Thank you for the question.
I don't agree with your premise that there is a tension between the best and brightest and the nature of military duty. I would also add in regard to your description of the best and brightest that they are not just those coming from RMC. Our troops from across the nation, who are joining as young soldiers, airmen, and women, are also among the best and the brightest and certainly acquit themselves as such in allied fora. We see that. So we have good raw material.
The fact is that you asked a great question and, of course, it's one of the enduring challenges, how to ensure that someone maintains critical thinking skills while at the same time operating within an environment that by necessity has some doctrinaire aspects to it. The simple answer is that it's an ongoing challenge and that we recognize the importance of having critical thinkers at all levels, while ensuring that critical thinking doesn't allow something to become so chaotic that you don't get the job done.
What caused you to ask the question we see every day when trying to inspire people to think, giving them the confidence and the tools to think, but at the same time constraining their actions appropriately to ensure that the mission is accomplished. It is a hierarchy and as you move up the hierarchy, you don't necessarily become any smarter than anybody else, but you do have experience and have the ability to place in context for your junior leaders the situations that you put them into.
So with the incredible investment in education versus straight training and those sorts of drills, you will see that there's a very good balance in the Canadian Forces between that straight education and straight training. We have a good balance there.
In conducting operations, these are not routine and mundane but demand critical thinking, such as in warfare in general.... In Afghanistan, you just didn't go there and start executing. You had to think. You had to devise strategies and campaigns that took account of an incredibly wide set of factors that all mitigated to success or failure, depending on how you took advantage of them.
In ensuring readiness, we invest in critical thinking at all levels. We encourage a mission command environment where we adequately identify the task and the context that you're in and let you use your imagination and experience to the best effect in that environment. But there are some things that you don't give on, such as the rules of engagement. No matter how much of an outside the box thinker you are, the Chief of the Defence Staff sets the rules of engagement for very clear reasons. Your weapons and equipment can be used in one way for many purposes, but that's how your weapon is to operate. Don't try to think too far outside the box on that, and so on. And caring for people, and on it goes....
There's an appropriate balance, as there is in any profession between critical thinking and abiding by the rules that allow you to be effective.