I agree. When I first drafted this, of the many drafts I went through, trying to get my head around all of the different ways you can cut at readiness, the question always came to me as, “Readiness for what? What do we want to be ready for?”
That has to be decided and defined. If you put it in the context of future environments, it becomes clearly complicated. That's why, in my view, one should look at not any attempt to specify specific combat environments or any military environments where armed forces may or can play a significant role, whether it's constabulary missions or combat missions, but rather to identify in the generic or the abstract what kinds of missions we are talking about. That leads me, as I mentioned in my presentation, to the emphasis on combat as the most extreme environment where the Canadian Forces may be deployed.
Then, of course, that relates to the second question. What are combat environments going to look like in the future? These are extremely difficult to predict. The general view, if you come from my field of academic study on this, is that we're looking at two opposite environments.
One is an environment of the continuation of the past two decades, with failed and failing states, internal conflicts, and civil wars—the events in Syria today, for example. All of the past experiences that began with Somalia and the collapse of the former republic of Yugoslavia will continue.
Here the forces, of course, look at this environment of insurgency/counter-insurgency, and some elements of the forces playing roles in the field at the same time in the realm of nation building. You look particularly at the experience of the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan—in which they were fighting a counter-insurgency operation, winning hearts and minds, which of course required different types of capabilities, and training forces—and the investments that went in, particularly here at home in preparing forces as they rotated overseas.
That's an environment in which, because we have a lot of experience, it's not difficult for Canada to continue. That's what I meant by the immediate future conforming to past experiences. If that's where we're headed—and I'm not convinced we are headed in that direction—then I think that's relatively manageable. You have that bulk of people, as long as you can retain them and have enough resources to keep them trained and to pass this on to the next generation of forces that are moving through the pipeline.
The problem, of course, is that when you look at the world we face, two things in particular come up.
One is—and I'm sure the committee has already heard this from other people—the growing attention to potential returns of great power conflicts, focused primarily on the growing American obsession with China. Great power conflicts are conflicts that have nuclear weapons directly in the background, which may lead to a return to issues we are more familiar with from the Cold War of deterrent-type forces, where attention will be moved away from failed and failing states. They'll still be there, as they were in the Cold War, but governments by and large ignored them or saw them through the lens of the Cold War rivalry. That type of environment is a different one for the Canadian Forces to be prepared for because they haven't been doing that for a long time. No one knows how that will play out.
Again, when you have limited resources, it's very hard to try to spread yourself thin to invest in trying to do both or all of them.
In the midst of all this—as we've seen very small outlines of in the case of Afghanistan in the ability, for example, of the Taliban to use social media and other aspects, which is a bit surprising given our assumptions about the nature of the Taliban and the nature of Afghan society and their experiences—is how these operations will become much more technologically complicated for the Canadian Forces, an insurgency/counter-insurgency operation of the future where everyone can imagine it to be. As we should have learned from Afghanistan, we can never imagine them.
You might ask me—and people did a decade or so ago—where the forces were going after Bosnia. I said we were going to Africa. Well, we haven't really gone there yet, but we might. We might go back to the Middle East. It's very hard to know.
It's in these environments that you have forces you're going to face, irregular forces but equipped with more and more sophisticated technologies, into the areas of cyber warfare and the ability to use off-the-shelf jamming equipment and spoofing equipment to undermine western technological experiences. So you have that mix as well, which requires not just a fundamental....
If you think of counter-insurgency traditionally as boots on the ground, patrolling, traditional types of counter-insurgency missions, into ones that would be much more complicated, how do you train for all of this? How do you train, particularly when you can't train for them all? You just can't. Even if there were no budget cuts, the forces couldn't train for all of it. We've never been able to.
That's where you get into the realm of what I'd call hard choices. In the history of the Canadian Forces, National Defence and governments—regardless of their stripe—have been reluctant to make choices and just let time figure itself out.