EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, November 21, 1995

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[English]

The Chairman: We are resuming our study of the report of the commission on the restructuring of the reserves. Today it's my pleasure to introduce Mr. Fred Mannix.

Mr. Mannix is a former honorary colonel of the Calgary Highlanders and is presently director of Trison Investments Limited. Mr. Mannix has been a long-standing and articulate supporter of Canada's reserves.

In 1994 he and other prominent Canadian businessmen, including the chief executive of Burns Foods and the chairman of TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. formed the group CANADA: Can we stand on guard for thee? One of the group's principal concerns was the assurance that Canada maintain a specialized combat-capable, reserve-oriented and well-equipped military.

Gentlemen, I am sure we're all interested in hearing Mr. Mannix's reflections on the reserves and the report of the special commission. It gives me great pleasure to introduce him.

We can let you have 10 or so minutes to make your presentation, and then I'm sure there'll be many questions, sir.

Welcome.

Colonel Fred Mannix (Individual Presentation): Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of this committee, good afternoon and thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak to you on a subject I hold dear to my heart and one on which I feel competent to speak.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the National Defence College in 1978-79. In my capacity of running our family businesses, which included construction, oil and gas, and coal mining, I was fortunate to have as colleagues General Rockingham, who commanded in Korea, Brigadier-General Jones, engineer, and Senator - I guess you would know him best - Stan Waters, who beat up on me on military matters to some great extent, as you might imagine, if you knew any of them.

Finally, I was associated with the Calgary Highlanders for over 13 years as both honorary lieutenant colonel and honorary colonel, and I am currently provincial chairman of the Canadian Forces Liaison Council in Alberta.

My view of the military is coloured somewhat by the philosophical framework, which I think we have to look at. To my mind, the greatest victory in the annals of warfare was the winning of the Cold War. This was achieved because the two sides had sufficient deterrents to convince the other it was not worth their while to attack. This was brought about in no small part because of the number of troops each had at its disposal.

Although the international situation is changing, I believe this lesson should never be lost. In my opinion, more troops and a certain degree of readiness are of greater value than fewer numbers at a very high degree of readiness.

Deterrence also provides government with political options and a voice internationally. The commission reinforced the white paper in the mobilization and total force concepts, both of which I concur with. In either a forces-in-being or mobilization approach to defence planning, I believe the value of the forces must be judged against their deterrent value.

My two main points in these formal remarks with regard to the commission centre around the issue of deterrence and the cost-effectiveness of the reserves in Canada. I believe the special commission, which did a very good job of researching the issues surrounding today's reserve, missed these two points in its submission to the Minister of National Defence.

First, the reserves are the most cost-effective option the government has for reducing the deficit and providing this nation with the standard of defence preparedness it requires.

In my opinion, the special commission was constrained in its report by the mandate given to it. There's still sufficient money available within a reduced DND budget for better defence as long as Canada is prepared to take some of the recommendations made in the commission's report and push them even further. I'll say more on that in a moment.

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Second, the commission's report legitimized the militia's complaints regarding the regular force's handling of reserve matters. None of the issues raised in the report are news to the reserves themselves. It has to be remembered that the reserves are only as good as the regulars make them.

The report did not deal adequately with how to make the reserves more effective. It pointed out that senior regular force officers must punch their ticket through reserve involvement if they are to successfully aspire to a higher rank in the Canadian forces. This point is important to note. The style of leadership required in the reserves is different from that in the regulars because of the voluntary avocation nature of the reserve.

The report did not pursue in enough detail the advances occurring in distributed and computer-based learning, which are well accepted in industry and would be a great asset for armoury-based teaching. The teaching on the armoury floor is very important in having an effective reserve.

Also missed was the issue of ensuring that appropriate authority, responsibility, and accountability are focused in the reserves at the point at which it will have the greatest impact. This means that the reserves should have their own budget. Business would not think of having a major plant and not being able to account for and understand its costs. It would just not think of having it otherwise.

One of the concerns I have about the report is that it did not take adequately into account the previously mentioned point on deterrence and the cost-effectiveness of a mobilization-based reserve structure for the Canadian forces. The report made a comment about the cost of the reserves going from $1.028 billion per annum down to $875 million during the time they were studying the issue.

Gentlemen, if a business within a period of almost a year couldn't find out what a major plant was costing it and the cost of the unit of output...that's so unacceptable from a business point of view that the person responsible for trying to generate those numbers would be on the street looking for a job.

What it did not say was, if the new number were used or if a more accurate number even less than $875 million were used, what size of a reserve force could Canada afford to have? Does this not suggest that the numbers in the white paper and the last budget are suspect, because they were based on incorrect information? Should not the reserves be greatly increased rather than decreased because of their cost-effectiveness and deterrence value?

The following are standing committee points for consideration.

In your handout I have included four charts that are to be viewed as representational only. The first one, entitled ``Training Cost Per Soldier'', reminds you that there is a higher cost for a full-time soldier than there is for a reservist. To take either a regular or a reservist to a deployment standard of training requires more money again. How much should Canada spend per soldier now, given our deficit and threat appraisal?

The next two charts relate to the ``Shelf Life of Training'' and ``Total Force Levels of Training'', and point out that the regulars are better trained than the reserves but that neither are now at a deployment level of training on an ongoing basis. The shelf-life of the regular's training is less than that of the reserves for many reasons, not the least of which is centred mainly around collective skills, which diminish every time one of the team changes. It also must be remembered that the amount of money available in the future for regular collective training will most likely also diminish.

The last chart, ``Regular-Reserve Model'', indicates that with a high DND budget it is possible to have greater numbers of regulars or forces-in-being since the budget is available to train them and keep their shelf-life sensitive skills current. However, as defence dollars are dramatically reduced, the structure model should change to more of a mobilization one in which the emphasis moves to the reserves, individual skills are developed, the shelf-life is longer, and the deterrence value greater. Bluntly, would you rather have one airborne regiment or 6,000 reservists?

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It seems to me that the special commission on reserve restructure report fails in three respects. One, without having a valid cost comparison for the regulars and reserves, the reserves are being reduced in strength much too dramatically rather than being strengthened. The commission chose not to challenge the overall reserve numbers given to it, thus reducing Canada's deterrence and, more importantly, our international political voice abroad.

While confirming the problems of regular force control of the reserves, no solutions were given by the commission other than that the regular officers must punch their tickets by working with the reserves. Establishing the reserves with their own budget will go a long way to solving this problem. It would bring together the responsibility and accountability with the budgetary discretion.

The number of units recommended to be reduced is well beyond what makes sense given the nature of the regimental system, time and space considerations for reservists, and the need for deterrence value. They are needed for mobilization.

In conclusion, this standing committee must take a close look at the recommendations in the report of the special commission on reserve restructure. I believe you must challenge the cost numbers and seek ways to ensure that the regular force develops appropriate effectiveness measures for handling the reserves.

I accept the commission's recommendation and suggest that the committee support the creation of a special commission with the widest possible mandate, to examine the administration and structure of the Canadian forces and the civilian component of the Department of National Defence. That is on the last page.

The reserves should be increased in strength and the number of units and brigades should be increased substantially from the number given in the report. I believe the structure for the Canadian forces should dramatically move away from a forces-in-being model to a mobilization model based on the reserves.

Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Mannix. Your presentation was very interesting. You've opened some areas that we will have to look at very seriously.

I have one point on which I want some clarification. One of your points was that with the declining budget, the reserves should have their own budget. From what we hear - and the commission has mentioned this too - things are charged to the reserves for which the reserves are not necessarily responsible. Is this part of where you're coming from with this?

Col Mannix: That's correct, Mr. Chairman. I think the issue is one of two things. The first problem is that the system at the present time doesn't do a job of costing the input elements that give us an effective force. When you talk to them, regular force officers say they would never want to do all of the administration and everything else to come up with a cost figure for a reserve soldier versus a regular-force soldier.

In business, it's a raw material input to the product. Any business person who had any sense of judgment would want to know the cost of his inputs, as well as the cost of his products coming out the spout. You can't make decisions on whether you should have secondary training in the reserve, or whether you should go out and recruit new reservists, unless you have a fairly good costing system. It's axiomatic to business, but it is totally foreign to the military because they have not had training in that area.

With the exception of a few people in logistics, there are few people in the military who have any concept of trying to do a cost accounting. Otherwise we would have been able to get, within the last four years that I've been involved, a cost comparison between a reservist and a regular force soldier.

In private life, if you couldn't get that from your department of human resources in any major company within a month, you'd be amazed, and if you couldn't get it within a quarter, the guy who was running it would be on the street. If you couldn't get it in four years, you'd probably change the chief executive officer. But that's the case in the reserves.

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You have to ask why we can't get this simple comparison, a comparison that everybody would buy into. There have to be some other agendas at work. Those agendas are controlled by the regular force, and I don't think it takes too much imagination, because if money is withdrawn from the regular force and given to the reserve, it's jobs and careers in the regular force that are at stake.

I think it's totally unacceptable that the Minister of Defence would come out with a white paper that would be off on the cost of the reserves, and make fundamental decisions on the defence of this country and our defence deterrence capacity on numbers that are changing. Within the terms of this commission, they dropped from $1.28 billion to $875 million. You could not run a business that way. I think it is unacceptable that we have to make defence decisions with those kind of problems in front of us.

I don't blame the military soldiers who are suddenly put in charge of this. They aren't trained to do it, for starters. But we need to start thinking about what kind of systemic problems need to be dealt with in the forces to get some kind of handle on these costs.

Many issues fall under this line. If you saw the Bison armoured vehicles being used at Gustafson Lake - those are supposed to be available for reserve training, but the reserves have never seen them.

There are lots of reasons for that, but these are complaints that the reserves go through. As parliamentarians, you will remember that a big fuss was made about equipping reserves and buying those strictly as training vehicles. Business would approach this kind of thing by trying to encapsulate the issue, cost those issues and pin the responsibility, authority and accountability.

If a guy who is running a factory can't tell you what the cost of his output is, he doesn't know how to price his product. If the minister doesn't know the cost of a reserve soldier versus a regular force soldier, he cannot make a decision on the balance between those two inputs to create the greatest possible deterrence value, and hence the greatest voice for Canada in international affairs.

I know of no other way, and business would take it no other way, than to establish an envelope, make sure the authority, responsibility and accountability were there, and make that special budget part of it. It doesn't have to be a budget out of the DND budget, but DND must outline the budget for the reserves, adhere to the budget of reserves, and allow whoever is the commander of reserves - I am a strong supporter of total force, by the way - to control it to produce his output.

That's how you would handle this problem in business, and I think the Department of National Defence needs to learn this to handle their affairs.

The Chairman: Thank you.

[Translation]

Mr. Leroux.

Mr. Leroux (Shefford): Mr. Mannix, welcome to the committee.

My first question deals with the tensions that exist between the regular forces and the reserves. We will have to draft a report about that. What should we propose to the Minister as appropriate measures to reduce - it would be unthinkable to eradicate - the tensions that may exist between the regular forces and the reserves?

[English]

Col Mannix: First of all, I apologize that I cannot return the answer in French.

It is true that there is quite a bit of tension between the reserve and the regular force. On the reserve side, this primarily comes from frustration at the fact that they are basically a product of regular force decisions.

The regular force is responsible for the reserve's effectiveness. The reserve is tremendously constrained, and any time you're constrained, of course, there are major problems in terms of people feeling they're being discriminated against and so on.

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One of the important points that's come out of this reserve commission is that the majority of the reserve commission's complaints are justified as found by this commission. The second important point is that the commission has recommended - and I heartily concur - that any officer who wants to be a senior officer must have punched his ticket - that is the term they use - with the reserve, because this builds a bridge of understanding.

I think it is highly significant that the commission has recognized this fact. I was talking to Sir Patrick Palmer, the just-retired commander of the northern NATO flank and a three-star general who came through the British TA system. I mentioned this point to him last Thursday, and he said that in his view, any officer who wanted to be a colonel or above and involved in commanding the reserve in any way had to have spent two-thirds of his career to that point with the reserve.

I think that is a significant factor with regard to reducing the tension between the regulars and the reserves. There are many people in the reserves who held regular force positions and then left the regular force and transferred to the reserve. I think there is a greater understanding of the regulars by the reserve than there is of the reserve by the regulars.

General Vernon, the commander of central command, was known as a person who didn't believe in the reserves, but he was put in command of the reserves. He had no comprehension of the problems that the reserves face on a day-to-day basis. Not having been exposed to them, how can he command them? I have much sympathy for General Vernon. He was very hard done by with this posting. He was put into a job that he was not trained to handle, but he was expected to handle it.

It was unfair to General Vernon to put him there, but the system put him there. It was also unfair to those people he commanded, because he didn't understand the factors and so on that were required to run a reserve organization. That resulted in great resentment and greater tension between the reserves and the regulars. So I think anybody who is put in command of the reserves must have received basic training.

The Ross rifle was referred to earlier. If we had an infantry company equipped with Ross rifles and they were to go to Yugoslavia tomorrow, we'd run a course and retrain them with the C6 before sending them overseas.

We have to recognize that the regular force has 30 years of being trained in the forces-in-being mentality, and I believe, and the white paper and commission have reinforced this view, that we must move to a mobilization model. But all of the evidence you will hear from the regular force is coloured by the fact that they have had a forces-in-being model before them. They are trained in it and have it ahead of them.

If we ran a conversion course from the Ross rifle to the 6, then it's time the regular force ran a course to convert their officers from the forces-in-being mentality to a mobilization mentality, and part of that is learning about the reserve.

[Translation]

Mr. Leroux: At the end of your presentation, you said that the reserves had to be increased. You know there's only a global envelope. Are we to understand then the regular forces should be reduced?

I would like you to explain the advantages of an increased in the number of reservists in the Canadian Army, both for Canada and Quebec.

[English]

Col Mannix: I think this is a key question, because as I've already said, numbers are an important part of deterrence. I believe any factor you take with regard to looking at the structure of the Canadian forces has to be based on how we create a deterrence value.

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I asked whether you would rather have one airborne or 6,000 reserves, because at a cost ratio of about 10:1, which is what it appears to be for a corporal, the best estimates of those people who are knowledgeable are that it takes about $4,000 a year for one reservist and $52,000 a year for a regular force. Which gives Canada the greater deterrent, 600 very highly trained guys, or 6,000 who in 30 or 60 or 90 days can be brought up to levels very quickly?

At the present time, every time we send troops to Yugoslavia we exercise a mini-mobilization. But I would point out to you that it takes the same 90 days to bring the regular force up and ready to go as it is taking the reserve forces to get up and ready to go, albeit there is a major question, because you have the difference in skill levels.

The fact of the matter is, this is a matter of judgment that needs to be looked at by this committee and by the minister. But until you get accurate cost numbers of the difference, I don't know how you really deal with that issue. It would be a very difficult one.

Canada is only one of two countries I know of where the reserve force is less than the regular force. The Montreal police force has more constables than the Canadian army has infantry: incredible, but true. What we really have to say is that creates the kind of deterrence value that allows Canada to have the political option to use force if it wants to and gives us the stature in the international fora with our allies and with other people that Canada has enjoyed since World War II. We enjoyed a very good reputation and great influence because we contributed largely in Korea, World War I, and World War II, and we've had a disproportionate influence.

As our deterrence capacity falls away, our voice is lessened, and the more it's lessened the less influence we have and we'll eventually revert to just another nation of 30 million people. But if we really think Canada should maintain its international voice, it requires something it can point to that our allies will respect, and that is deterrence. That deterrence is primarily in the mind of those people looking at our forces. Numbers count a lot more than the fact that ready-to-go forces are available.

The reason I say that - this is also interesting - is because in the Gulf War both the British and the Americans discovered that their forces-in-being model didn't work. If you remember, the Americans and the British went into the Middle East in August, and their attack was in January. It took from August to January for them to be comfortable that their troops were ready, organized, sustainable and so on in this environment.

Canada didn't have the political option even to participate on the ground. We didn't have the equipment and we didn't have the manpower. We didn't have the equipment even to train them within the 6 months we could have trained them in.

Mr. Leroux: I have one small question, and I'm sure the other gentlemen will have questions to ask you.

My final question will be about the proposed protection legislation. I know you're a businessman. Do you believe a business community in Calgary and the surrounding area will find it difficult to accept the job protection legislation proposed by the special commission?

Col Mannix: You're basically asking me a political question, which I'm not really that good at answering, but I'll answer in this way.

I am the chairman of the Alberta CFLC. During my tenure now, which is a little over two years, I've only had one occasion where we were in a position where we could not get a young reservist off to go on training. The reason for that is Calgary is unique, and Alberta to a degree, because of the high content of Americans in the business community who accept this kind of legislation as a matter of course. It's in every state; it's a matter of fact in the United States.

In Alberta, I don't think you'd have a political problem getting it. The problem is, outside of Alberta...and you know the issue of the conscription and other political issues that have raised in the past. I think your judgment will be much better than mine in this area, although I do believe within the context strictly of Alberta it would be something that would be accepted because it's accepted by a majority of the people in the oil business as a matter of course, and the oil business is about two-thirds of the business of Calgary.

Mr. Leroux: Do you think we can do more than just have a protection legislation to encourage businessmen to hire young military people?

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Col Mannix: We have a very interesting thing happening in Alberta, which I hope will be emulated across the rest of the country. We have actually gone quite hard at inviting business to see the ExecuTrek program and what the young reservists are doing. We have actually had seven or eight companies come to the CFLC in Alberta to ask to hire reservists because they've been impressed with the quality of training and the management skills of the young reservists.

As far as I know, this is unique. But it is a fair development in Alberta. As chairman of the Alberta committee, I say this is one that we're going to do everything we can to expand.

This is something in which we are still developing the methodology of its implementation. Certainly, showing business the real product of reserve training is a very important part of the CFLC's mandate and work. They'll see the advantages to business of having young reservists because of the training and how much more they can contribute to business.

It is becoming, I think, more feasible. But this is something we need, as the military, to exploit and advertise more and to show more to the public.

You're basically raising an issue of how the military could be used as an instrument of social policy. It goes a little bit beyond just getting business to take and hire reservists, because the training given the reservists is first-class training. A lot of the people we take in as reservists are in a high-unemployment category.

So moneys could be channelled from unemployment issues, in which we are trying to train people to be unemployed, to the reserves, in which we take these people to train them.

Many other countries use their armies and military forces as implements of social policy. In Canada, we've done a very poor job of that. So I think it's another step that's certainly beyond the report of this commission, but it's a very important point, and one that deserves a lot of study.

We should be using the reserves - many of the skills are transferable to civilian life - as a training ground for those young people who are at the end of their benefits package and so on. They should be given a streamlined run into being recruited into the reserves so they have some modest income and are on a training track.

Again, these are important elements. I believe in the overall context of running a reserve. They're not possible with a pure force, which is a regular force. But it's a way for the reserve force to, in a major way, contribute to the fabric of Canada. It would train these young people and absorb them at the points at which there are the greatest numbers of unemployed.

Mr. Leroux: Thank you, sir.

Merci monsieur le président.

The Chairman: Mr. Hart.

Mr. Hart (Okanagan - Similkameen - Merritt): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

It's good to see you, Colonel Mannix. It's nice to have you here.

I have a couple of questions. First, you talk about how the reserves should relate to a business perspective or that this model could certainly be used. Do you think that could also be used in the regular force as well?

Col Mannix: Absolutely. The regular force really needs to know.... Basically what you're talking about is resource allocation. How do we allocate the money to the various aspects of the armed forces? If you don't know what the costs are, you're at sea in terms of the allocation process.

This is why, in my view, one of the issues is a comprehensive and cohesive mobilization plan. You can then take the cost envelope and move as far down the mobilization plan as you can. But to do that implies that you can make rational, reasonable decisions on a cost basis of the various choices.

At the present time, we seem to be totally unable to come up with these kinds of cost choices. It's equally applicable to the regular force to understand what the cost is of their various products as it is to the reserves. In fact, the reserves trail the regular force, because the first level of total force has to be the regular force itself.

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You're basically talking about graduated response. The key thing for mobilization is to first have in place the nucleus around which to form units. The second thing is a very competent, well-organized, cost-effective, and cost-rationalized basis for training people up to the level of training required to get to whatever level you need before you can deploy them.

Obviously, in some cases you have to be right up to war level to deploy them into a war scenario. It may be slightly less for Yugoslavia - although, we found that basically Yugoslavia is a war zone.

The requirement for costing is implicit all through that. Of course, the regular force doesn't want to sit down and look at - they've never had to do this - the cost-effective aspects of what they're doing.

Mr. Hart: As for the mobilization plan that you talked about, how many people do you feel we should have ready to mobilize? I ask that because there are probably many people in Canada who would say we're in a post-Cold-War era and there's no threat any more. Yet we look around the world and see a world that has more instability than at any other time in recent history. Is there a number you have for a mobilization plan?

Col Mannix: First, we should have, in Canada, at least a 1:1 ratio between the reserves and the regulars. This gives you numbers, which give you deterrence. It also gives you the ability to talk with your allies, such as Americans, British, French, or NATO in general, on a basis on which you have influence.

The real question in terms of total numbers is one really of: what can be assigned as a total budget to the armed forces? As I say, if you give a total spending envelope, then you'll move down the mobilization thing and you will come to a number.

At the present time, without much trouble at all, as I say, if you did away with one regular group, such as the Airborne Regiment, you can add 6,000. Then you've just about balanced, on a 1:1 basis, the regular and the reserve force. I believe Canada must really look beyond that, because a total force of 21,000 in the regular force and 14,000 in the reserves does not have much of a deterrence value.

But say we wanted to go and press the model further, assuming it is 10:1 on a cost basis. Say you reduced the regular force by 5,000; we could add 50,000 to the reserves.

A force of 14,050.... Say it's 65,000. That has a much greater deterrence value, credibility with our allies and voice in the international sphere than a regular force of 30,000. That's my opinion, and I've heard it expressed by other people whom I respect in that regard.

When you ask me for a specific number, my reply to you is, are we free to allocate between the regular force and the reserves? If the answer to that is yes, then my answer is that I would go for quantity. I would vary quality with training operations that could bring that quantity up to a level, rather than having our forces being ready to go as a short-shelf-life, high-cost regular force.

I think that serves Canada better, especially with the experience in the Gulf War, whereby it took six months to go. You can bring the regular force up. You can augment it. You can do all the things you have to in 90 or 120 or whatever days. By augmentation, you can bring them up to get the same effectiveness they have today. But you also have a greater ability and voice, and you have the political option.

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It takes a long time to develop leaders. It takes a long time to develop officers, NCOs. It takes a tremendous amount of organization to make the structure that you can quickly expand. Most important in the whole thing is having a very efficient, credible and organized training system that you can bring the reserve quickly up to the standard you would need.

Canada isn't going to commit more than one brigade in 120 days. If you give us the go-ahead now, in 120 days with an efficient training system you can have the reserve plug whatever holes are in the regular force, and up to a very high standard. Our mobilizations to Yugoslavia have proven that.

Mr. Hart: One of the inefficiencies I see is that there are so many levels of bureaucracy in the reserve and the regular force. The money allocated is actually being eaten up before it gets to the armoury floor. You had talked about how instruction on the armoury floor is really what is important here.

What can we do to prevent that situation from happening? Do we have to cut levels of rank structure? What exactly would you suggest there?

Col Mannix: The reserve commission has made some recommendations in terms of the overhead costs. By and large, the organization that I think they're talking about is pretty good.

One of the issues you have to understand, though, is that if we're moving to a mobilization model, there is a great difference between the regular force's and the reserve's requirement for officers and NCOs, and in effect that overhead, because you're looking to have a mobilization base where you can expand that. Because of the length of time it takes to train officers and NCOs, and because you're looking to that militia, the reserve force, to be able to expand rapidly, the ratios in those units should be at least twice what they are in the regular force.

The question was asked about the regular force and militia interface and how it can be made better. One of the problems, when you talk about total force, for example, is in the reserve commission's report. They recommend that the brigades of the militia be commanded by a major, and yet in the regular force it's a brigadier. Is this total force? This is why the resentment is raised.

What you have to get back to, then, of course, is that the permeability they talk about in this has to be improved. That permeability must mean that you can bring officers and NCOs back and forth easily. For a good mobilization you basically have to have a higher number of NCOs and officers in the reserve.

When you look at the overhead costs, for example, I think it is very difficult for the reserves to deal with this issue. This is an issue for the regular force, because the regular force basically controls all this overhead. As we've talked about, they don't know how to cost it. When 15 days, for example, of the training days in the reserve is allocated to NDHQ, this is exactly this problem of getting the money down to the armoury floor.

When we get it to the armoury floor, we have to do a hell of a lot better job of delivery. We're still using World War II methods.

Now, I say we still are; in my regiment, the Calgary Highlanders, I bought for them a Weaponeer, a computer simulation device for rifles. We have put 3.5 million rounds down-range in that device. If that were real ammunition, it would be $1 a round. That machine costs only $120,000, and yet there is only one in one armoury in the whole of Canada.

Those decisions are not made by the reserve. They are made by the regular force. They're made without understanding the cost-effectiveness of it.

Let me tell you also that in the Yugoslav mobilizations, where the Calgary Highlanders have sent as high as 37 and I don't think less than 30, those young soldiers have all qualified in the top 10% as riflemen because of that piece of equipment.

That delivery system is the kind of delivery system I am talking about, which is essential to get onto the armoury floor for the militia to be effective.

Mr. Hart: I probably don't have much time.

The Chairman: You're out of time, but go ahead. I let Mr. Leroux go over, so I'll let you go over.

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Mr. Hart: We can talk about the cost and the business aspect of the reserve force, but I'm also very interested in what type of persons these reservists are.

What kind of persons are we talking about? What interests them? What motivates them to become a member of the reserve force? They're not in it for the money; they're there for other reasons. Maybe you could explore that.

By reducing the reserve to this size, are we really losing out on a tremendous resource we have with our young people in this country?

Col Mannix: Absolutely. I think there are a couple of issues here. The first one is that many of these young people are serving because they have an interest in the country. To a degree they are being patriotic, but they can't all afford to do that. Many of them are students. In fact, I would say maybe 50% or more are students or teachers.

But these are intelligent people. By and large the IQs are higher in the reserves than they are in the regular force. Many of the officers are in postgraduate or graduate courses. This is another major distinction between the regular force and the reserves.

The issue of using the reserves as a social implement for training is brought up quite often by these young soldiers, and we are missing a bet here.

There's a lot of debate about the question of equalizing pay for members of the regular force and the reserves. If they're doing the same job for the same time, I agree. But as a businessman I I would say that if you have a low input cost - because many of these people are doing it almost on a voluntary basis - then it's an important factor that Canada should take advantage of. It gives us deterrence at a lower cost.

Now, the regular forces don't really like that because if somebody can come in at a lower cost, that undermines their positions, jobs and careers. Maybe that's why they don't want to really cost the reserve.

Another aspect of the commission report that is very important is when they bring attention to the supplementary reserve. By and large, my experience has been that the soldiers who leave the regular force and who have an interest join the militia. Those who have minimal interest go to the supplementary reserve because it's a few free beers and a few free bucks.

There is an aspect that is very important. Let us say the supplementary reserve could be enhanced so that a soldier could train and keep up the shelf-life of his training without pay, only being paid the one day a year. If that could be enhanced in such a way that the system would look after his field rations, his ammunition and uniform cost, for example - in effect the direct items he needs to do his training - and he was covered medically without cost to him, I think we would have a very effective supplementary reserve.

Other than that, if we don't do that, the commission has misjudged the value of the supplementary reserve. The shelf-life of the supplementary reserve drops off within two years of their getting out of the regular force. Unless you do something to keep up their training, I don't know how we can expect to really look to value from the supplementary reserve.

If it were a repository, however, for people who want to volunteer their time to maintain their training, it would be a very valuable resource. From the point of view of cost, it's one that Canada can't afford to overlook.

Mr. Hart: Thank you.

The Chairman: Before I go to Mr. O'Reilly, I want to interject on something you andMr. Leroux were talking about.

One of the areas the commission mentioned - and you brought it up - is that rather than using a colonel, you could use a major. This would save money and allow for more people.

As I understand it, you are saying that will not work. If you have a certain group of people who have to be led by a colonel and you drop that back to a major, that doesn't solve any problem?

Col Mannix: Well, Mr. Chairman, this is really a double-barrelled question. The question then becomes, how much importance do you place on the aspects of mobilization?

.1620

Ideally, in an armed force positioned for mobilization you would have every officer and every non-commissioned rank trained to two ranks above the rank at which they're now serving. Obviously to do that it's a tremendous cost, and I don't recommend that. But what you should do is over officer, and over NCO, the cheapest element you have that will give you an expansion capacity - your reservists, who's much cheaper than the regular, should be...many more of them to give you the basis for expansion, deterrence capacity and the ability for mobilization.

That means that when you then turn around and on a day-to-day operating basis reduce the rank down to, say, a major, you in effect destroy the ability to generate through the militia system the officer cadre you need for any major expansion. Therefore you destroy a great deal of the deterrence value and the voice as a result of having deterrent value.

The reserve forces already face the issue of having enough jobs within the scope of what they're doing to generate the required officer and NCO corps.

I will give you an example. We have sent about 167 soldiers from the Calgary Highlanders to Yugoslavia. Within the unit we've retained less than 20% of those. And the answer is very clear: there is no training at the secondary level to keep the interest of those soldiers, and therefore they leave the unit.

The Chairman: Once they come back?

Col Mannix: Well, they come back; they'll serve for a little while. But because they've been recruited and trained as riflemen and they come back, they don't want to go back to Yugoslavia as riflemen. But there are no training dollars on the armoury floor at the times they can go.

Don't forget, they've just taken nine months to go away. Then they come back and the regular force says, oh, you have to go for six weeks to take the course to be a sapper. They can't do that. They've just taken nine months from their job.

This is part of the understanding issue between the regular force and the reserves, but these young soldiers will serve for a bit of time.

We had a very bright soldier who was in Yugoslavia. He actually did two tours in Yugoslavia. I saw him in a bank in Calgary the other day. He was wearing his ribbon - and I congratulated him on it again - with his police uniform.

I asked how things were going with him in the unit. He said, oh, sir, I left the unit. There was no secondary training; he couldn't do anything. He wasn't going back for a third time to do the same thing.

When we come back to costing of the reserves, the retention issue is a big consideration. It costs much less to retain men than it does to go out and recruit them. As I understand it, the best we can pin down is that it costs $24,000 to recruit a soldier, bring him in and bring him up as a rifleman.

I submit to you that we can hold experienced guys who give us the cross-trained expertise the regular force complains and bitches is not available in the reserve as long as we put some money into secondary training.

But there is no money for secondary training. There is no equipment for secondary training. And the courses are structured in such a way that the young soldier who's been off for nine months can't possibly go and take secondary training at the big training bases.

We have to deliver that on the armoury floor, or we lose those soldiers. It costs maybe $10,000 or $11,000 to train one of those soldiers. Then you have a cross-trained soldier, which the regular force is going to be very pleased with because that's their biggest complaint about the militia, but it's a totally unjustified complaint. How can you expect the militia to produce cross-trained soldiers when the regular forces never sent the money to have the training for the cross-trained soldier?

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. O'Reilly, thank you, sir, for waiting.

Mr. O'Reilly (Victoria - Haliburton): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Colonel Mannix, for attending and certainly for your interest in the reserves.

I have a number of questions; maybe they already have been asked. You indicated equal numbers in the reserves and the regular force. What's your recommendation on what that equal number should be? That's the first question.

I'll just go on to another one, and maybe you can talk to them as you go.

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Your philosophical question in here, and your philosophical framework, where you indicate more troops at a certain degree of readiness is a greater value than fewer numbers at a higher degree, is to me an entirely different thrust from the mandate under which this report was written. So obviously my second question is about the philosophical difference between this report and what you would recommend.

My third question was, would you reduce the regular forces to increase the reserves?

Then I have a supplementary. How does this report differ from the downsizing in the 1970s? Or does it differ at all in its thrust to what happened even after the Korean War, where many armouries were closed and it became harder for people to travel the distance to armouries from rural Canada and still hold a regular job in between tours of duty?

I was interested also in knowing where your numbers come from in regard to one reserve at $4,000 a year versus $52,000 for one regular in training.

That's enough to start with, I think, Mr. Chairman.

Col Mannix: You covered everything.

Mr. O'Reilly: Did I cover everything? I wasn't trying to!

Col Mannix: Regarding the regular reserves envelope and the numbers between the two of them, as I pointed out, Canada is fairly unique in the world because we're one of the few countries - in fact I think there are only two - that have more regulars than reserves. I think that is a big mistake. As a minimum that needs to be redressed.

That really requires you then to look at the overall dollar envelope and the costing between the regulars and the reserves. That is a philosophic difference from this report because this report did not challenge that particular issue. Although it's arguable that it could have, it chose not to.

In the afterthoughts or afterword, they did comment that it's very hard to look at only one slice of the apple. I think this commission, if it had the opportunity...and the commission was placed at a disadvantage by the minister by not having the opportunity of looking at how you do slice that apple.

The overall envelope for defence will set the balances between the reserve and regular, but I suggest that Canada should at least balance our reserve and regular. I believe there are great efficiencies that could be made within the total structure, and if you did that you could still reduce the overall budget and increase the numbers on the armoury floor and in the actual service. That's part of what your overhead costing issues have to deal with.

But if we can't even get a direct comparison on the costs, as you raised, between the regular force and the militia, the best numbers that have come out - and they come from Brian MacDonald, an ex-reservist - are that it costs $4,000 a year to support a corporal in the reserve, and $52,000 in the regular force.

In the absence of being able to get at any other number, you have to accept that, but that number is not accepted by the regular force. That's a number that is a best estimate from outside and looking at the various material available. To not be able to pin that down within a three-month period at the maximum is an absolutely unbelievable thing. In terms of a business, it would be unacceptable.

But of course then we have the same issue with regard to pay. For the fourteen years I've been intimately involved with the reserve force, the forces have been unable to pay on time the militiamen. It would not happen in business, and I can tell you that if it was the regular forces' payroll, it bloody well wouldn't happen in the regular force either.

But it's a very simple solution. You could -

Mr. O'Reilly: My supplementary, by the way, was going to be commenting on the pay system. You've led into that, so that's good.

Col Mannix: The very simple solution is that you do what you would do in any project in a construction company - assess how much the unit's salary cost requirements are. You then would have the unit go and arrange with the nearest bank to pay the soldiers. There is no rocket science in that.

The problem when you talk about the regular reserve interface being rough is that every single reservist who has a job sees that happen in business every day, smooth as silk. He goes into the regular force controlled environment and, by God, it doesn't work. Then he says, well, who's responsible for my pay? Oh, the regular force is responsible - and they can't get it right.

.1630

Now you have tension between the reserves and the regulars. You can solve it just as you would with any project of a construction company, by letting the unit do its own payroll. It's very simple.

The philosophical difference you're talking about is very fundamental. As I said, the forces-in-being concept was disproved in the Gulf War by both the Brits and the Americans. This was not one nation's experience; both of them discovered they had to do some serious training to get those forces up.

The shelf-life of regular force training so that they will be ready to move on 24-hours' notice is very short. Every time that team changes, the shelf-life goes downhill, big time. This is well known. It means that the forces-in-being concept, in which 100% of our regular force officers have been trained in the last 30 years, is obsolete. It's the ``Ross rifle'' of training concept, and mobilization is the ``C5'', or the modern one. We must do a training job of getting this philosophical difference over, getting a mobilization concept across, and getting a mobilization plan, one that gives real roles that give incentive to the reserves, in place.

If you don't have a mobilization plan with good rationale you cannot do the resource allocation issues - between regular force and reserve; between one type of equipment and another; between one kind of training and another - and what you have to do to get your various levels of readiness up to where you would need them if you actually had to deploy them. A mobilization plan is essential, because it gives you the rationale for resource allocation.

Your other question was on the downsizing in the seventies.

Mr. O'Reilly: The downsizing started after the Korean War.

Col Mannix: We've had two major downsizings of the reserves.

Mr. O'Reilly: Since then.

Col Mannix: Yes. Basically we've had two.

Mr. O'Reilly: I was involved in the first one as a reservist. Our armoury was moved 50 miles away. As a result, the armoury and the reserve unit folded up.

Col Mannix: That would be the experience again. There's no question in my mind.

Mr. O'Reilly: My question is, do you see this report following along the same line?

Col Mannix: Absolutely. It's a disaster from that perspective, for two reasons. Our experience twice has shown that when you downsize and put two 200-man units together, what you end up with is one 100-man unit down the road. That is not conducive to a good mobilization organization, nor is it conducive to keeping the military footprint across the country.

Basically, this report says you're going to withdraw 73 units from small communities and shut them down, and the military presence will be lost. This does nothing to help us build a sense of Canada among the young citizens. It does nothing to help us employ the high number of unemployed kids who need jobs. It does nothing to give an alternate source of revenue to the young students who require some kind of job so that they can take their girlfriend to the movies.

I remember well when the budget for our unit was cut in Alberta. It was in November. We had four parade days between November 1 and the end of March. The kids were leaving the unit in droves. They came to me and said there was no way, on four paydays, they could afford to stay in the militia; they had to at least be able to take their girlfriends to the movies.

Mr. O'Reilly: I just want to clarify something on that point. Witnesses before you have drawn on some of the words in this report, and one of them is ``footprint''. To me, a footprint is something you see when something is gone. I want to clarify the fact that when you say footprint to me, it is something somebody left after they've gone. Are you talking about a foothold, perhaps?

Col Mannix: A foothold - or presence. I think it's very important to realize that each unit has a support structure around it. The legions, the old boys, the women's association with it, are all links that are important to the community, that enhance the military presence and acceptability and increase the understanding of the military within the civilian community.

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When I say ``footprint'', basically what you're looking for is the area of influence around the armoury and around the unit. I am not recommending that in any sense we should be withdrawing units so that you have a footprint where it used to be and it's gone today. What we need is that presence, and we need some other things to enhance that presence.

It was a great problem in Alberta, for example, in the floods this last spring in Medicine Hat where the unit down there, the young soldiers, wanted to go in Canadian uniform and help with the flood. The British army went down there in uniform, and our guys were there but they were all in civvies. This did tremendous damage to the morale of the units down there.

We have to do things that give the units motivation and image, and enhance that relationship with the communities. These are problems that are not well understood by the regular force because they don't live in the communities. Nine times out of ten, they are on an isolated base somewhere.

Mr. O'Reilly: The example I use is a friend of mine who served in Bosnia as an ambulance attendant. He came back from his tour of duty and then went back to his regular job, which he's required to do. He would have to travel 100 miles to train in the nearest armoury on a once-a-week or three-times-a-month basis in order to hold his rank. He's unable to do that because he has been away from his family and away from his job, and he has to work at what he's doing on shift work, and recall, and so forth. He would automatically then lose his rank if he went back to serve again, and it takes another maybe six months to get his former rank back.

Of course, he has to turn in his uniform as soon as he doesn't show up for two or three practices, in which he isn't going to learn any more than he's going to learn on the job he's on. In fact, he'll be more up to date when he goes back in.

What's your answer to that person's query on how they retain their rank and on civilian training being counted towards that military job if he wants to go back for another tour?

Col Mannix: I think this trade equivalency across the board is a big issue that needs some serious work done on it. There are many civilian trades where people are better qualified than the military equivalent. But the problem is that the military don't recognize them.

Specifically the case in our part of the world is that in Alberta we have tremendous numbers of oil companies that are very used to logistical problems shipping drill pipe to the Arctic, for example. So the logistics side has tremendous capacity and there are many people who are really trained.

I haven't an easy answer to how you get across the board, back and forth, the acceptance by the military primarily of civilian training. But the issue of the use of the sup-reserve was raised by this commission. I think if the rules are written correctly for the sup-reserve, your friend should be able to transfer to the sup-reserve and hold his rank position and apply through some channel within the system where his training on the civilian side will be recognized by the military.

As I say, we've been somewhat successful in getting military training accepted by industry. One of the issues this raises is that maybe we should be looking at the SAIT, the NAIT, the technical colleges and the courses they do, and at military participation there on some kind of a basis where we can then start to interlink these equivalency-across-the-board trades.

The problem is that everybody wants to do them all at a very high level. The medical area is a very good area because we have proven in Alberta in some of the training in SAIT that the cross-training has been accepted. I think there should be a major thrust by the reserve force to try to get that expansion of those....

We don't have to do all this reserve training on the armoury floor if we can get other people such as the technical colleges to give equivalent training that will then be accepted. It's a key point of trying to retain the young soldiers. If we have good costing as to whether or not the training is better delivered on the armoury floor or in a civilian institution, then we can make that kind of decision on a rational basis.

.1640

Mr. O'Reilly: As a final question, what part of the report did you like?

Col Mannix: The thing that I thought was absolutely outstanding was the vindication of many of the reserves' complaints and the requirement that people who command the reserves must have served with the reserves. That is a huge step forward from the point of view of the reserve force, because it's going to breed.... Anybody who serves, say, two-thirds of their career with the reserve force and then has to command them is at least going to understand the issues and the problems.

If there is a tremendous advance, it is that factor alone, that it is now vindicated and validated and recognized: the handlers of the reserve force, that is, the regular force, have not done a good job in that position, and this has been a very great source of frustration for the reserve.

The answer this commission has basically given is that no man should command the reserves who hasn't had intimate experience with the reserves. That's a quantum leap in thinking. It means, then, anybody who wants to be a colonel or above in the system is going to want to serve with the reserves.

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

Mr. Bertrand (Pontiac - Gatineau - Labelle): Colonel Mannix, I can tell by your statements that you are sold on the idea of a separate budget for the reserves. Have you put numbers on paper to find out how much money would actually be saved by going that route?

As you know, the budget for the reserves is roughly $1.179 billion. How much would we be saving with an individual budget?

Col Mannix: Well, the first question I am going to ask you is, have you any other solution to establishing accountability and responsibility in the same place for the reserve budget other than separating out the budget and putting it under a separate envelope? I know of no other way of making it effective to judge the effectiveness of the force, the cost of the force and so on.

I would be quite willing to entertain any other method, but no method has been put forth either by this commission.... I have never heard an explanation by any regular that would give me any confidence that you could have any reliability as to cost. We can't even find out what a reserve soldier versus a regular soldier costs today.

The number you have as a reserve budget I will accept tomorrow, because the best numbers we've heard about the reserve is that it's about $1.28 billion. As the reserve commission found, this was the first number. The last number they heard was $875 million.

I'm telling you, if you could tell me another way other than establishing a separate budget so that at least you'd know the total, I would listen to it. But under the present system, the regular force can't even tell us the total.

I don't know of a way, other than establishing a separate budget, which is establishing that total and establishing a minimum number of troops for the reserves, that you're going to have any effectiveness at trying to control this issue. We haven't been capable of doing it to date, and I have never heard any other system or suggestion that we could do it.

The reserve would love it. The regular force people are totally against it because it would remove the ability of the regular force to take money out of the reserve budget and do other things that they decide they want to do. It would remove the ability for people to move around how effective the reserve was.

I believe people should take responsibility and have accountability for what they're doing. I know of no other way of doing that other than establishing a special budget. It should be a budget under DND's general budget, but it should be sacrosanct from being raided by the regular force. It should be the responsibility of the chain of command that looks after the reserve to be accountable for the effectiveness of that reserve force.

Mr. Bertrand: I agree with what you're saying, but it seems to me you're creating another level of bureaucracy. Is that good or bad? I guess it would depend. We'd have to wait a couple of years to see how what you've proposed was coming along.

Col Mannix: The first problem is that presumably there are already people looking after this budget, so you shouldn't be creating another level of bureaucracy. You might be taking the resources who are presently administering that budget and moving them over and making them accountable to whoever was responsible for that budget. Maybe out of that he would know what it costs to train a soldier. That would be a very good and definite improvement to what we've already got.

.1645

In a business context it would not be an increase in overhead. In fact, because you were focusing on those issues it very likely would be a decrease in overhead, but that would depend on the people implementing it.

So I think it's very possible that if you set a special budget, you will be able to analyze the overhead cost of actually doing various things that are presently very fuzzy, identify and be able to make rational decisions on resource allocation and the cost of training, and see whether it's better to train soldiers or to recruit new ones.

I can already tell you what my best guess is. I can tell you that it's better to do the secondary training and keep them and that it solves a lot of the other problems. But those questions don't stand out and hit the present commander of the army in the face. Because he can't know that, he can't make those decisions rationally. And he can't fight the issues of jobs and careers in the regular force...which are not wanting to hear those kind of stories.

Mr. Bertrand: What about the equipment? Would you see the reserves buying their own equipment or buying it in conjunction with the regular forces?

Col Mannix: One of the major issues in the reserves is the lack of equipment. It's impossible to train without any equipment, and one of the reasons that secondary training doesn't exist to any great degree in the reserves is a lack of equipment.

Perrin Beatty bought equipment especially for the reserves. The reserves aren't using it today, so it doesn't mean too much in some of these cases when these things have been tried in the past. Our attempts at getting equipment to the reserves on an effective basis to date has not been very good.

The whole issue of equipment is a broad issue. I suppose SCONDA itself should be considering it.

First, many of our allies have been doing what they call cascading. Equipment is being passed down from one level of readiness to those below. Canada has not participated in that cascading. The Americans, the British and so on have been spinning off equipment at very cheap prices. In my opinion we should be buying that equipment, to bring up over the years the deficit in our equipment replacement so that we can re-establish the equipment level that's required in the Canadian forces.

The second thing is that Canada is paying exorbitant amounts for military equipment because we're using the military budget for things other than the supply of military equipment. I can buy a C6 rifle across the counter in California for $306. The Government of Canada is paying $1,400 to have them made in London, Ontario, and I don't think that's a defence expenditure. With all due respect I consider that something else, but it is not a defence expenditure.

The Volkswagen Iltis jeep is bought by the Bundeswehr at something like $6,000 or $7,000 a copy. We're buying it from Bombardier at $36,000 a copy. Is that a defence expenditure?

I think we get totally distorted views of what the effectiveness of the defence budget is if you include those kinds of things in these issues. For the reserve a great deal of this equipment, and even commercial equipment, should be bought off the shelf. It doesn't even have to be to a very high military specification.

We're basically talking about issues of procurement that would allow the armed forces a greater ability for training and expansion of the mobilization base.

I think another issue of major importance is that DND should be allowed to do the purchasing itself without going through some great Government Services rigmarole. I think cutting down that overhead alone would be enough to enhance by maybe 25% or 30% the military purchases presently being made.

I have very little way to understand how much increased effectiveness you would have, but you're raising an issue of getting and identifying effective military purchasing for military purposes only.

If we want to subsidize industrial production, assign that to Industry, but don't confuse our defence figures with industrial support.

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The Chairman: Mr. Richardson.

Mr. Richardson (Perth - Wellington - Waterloo): Mr. Mannix, it's nice to have you with the committee today. I enjoyed the written presentation to the defence review committee.

One of the good things we're seeing in this committee is that they've taken the corps concept.... For years Brigadier-General Kip Kirby preached this concept. I don't know whether you have ever met him, but he was a friend of General Belzile. It may have been a bit of a burr, but they have always remained friends. He has been preaching that concept since the day they threw out the mobilization plans in the sixties. We didn't have one, and no one would own up to it. If we were caught and had to go to war.... I thought I would write a letter that it was treasonous not to prepare us for war.

All of that being said, we've moved back into the phase of planning for something other than a UN operation.

There are two things you made a point of. After training at section and platoon levels, what is there for what we call interest training or sub-unit training that would give those soldiers, young officers, and young NCOs an opportunity to enrich their training by undertaking on weekends deep-penetration patrolling exercises or short-range patrolling exercises - things that are easy to set up, pure infantry-type training? The same thing could be done with armoured units. On the weekends the reconnaissance groups could be doing interesting training that would help them to do all their road...lateral work, reporting, and team work.

I know everyone says that there would be a cost, but it is enrichment and enrichment is what keeps the soldiers coming back. Hitting the parade square on the armoury floor isn't what really sets them on fire. I do believe, though, from what I've seen, that training through regular force supervision and training programs has improved and that the standards achieved by the young soldiers now are better...physically and at basic levels.

I don't know how we're going to get what you're talking about, but you have some good ideas on the table. I know we took away the short money for the supplementary reserve people. I think, if nothing else, they should be brought back and given some upgrading on current events and shown some movements or changes in tactics, saying that we used to do it this way and now we're doing it slightly differently.

The biggest thing is that they're way out of shape. But you hit the nail on the head when you said that the officers' cadres should be larger than they are, and so should the NCOs'. Why? Because it takes so much longer to train an officer to that level. But you can bring those at the lower levels much more quickly from basic training to a higher level or into some straight specialities than you can bring your officers and your NCOs up, because some of the NCO training is long and difficult.

I agree with you that we shouldn't go too skinny on the outline of what a battalion should have. There's a problem when you get yourself all wrapped around a gate post over something. I've been in the regular force and I've been in the reserves. I can remember being at Wainwright, and my first job was taking the reserves on training exercises. I thought I was condescending until I got to wear the other shoe. I want to say that it's money well spent to have extra officers, NCOs, on strength because of an ability to meet training and to maintain and sustain training. If they can't turn up, they don't have the backups.

Say the Calgary Highlanders were mobilized. They would have nearly full strength in officers and NCOs. With the surge of people lining up to join, they would have a basic cadre to help train them rather than having the regiment training its NCOs and officers and then bringing in the troops. I think you make a very good point about that.

.1655

Do you think the government - and I'm with the government, that the 14,500 is a budget figure. It's been used there, in the budget, because it was a budget figure.

Col Mannix: It was a given number in the terms of reference for the commission, and it was picked by the white paper, but the white paper picked that number on false information. The cost of the reserves may vary 20% from the paper's basis for picking that number.

I think that alone is enough to say that the white paper on defence needs to be revisited. I think the number of 14,500 means we're going to go through reductions of the type we had earlier, where the capacity of the reserves, the militia, was in effect wiped out. Although there's no particular magic in a number, I still feel strongly that we should not be one of the two countries in the world with more regulars than reserves. You're back to cost effectiveness.

On your point about the subunit training and so on, in the Calgary Highlanders, for example, the secondary training that you are talking about there is cheaper than going out and recruiting a soldier.

The biggest issue is one of tactics. I would defer to people who know more about it, but I understand that 85% of casualties in World War II were from indirect fire. At the present time, our young soldier gets no training whatsoever in indirect fire. That means being able to call down artillery fire, being able to set up heavy machine guns so that they are indirect-fire supported, and it means using the machine guns on APCs and so on. Those can all be trained for on the armoury floor with the right simulation equipment.

A voice: Or mortars.

Col Mannix: Mortars are another issue. In my entire 14 years as a Calgary Highlander I never saw a mortar, and that's a travesty. There is no money for mortar training that the militia men can go and get. The result is that we don't have cross-trained mortar men to give to the regular force when they want to go to Yugoslavia. They have to start from scratch if they're going to do that.

Those courses are run in such a time and in such a manner that, although they're available to a few people, are not something we can rely on to retain the bulk of those with experience who want to keep going in the unit. You have to go to extraordinary lengths to take those kind of courses. The sapper's course is another one. The result of that is you lose the experienced soldiers and you have a hard time producing the NCOs.

It's cutting off your nose to spite your face because the retention costs of those soldiers - my best guess from the estimates we've done is that it's about $11,000, and to recruit a new soldier is $24,000. This is self-defeating.

Mr. Richardson: I agree with everything you've said. That's all I have to say. I appreciate your attendance at this meeting.

Col Mannix: Thank you.

Mrs. Hickey (St. John's East): Mr. Chairman, for the record and for Mr. Leroux, we are not all men on this side of the room. I am one female.

Mr. Leroux: Gentlemen and gentlewoman, of course.

Mrs. Hickey: Colonel Manning, do we have any honorary female colonels in the reserve?

Col Mannix: Unmarried female colonels?

Mrs. Hickey: Honorary.

Col Mannix: Unmarried?

Mrs. Hickey: Honorary, not unmarried.

Col Mannix: Oh. Yes, there are female honouraries. Madame Sauve is one and Joyce Fairbairn is another.

Mrs. Hickey: We haven't mentioned women all day. Do women rank in the reserve? Do we have many women there? Are they as capable as the men in the reserves?

Col Mannix: There are more women in the reserves, comparatively speaking, than there are in the regulars. Many of the functions that the reserve is particularly good at are held by women.

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For example, many of the logistics, medical and transportation areas have large proportions of women, and a lot of the administration are women. I don't know how many women from the reserve served in Yugoslavia, but a couple of notable examples came out of Calgary. One of them was taken prisoner and was badly treated for a while, but she was an excellent officer. In fact, the 2nd Patricia's considered her their best reconnaissance officer at that time.

Mrs. Hickey: So in your view we make good reserves.

Col Mannix: Yes. We have no problem with women in the reserve.

Mrs. Hickey: Can we do better with more women? Can we do something to encourage more women?

Col Mannix: We've never discouraged them. At least in our unit we've never discouraged them.

Mrs. Hickey: I'm not saying we discourage them, I'm just asking if we can find a way to encourage them, to bring more women forward.

Col Mannix: The issue is one of interest. Not a lot of women have an interest in it. The problem is partly one of education. If there was a broader understanding of the military requirement and military issues in the general community, I think we'd see a greater response by women to serve in the armed forces. I think we have some excellent women in the armed forces, not only in the reserve but in the regular. The biggest issue in terms of women in the forces is getting a broader understanding in the business community about the opportunities in the armed forces. To me, that is the biggest thing we can do. The better the understanding in the civilian community about the opportunities and roles that women can play, the better the response will be. Basically, the biggest problem has been a response problem.

Mrs. Hickey: Thank you.

Mr. Hart: One of the problems that I see in the Canadian Armed Forces, and probably in government as well, is that we tend to look at things in isolation. The report does mention that they looked at this as one single problem, but not having the mandate to look at the big picture of what the problem is.

This was also done when we announced in the last budget that there would be base closures. CFB Chilliwack is one of the bases that will be closed, and Calgary. What impact do those closures have on this whole area of the reserves? Should we look at these things in isolation, as we tend to do, or should we look at the big picture and determine what effect the closure of CFB Chilliwack will have on the reserve, the regular force and the province of British Columbia?

Col Mannix: You're right on in some respects. The closure of bases does a lot of different things that are not always understood, and one of the issues goes back to the costing issue of the armed forces. The decision to close the Calgary base, for example, was made without any real understanding of the cost to move that base to Edmonton. It emphasizes the issues of separate budgets, accountabilities and responsibilities, and I think one of the issues of this commission is that it has looked at the reserves strictly in isolation. I believe it's this committee's responsibility to throw a wider net, to look at a broader view of this commission's report than just the specific items within the report.

As I've already said, I consider the white paper to be totally obsolete because it's based on assumptions about the cost of the reserves that are off by 20%. When you start to investigate the issues, and I confess that I'm not up to speed on the cost of the base closure in Calgary, but it was substantial.... Something like $55 million was lost just from the movement of the base between Edmonton and Calgary, because you have to recreate a lot of the things that are already in place in Calgary, such as swimming pools and officers' clubs and things like that, or amenities that are at every other single base, and you have to duplicate those things.

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Don't forget, the base in Edmonton at Namao was an airforce base that didn't have those kinds of facilities on it. Then to take it and turn the third-largest runway in North America into an army base seems to me very strange. The costs of doing so are astronomic. Those costs were not well-researched, well-thought-out or well-organized, because the system isn't organized to do that kind of costing.

So the decision was made more or less on an ad hoc basis, I would have to say, and the effect of what it does to the militia units and the reserve units and so on have never been thought out. Nobody has thought about, for example, the issue of the museum of the regiment in Calgary when you lose the two participants from Calgary who are regular force. What's the cost of that going to be? Now you're going to have to set up.... Are those museums, as of part of DND, going to be carried on as a presence in the community and to promote DND's purposes? You're now going to add to overhead rather than reduce overhead, because that overhead was partly covered by having the base there. That was not factored in, for example. It's a small example, but it's a typical example.

I think the reserve report cannot be considered in isolation. The reserve report does make a recommendation that the overall structure of the forces be looked at, and I think it's up to this committee to pursue that particular point.

Mr. Hart: We had talked earlier about the CO of a reserve brigade. In the report it suggested maybe they should be a major.

Col Mannix: It's colonel.

Mr. Hart: In the regular force it's a brigadier. Does it have to be a brigadier in the regular force?

Col Mannix: Total force would imply comparability, so maybe you should ask the regular force that question. I think you'd get quite a strong answer that it has to be a brigadier. From my point of view, the real issue is that notwithstanding that, the brigadier needs to be trained to at least one level above his rank if we're going to have an effective mobilization base.

Mr. Hart: We have a tremendous bureaucracy at NDHQ. Even right here in Ottawa we have that problem. It would appear to me that one of the things is if we're going to downsize the reserve force, it would be wise if we downsized the rank structure on the regular force as well. We don't need as many generals.

Col Mannix: That is correct. For the cost of two generals you can run a reserve unit. Which is of more deterrence value?

But you've raised another issue. You've raised the issue of NDHQ and the general overhead. When you then use the envelope that what we're trying to do is create deterrence, one-third of NDHQ is civilian. They create no deterrence value whatsoever.

The second problem is that all of those jobs being held should be held by military people to give both expansion and mobilization capacity. The cost is the same. In fact, we are throwing away high costs in training of military officers because we have no place to park them. What do we have instead? We have a civilian sitting in that job. He contributes nothing to deterrence and he inhibits our ability to take and mobilize. Instead of being able to put in jobs that are necessary anyway - maybe not all of them - people who have military experience, which would then contribute to a mobilization capacity, we're denying ourselves that ability. That hurts us even more when it comes to deterrence value.

Now the question is, how would you remove the one-third influence in NDHQ? I don't think it could be done by a man in a military uniform. The next CDS should probably be a civilian of a high rank in the civil service, and he should just tell all the civilians to uproot and out they go - either that or put on a uniform and take the appropriate training.

That alone would cut down the overhead of NDHQ fairly substantially and make it affordable. But again, the issue really becomes that under the template of what we're trying to create is a greater voice of Canada, which requires deterrence, and deterrence requires mobilization.

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A major portion of NDHQ being civilian doesn't help us achieve that; therefore, we're wasting that money. That money is being spent anyway. It's under the Defence budget, but it isn't giving us a defence result - or a marginal defence result.

Mr. Hart: I was interested in your point about bringing in a civilian as a CDS. Our CDS is just about to retire.

Col Mannix: He was a good piper in the Highlanders.

Mr. Hart: He was.

I in particular appreciate your business perspective. I was wondering, what are you doing for the next three or four years?

Col Mannix: I hate to hear that question, because in Canada the tradition of C.D. Howe was a dollar a year, if I remember correctly.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. Hart: That's all, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Hart.

Mr. Mannix, I certainly thank you for being with us today. Some people might take issue on the matter when you said the civilian group in NDHQ has no deterrence; you must have tried to get through to them yourself sometimes.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

The Chairman: I want to thank you for being here. You certainly have given us a lot of food for thought. The recommendations, especially the one that highlighted the budget singled out for the reserves, is I think going to have to be looked at. This is one area where you hear an awful lot of complaints. The militia, the navy reserve and people like this never getting paid for months - something has to change in those areas.

That was a very, very well-documented presentation, sir, and I thank you very much. We'll probably be hearing from you again before we're finished.

Col Mannix: Thank you.

The Chairman: We are adjourned.