again, the question is on the issue of intelligence and sending armed forces personnel abroad, if I might, Mr. Chairman, through you to Mr. Thompson. Thank you.

Mr. John Thompson: There are a number of points to cover. The first failure of intelligence is never actually the ability to collect intelligence, it's the ability of the client for that intelligence to believe what he is hearing. Historically, I refer you to Joseph Stalin, who was being told from every possible source that the Germans were coming and refused to believe it, and he got caught, figuratively, with his trousers down around his ankles.

A trade secret I think you probably never hear from CSIS, from the CIA, or from anyone else is that about 90% to 95% of the information they collect is from open sources. They watch. In Langley, Virginia, they watch the raw feed going in to CNN. When our military opened up a special workshop to prepare for Y2K, one of the first things they did to start gathering intelligence was to get a cable subscription, and then they started pulling in newspapers and magazines. That's true for just about everybody. However, one of the problems is that you have to, as it were, take out of the white noise of the modern media the information you actually need. Sometimes it's helpful, for example, instead to turn off CNN before you go to a place like Somalia or Afghanistan, and maybe consult the 1912 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was the last encyclopaedia that factually reported on a lot of local conditions, before modern sensibilities started to assert themselves on top of the facts.

As for overseas intelligence, we do have an overseas intelligence organization, we've always had one. It's called External Affairs. A large part of External's mandate is actually collecting information. And part of our problem in some regions is that we don't really have much of a presence from External Affairs.

The next vantage point for our overseas intelligence gathering is with our military, with the sharing of information, often on an automatic basis, with our alliance partners and with the United States. So that has always gone on as well.

For some of our domestic concerns, I don't think we need to see the RCMP or CSIS overseas that often. If we're going to give them more money to improve security, I think we really need to spend it here, improving some very real capabilities they don't have much of. They don't have many people who speak Arabic. I don't think they have anyone who speaks Pashto, and very few people who speak Punjabi.

And then, at the same time, we could develop information we can share with the French or with the Americans or the British, because some of these problems are international problems. We've seen how Ahmed Ressam travelled to so many different countries. If we had been developing timely information, the French and Belgiums would have been delighted to receive it, just as the French were upset at the fact that they shared information with us, but we refused to act on it.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: Mr. Chairman, very quickly, through you, if in fact you're sending people to parts of the world where we have little or no information on the ground, and if in fact we have a situation where we rely, to some degree or to a large degree, let's say in this particular case, on the United States or Great Britain, with regard to filtered information, what would your assessment be of what we actually receive and how, again, it's going, as you say, back to the client, the utilization of that information?

Mr. John Thompson: In some cases, for example through NORAD or information received through SACLANT, it's technical information. We get the raw feed just as quickly as the Americans do. Often we might be looking at the same screens American officers are looking at, receiving the same information. Other times information is of more a political nature. It certainly might be screened. I remember, back when I had access to classified data, you did sometimes mark which countries were allowed to receive this one particular document. That's always been the case. I did notice that we shared information very closely all the time with what the Germans would call the rest of the Anglo-Saxon Mafia. So I'm not too concerned about that.

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I was working a few years ago on cross-border smuggling, especially the black market in firearms coming from the United States into Canada. I noticed that the BATF provided exemplary cooperation with the RCMP. In fact, they expedited any request for information from the RCMP and gave them every piece of information they even thought the RCMP might ask for. It was superb cooperation, and I understand that extends in some other environments between the RCMP and other national police forces.

The Chair: Mr. Thompson, I'm going to have to cut you off there, and you too, Mr. Wilfert, as you're well over your time.

Mr. Bryon Wilfert: Thanks for your generosity.

The Chair: Mr. Stoffer.

Mr. Peter Stoffer (Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore, NDP): Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Thompson, for your presentation.

Sir, how long were in the service yourself?

Mr. John Thompson: I was in for 13 years.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: Thank you.

I don't want to pick a fight with you in any way, shape, or form, but I just find it amazing that you actually wrote this and led to it in your presentation here. In 1999 you wrote:

By contrast, the Canadian Army now seems to be a collection of the uneducated.

Do you still hold that view?

Mr. John Thompson: The statistics later in that article, collected for the Minister of Defence in 1997, pointed out—I haven't got the article in front of me—that in contrast with the Americans, very few of our officers and few of our men had a university education. This was when I was on a visit to the 101st Air Assault Division, which is one of the more famous American divisions. The current show on HBO Band of Brothers concerns this division in the Second World War. We were told we could pretty well go anywhere we wanted to, talk to whoever we wanted to, as long as we stayed out of the special forces compound. I remember dropping into the mens' mess one time for lunch, near the artillery brigade for the division. I just went up to a table full of American army troopers and started talking to them. Three of them at the table were working over their notes; they were taking community college degrees. They were all privates. They talked about the master sergeant on their gun detachment who was working on his post-graduate degree.

I made enquiries and found out that almost every member of the unit, when his duties permitted—and local community colleges and universities had programs to facilitate this—was working on a community college degree, an undergraduate degree, or post-graduate training. Most U.S. army officers do not pass the rank of major without some post-graduate education. The level of knowledge, expertise, and continuing professional development in that division was profound. Of course, that's also a point for almost the entire U.S. military, that these educational standards prevail. In the U.S. Marines 95% of the recruits are high school graduates.

Mr. Peter Stoffer: I thank you for that, sir, but I would point out that I don't have a university education myself, and I don't consider myself less of a politician because other people have the ability to put initials behind their name. I have met thousands of service personnel and veterans, and I wouldn't call any of them uneducated. They may not have the initials after their name, but they're loyal, they're dedicated, they listen to orders, they train hard, they work hard, and in many cases they are our liberators. I think of those Buchenwald veterans who just received their compensation—I don't think any of them had a formal education.

I agree with you that continuing professional development is something all aspects of our society, including the military, must address. I thank you for that presentation, and I encourage the government, and urge my colleagues on this side to encourage the government, to keep that there, because everyone needs continuing education. But I just find it astonishing that a man of your intelligence would actually say that to many of our men and women. I personally wouldn't walk to Shearwater, at least I would not leave alive, if I said that. I have met so many of them who are more educated than I am, and they don't have degrees behind their names.

• 1615

I just caution you on that concern, sir, because you're painting all of them with the same brush. I know you don't mean that, and I know your intentions are good, but the men and women of our forces do such a fine job for this country, and the ones who are on those ships that left Wednesday do such a fine job. To call them uneducated or give the impression that the majority of them are I just find unacceptable. I can't appreciate that, Mr. Thompson.

I will, however, say this much for you, sir, your level of debate in this is very good, and I commend you for that. What you've brought to this committee and the furtherance for our studies is greatly appreciated, and I thank you for that.

My last question, sir—and I like to ask this of most people—is, how much money do you think the finance minister should put into the military for the upcoming budget to meet the needs you've addressed?

The Chair: Mr. Thompson, please feel free to address any of the previous comments Mr. Stoffer made, as well as the question directly.

Mr. John Thompson: All right.

As an aside, I would prefer that all our military personnel were high school graduates, to start with. University degrees do not necessarily mean the same thing as community college degrees, and a large number of our personnel, especially in the navy, which is an incredibly technical profession, do work on getting these degrees when they can. But even a modern infantry soldier, although he has to be extremely fit and capable, also does need to understand often the principles of the system he's using. If it's 3 a.m. in freezing rain, and your thermal imager has broken down, and that's the one instrument that may prevent someone from creeping up on you, you do not need to know just how to fix it, but often it's extremely useful to have somebody who understands the basic principles it operates from.

With a modern soldier, again, you're looking at somebody who's using a global positioning satellite system to find his way around. I'm talking about a private soldier on the ground. He has to know how to operate the Internet. Again, in the modern American system that's part of this revolution in military affairs, every section at least is carrying the equivalent of a very robust laptop computer, and they know how to use it. If you're planning a patrol, you want to know what the weather conditions are going to be like. You want to get a recent appraisal of the intelligence about what's going on in the four or five kilometres you will be going through. You might want to quickly review a manual you're not carrying in your pocket. Say you encounter a mine and you want to know how to disarm that mine, all right, call up the diagrams and look, and it's there. This is what modern warfare is getting like.

You're right that a university degree is not absolute proof of intelligence, but it helps. It helps to at least say, okay I've been there, I've done that, I've got the training, I've expanded. Actually, how many people do you know with a BA who apply what they learned? What's more important is often the research skills and the writing skills they've actually learned in the course of that degree.

As for increasing the size of the military budget, I'm not an economist. I just know it should be larger. God knows how you'll squeeze the money out of everywhere else, but it's needed badly.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Thompson.

Thank you, Mr. Stoffer.

Ms. Gallant.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Thompson.

You've noted in the briefing that the JTF2, while it has more resources available for training than other military units, lacks experience in block operations and counter-terrorism operations. What we're finding is that instead of putting together a unit much as you describe, similar to the 101st, the government is planning to expand the JTF2, hopefully, by 1,000 troops in order to take care of special ops. In your experienced opinion, would it make more sense to keep the JTF2 as our domestic hostage rescue unit and to take troops from the general population of the armed forces and perhaps go back to a special service force, such as the Airborne?

• 1620

Mr. John Thompson: There are two things. First, the JTF2 does, like the British SAS or the American Special Forces community, with which it does cooperate quite closely, I'm told, have a number of activities, including the bodyguard function for senior officials overseas. And I've been told, although I don't know if I can believe it or not, they've been abroad on a few missions, usually pointing a laser at somebody for a smart bomb to come in. Beyond that, of course, you probably know a lot more about their doings than anybody else does.

The people who get involved in the special forces community really have to be la crème de la crème. They need to have enormous levels of fitness, but at the same time a lot of applied smarts. They need to be smart enough to know when not to get in trouble. A very close friend of mine is a veteran of some 20 years in the British special forces community, 13 years in the SAS, and they trained him to perfection as a very lethal soldier. Once they did that, they spent a long time training him in how to avoid getting into trouble. The criteria for someone in the SAS, for example, include that degree of intelligence so they know how to handle themselves, but also an extraordinary stubbornness and determination.

A lot of people apply for the special forces community. In every army it's the main challenge there is, but not many actually have the stubbornness, the determination, and the discretion. A lot more people have the fitness standards, and I think that if we were to reactivate the Canadian Airborne Regiment—and maybe, for historical reasons, call it the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion again or something—that would be a good home for a lot of soldiers who would like to get into the special forces community, but aren't quite good enough. But also, you don't really want the special forces community to go off fighting people. You don't want them to do, say, commando raids or anything else. The Americans have the Delta Force, the U.S. Navy Seals, and other groups like that for reconnaissance, but when they need a commando operation, they bring in the Rangers, and the old Canadian Airborne Regiment was a match for the American Rangers any time. If we were to bring back the parachute battalion, I'm sure the same thing would happen.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: You're familiar with Caught in the Middle, the CDA report. There is reference made to the decline in the training standards. Have you had a chance to examine the issue of the declining training standards in the Canadian forces?

Mr. John Thompson: I still have a lot of contacts in the military, both in the regular forces and in the reserves, and I've had a look at some of the new training standards. The physical fitness standards have fallen off by about 20 to 25%, and sometimes even more. An important point now is that chemical and biological warfare training isn't there any more. When I did my officer training in Gagetown, I had to spend three days in an NBC suit in summertime, which wasn't easy, but it certainly taught me how to handle that gear under any circumstances. Now that training really isn't there. There might be a quick trip to the gas hut to learn how to fit your mask properly, and that's about it. If we do have a large-scale anthrax contamination, the first people we'll turn to after the local fire departments for decontamination and for rescue will be the military, but the people who have had long experience wearing the gear and learning how to handle themselves in a contaminated environment are not there any more.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Thompson.

[Translation]

Mr. Bachand...

Mr. Claude Bachand: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I asked you a question earlier, and perhaps I was a bit too direct about it, about the fact that the CSE, the Communications Security Establishment, had security problems. However, I have here the presentation that you gave on January 26, 2001, before the Sub- Committee on Immigration, and I quote from your remarks. I am sorry, I will read it in English because I only have it in English:

• 1625

[English]

The Canadian Armed Forces have some role in internal security. Like the American NSA, the Canadian Signals Establishment plays a role in communications security and the development of electronic intelligence. The organization is shrouded in secrecy and little is known about its actual budget. However, there have been rumours of low morale and major security breaches in recent months.

[Translation]

Let me put a more specific question to you. Where do these rumours come from? Do you believe that the rumours to the effect that there are major security problems are true?

[English]

Mr. John Thompson: Is that document footnoted? Because I was referring to a Globe and Mail article that reported there were problems with morale and personnel problems inside the organization. That was a Globe and Mail article that probably came out sometime in the middle of 1999. I've certainly got it back in my file somewhere in my office.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: Do you make presentations? I look at the MacKenzie Intitute and I see that you are the executive director of the organization. I imagine that you would not raise questions on the basis of newspaper articles. With all due respect for journalists, their stories are not always absolutely accurate. You are the executive director of an institution that is fairly well recognized.

According to you, given that article from the Globe and Mail, on which you seem to base the statement that I have just read, do you believe that there are security problems in the Communications Security Establishment as we speak, or you don't know about it?

[English]

Mr. John Thompson: I don't know if there are security problems in the CSE. I know there are problems in the American counterpart, the NSA, with older computers and older equipment. That's their main problem. Also, I think their problem is that they don't have enough funding to handle all the jobs they're currently asked to do. But when you talk about security problems, I think you're implying that there might be a leak or something. I don't know anything about that. I'd be fairly surprised if there were.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: I suppose that you are aware, Mr. Thompson, that just last week the federal government has injected a fairly substantial amount into the CSE. Do you believe that this money is a good investment for the taxpayers? Do you believe that it is enough?

It seems to me that with Bill C-36, if we want to give a greater scope to the CSE... We seem to be giving them more powers, among other things. The minister could even allow wiretapping without going through a judge. What is your reaction about that aspect, wiretapping without going through a judge?

[English]

Mr. John Thompson: When we were talking about wiretapping without going through a judge, we weren't actually talking about the CSE so much. But the CSE does have a role in protecting our communications, including computer communications.

As an aside, if you ever want to spend an interesting afternoon, perhaps you should ask the CSE to give you a tour of the rooftops of various embassies around this city, so you can look at some of the antennas that are up there that really shouldn't be there.

As I understand, part of the new spending at the CSE was something like $3.1 million for new computers. I don't know what the going price is for new Cray computers, but that might not be enough. I think there's also $26 million for new training and expansion of their role. Again, that might be enough to catch up with where they should be. As a taxpayer, I know how little money there is for expansion of new capabilities, but I think perhaps the CSE might need a little more than was given to it in the last couple of weeks.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Bachand. Thank you, Mr. Thompson.

Mr. Wood, you're up. Five minutes.

• 1630

Mr. Bob Wood (Nipissing, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Thompson, you're reported in a lot of the periodicals, but in one I happened to browse through you said that Canadians, and by extension Canadian politicians, don't take any terror problems seriously. I think it would be safe to say that we now take the terror problem very seriously. But in your mind, how long will our concerns last? A year from now will we again be complacent, or will Canadians ever be complacent again?

Mr. John Thompson: I think the current crisis is probably going to go on for a very long time. In fact, to use a metaphor, I sometimes get the feeling, after September 11, I used to get whitewater canoeing at the point where the current picks you up and you are no longer really able to go in any direction but down river. We're heading into a crisis we don't know the end of, we don't know what's going to develop, we don't know what's going to result, and all we can really hope to do is stay upright and not run into any rocks. I think it's going to be a long time before that old complacency about terrorism comes back, if it ever does. In one respect I wouldn't mind seeing a bit of complacency, because I'm tired of all the anthrax panic that's often unjustified.

One thing that, up until September 11, often infuriated me was our blasé reaction to terrorism coming from within Canada. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam operated almost entirely in the open. The Air India bombing was often seen as an Indian problem, not a Canadian problem, not by the RCMP, but by our media, by the general population, even though almost half the people who were killed were Canadian citizens. But no, I think the complacency will be gone for a long time.

Mr. Bob Wood: You were also quoted as saying there needs to be legislation allowing anyone found guilty before becoming a Canadian citizen of drug or violent offences, fraud, firearms, political crimes to be deported upon conviction. I think you said that about a couple of years ago. Do you still feel that the government is dragging its feet? And do you think that if legislation had been in place a couple years ago, we might not have had these people hanging around and operating out of Canada?

Mr. John Thompson: It's hard to say. I guess Ahmed Ressam is the case again, where he was involved in an automobile theft ring. When he came into the country, our immigration officers were alert, they noticed he was on a doctored French passport, and so they interviewed him. He admitted in the interview that he'd been involved in the GIA in Algeria. So right off the bat you have someone travelling with a false passport under an assumed name with experience in an overseas insurgency. Then he got involved in a systematic criminal activity, the automobile theft ring.

You can understand somebody who comes to Canada and commits, say, an ordinary crime of passion or a minor criminal offence, but it's different when it's something involving narcotics, or if they've acquired firearms, something that actually says they are connected to a criminal network. Most insurgent groups around the world are now actually fuelled by organized crime, that's how they pay for what they do. That certainly would have sent up another warning signal that he was a dangerous individual who we should not keep in this country any longer than we had to.

As for what's coming up now, in some respects I look at the new security legislation and I see a wish list that I always wish had been there. On the other hand, I guess there's the speed with which things are coming. Ordinarily, I do have some libertarian instincts and am quite fond of protecting civil liberties, so I'm trusting that all due deliberation is taken to make sure we still have as many protections as we can afford for a liberal democratic society, while still enhancing our own individual security. We are now in an age where terrorism is conducted with weapons of mass destruction and on a horrible scale, but we still have to remain who we are as much as we can.

• 1635

The Chair: Mr. Benoit, five minutes.

Mr. Leon Benoit: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Thompson, it seems to me that this is an opportunity for anybody who cares about strengthening our security forces, and especially our military, that may not come again, an opportunity to pressure the government to commit serious resources to the military. Quite frankly, I wish you'd be a lot tougher when you're asked about money and you say, well, you know, it's tough to balance these resources.

It seems to me the first responsibility of the federal government is the security of this nation and the citizens of this nation. That's not for money that's left over. It may cost another $10 billion, it may cost an extra $15 billion a year to build up our security forces to the level at which they should be in this country. If it does, we don't have to raise taxes. We have identified, as a party, over the last eight years, where government can cut $10 billion a year in low-priority spending, and totally wasted spending in some cases. So it's not a matter of paying more taxes, that's not acceptable. Running deficits is not acceptable. Reprioritizing is the issue. And because the first priority is national security, we have to put pressure on the government now, I as an opposition member and, I think, you, Mr. Thompson, and anybody who cares about the military, to get serious about putting proper resources into the military. If we miss this opportunity, we won't have another, not with this government certainly.

So I would just ask if you agree that this is an opportunity we may not see again for pressuring government to get serious about the military?

Mr. John Thompson: I think we may be in for 10 to 20 years of having to confront a very serious security problem, perhaps with regional conflicts we didn't want any part of at September 11. I can't see how this conflict is going to end, but I don't think it's going to be over soon. I doubt if Osama bin Laden will be alive by the end of the year, and I think the Taliban government in Afghanistan will be gone, but we might be facing something really horrible after that.

There were a lot of writers trying to describe the way the world was shaping in the 1990s, and Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations, had a pretty ugly vision. On the other hand, he was more right about what's actually transpired than anybody else has been. And I'm afraid his interpretation of what's going to come is more accurate, and I think we're in for some very hard decades.

Mr. Leon Benoit: We're in a less stable and secure world than we have been for some time.

Mr. John Thompson: Our military has been neglected for a long time, and it does need to be improved, built upon, and expanded, but if we're going to repair the house, let's work on the foundation first. The reason I talked about the military ethos, quality of recruits, paying attention to professional development, the revolution in military affairs, and configuring ourselves for that first, was that these are more important right now. Then we can start building on top of that as much as we can.

When I was a junior officer, I always used to see plans coming out about these magnificent Canadian corps, divisional reconnaissance regiments, the Canadian artillery brigade, and all these other notional designs and notional weapon systems that were always something in the books and never actually real. We had to make do with 120-man infantry battalions. So I'm not going to come here with a wish list of what sort of formations we should have, but expansion is going to come. There's no choice. We're facing a world that's going to get really ugly.

Mr. Leon Benoit: But how long can we wait? To train a top-notch junior officer who's out there in the field leading men takes 10 years. With the recruiting program starting now, you're not going to have anybody who could really go overseas and be involved without at least, I would say, a minimum of three years training—or at least three years from now, if the initial recruiting is just starting now.

Mr. John Thompson: That's why I'd like us to pay attention to the foundations of individual quality, the revolution of military affairs, and the military ethos now, to give us a solid foundation that we can rebuild the military from.

• 1640

Historically, if you look at the Canadian army, we were lucky in World War II that with the exception of the poor men sent off to Hong Kong, everybody else had about three years of training before they actually got committed to battle. In the American army, again, there was titanic expansion, but they were fortunate, they also had a good foundation to build from, so they could turn a 200,000 man army into a 6 million man army in five years. If you have the solid foundation there first, you can do anything with it.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Thompson. Thank you, Mr. Benoit.

Mr. Dromisky.

Mr. Stan Dromisky (Thunder Bay—Atikokan, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm very interested in your comments regarding morale in the military. I'd like to zero in not on the reserve, but on the active component of our military. I once read an article saying that as you go from the highest-ranking officers in the active component down to the other levels, the further down you go, the more serious is the morale problem. This article was directly related, if I remember correctly, to several factors, but one factor that really stood out in my mind was that the fellows near the bottom were very unhappy or bitching about the benefits the higher-ranking officers had. It was like a country club, you know, blocks of time for this, and blocks of time for quiet time, and golf. All these factors were brought into the article. I really don't know how accurate that article was. All I know is that there were a lot of people complaining about the lifestyle of the people in the highest ranks compared with the people at the bottom. That was a key factor in the development of low morale. Can you comment on that?

Mr. John Thompson: Such things are found in Esprit de Corps magazine and Frank magazine, although I think the charges in Esprit de Corps are always a lot more serious. The military is always a hierarchical organization, and yes, I lived very differently as a captain from the way I did as a private, there's no doubt about that. But there has been some resentment. The use of food banks by some of our junior personnel, especially in Halifax and Victoria, with the long pay freeze, where they didn't see general officers quite sharing the hardships they had, was real. There have been some other problems. I've heard captains and majors complaining about some of the behaviour of our general officers.

But some of our general officers, I know, have been fully attuned to what the privates and captains were thinking, and very aware of their concerns. With the general officers, sometimes there is a difference between somebody who has come up the administrative or logistical chain and somebody who has come up through, say, an operational chain in the navy or the army, who has had to work very closely with low-level personnel all of his career, so that the military ethos has actually rubbed off on them. I found a number of our army officers had been keenly aware of what the problems were with the men.

The Chair: Ms. Beaumier, did you want to take two minutes from Mr. Dromisky's time?

Ms. Colleen Beaumier (Brampton West—Mississauga, Lib.): Yes, please.

There are a number of issues on which I disagree with you, your take on education for one. I do have a university education, and I've seen a number of people who are educated far beyond their capacity and a number of people who drop out of high school because the school system failed them, not because they weren't smart enough to learn.

The problem I'm having with what you're saying is that it's like reading the newspaper. I see where some terrorist expert has said they were really out to bomb a nuclear plant, but I don't see any references. This is your opinion, and I didn't see any references in the document I looked over from the immigration committee. What do you base this expert testimony on?

Mr. John Thompson: About our educational standards?

Ms. Colleen Beaumier: No, everything you're saying. You're giving us such a bleak picture, that life is going to get worse, terror is going to increase, threats against our security are going to escalate—based on what?

• 1645

Mr. John Thompson: You might want to read Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy and Samuel Huntingdon's The Clash of Civilizations. Yossef Bodansky's Osama bin Laden and the Islamic Fundamentalist is quite revealing. It points out that there will be no peace with the fundamentalists.

If you look at military history, often you can draw inferences from there. We have not seen Nazism or the imperial Japanese fervour since 1945, because those ideologies were crushed utterly. But when the Taliban is gone, when Osama bin Laden is gone, the preachers, the mosques, the teachers, and the schools that gave birth to that ideology are still there, and they'll still be generating people to follow in their footsteps. I think in Yossef Bodansky's work you might also want to take a look at where some of the funding has been diverted, including the Saudi royal family. This is not something that is going to be over that quickly.

For everything else, if you want to look very critically at military dysfunction, the best book you could probably read—in fact it's one I reread every five years or so, just because it's that good—is Norm Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Norm Dixon was a bomb disposal expert in the Second World War, which actually meant he had to sit there with trembling fingers over something ticking away underneath him. After the war he became a psychologist. His book is an examination of dysfunction in a military hierarchy. He first writes as a military historian, pointing out 100 years of British military disasters. Then he turns over, puts his professional hat on, and says this is a personality type that leads to this sort of incompetent behaviour. It's an excellent book. It does apply to militaries, but it also applies to any hierarchical structure where conformity is rewarded. I think you'd find that reading the book is an anodyne against conformity in any particular organization—military, corporate, even political.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Thompson. If you have further questions, we can get back to you, Ms. Beaumier.

We've got Mr. Bachand at this point for five minutes.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I have a question about political control. In that same document that you have tabled before the Congressional Sub- Committee in the United States, you said and I quote:

[English]

Outside of police circles, the routine sharing of information is less than it could be. The CSE—

[Translation]

the CSE keeps coming up—

[English]

for example, is an extraordinary source of information, but only reports to the Privy Council Office, the small body of elite senior civil servants who support the cabinet. When intelligence is passed on to other agencies, it has already moved, often slowly, through a set of politicized filters. Delays of this sort often damage intelligence work. The classic failure of intelligence is when the client refuses to believe what his officers are reporting. Inserting a political speed bump into the flow degrades the quality of information, adds a time delay, and may well block some material altogether.

[Translation]

This is what I want to know about control. If we create organizations such as the Communications Security Establishment, shouldn't there be a political control normally on agencies of this kind? That is my first question.

I don't know whether you will have time to answer my second question, but I would like you very much to do so. Otherwise, I will talk to you about it individually. At the end of your presentation before the American Congress, you said this:

[English]

Canada owes protection to its own citizens, and as a responsible neighbour, cannot allow threats to the United States to develop on its own territory. We could do a better job.

[Translation]

Could you explain to us briefly how we could do a better job to ensure our good neighbour relationship with the United States?

• 1650

[English]

Mr. John Thompson: On a military staff often one of the characteristics that's most highly prized is a complete and total objectivity. Facts are facts, and the facts are put together and passed to the client as quickly and accurately as may be done, even when the facts are often unwelcome. One of the problems with modern insurgency and modern organized crime is that in a cosmopolitan society, we've often conditioned ourselves—and at the political level the conditioning is there—to be uncomfortable with or be wary about problems coming out of a particular community. Most insurgent groups and most organized criminal groups tend to recruit now from a narrow ethnic community. We've often had this problem in Canada.

One of the specific cases was the Jamaican posses that first started to appear in Toronto and southern Ontario in the late 1970s and the 1980s, and they were violent. The homicide rate shot up. There was gunplay everywhere. A group appeared called the Black Action Defence Committee, which seemed to have funding coming from people associated with the Jamaican posses. It's circumstantial evidence, but it appeared all the same. They claimed to represent the entire black community. If the police shot a black suspect, there was hell to pay. The Jamaican posses killed seven or eight times as many young black males, and there was never a peep out of them. Any local politician who tried to raise the point that these Jamaican posses were becoming dangerous, or perhaps we should speed up extraditions of posse members to Jamaica, got a lot of flak.

When the Babbar Khalsa first appeared in Canada, started to take over moderate Sikh temples, and tried to deliver themselves as the representatives of all Canadian Sikhs, again, when political figures started to get interested in their activities, you suddenly had a whole series of speakers coming out of the Sikh community denouncing the investigation as being bigoted or racist and so on.

Finally, one real example is the Tamil Tigers, a group that's responsible for 65,000 deaths in Sri Lanka. Now half of the Tamil diaspora lives in Canada, and they are raising money quite openly through groups that have been characterized for six years running by the United States State Department as front groups for the Tamil Tigers.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: Just a final point, Mr. Chairman, I would like Mr. Thompson to answer my question. Do you want political control or no political control? That was the question. I do not want to hear about the Tamil and about Jamaica; I want to know, if there is to be any political control, whether he is against political control, to put it bluntly.

[English]

The Chair: Mr. Bachand, you're over your five minutes. I would suggest you take that up in the next round. We will get to you on another round.

Madam Beaumier.

Ms. Colleen Beaumier: The more you talk, the more questions and controversy you bring up. What is the Mackenzie Institute? I'm sorry, I don't know, I'm new to the committee.

Mr. John Thompson: We are basically a small organization; there are five of us. We provide research and comment on matters pertaining to organized violence and political instability. That includes anything from regular military activities down to, often, rioting, terrorism, organized crime in particular communities. Among other things, we did a major investigation of the black-market cigarettes, which I'm told helped drive the tax cut in 1994 that crippled the black market in cigarettes. We've profiled the Tamil Tigers, profiled the—

Ms. Colleen Beaumier: Who finances your organization?

Mr. John Thompson: We are funded by several Canadian charitable foundations and individuals. We don't take funding from government, from any level.

Ms. Colleen Beaumier: Is this a club?

Mr. John Thompson: No. Right now we've got ongoing grants from three major Canadian foundations, but seeing that this is a public record, we do have some security problems. I had a mail bomb sent to me in 1995, I was shot at in 1993, and in the last year we were stalked by the Tamil Tigers. They were trying to find out where I lived and where our offices were. So you'll forgive me if I decline to identify the foundations.

Ms. Colleen Beaumier: Sure.

• 1655

You were talking about the Babbar Khalsa. I have a little knowledge of that group. You were talking about Sikhs coming out and defending them and accusing people of going after them as being racist. That simply isn't true. What did happen was that Joe Clark in 1988 sent out a message telling everyone who was involved in politics not to associate themselves with anyone who belonged to the World Sikh Organization or the federation, because they were terrorists. I happened to be doing an election campaign for a Sikh gentleman, and I stood in a room full of people and said to them, oh God, none of you belong to these organizations do you? They laughed and said that every single one of them was affiliated with one or another. I think you have to acknowledge that any sympathies for any of those organizations were well founded, based on what has happened in India.

Mr. John Thompson: Yes, 1984.

Ms. Colleen Beaumier: These people were not all terrorists—in fact, the majority of them weren't terrorists. I think, before commenting on the others, we should perhaps wait and see what the outcome actually is of this court case.

Mr. John Thompson: Well, the World Sikh Organization has been characterized by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization for some time, as has Babbar Khalsa. However, in 1984, as a result of the outrage at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, a lot of Canadian Sikhs did affiliate themselves with the organization. I'm Roman Catholic, and if somebody had done what was to the Golden Temple to the Vatican, and there was some sort of Catholic terrorist group out there opposed to those people, I might have joined it too for a couple of years.

Ms. Colleen Beaumier: This is my point.

Mr. John Thompson: There has also been for years a very bitter struggle inside the Sikh community to keep the Babbar Khalsa militants away from temple funding. That's a struggle that's often resulted in the murder of moderate Canadian Sikhs.

Ms. Colleen Beaumier: You have private police information, then, that is not available, because a couple of those moderate Sikhs who were killed were personal friends of mine, and I know the issue was not the funding.

I don't want to debate this or argue it here, I just find some of your conclusions questionable. You seem to be very definitive on all of these, and I find them questionable. That is just a comment—you may be absolutely right, but I find them offensive.

The Chair: Do you have anything further, Ms. Beaumier?

Ms. Colleen Beaumier: No, thank you.

The Chair: Ms. Gallant, for five minutes.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Minister of National Defence and, I believe, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Defence have gone on record as saying that the Canadian military is more competent and capable and is better equipped to fight now than it was 10 years ago. Would you concur with that assessment?

Mr. John Thompson: No, I wouldn't. Ten years ago we had the benefit of a larger number of NCOs and officers who had been recruited in the 1970s and the 1980s, a good many of whom had been with the 4 Mechanized Brigade Group in Germany. They had been involved in high-end conventional training in a mechanized environment, so that we had a lot more people who knew how to handle themselves in a large NATO exercise, one of these thoroughly integrated multinational exercises. We had, in Germany anyway, more of the equipment, and it wasn't quite as obsolescent as it is now. That's one of the main problems. Also, these people who came in at this time and took training have been leaving over the last 10 years.

Looking at our infantry, a huge number of them have been involved in some very traumatic peacekeeping operations. That means there's a lot of real experience in hostile environments now that wasn't there 10 years ago. In 1991 came the first time, I think, we fired shots in anger in warfare since the Korean war, and the first time since the Cyprus crisis in 1974. But overall, the level of training in high-end, sophisticated operations and the equipment we have is gone, or in deep storage. We don't have people who've been involved in a lot of really large-scale collective training any more. To my understanding, the army has not done a real brigade level exercise since 1991.

• 1700

Most of our tanks have been mothballed. They might have new computers and new sights in them, but the Leopard tanks we bought in 1978 are still out of a design concept that appeared in 1960. They're well past their prime.

With the communications system we got, the TIC system, we've just started to issue those radios now. They were on order in the late 1980s.

As for the number of people who'd had training, in the infantry especially, jump school, there were a lot more people who'd been to the parachute school, so there were high standards of fitness, and of course, they're not there right now.

There are so many other areas. I don't think we are nearly as good relative to every other army in the world as we were 10 years ago.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: You say this threat of terrorism isn't necessarily a fleeting concern; we may tackle and conquer terrorism, but there's still a much more violent element out there. The world map as we see it, especially in the Middle East, could change dramatically. The threat is imminent. In addition to the foundation you described, what about at the top level? It's often mentioned that there should be a depoliticization of DND.

Mr. John Thompson: Again, there are a couple of books, Tested Mettle and The Sharp End. In Tested Mettle it's pointed out that having civil servants, who have a different ethos and a different direction, write performance reviews for military officers is not all that conducive to maintaining the military ethos.

Also, I've noticed that with unification, the model we have, with not just our armed forces all together under one operational command, but the insertion of large numbers of civil servants into our headquarters, is a model none of our partners has ever bothered to follow. They don't like it, they don't think it works that well.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: So that would be another first step, to separate the civilian servants from....

Mr. John Thompson: Yes, to create a clear delineation between civilian authority and military authority, bearing in mind that the military must always be absolutely answerable to civilian authority. But at the same time, on a day-to-day basis, the military really should conduct its own affairs in a military manner.

With concerns about public image, damage control, and other things, the military's actually spent a lot of time, money, and effort in the last few years on its public affairs staff, which is often indicative of a civil service way of looking at things that they shouldn't be involved in.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Thank you, Mrs. Gallant.

Mr. Provenzano.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano (Sault Ste. Marie, Lib.): I just have two questions, related to the comments you're making about the general level of education.

There are problems, I think, with respect to recruitment. Then there would be a specific set of problems in relation to renewal. Have you got anything to say about that?

Mr. John Thompson: In the U.S. Air Force, as of 1995, 92% of the recruits were high school graduates. In the U.S. Marine Corps, which has the highest standards of the four main branches of the U.S. military—the coast guard wasn't included in these statistics—over 95% of the recruits were high school graduates. They find this works for them, especially as they're conducting a very technical form of warfare now. That's what the revolution in military affairs is about.

Generally, I think about 80% of their officers have an undergraduate degree. Typically, most officers will not be considered for promotion past major if they don't have a graduate degree of some kind or other. This is in addition to professional training, staff school, staff college training, which other militaries also supply.

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In the Soviet military, back when it was a going concern, one thing about Soviet generals was that they were always very good at their craft. A general might spend about a third of his professional career in ongoing education and staff development.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano: Do you have any specific examples, sir, of how “interoperability” with U.S. forces might be affected by the level of education you described in our military?

Mr. John Thompson: First, in defence of the Canadian infantry, most of our kids have always been fairly adaptable and quick on the uptake. But the American soldier who might be operating with them is operating in an environment we're just not ready for. For example, his—

Mr. Carmen Provenzano: I'm sorry. I would really appreciate it if you would address whether you're aware of any specific examples where “interoperability” between the forces is actually affected.

Mr. John Thompson: I have no examples yet.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano: None.

For my last question, you referred to a number of authors of books and articles, perhaps periodicals. Would any of those authors be directors, employees, or associates of the institute?

Mr. John Thompson: No. I haven't met Huntington, I haven't met Kaplan, and I think Norm Dixon is quite retired in England. But Huntington, among other things, used to be in charge of development of U.S. strategy for the National Security Council, and he's a very senior political figure. Kaplan is, I think, one of the world's top reporters. He was always out somewhere in the developing world taking a look at local conditions. I'd love to have them on my board, they'd be great.

Mr. Carmen Provenzano: Thank you.

The Chair: Monsieur Bachand.

[Translation]

Mr. Claude Bachand: I hope, Mr. Chairman, that the witness will have time to answer my question. I feel, when reading your presentation before the Congressional Sub-Committee of the United States and in the light of your answers this afternoon, that you have some reluctance to any kind of political control on the military.

Let me explain. If I look at your presentation, your brief, your reluctance in this regard comes out clearly when you talk about politicized filters and political speed bumps.

I wonder how you can control the agencies that are linked to the military if not through politics. Personally, I believe that the civilian authorities must control the military. The political stripe of the government does not matter; it could be the Liberals, it could be the Alliance in the future, and it will certainly never be the Bloc Québécois, but still, the civilian authorities must exert control over the army.

It is a relationship that can sometimes be difficult, I agree with you on this, but if the military is not to be controlled by the civilian authorities, what kind of system do you then suggest to control the military? Am I wrong to say that you have some reluctance to any political control over the military?

[English]

Mr. John Thompson: First, I'd like to apologize for going off on a tangent on your last question and chewing up your time.

As to examples of political control over the military, it's actually never been an easy problem for anyone. Let's be honest about that. I think probably the most complicated and stressful seminar I've ever been at was three days with David Charters of the Centre for Conflict Studies at the University of New Brunswick, where this very issue was discussed, and of course, nobody could come to any particular agreement. It might also be, perhaps, that this is one of those questions where the answer varies according to each individual within their own philosophy.

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That having been said, ultimately, of course, naturally, it must be that the military is always answerable to political authority, and under other circumstances, to even lower levels of political authority. If the military has been called out to help the Government of Quebec with what appears to be an insurrection or the Mayor of Toronto with an undue snowstorm, then, of course, they have to answer to those particular political authorities. But on a day-to-day basis or on an operational basis, ideally, you give the military its task and say, this is what has to be done, get out there and do it, and then leave them to do things in a military manner. That's the ideal relationship, but we know real life is much more complex than that.

Perhaps what I should say is that maybe in Ottawa we should let the reins off a bit, not hold them quite so tightly.

Mr. Claude Bachand: No more questions.

The Chair: No more questions, okay. Thank you, Mr. Bachand.

Mr. Thompson, I have a question. You seem to be a consumer of articles, journals, and books on military issues, and one that really caught my attention within the past few months was an article called The Swift and Elusive Sword—I don't know if you saw that—on the CDI website. I thought it was quite good. I can't remember the name of the author, but it was all about what the U.S. forces should look like in the future. What this fellow did was take the ideas of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist, and combine them with the ideas of Lieutenant Colonel John Boyd, who was a famous U.S. fighter pilot and strategist. What he came up with was a ranking of what's important for a military. The first thing, he said, was people, the second thing was ideas, and the third thing was equipment. I'm sure you're familiar with the writings of Sun Tzu, where he talks about conventional and unconventional warfare, the importance of intelligence, etc.

For us, as people who are looking at the whole issue of counter-terrorism and asymmetrical warfare, what is likely going to happen over the next year or so is a hard look at either a foreign policy review or a white paper review. Do you see any necessity for us to go back to the basics in what we have to be concerned about, how we redesign our militaries for the twenty-first century?

Mr. John Thompson: Yes, basics first, and that includes paying attention to the military ethos and individual troop quality. We've always had fairly good stuff to build our military with, as Canadians have always been fairly good soldiers, but those are the priorities: the quality of the people, then the ideas, and then the equipment afterwards—but don't for a minute take me as saying that the equipment is unnecessary or unimportant, for it certainly is important.

The Chair: Yes. So I take it you didn't catch this particular article.

Mr. John Thompson: No, I missed this one.

The Chair: Okay.

Mr. John Thompson: I've read Sun Tzu, of course, and I reread him every now and then. He's still quite applicable to anything from a theoretical thermonuclear conflict to a street gang fight.

The Chair: You might want to read that, Mr. O'Reilly.

Mr. John O'Reilly (Haliburton—Victoria—Brock, Lib.): I was a street-fighter—what can I say?

The Chair: Do you have any further comments on the whole issue of asymmetrical warfare and how we go about redesigning the forces for the future? Because there's always a balance, I think, between special forces and what could be described as conventional forces.

Mr. John Thompson: In a very general sense, with asymmetric warfare, counter-terrorism, or whatever you want to call it, the first agency to handle it inside the country has to be civil. It has to be for your police. We should also, of course, be paying more attention in this country, when you've seen the scale of what happened on September 11 and the threat posed by chemical or biological weapons, to our emergency measures organizations. They have also been neglected and could stand to be polished somewhat. That's, of course, something that will pay dividends under other circumstances as well, because emergency measures organizations react to ice storms and floods and other problems we are all familiar with.

The military overseas is our first response, I think, when there's asymmetric warfare, when the threat can be identified as being overseas. We'd certainly have to look at logistics, transport, and the means of rapidly moving resources to the other side of the world. We don't pay much attention to that in Canada either. I know the air force will probably hate me for this, and I know I'd like to see them with fighter bombers, but I really wish we had a lot more large transport aircraft and could move a lot more assets by air a lot more quickly.

• 1715

Focus on troop quality again. JTF2 is good for its tasks, both at home and abroad, and it should be fairly small. But we do need, I think, something like the Airborne Regiment again. I think, on top of that, we also need something like a really good-quality sustainable light infantry brigade that can be used anywhere and sent anywhere in a hurry.

As always, the Americans are the world leaders right now in military technology. We should stay tied fairly tightly to that lead and work on “interoperability” with the Americans, not least because the Americans really do represent, for a military, the most lethal force in the world today, an organization that's infinitely capable of handling any threat, once they actually come to grips with it.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Thompson.

Mr. Benoit.

Mr. Leon Benoit: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Your comment on having some elite force like the Airborne is certainly at odds with what the minister and the chief of defence staff and others have said. They refer to that concept of actually planning for war as “Cold War old-think”, and having an elitist force like the Airborne is “old-think”. These are the terms they've used. It's quite a different thing from what you're saying. The minister at committee here, just last week I believe, or maybe the week before, said we absolutely would have no use for an elite force like the Airborne. Yet of course, the first force to go into Afghanistan is exactly like that, so I don't know where the minister is coming from.

I'm wondering, as long as we have government that thinks like that, where we're really going to go. In fact, my concern is that we've had governments for 30 years in this country who really don't believe we need a strong military—and it shows—starting with Trudeau. They just don't believe we need it, that there's no threat, and it's reflected in what's happened over that time.

Do you think it's time we had a new white paper to define what the Canadian military should be, what its responsibilities should be, and exactly what it should be able to provide?

Mr. John Thompson: I think a new white paper is probably going to be written for us as circumstances continue to develop in the coming year. After September 11 we are sliding into a very different world from the one we knew. Maybe a century from now historians will be regretting the lost opportunities of the 1990s. We are definitely going to have to change.

I think our Cold War thinking was of a heavy mechanized brigade to confront the Soviet military. That is a threat that is gone. But light forces that can be plugged into any particular situation will be much more necessary in the coming years.

Mr. Leon Benoit: Yes, that would seem obvious. I couldn't believe what I was hearing from these people over the last three weeks or so. Of course, my fear about a new white paper is that it may be used by government as an excuse to further downsize—that's a real concern.

But I think now's the time to do it, because there is a bit more awareness amongst the Canadian public that we need the security forces and we need a strong military. That's why I asked you about that. You said it's going to happen on its own, but I don't think that's good enough. I think we need some proactive move from government to look at what's happening and what's likely to happen, and to actively change the military to focus on that a lot better.

Mr. John Thompson: For 15 years I've always been talking about the need to improve our military capabilities, and I'm not going to change that now.

Mr. Leon Benoit: No, I certainly appreciate that.

• 1720

I had a specific question here. I probably don't have the exact quote, but I think you were talking about ethos in the procurement of equipment.

Mr. John Thompson: I think I said we should pay more attention to the military ethos before we start to really get into major equipment procurement. I still think it is very important that we pay attention to some of the essentials, the communications equipment, the sensor equipment, and the training simulators that allow the Americans to fight the way they do. We should be acquiring that fairly quickly, because that's applicable, no matter what else we get.

Mr. Leon Benoit: Yes, that's probably what you're getting at. I misunderstood what you were saying there.

Thank you, Mr. Thompson. I have to run. I have a plane to catch. I appreciate very much your testimony here.

Mr. John Thompson: Thank you.

The Chair: Mr. O'Reilly.

Mr. John O'Reilly: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Thompson, I don't have any questions for you. I've heard what you have to say, and I appreciate it. It's a dissenting view as to what my thoughts are on the military, and I'm surprised at some of the comments that are made by the opposition—no, I'm not really surprised, I expect them.

Mr. Benoit has just pointed up a problem. Here we are, we have a witness, it's Thursday afternoon, and we have no members left, because everyone is catching planes. God bless them for catching their planes, but the Conservatives didn't show up, the NDP left as soon as they had asked their questions, everybody has things to do. I want to put to the chair that this isn't fair to the witness, not having a full set of questions given to him—or to any witness, not just you, Mr. Thompson. We appreciate your coming here, you're on the record, and that's important. There will be a record of today's proceedings.

What I'm worried about is the procedure. We have nine committees meeting today. Each one of them has nine Liberal members. Everybody knows what nine nines are. There are just not enough people to go around. I think we have to re-evaluate our time slot to show some respect and courtesy to the witnesses. We have two members here from the official opposition and we have two parliamentary secretaries. Mr. Chairman, I think we had better deal with this. I worry that our committees are just coming apart at the seams. I don't mind staying, it's my job. I think we had better deal with this.

Thank you for appearing, Mr. Thompson.

The Chair: First, Mr. O'Reilly, I don't want to get too far into this, because really this is a matter for the steering committee to deal with, and it should not be brought up, I think, at this point.

Mr. John O'Reilly: I just wanted to bring it up on a point of order.

The Chair: That's fair enough, but I think we should maybe look at dealing with this at the steering committee. Just by way of explanation, the Thursday afternoon time slot is one of the worst. We have this for a year, and it will change next year. So we are suffering through it until the end of this year at a minimum.

If there are any further questions to Mr. Thompson about the defence policy issues we're here to deal with, let's get them out now. We have another seven minutes or so.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: Right.

Mr. Thompson, do you think that planning for an actual war is Cold War old-think? And can you give some examples of the thinking of the Canadian government, and how we fail to keep up with the realities of modern war?

Mr. John Thompson: First, if I can address your colleague's remarks, I'm not offended by early departures or the attendance. I've been on the record as critical of political figures quite frequently. On the other hand, I know damn well how hard you all have to work and the load of your duties, such as they are. Thank you, but I'm not upset by these things.

As to your remarks, between the First and Second World Wars you had all the discussion of the great formalized plans for what we would do in case of an attack by this country or that country. The Americans had their orange plan, and their red plan, and their black plan. Canada, God help us, even had Buster Brown's plan to invade the United States, which was written up in the mid-1920s. It was a good plan.

The Chair: As far as it went.

• 1725

Mr. John Thompson: Now the world is a lot more complex. In the 1980s, again, we could say, okay, if the Soviets invaded western Europe, this is what we would do. But now sometimes to really predict what's going to happen is beyond us. I don't think anybody could have worked up a plan, say, for the systematic elimination of bin Laden's training camps ahead of time. That one probably had be done on the fly. On the other hand, if our intelligence organizations are up to speed and linked in with those of allies, we can plan on the fly, if we have to. And if we have a good, solid military base, then we can have a military that can react to whatever circumstances are presented to it.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: On the good, solid base, the chief of land staff reported to this committee last May that the army is down to 18,600 active soldiers, while even fewer are combat arms or front-line troops. That means most of the combat arms are engaged in carrying out the Bosnia mission, preparing for that mission, or just returning from Bosnia. As stated in Defence Performance Outlook 2000, this mission is taking a toll on the entire forces. It also said we can't do more when we're already stretched, and we're not making the level of investment needed for the future.

Recognizing this, if requested, does Canada have the capability to replace the U.S. forces, with our current commitments to the Balkans, while still being able to respond to an internal emergency here at home?

Mr. John Thompson: No. We're scrapping the bottom of the barrel right now. For example, if we were presented with an Oka-style crisis again, we couldn't respond to it.

Ms. Cheryl Gallant: Thank you.

The Chair: Okay.

Mr. Thompson, I would like to thank you again for being here. It's been an interesting discussion. Thus far we have a lot of good testimony from people like yourself and other people within the department. We're going to be given the task of putting together a report over the next few weeks, an interim report for the minister, and you may want to have a look at that when it's completed and provide us with your thoughts after the fact. Thanks again for being here.

Mr. John Thompson: Thank you for the invitation.

The Chair: The meeting is adjourned.