National Defence Committee on May 15th, 2012

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Good morning, everyone. We are continuing our study under Standing Order 108(2) on the NATO strategic concept and Canada's role in international defence cooperation.

Joining us today we have Paul Chapin, who is the vice-president of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, and Colonel George Petrolekas, a member of the board of directors.

Lieutenant-Colonel Petrolekas has a unique background, combining years as an army officer and as a senior executive in the telecommunications industry. He has served in Bosnia, Cyprus, and Afghanistan. In the latter conflict he was recognized as a pre-eminent authority on NATO and coalition warfare in that country, serving as a confidant and trusted agent between the Canadian CDS and senior NATO and U.S. officials on the Afghan file. He is a marketing executive now and has extensive experience in large, medium, and start-up enterprises in high-tech industries, providing network equipment and solutions in over 87 countries.

Paul Chapin is an adjunct professor and research associate in the defence management studies program at the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University in Kingston. He has been the vice-president of programs at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, and has joined the board of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute. He left government service after 25 years in DFAIT. During his diplomatic career he served in Washington as the minister-counsellor in charge of the protocol section of the Canadian embassy, as Canada's representative on the NATO political advisers committee in Brussels, and as a political affairs officer at the Canadian embassies in Moscow and Tel Aviv.

So both have had extensive careers. We welcome you both to committee again and look forward to your comments. I turn the floor over to you to bring your first 10 minutes of presentation.

[Paul Chapin, Vice-President, Conference of Defence Associations Institute]

Thank you, Chair, and honourable members.

We have circulated our opening statement, so we will not repeat that in the interests of time. George Petrolekas and I will have a very few brief opening remarks just to kind of set the scene, and then we're in your hands.

Your subject, and we don't want to sound patronizing, is an important one, because in fact it's our assessment that Canada has reached the stage at which it's probably important to go back to some first principles on the security and defence policy and look at our interests a bit more carefully than has been traditionally required of this country.

Beginning with NATO, there's a major NATO summit this weekend in Chicago, as you know. They're becoming almost annual events. This is the 25th such summit since they began 55 years ago. The last NATO summit, which was in Lisbon about 18 months ago, issued a strategic concept of 2010. Strategic concept papers tend to be broad political guidance for the indefinite future, reflecting recent international developments and trends, that require NATO to look at itself and look at its direction and look at its priorities. NATO has issued seven such strategic concepts since it was founded in 1949.

The strategic concept of 2010 is important because it was the first one, although it came a little late, to try to take account of such transformative events as 9/11, our engagement in Afghanistan, the major dissension within NATO over Iraq, and all of the concerns that have arisen since that time about what the western democracies are trying to do in places where they're heavily engaged to rebuild war-torn societies.

SC 2010 stipulated that NATO has three functions. Typically NATO doesn't declare itself quite so specifically and so definitively. This one was a little different, and therefore interesting. It identified the requirement to, firstly, defend members against all threats; secondly, address the full spectrum of international crises; and thirdly, develop partnerships with others, other countries outside of NATO, other organizations beyond NATO.

This is a stretch for the alliance, which for the most part, particularly for its European members, has seen itself in the business of defence—item number one in the three tasks—and defence specifically of the territory of Europe. For NATO to formally now espouse a much larger mission, to be cognizant of and to do something about international crises writ large, for, during, and after, implies obviously a role in nation-building. And that, as you would imagine, is a hugely controversial issue today. It has been for quite some time. The controversy has been heating up for quite some time.

The notion that the alliance to cement that approach ought to be developing more formal ties with countries outside of NATO and with organizations outside of NATO implies that NATO is getting ready to go abroad and to stay involved in these issues. There's a good deal of angst within the alliance about what these aspirations as identified in the paper actually imply for policy.

The background obviously is that the financial crisis has afflicted the economies of every NATO member one way or the other, and has imposed on them defence budget cuts—at the low end about 9% or 10%, and at the high end about 28% or 30%. You don't cut your defence budgets by those amounts without cutting your military capabilities.

So at the very time that NATO is espousing a rather more forward-looking and enterprising approach to itself and the world around it, the NATO members themselves are probably less equipped to do that, and they're less inclined.

Why are they less inclined? It's because they are war weary. They've been at war one way or the other for 10 years. NATO has 28 members. A lot of governments within NATO, or opposition parties to those governments, are very skeptical about whether the alliance should be doing very much more of this.

I will stop and let my colleague, Mr. Petrolekas, take the story from there.

[George Petrolekas, Member, Board of Directors, Conference of Defence Associations Institute]

Thanks, Paul.

I'm going to talk a little about the Chicago summit, the main points that are going to come up, and some implications for Canada as a result of that.

It's really important that we keep in mind the last three things Paul talked about. One is the landscape in which the strategic concept of 2010 is hitting, namely the fiscal constraints that are being felt across the alliance and decisions being made by countries based on fiscal demands.

The second thing is a public reticence to get involved in long campaigns and what that provokes in terms of thinking about strategy. That has also provoked in most nations a rethink of what constitutes national interest. The four major points of that are: security and sovereignty of the country; its economic well-being; the stability of the world order; and the promotion of values, democracy, rule of law, and so forth.

I suggest that the landscape of war weariness and fiscal constraint have really sharpened the discussion or interpretation of national interest. So while the fourth is important, it is no longer primordial. Certainly the stable world order is important, but only as it relates to national economic interest.

So in the Chicago summit we think the first major point will certainly be Afghanistan. It has to be recognized that the Afghan state, the Afghan national security forces, cannot stand alone at this point. There is a notional deadline of 2014 to transition the mission fully to Afghan control, but it has to be recognized that the Afghan national security forces will still need military assistance or training assistance after that date, and most certainly will need financial assistance. So those needs are going to come into conflict with the landscape we just described of fiscal constraint and public weariness.

The military capability side will also be discussed at the summit. You'll have heard the term “smart defence” often used. NATO does not dictate to sovereign states what to do. Sovereign states will decide what they need to do. NATO itself as an institution becomes the enabler to permit certain thinking to become more efficient in how the defence dollars are spent in a fiscally constrained environment, but also to take some lessons that were learned from the recent Libya campaign. My colleague, David Perry, who will be testifying in front of you on Thursday, will be able to go into a little more detail.

To summarize very quickly, one of the things NATO has learned is it absolutely cannot conduct major military operations without the United States. So even though fighters and troops are contributed, things that make operations possible—the logistics behind them, like refueling capabilities, electronic warfare capabilities, and so forth—reside almost uniquely in the United States. Smart defence seeks to address that through common funding initiatives.

Finally, and Paul alluded to it, is the question of partnerships. You're all aware of the United States strategic pivot announced in January of this year, with increasing focus on Asia. It doesn't mean an abandonment of NATO; it just means something else has now risen as an area of interest that's far more important for a number of reasons that we can get into during our discussion.

Within that shift, within other operations we are involved in, there are like-minded states that are similar to us or to most of the western liberal democracies with which we share certain values, notions, and world views. They would certainly be Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and some others. However, there is no construct at this point within NATO to bring in partner nations to be able to function together.

On what all that means, before we even get into a detailed analysis of the strategic concept, I believe we as a country need to decide on areas where our interests are involved. How do we move NATO to better adopt or address things of concern to Canadians, or should we look at other types of security arrangements that better suit Canada's interests?

There are four areas that I believe are important for Canada in the near future.

Obviously, North America is one.

Certainly the Arctic is another, as receding pack ice makes it more of an international waterway, and a navigable waterway, with potential competition for resources, but having an ability to look at our own territory.

Third is the Americas. When you think that 15,000 people die in Mexico a year through drug-related violence, that is four times greater than Afghanistan. So there are critical issues that are just beyond our borders. Gang violence—I'm certain all of you watch the same news I do—that happens in Mexico or in Guatemala or through the chain of narcotic cartel-controlled or transshipment countries has an impact on what happens on streets in Toronto and in Vancouver. So we ignore the Americas at our own peril.

Finally, there is the Pacific, driven partially by the American pivot, but also by our own interests. Our four leading trade partners in the Asia-Pacific area eclipse our trade with every other region of the world, save the United States. With the opening of the northern gateway, with increased maritime traffic, with maritime disputes in the South China Sea, where gunboat diplomacy is alive and well in this period of time, we do have an interest in what goes on in those areas.

So how we look at Asia-Pacific and the Americas has a huge impact on how we structure our forces and where we pay attention from a foreign affairs and Government of Canada standpoint as a whole.

That concludes my remarks.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you, gentlemen.

We're going to start off with seven-minute rounds.

Mr. Harris, you have the floor.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Chair, and I want to thank you both for coming to join us today.

Of course, because you didn't read your paper, we had to read it while you were making your presentation, and I want to thank you for it because it does outline some of the things you said. Of course, I've also had a look at some of the other papers that your organization has worked on, and you, Mr. Chapin, in collaboration with a number of other people in the last couple of years.

To what you're presenting to us today I have to say a big “wow”, because in listening to everything you had to say, it seems that Canada has a role in the world that I never thought we would have in terms of military interests, particularly from a defence point of view. I want to say there's a difference between being interested and having an interest. Obviously, we care about what happens in all parts of the world and support working toward international peace and security and our partnerships with NATO and with the United Nations. Forgive me if I focus a little bit on NATO, because that's really the purpose of our study here today. What you're saying and what some people say is that you're not arguing against involvement in NATO, but there are other areas that Canada should take an interest in. Certainly, that's the case.

To get back to NATO for a moment, I do want to clarify some of the things your organization has said, and some things that you, Mr. Chapin, have said concerning NATO and the UN. Of course, the Washington Treaty is very much engaged itself as a party to the Charter of the United Nations, and NATO is integral to that, as reinforced by the strategic concept itself and reinforced by the UN-NATO declaration of 2008, which I'm looking at here. It's very much a vehicle for international action.

I wonder if you could clarify what you mean in your most recent strategic paper, “The Strategic Outlook for Canada”, in which one of your recommendations, recommendation 7, suggests that Canada should begin discussions with the U.S. and other democratic allies on a new international architecture better suited to the security environment of the 21st century.

Then you go on to say that the doctrine, laws, and institutions on which we have relied for our collective security over the decades are all well past their prime. Well, they may be traditional, as you point out in your paper today, but certainly the whole basis of NATO is article 5, and the whole purpose of it—there are other purposes, obviously, but the notion of collective security and how that adds to the stability, at least of the NATO areas, and the notion of including others, including relations with Russia and the other European nations, seems to me to be still a very important goal.

Why would you say—I think it was interpreted by the Library of Parliament analysts—that they were irrelevant, and were no longer valid? Could you clarify that for me?

[Paul Chapin]

Sure. It's never been our intention to argue that NATO needs to disband or that we need to get out of NATO. The architecture we had in mind began as a concept at the end of the Second World War, that is, to create a United Nations organization. It was supposed to be an all-encompassing solution that would deal with international peace and security, economic prosperity, and social issues. That organization remains in existence, and it does some very good work in most fields. It does a little bit of good work in the security field, but it is not fulfilling the security function it was designed to fulfill, in part because of the way in which the UN is organized. Its decision-making is captive to unanimity among the permanent members of the UN Security Council, and that has been rare in any period of time since the UN was created.

NATO came along as a pragmatic fix for the problem that western countries had with the UN's inability to do security. In the NATO charter, the Washington Treaty, right up front it says we believe in the United Nations, but we also believe in the United Nations principle that we're entitled to our self-defence. In the event that the United Nations cannot guarantee our self-defence, there's nothing to inhibit us from developing alternative arrangements under the UN system. That's what NATO did.

For years NATO's function was strictly to deal with the most immediate problem, which was the defence of Europe. When that function was no longer required at the end of the Cold War, NATO surprised many people by performing admirably a vital function that has been given very little attention—to ensure the stability of the process by which the Soviet captive states were reintegrated into Europe. It would have boggled the minds of people in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s to think that the Cold War would come to an end, not with a bang but a whimper, and that an angry shot would never be fired, and that all of those countries the Soviet Union had taken over would find themselves not just in NATO but in the European Union, acting under European Union rules.

NATO has served two vital functions. A third one—and I'll let George discuss this in greater detail—has been its ability to train people, train countries, its own members and others—

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Can I interrupt? We're very short on time. All of the things you talked about are important. We probably need more than two hours.

So you still support NATO? You don't stand by this comment that the collective security notion is irrelevant?

[Paul Chapin]

We just don't think that NATO should be the full answer anymore.

[George Petrolekas]

NATO's boundaries end at the western shores of Canada and the United States. You never see any discussion about the Pacific dimension of NATO. It always seems to end on the western shores of France. That's one of the things we need to raise.

With respect to article 5, and from a policy standpoint, the United States recognizes five domains of warfare: air, land, sea, space, cyber. What triggers a conventional response? What triggers article 5 in emerging domains? That's what we're talking about: modernizing NATO and moving it into the 20th century.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Alexander.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be with you, gentlemen. Thank you for the serious attention you've given to these issues that relate to Canada's security and to the strategic concept, which is the subject of our report at the moment.

You wrote a paper on behalf of CDAI that was very well received. It came out in advance of the release of the strategic concept, which brought together many independent, government, and former government views on what NATO has become and what it should be under this new strategic concept. You brought that forward before the concept itself was finalized.

Could you compare your priorities, what you thought the alliance should be setting out to do in 2010, and what actually came through in Lisbon?

[Paul Chapin]

Well, Mr. Alexander, you catch me a little off guard, because there was a point about a year and a half ago when I was asked to actually put together, in chart form, exactly the answers to precisely those questions.

I think in general we took a little darker view of the strategic outlook than the NATO strategic concept displays. However, we were more akin to the experts group that NATO had struck to do this kind of work, so I think we were in good company.

Secondly, we laid on the line some of the early thinking about the cautions about nation building, about fixing war-torn societies, in that if NATO is going to be in this business, it had better have the decision-making systems in place and it had better not make decisions without ensuring they are adequately resourced. Also, once they're resourced, if there's a fighting component to it, the NATO generals and NATO forces had better be given the means and be allowed to conduct their operations in a way that would enhance their effectiveness in theatre.

We also said in that paper that it was time—and maybe this is the origin of some of our thinking today—that NATO thought a little bit more about Canada and Canada thought a little more about NATO. NATO was one option when we selected it in 1948-49. There were two other options at the time.

One was simply that the United States and Canada join the Brussels Treaty, which had the three Benelux countries, Britain, and France. A second option was a much larger international organization that would have comprised basically many of the original members of NATO, all of the Scandinavian countries, and key members of the British Commonwealth. It would have included Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, and there were probably one or two others there.

People thought the first option was too little and the second was too much, so we settled on a NATO of 12 original members focused on Europe. That was then.

The question today is that we've now grafted on to NATO.... Well, NATO now has 28 countries. It has transformed itself. Is that still suited to Canadian needs? We flagged that in our paper. I think we were a little disappointed that there wasn't a bit more reflection of some of that kind of thinking about the future.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Let me put to you another question, a related question. On the whole issue of partnerships, you described in your opening—perhaps Mr. Petrolekas can answer this—how a very large number of the partnerships that NATO has arose essentially as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council attempt to have partnerships for peace and other relationships with a very large number of countries that had once belonged to the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet Union, and then others even beyond that group, but geographically proximate.

In both of your recent papers, though, you talk now about the imperative Canada has to solidify security partnerships in Asia, and to do more in the Americas, where there are hard security challenges, as you were saying. You also mentioned Africa as a place where the state-building challenge and potentially the challenge of conflict on a large scale are perhaps the most acute anywhere in the world.

What are you saying about how Canada's partnerships in those regions should be structured? Do you see NATO as a vehicle in one or all of those regions? Do you think we should be going back to the UN to try again? Or is there some other kind of third option that you see, regionally specific...?

I think this is relevant to a discussion of the strategic concept, because the strategic concept—apart from the UN charter—is the only articulation of our shared security interest with allies that we have so far for 2012.

[George Petrolekas]

We agree, and it's not a sequential or a linear series of steps, and one isn't to the exclusion of the other, so let me just clarify that really quickly.

Yes, there are partnerships that NATO has established. There are partnerships for peace. There were certainly partnerships that were much trumpeted for the Libyan mission: the inclusion of the UAE, non-combat support by Morocco, and so on and so forth. Those are all good and valuable things, but they are punctual and tactical, if you will. They're not strategic in terms of the partnerships that are formed.

When you put a strategic concept in a document that is supposed to provide guidance for an organization for the next decade, it's incumbent on that document to look at the trends that are unfolding in the world and try to anticipate its partnerships as a consequence. So, yes, there should be smaller, punctual partnerships, which obviously are valuable, but we did talk about the long-term strategic shift in Asia and incorporating some of those.

Now with respect to Asia and the Americas and certainly Africa—and we're seeing South Sudan materialize as a hot spot right now, which we identified as well in the strategic outlook paper—there is a role for NATO in these places. NATO's strategic concept in itself talks about mobile, deployable, joint forces, including the NATO response force at a strategic distance. It talks about protection of transit areas and lines of communication and energy infrastructure. But aside from making those statements inside the concept, we're not seeing advancement of that discussion, and it's in our interest to advance that.

What we would like, first of all, is for NATO to more seriously address the role it has to play in places like Africa and Asia, because as we said, the border is on the west. We just don't see that happening right now.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

We'll move on to the last of the seven-minute rounds. Mr. McKay.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you both for coming this morning.

Your conclusions kind of caught me by surprise, and that has to do with the larger question of how you define interest. I think one of you made the note that you're rethinking what constitutes national interest. That seems to be kind of a draw-down on the concept of values, a projection of values, and almost flipping it to say, historically speaking, that if we have an economic interest, we're interested. When you apply that lens, you then seem to arrive at the conclusion that our interests are at home, in the Arctic, in the Americas, and in the Pacific. I'm not sure I disagree with that, but on the other hand, what's notable is the leaving out, if you will, of the Middle East, which within the foreseeable future is going to be the source of a lot of conflicts, and Africa, which is in some respects a litmus test, because we actually don't have much in the way of interest there, other than mining interests and things of that nature.

Are you in effect repositioning our relationship to NATO and in effect saying to NATO that the other parts of NATO are going to have to take over these conflicts? I don't know where you're going with these conclusions.

[Paul Chapin]

I think where we're going with these conclusions is to an appeal to people who value the interests of Canadians to consider the future a little bit more than the past. If you consider that there's a taxonomy of interest, the first and most immediate being the safety and security of citizens, the second one being their economic livelihood and prosperity, and so on, those two things ought to drive a lot more of our foreign defence policy than I think they have traditionally been doing. So they are more vulnerable in some respects to globalization trends than maybe they have been and maybe they were in the past.

There are two other broader contextual interests, one of which is the value that we place in a stable world order. If it's disruptive and chaotic out there, it's going to wash over into Canada. We have a hard-edged interest in dealing with international conflicts.

The fourth one is that we can try to head off much of the stuff out there if we can get people to understand the value of democracy, human dignity, respect for government, the consent of the government—those kinds of things. The more other people believe in those values out there, the less likely there's going to be trouble out there.

How that translates into policy is the sense that there's probably a new division of labour required. For a very long time, Europe couldn't manage on its own. It needed help. It needed the deterrence factor of North American help. Europe has 500 million people. They are wealthy as hell, notwithstanding their economic problems.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Yes, I was thinking about the Greeks.

[Paul Chapin]

They can certainly look after themselves and their security. They could do a credible job if they ever got their act together—and some of them have—to look after the security interests of their neighbourhood.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

But you already said the U.S. is a sine qua non of NATO.

[Paul Chapin]

The UN is the context for NATO. To the extent that the UN doesn't function, NATO is our second-best solution.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

It doesn't function without the UN.

To apply that to your analysis to, say, Afghanistan, are you, in effect, saying that governments have been blowing us smoke, we the public, when they say “Well, we're there to bring democratic values to the Afghan people, to protect women and children”, all that sort of stuff, when in fact they really have no interest in Afghanistan?

[Paul Chapin]

I would argue with you, sir, that we—

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

I'm just teasing it out here.

[Paul Chapin]

George, do you want to take that?