LYTLE: Amateur hour is over, defence file should go to serious people

During the Bosnian conflict of 1992-1995, I was struck by the uniformity of reporting by the news media. Changing channels from CBC to CTV resulted in the same words from a different mouth. Radio reports mimicked newspaper articles. To believe the news, Serbian president Slobodan Milosevich was as terrible a man as his name suggested. (The Croats and the Bosniak Muslims were the best of all people and clearly suffered ethnic cleansing via murderous concentration camps. Confusingly and disputedly, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia stated in its decision on Radovan Karadzic that 'there was not sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milosevic agreed with the common plan,' to create territories ethnically cleansed of non-Serbs.How was one to know whether any of it was true? I accepted it all as given. And then I was introduced to the writing of Scott Taylor and Esprit de Corps. During that war, he was embedded with Canadian peacekeeping soldiers and his reporting painted a different picture. Unlike the other news outlets, he pointed out that only the Serbs fought with Canadians in both World Wars. I realized that I needed to learn some history if I wanted a hope of understanding current events..I give this background to justify tiptoeing into Canadian defence policy. This is an area in which I have considerable interest but little expertise. My brush with the Canadian Armed Forces came in the early 2000s when my son joined the reserve forces and was entertaining a career in the regular forces. What I saw of the institution was not impressive. But that is a sample size of one, so can be safely disregarded.In a recent edition of his magazine, Mr. Taylor asks why the Canadian Armed Forces does not have a specific procurement policy for modern drones. He wonders why Canada paid a cost much higher than the list price for those drones we have. In the same issue I learned that the housing conditions for Armed Forces personnel is beyond shocking. If you click through to read this article, be forewarned that you will be disgusted by what you see.Compounding these issues is the fact that the Canadian Armed Forces are at 80% of full strength and veterans are leaving in increasing numbers. If Canada can’t fill the slots in its army, is it any wonder that we can’t meet spending commitments to NATO? For how much longer are the Americans going to extend their military protection to Canadians at zero cost? Where is the pride in being a nation of shirkers? Yeah, yeah we are great fighters but maybe we need to commit more money for the infrastructure to support more great fighters.Our feminist prime minister doesn’t want to break any fingernails over this issue so we can only hope that he will soon be replaced by someone who is motivated by the mores of 1955 rather than the wokeism of 2025. How should such a toxic male modernize the Canadian military?The Canadian Department of Defence has done a lot of work on the priorities of Canada’s military establishment but these are the people who do not see a role for drones in modern warfare, can’t fill its battalions with fighters and, if the press is to be believed, routinely tell veterans that assisted suicide is an option to deal with their work-related mental and physical problems. I could be wrong, but their opinions may be as legitimate as mine. Organizations like the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and the University of Calgary Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies are delivering a stream of policy and strategy papers which are places to start.I certainly don’t have specific answers. It seems obvious to me, based on the dynamics of the Ukraine war, that drones are strategically important for northern and border defence. Russia, with a GDP per capita that is one third that of Canada’s, has a fleet of icebreakers that allow year-round shipping from their northern ports. Perhaps our defence policy should include strategies for the high north that go beyond a few over-flights. In less than a year, Canadians will be going to the polls, and it is important that all parties commit to making the cuts necessary to immediately spend two percent of GDP on defence and to list the strategic priorities for that spending. It will be disappointing if the lists include F-35 fighter jets that are mechanically available only 14% of the time or sophisticated warships that would be immediately destroyed by hypersonic missiles. It is time for the current kids to be quiet and let the adults talk about the important topic of national defence.