Let me respond to the first remarks, Mr. Chair.
In my academic business—my military business was another period--we like to begin, as I'm sure Jocelyn will agree, with a definition of the terms we're using. What we've never been able to do, in my view, is find anybody who could settle down and tell us what peacekeeping was and keep to that definition for very long. We call them peacekeeping missions, or peace operations, or muscular peacekeeping. We keep running around trying to find a definition. That suggests to me that we are trying to define something that perhaps is too difficult to define, because it always changes in the circumstances.
That's why, in my own view and that of lots of people, especially members of the Canadian Forces, peacekeeping is assumed to be warfare, and has the conditions of warfare, and the circumstances, and they will change right in front of your face, as they did in Cypress in 1974, when the little peacekeeping force came under attack by the Turks. They killed a friend of mine, a Canadian Forces officer, in that operation. The morning was quiet, and he was dead by the afternoon.
So when we look at the experience in Afghanistan and other places, since the end of the Cold War, especially in Bosnia, the people who led the Canadian Forces...and are leading the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan are young officers trained and experienced in the former Yugoslavia. Rick Hillier, Andy Leslie, Mike Jeffery--all these people grew up in those circumstances, when Canadians didn't understand it but they did. And when they went to the next operation, they said, “We're not doing that again.”
So I would think that the policy and the plans that military officers in Canada will put forward will be to say that peacekeeping is warfare, and that's the first assumption; that we'll adjust the needs of the deployment to the circumstances of the mission, either a lot of stuff or not so much stuff, but we're going to go there with the assumption that we're in a dangerous environment; that we need logistics support and can't depend on allies to provide for our logistics support and so on; that we need our own rules of engagement, our own weapons and so on; and that if, when we arrive there, it's kind of benign, well, the commanders will stand down a bit.
It's very hard, as we learned in Bosnia, to go on a mission and then call back home and say, “We need more than six rounds of ammunition here. People are trying to kill us.”
I think the general remark to your question, then, is that people are going to assume that the operations they go on are military combat operations, and that operational effectiveness--i.e., “Will it work in conflict?”--is the first question they will ask you.