Distinguished and honourable members, Admiral Murray, it's a privilege to be asked to appear before you and participate in this important discussion on Canadian Forces readiness. Please excuse my lack of proficiency in French and inability to converse with you competently in both official languages.
I speak to you today representing the Brigadier Milton F. Gregg, VC, Centre for the Study of War and Society, or the Gregg Centre for short, at the University of New Brunswick. The broad purpose of this centre is to study the cause, course, and consequence of war in history and in the world today. A subset of that mandate is to study the Canadian army's past, present, and future. In this we are closely partnered with the army's combat training centre in CFB Gagetown.
That partnership involves the Gregg Centre faculty members in professional development for both the field force and for training units. Our program of research includes, but is not limited to, ongoing projects concerning Canada's mission in Afghanistan, the era of violent peace and stability missions during the nineties, and the Canadian Forces in two world wars. There are other projects as well, but these are the ones I am directly involved in and best able to comment on today.
The common thread linking Afghanistan through to the 1990s and of course the world wars is that Canadian military forces in all three of these particular periods operated as part of a larger coalition of allies, joined for a common purpose. They also include what in today's terms we label whole of government, or the comprehensive approach, or, alternatively, they are operations with joint inter-agency, multinational, and political dimensions.
I should add that our faculty members, including me, are military historians by training and discipline, and therefore we bring a historical, evidence-based approach to the study of operations and readiness. For example, back in 2006-07, the Gregg Centre undertook a focus project on Canadian army operations in Afghanistan by studying the training, deployment, and return home of one rotation, Task Force Kandahar. The result was essentially a short history of one tour of duty. That study, along with subsequent research into how events unfolded from 2008 on, informs what I have to say today.
In today's era of technologically sophisticated warfare, I understand that the issue of military readiness almost always defaults to equipment. I submit to you today that the most important elements of military readiness I have observed, the ones that define more than any other factors whether a unit can succeed in its mission and win on the battlefield, are training and education. These two distinctly intellectual preparations create both the will and the mental capacity to solve whatever problem there is that must be solved in order to accomplish the mission. Training and education are equally important for both officers and non-commissioned members.
Canada's military past contains many examples of well-trained units led by well-educated officers who found innovative and sophisticated ways to achieve their mission, even though they neither had the perfect equipment nor enough resources to guarantee success. I'm not arguing that investing in training and education is a replacement for good equipment. There are plenty of other examples of Canadian units paying too high a blood price for being under-equipped and outgunned in a fight, but I am arguing that the best ships, aircraft, and armoured fighting vehicles are only as good as the minds that operate them.
I mention training and education in the same breath because they are inseparable in providing Canadian Forces members with both the practical skills and the critical thinking ability to solve military problems. It is important to consider the value of training and education this year, as the Canadian Forces come to grips with the belt-tightening we all know is coming. Difficult choices need to be made about what people, institutions, capabilities, and equipment are essential to maintain the level of defence readiness Canada needs and which ones should be cut to lower costs.
If the last 65 years are any indication, the national tradition in times of peaceful budget reduction is to reduce training and education allocations to maintain funding for major equipment purchases.
In the years since the Second World War, the rising costs associated with keeping up the rate of military technological advance create a reality we cannot avoid. But the people who man those systems must always be upheld as the most important investment. It may take 10 years or more to get a warship from the drawing board onto the high seas, but as I always tell my students in the classroom, it takes 35 to 40 years to build a skipper, it takes 22 years or more to produce a high-quality infanteer, and it takes 30 years to create a seasoned professional section commander or petty officer. The training and education institutions and establishments across Canada that produce these high-quality personnel have never been so sophisticated. As in 1914 and in 1939, the necessity of this most recent war and the risk that failure means death forces them to be excellent.
I submit to you today that in the world we live in, where the nature of the threats to Canada's global security are uncertain, never has the need for well-trained and well-educated soldiers been greater. Our search for the essential ingredients to the Canadian Forces readiness must therefore include those components of training and education establishments that have proven themselves in the last 20 years in which the Canadian Forces have been in or at war on our behalf.
On the educational side, these include the Canadian Defence Academy, the Royal Military College, and the Canadian Forces College, as well as linkages to supporting civilian universities and colleges.
On the training side, I am most familiar with the army case. In this respect, the land forces doctrine and training system and the various schools that form the Combat Training Centre are the critical pieces that produce high-quality individual soldiers and leaders. Those individuals are then assigned to field force units to train collectively as a team. Historically, one way to reduce budgets has been to cut costs for that individual training system in the hope that skills can be learned when a particular member reaches their regiment, squadron, or ship. On the flip side, wartime requirements often tip the balance in favour of that collective training, the idea being that individuals not qualified for their jobs can be trained into them or weeded out as the unit collectively goes through its high readiness training cycle immediately before action.
Arguably the best way to maintain readiness for whatever the Canadian Forces face next, though, is to produce better qualified individuals before they are assigned to their units. Those individuals will then be able to be prepared more rapidly and mobilized more rapidly on short notice for surprises, be they the Libyan uprising, be they a suddenly violent counter-insurgency in Kandahar, or be it Germany's invasion of Poland.
I'd like to close by identifying two particular training and education areas that I believe the Canadian Forces can use more of. The first is military history, a bit of self-promotion perhaps. I'm aware that the Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs is looking into matters related to commemorative events for great Canadian wartime achievements. Certainly, Canadian history is important for national public education purposes. However, the study of military history and placing a priority on research into our distant and recent military past offers an inexpensive way to maintain intellectual readiness for what comes next.
The second new training and education priority that requires deeper commitment from several departments—and I know there is one member of this committee who has some experience with this particular matter—is to create opportunities for Canadian Forces members to train and interact alongside DFAIT and CIDA officers. Few people know it, but Sicily, Normandy, Somalia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan all teach us that Canadian defence and foreign policy is more effectively implemented when combat leaders work in concert with civil affairs operators, diplomatic envoys, and aid workers.
Different professional cultures exist between these groups, which makes collaboration difficult. You've probably heard this message before. Improving cooperation between these entities can only happen when Canadians serving in the four military and civilian assignments are trained and educated to understand that together they can build a better world for all humanity. Indeed, they have performed this feat in the past.
Thank you for your time.