National Defence Committee on June 17th, 2010

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

The C-17s are unbelievably valuable. We need more of them. But you don't move a combat unit with heavy equipment by air. You move it by sea. You keep it together. You move your advance parties. You move a company of infantry. Trust me, it's immensely better than it was before. We can move things like the DART, etc.

One thing I didn't get into in my opening comments was that one of the lessons we've learned is that our units are way, way too small. Even if you reduce the number of units, build them up in size. We send over what we call battle groups. They're actually battalion groups. We send the battle groups to Afghanistan. It takes a year to get them ready, because no unit is big enough to go by itself. They need a company with 200 from another battalion. They need a large number of reservists--God bless them; we couldn't do it without them. They need all kinds of things to create a unit, and then it has to be organized.

You don't have a unit at that stage. You have to have a bunch of people with leadership. They have to get to know each other. They have to trust each other. They have to learn lessons from Afghanistan. That takes a year. Then you send them over in the field for six months. Then you bring them home, and a number of them will be recycled and will go back over fairly soon.

Units aren't big enough. You have 1,100 soldiers trained to live on a ship and prepared to deploy from each coast. It slows down the decision-making process in that building over there. Why? Because right now, when the Government of Canada decides to send troops somewhere, the CDS says, “Well, we have to charter a ship, and the cheapest one available is in the Indian Ocean, so it will be here in about three months. So I'll get our force there in about four months.”

After 9/11, when did we arrive? It was in March of the following year. We don't have strategic capability. We have C-17s that are absolutely essential for rapid deployment of the advanced group. To move a unit, it should be on a ship. Not only that, when the C-17 lands, it needs permission. It has to get clearance on foreign soil. When a ship arrives in international waters, it parks off the west coast of Africa or wherever. It can sit there until Parliament makes its decision that it's supposed to go in. Then they can say, “We'll be there in three hours”--not in four months.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you, General. The time is very short now.

We have Mr. Hawn for seven minutes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks, General MacKenzie, for being here to see us, as always.

Just before you answer my question, in regard to the use of the term “peace operations”, I'll speak for myself, but we wrestled with what we were going to call this study. Some wanted to call it the study of “peacekeeping” operations, and some of us said no, “peace operations”, meaning that everything the Canadian Forces does every day, wherever they are, is about peace. So that, for me personally, was the reason for having “peace operations” as a moniker. Besides, if we called it “war operations”, it probably wouldn't sell.

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

Yes. I went to the U.S. Army “War” College. We'd never get away with that in Canada.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

You talked about the UN subcontracting, and so on. The simple fact is, who would the UN turn to if they didn't turn to somebody to subcontract with, whether it's an organization such as NATO or individual countries? The other one you mentioned is that it's better to subcontract to a single country. I would suggest that there are a limited number of countries that could take on those kinds of missions—obviously the U.S., Canada, Britain, and a number of others, but that number is relatively small. They would wind up subcontracting, I think, to other willing partners. Would you not see that?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

Yes. I'm referring to the command and control. For example, Australia has done more with less than we have, but they were subcontracted for East Timor, after the UN's disaster where its civilian staff were slaughtered as a result of insufficient security forces.

But I'm really talking about the chain of command, the command at the top. I appreciate that the U.K., for example, in Sierra Leone, took it upon itself to grab it from the UN and go in there with the SAS, sort the thing out, and then hand it back to the UN. So I'm talking about the command level at the top, because I don't have to tell you that when you bring 30 different people into an op centre and tell them to run the op centre and they're all from different countries, it takes a year to get the thing working.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

One of the big challenges we face in any of these things now in today's environment is that the soldiers in the field, in my view, are never the problem; it's the people back here. Whether it's media, politicians, citizens, or whoever—

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

The centre of gravity.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Yes, and maybe using Somalia as an example, Canadians are surprised to hear somebody say that our mission in Somalia was actually a success. There was one really bad “oh shucks”, and that became the whole story, not the story of the whole mission.

Maybe using Somalia as an example, and maybe Afghanistan, what do we need to do better, to not control the public perception but to get the information out there so that people can make opinions based on the whole story, not just the filtered stories through the eyes of the media?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

It's a question that I'm sure a lot of people in this capital are wrestling with.

My first point is that it starts from the top. There is a requirement at the very top of the national leadership to explain to the public. I hate the term “grassroots”, but I'm delighted with that grassroots movement along the Highway of Heroes. And it didn't mean much to us until other countries started doing documentaries on it and telling us how well we were doing it, and now the U.S. is copying, and the U.K. in some ways. Those were publicly generated responses, which are just great. It ignores the mission and focuses on the troops, which is great.

But as to how we do it, as a guy who spends some time with the media, I think if it leads, it leads. My greatest concern in Afghanistan is that when a soldier is killed, he dies in a field, he dies again at the ramp ceremony, he dies again at Trenton, he dies on the Highway of Heroes, and he dies when he's interred, and the only time we're permitted to see the leadership of the Canadian Forces is at those Stations of the Cross. Therefore, the public associates our leadership with death, and I think that's unfortunate.

I haven't answered your question, but I really think what's needed is a little more openness. You and I both know the best ambassadors for the media from the military are corporals and sergeants and young lieutenants and captains, and you don't hear from them a lot.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I agree 100%.

In terms of lessons, whether it's from Somalia or whether it's from Afghanistan currently, how do we translate that into the future of, say, the Afghanistan mission as a peace mission, or call it whatever you want? How do we go the next step forward in that particular peace operation?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

They're doing it very well. I'm really pleased with what I see in terms of the lessons learned when I visit. In my day, when we went to Cyprus, where I did three tours and had extended leave on most of them, you didn't even ask the previous unit for any advice. If you did ask for advice, you normally got it from a document that was written four years earlier by earlier rotations. That's how backward it was. Now they're turning around within hours.

On the lessons learned in Afghanistan, the folks in Kingston turn that thing around and it goes back as direction or advice, or whatever, almost immediately. They've done it extremely, extremely well.

As far as lessons learned on a more macro basis, I think the one I would emphasize is the size of the units. Nobody's ever going to ask for a 500-man battalion to go overseas and participate in one of these operations. There's always going to be somewhat of a balanced battle group, as they call it now, of around 1,000 or 1,100. When I was commissioned, battalions were 1,100 strong, and we have kept reducing and reducing them in size.

It's a tiny army. I'm just speaking of the army now, which is said to be just over 20,000, but it's not 20,000 deployable soldiers. I know people are tired of hearing me say this, but I repeat it over and over: if you march the army into Maple Leaf Gardens and order it to sit down, there will be empty seats. I'm an honourary chief of the Toronto Police Service, and we have 2,000 more cops in Toronto than we have infanteers in the Canadian army. The numbers are tiny—and they do magnificent work.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Given those tiny numbers, and again, sticking with Afghanistan a little bit, what's your view of what ought to happen next in terms of the future of the mission? I ask because the mission is obviously ongoing and there are questions about its continuation in some form or another, based on what I talked about with regard to public perception and the challenge of educating the public, and the realities of what's needed there.

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

Well, if nothing else, I might not be right, but at least I'm consistent in saying for the last three years that come 2011, we will not be in a position to leave the battle group there. We've ground the army into the ground, and we just don't have the numbers to maintain these fourth, fifth, and six rotations of a lot of people.

But we have a tremendous cadre of operationally astute leaders at every level, from the NCO level through the warrant level, from the officers to the commanding officers. So the training role just falls naturally. Considering they're short about 50% of all the trainers they need—NATO is in the thousands short of trainers—to satisfy the perception of the Canadian public that if the army is in Afghanistan it's under intense risk, I would say that a lot of us in here have wandered around the training area without flak jackets and helmets on. That is, it's the safest environment in Afghanistan, period, because what idiot would take on that particular well-located area?

So I hope and pray we will post a significant cadre of trainers—not Omleters, the operational mentoring and liaison teams, as that would get terribly controversial in the House, because they actually go out and do the high-tech stuff with the Afghan troops as they're fighting the Taliban. But individual training of privates and NCOs and officers, and collective training on how to fight together as a group of 30 or 100, or 600 in the case of a battalion--there's nobody in the world that would be better at it than we are.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, General.

I will give the floor to Mr. Wilfert. I think you're going to share your time.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Being a Liberal, I'm going to share my time with Mr. Trudeau.

Mr. Chairman, through you to General MacKenzie, if you go back to your first point about foreign policy and defence, very quickly, where do you see our national and strategic interests after 2011? And given the high tempo of the Canadian Forces, what would you suggest we be doing?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

It's a mug's game predicting the future, I must admit, but certainly, first of all, I think we should be looking west, significantly, into the Pacific area and Southeast Asia, etc. That's going to be of valuable economic benefit to us. We want to maintain a working relationship with the United States, and it's amazing how our very small contribution, in overall terms, to the American military makes a phenomenal amount of impact.

I lectured for 13 years, thanks to an invitation from Colin Powell to the joint flag officer war fighting course in Montgomery, Alabama, for their two and three star generals. When I mentioned the size of our force, there was a pregnant pause from the generals waiting for the punch line. They thought it was a joke. They said, “You are everywhere.” I said, “Yes, but in fairly small numbers.” They said, “Nevertheless, you're everywhere.” They were complaining about the shortage of resources at 800,000.

When the government decides that we are going to participate in coalition operations, whether it's UN, NATO, or coalitions of the willing, which I like, because that means they're put together when there's a crisis, and they're all committed to resolving the crisis, we need the ability to respond with flexible forces. And that means navy, air force, army units that are large enough that they don't have to be put together as some sort of heterogeneous thing for a while before they become a fighting unit. If we have that, and we're close to having that right now, if we don't let it wither on the vine--we have a habit of letting our military wither on the vine after an operational commitment--we would continue to make a significant contribution.

As for the Middle East, I won't go there. It's just so, so potentially volatile that we stand by waiting for coalitions of the willing and deciding whether we're going to play or not.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Quickly, should this committee, in your view, be looking at Australia as a model, in terms of regional interest and that we're going to devote all our...in that area, rather than trying to be all over the place?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

I wasn't warned about that question, because the answer is yes, they've done very well, particularly on the amphibious side. They have ships on order.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you.

[Justin Trudeau, Liberal, Papineau, QC]

Thank you.

Thank you, General, for being here. I appreciate your words about the myth of peacekeeping. We tend to define ourselves that way when the reality is that Canada is strong in its reputation internationally because of our presence in the trenches of World War I and on the beaches of World War II, because we knew how to step up well beyond our nominal capacities.

Looking forward, the phrase “the best small army in the world”, of course, resonates. We're going to have to make choices automatically about where we can go or what type of intervention we should be in, and the optimal, flexible, lethal, capable force of responding to some of the different challenges is essential.

On top of these three amphibious stations or forces that you see, what will we have to remove from what we do right now in order to create those? Because there's always give and take. If we were to focus on that, what would that mean we couldn't do and what would we have to remove from our arsenal, as it were, of capacities?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

That's a great question, in that we don't have to remove anything because the troops are already here. They're already inland somewhere. The cost of the assault ships is very reasonable, and we have a navy that can escort them, including, hopefully, submarines. The Americans, the Spaniards, the Italians, all lease with Maersk. Maersk is the largest container ship company in the world. It puts together a ship, including crew, if you want, who sign a waiver to go into an operational theatre. But they will configure the ship to carry your specific kit and your troops. The marines are also contracting from Maersk. However, there are assault ships and keels are being laid, which the Australians have ordered, and various variants from France and the U.S. The good news is the cost is less and the crew is less than for a destroyer or a frigate. We're in the process of planning to replace a number of our naval vessels. So we would enhance our capability within the same budget, within the same personnel ceilings, if that's the case.

That's the good news.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much. Merci.

I will give the floor to Mr. Braid.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

And thank you, General, for being here this morning and for your contributions.

General, if you were providing advice to the Government of Canada, what factors should the government consider in determining whether or not to participate in a peace operation?

[MGen Lewis MacKenzie]

It's a great question, because there are criteria, and every country has them and the UN has them: identifiable end date, good chance of success, exit plan, criteria for success, in the national interest, etc. Every one of them is ignored, and they have been historically. They're never applied.

They are driven very much by the media that are covering that particular event. The absence of the media in Rwanda and the presence of the media in the Balkans are good examples of where the priorities were.

So I can certainly offer criteria. I just outlined some of them. But they will not be listened to.

With the UN, it's the same thing. In the Brahimi report that I mentioned, he said adequate budget, clear rules of engagement, well understood and implementable mandate—all that—and they're never applied. It's just an academic exercise.

I was blessed with the failure of that system, because when I needed some troops to come and secure the Sarajevo airport, we had 32 nations in that force and the only nation that responded to my telephone call within 12 hours to a request to borrow a battalion—and it had nothing to do with my being a Canadian—was Canada. It said, “Yes, sure; do you think it'll work, General MacKenzie?” That was the criterion. Thank God it did.