National Defence Committee on Oct. 16th, 2012

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

I call the meeting to order.

Good afternoon, everyone. Sorry for the delay. I had some technical difficulties that we are just sorting out. We're going to continue on with our study of Canada's role in international defence cooperation and NATO's strategic concept.

Joining us by video conference today from the University of Oxford is Professor Jennifer Welsh, the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. I understand Professor Welsh is a prairie girl now living in the U.K. and teaching over there. It's great to have her join us.

She is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Somerville College. She is a former Jean Monnet fellow of the European University Institute in Florence and was a Cadieux research fellow in the policy and planning staff of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs. Jennifer has taught international relations at the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the Central European University in Prague. She is an author, co-author and editor of several books and articles on international relations. She has a B.A. from the University of Saskatchewan and a master's and doctorate from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes scholar. Congratulations on that.

Also joining us by video conference is Mr. Paul Ingram, who is the executive director of the British American Security Information Council. He's from London. Paul is executive director, developing BASIC's long-term strategy to help reduce global nuclear dangers through disarmament and collaborative non-proliferation and coordinating operations in London and Washington. In particular, he leads on BASIC's work as host to the BASIC Trident Commission in London and BASIC's NATO program, looking to reduce the alliance's dependency on nuclear weapons. He is also involved in BASIC's work on the diplomacy around Iran's nuclear program and promoting a weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East. He is the author of a number of BASIC's reports and briefings, covering a variety of nuclear and non-nuclear issues since 2002.

I welcome both of you by video conference. We're looking forward to hearing your expertise on this issue. I ask that your opening comments be 10 minutes or less. Hopefully technology will be cooperating through this whole process. Then we will have rounds of questions from all of our members.

I remind members that bells will be going off at 5:15 Ottawa time for votes tonight, so we will have to adjourn by that time.

Professor Welsh, could you bring us your opening comments, please?

[Professor Jennifer Welsh, Co-Director, Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, University of Oxford]

Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be with you.

In my 10 minutes I thought I would comment on the six points that are in the preface to the NATO strategic concept of 2010 and would begin with the first point in the preface: that the strategic concept is reconfirming the bond between our nations to defend one another against attack.

I see two challenges to that first point, certainly most recently illustrated by the events in Turkey that call into question the real meaning of article 5 of the NATO treaty, and show, if anyone needed reminding, that while this appears to be a binding commitment, it obviously involves discretion as to how states will act. I think recent events in Turkey remind us of the difficulties surrounding article 5.

Second, and something that is mentioned in a follow-up to the strategic concept, is the whole question of cybersecurity and how we can determine whether cyberattacks are attacks that would invoke principles of NATO.

That's with respect to the first principle that's mentioned in the preface to the document.

The strategic concept talks about committing the alliance to prevent crises as well as managing conflicts and stabilizing those conflict situations.

Ban Ki-moon declared 2012 as the Year of Prevention, and I read this sentence with a certain amount of cynicism about the degree to which prevention has been mentioned so often by states as a goal, but yet very rarely operationalized.

The questions for NATO for me would be twofold. How seriously does it really plan to take prevention—how far down in the temporal chain, if you will? Is it going to get involved in the root causes of conflict and atrocities, or is it going to do what it effectively did in Libya, meaning prevent the escalation of crises? It seems to me the prevention of escalation is all that we are able to mobilize political will around.

I would also say that if Libya is perceived to be a case of successful prevention of escalation and atrocities, there is a backlash against Libya that NATO certainly needs to be aware of. I would mention two things in particular here.

The first is the backlash against the perceived expansion of the mandate in Libya from the protection of civilians to regime change, as was illustrated by the expansion of NATO's targeting strategy. Many countries, both permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council, have raised real concerns after Libya about the interpretation of Resolution 1973. I will just say that those countries are not just China and Russia; they are also democratic states—India, South Africa, and Brazil—that are important for countries such as Canada to consider.

Second, the nature of the backlash against Libya was around the accountability of the alliance back to the Security Council. I think it is a very important issue for NATO, going forward, that much of the concern expressed by states following Libya was about the perceived lack of reporting back to the Security Council about what NATO was doing on the ground. NATO was delegated the responsibilities that lie with the Security Council and NATO will often be in that situation, so questions of accountability, I think, are really critical here.

Finally on this second point, the Libya campaign raises questions about what civilian protection means, and if this is going to be a future area of focus for NATO. First, can you protect solely from the air, as we appeared to do in Libya? Certainly there were special forces on the ground. Second, what is protection?

In thinking about how NATO evolved, we see it really evolved from being a roving shield, protecting civilians wherever they happened to be, to something that I would call, and some NATO officials have called, enduring protection, trying to essentially get at the Gadhafi regime's power to harm the population in a more fundamental sense. Did that mean regime change? I think that is a very important question, but certainly that is behind a lot of the opposition that has come to pass over Libya after the apparent success of the mission.

I'll just skip over the third and fourth aspects of the preface and move on to the fifth, given my time constraints.

To the point about keeping the door to NATO open to all European democracies that meet the standards of membership, I would describe myself as one who's cautious about enlargement, especially to countries such as Georgia, because I think NATO's greatest success has been deterrence, and deterrence relies on credibility. Arguably, the larger NATO becomes, the more it stretches its credibility, possibly to the breaking point. I think with a new American administration following the George W. Bush administration, the brakes were put on enlargement, to a certain extent. I personally think that was a good thing.

The last point talks about continuous reform to make the alliance more effective and efficient. As we saw at the recent Chicago summit, there was a big focus on the idea of smart defence, which is really a way of saying we should be using our resources more wisely.

Fostering specialization and pooling military capability means that we will have a more specialized military with respect to Canada on the ground, but it also means we are going to rely much more heavily on allies to show up with the capacity that we need. The experience in Afghanistan, particularly with respect to helicopters, points to the problems with relying on those allies to show up with what we need, so again I would just make a note of caution about specialization.

It will also mean, if we're serious about smart defence, that NATO members will need to rethink caveats, the politically imposed restrictions that they have, but also that Canada will also have to rethink its previous rejection of the notion of niche roles in favour of being a combat-capable force.

Let me just end by saying a bit about the F-35 debate. It seems to me the decision on F-35s means something very significant about Canada's capacity to contribute to expeditionary forces, expeditionary operations, which, of course, are stressed in the NATO strategic concept. If we are going to focus more on interoperable air capability, it does mean we may be able to focus much less on land forces. There is a trade-off that we need to think about. Obviously, this links to what we view as the most significant security challenges we might face, but by becoming more niche, we also, in effect, rule ourselves out of certain kinds of missions going forward.

I'll stop there. I hope I've given you enough food for thought for questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you, Professor. You stayed under the 10 minutes, and we will have plenty time for questions afterward.

Mr. Ingram, you now have the floor.

[Paul Ingram, Executive Director, British American Security Information Council]

Thank you very much. I too am very grateful for this opportunity to outline what I perceive to be the main issues around NATO's nuclear posture arising from the strategic concept and, more recently in May, the adoption of the deterrence and defence posture review.

There are three angles I would like to cover, the first being internal alliance-wide consultations and the need for cohesion going forward, not just in agreeing to a consensus document in the last two summits, but also in looking forward and the challenges that the alliance faces.

The second is the primary potential nuclear threat facing the alliance, namely Russia.

The third is the emergence of potential new threats coming from southeast of Europe.

Turning to the first, NATO cohesion, I think it would be a significant error to look at the last two summits and conclude that there is a clear cohesion amongst allies on the future of nuclear deterrence within Europe. Yes, there is support for nuclear deterrence as a concept, going forward, at least into the indefinite future, but one also has to remember that there is significant support across the membership of the alliance for the vision outlined by President Obama in 2009 for taking serious steps towards a world free of nuclear weapons. One of the most obvious and clear symbols of the obstacles to that is the continued deployment of what many perceive to be outdated, free-fall nuclear weapons within Europe. There is continuing disagreement over the longer-term future of these weapons, which will inevitably arise as investment decisions come forward over the next few years in some of the host states, particularly Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

What we have at the moment is a false consensus that has papered over the cracks of the disagreement. The problem here is that the public opinion in these countries certainly seems to be that we have long since moved away from the Cold War and that the range of these weapons is not relevant.

Indeed, they fulfill no military purpose. They are only there because to withdraw them would send unintentional signals to the Russians. This is really the essence behind the obstacles to change, particularly in central and eastern Europe, where there is little faith in the deployment of these weapons, even for deterrence purposes, because they would require the agreement of allies that they don't trust to come through in a crisis. Nevertheless, they don't want these weapons withdrawn so that those allies are even less committed to their ultimate protection against Russian influence. As a result, I think we have guns that are being held to the heads of allies, which is not a very conducive strategy for long-term alliance cohesion.

The second issue I wanted to deal with was Russia. The false consensus I was referring to earlier has come around to focusing on reciprocity and on these weapons for which we perceive no particular utility, other than to negotiate with the Russians to ensure that their far larger stocks of tactical nuclear weapons are reduced and that they are more transparent over them. This is a very laudable objective, but unfortunately the Russians are not yet ready to play ball, and even if there were an election next month of a president who was ready to deal with the Russians, it's not at all clear that the Russians are easy negotiating partners here. The reason for this is that the Russians perceive the ever-increasing capabilities of the alliance with significant alarm.

It may look very different from the perspective of Ottawa, but in Moscow there is certainly concern around those capabilities. Mixed with the willingness of the alliance, not only in action but also in the agreements of the alliance, to use its force to intervene around the world, they perceive this as an ever-decreasing capability of Russia to contain what they perceive to be an alliance with many ambitions. Therefore, whatever we think about our intentions, the Russians certainly are painting them as something that is very hostile to their interests.

On the positive side, the Russians don't have particular ongoing financial capabilities to expand their nuclear forces. Indeed, I think there is some suggestion that they will be willing to negotiate in future rounds of strategic negotiations, but they're not quite ready yet to deal on the issue we really want to deal with, which is tactical nuclear weapons. There's a lack of trust that is deepened by the votes in the U.S. Congress over the last few years and by the debates that took place even on the very simple ratification of the new START treaty.

With regard to the Middle East, I would expect you to be particularly interested in the emergence of threats coming from there. Of course, many people are talking about Iran and its nuclear program, and the possibility of an Israeli strike. Where does NATO fit into this? Well, NATO doesn't have a particularly direct role, but of course there is always the possibility that the Americans will be asking NATO to play some sort of role if the Americans were drawn into a conflict, if only for legitimacy purposes.

NATO has a policy of trying to prevent proliferation into the region, and that's a very laudable objective. I personally think that the best promise here is to be dealing with the region in a more balanced way, to be looking at it region-wide, and to be placing greater emphasis on the proposed conference at the end of this year on a WMD-free zone across the Middle East, a vision that is a long way away from being realized but that is nevertheless a process that could pull together very difficult partners in negotiations and build confidence over a longer period.

The NATO ally most involved—other than, of course, the United States—is Turkey, and I'm not entirely sure we can get away with the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey into the indefinite future and negotiate on a WMD-free zone in the Middle East. It will be very soon that the Iranians and others that are not necessarily allies of NATO will be referring to those deployments as influencing their decisions as to whether to go forward in building confidence toward a zone free of nuclear weapons.

I think I'm out of my 10 minutes now. I'm very willing to take questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Actually, you have about two minutes left. I appreciate that you guys were able to keep your comments to the point. It gives us more time for members to ask questions.

With that, we're going to start off with Mr. Harris. You have seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to both of our guests. We're lucky to have the benefit of your knowledge and experience on this question.

Dr. Welsh, first of all, I was most interested in your comments about the Libyan mission and the concerns about what you called the backlash. We experienced it here as a party. We are now the official opposition. In opposition we supported the initial mission to Libya, but by the September date we're concerned about the very things you talked about in terms of mission creep, the regime change aspects, and other concerns that arose.

Are there any mechanisms you would recommend to avoid this kind of problem? We saw it. It was exasperating to us to support the notion of the international community's responsibility to protect, and then see nations, and NATO itself, as you say, extending the targets through different bodies, and also statements by defence ministers or governments about regime change throughout this.

Is there any mechanism that can stop it? NATO is involved, countries are involved, so when the leaders of these countries keep talking about it, it seems that it's then a NATO problem. Could you comment on that? Is there any mechanism that could be used to hold that back?

[Prof. Jennifer Welsh]

You raise a very interesting point about the dilemma of a collective alliance and there being particular unilateral actions and statements on behalf of individual states.

To a certain extent, I don't think there's much that can be done about those individual state statements, if you will. With respect to the evolution of a Security Council-mandated action, and let's remember that this is what this was, if we were to go back to 1999, we can think about how things have changed.

Right up until the day of Resolution 1973, the Secretary General of NATO was saying that we will not act without a resolution from the Security Council, so the council authorized that action. NATO was the council's delegated authority, if you will.

There are actually mechanisms the United Nations has used for peacekeeping operations to exert some control. There are sunset clauses on peacekeeping missions. There are reporting requirements back to the Security Council. There are caveats you could put into missions.

Of course, these kinds of procedural mechanisms have their drawbacks, and the response, for example, of the United States to suggestions like these is to say that you're trying to slow down its operation and that you have to let militaries do what they will.

I think the days of the U.S., French, and U.K. militaries being able to say to the rest of the world, “Trust us; we're liberal democracies, and we will do the right thing in the field,” are over, in my view.

I think the move for accountability mechanisms when actions are mandated by the council is a very strong one. I would actually advise the committee to have a look at the proposal of the Brazilian government, called “responsibility while protecting”, which was released about a year ago in a letter to the UN Secretary-General, to get a flavour of some of the things being discussed around the accountability of actors like NATO.

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

I have one other question on Canada's role.You mentioned the F-35 and potential niches for Canada. Of course, Canada has never used more than six or eight jets in expeditionary forces since it has had the F-18s, for example, back in the eighties. Is there another niche for Canada in perhaps other aspects of nation building?

You talked about that a little in your paper in June. There has been no call for nation building by Libya, by Canada, or by anybody else. They're doing their own thing, as well or as badly as we see. There doesn't seem to be any effort by NATO and the NATO countries collectively to put together some role for a civilian side or a governance side that would assist in either the prevention, or the prevention of the escalation, of problems. Do you see that as something that could be developed, or is that too theoretical and too far off in the future?

[Prof. Jennifer Welsh]

You identified building capacity and civilian assistance for what you call nation building. I wouldn't disagree that building that capacity is important. The question would be whether NATO is the right instrument for it.

If we think about how NATO is perceived globally, I think there would be huge issues around NATO driving those kinds of civilian activities. That's why you have to look much more at regional organizations or multilateral organizations like the United Nations to actually carry out those tasks. It's because of their perceived legitimacy. In the case of regional organizations, it's that they supposedly have more knowledge about these countries in their own region. In the case of the UN, it's the supposedly magic wand that's waved that says that if it's UN, it's multilateral, and therefore it's better. That perception exists.

While nation building, as you call it—which I would prefer to call assistance for building stable institutions—is definitely something we should consider investing in, I'm not sure that I would advise doing it through the NATO alliance per se.

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

I have one final question, if I have a chance, Mr. Chair.

You mentioned in your earlier paper, and you mentioned it again today, that NATO believed and believes that it can't act alone outside this area without the Security Council. Would you give that the legitimacy of almost the rule of law with respect to what NATO can or can't do? It is a regional organization under the United Nations charter, etc., etc. I know that in practice, obviously, Rasmussen's comments underline that, but would that be at the height of the legal or conventional state of play?

[Prof. Jennifer Welsh]

I wouldn't call it a legal obligation yet. I think what we've seen is a belief that a Security Council authorization is politically and even morally desirable for NATO. Although it is true that under article 51 of the UN Charter force cannot be used except in self-defence or as part of a collective security operation, that doesn't mean that NATO always has to act under a council authorization. However, for these wars of choice like Libya, I think it has become the practice. That may build up over time into customary law, but I wouldn't yet call it a rule of law.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Alexander, you have the floor.

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

Greetings to you both, and thank you so much for those presentations.

Professor Welsh, I wanted to explore the difficulties you've perceived with article 5, a cornerstone of the NATO alliance. You both mentioned that deterrence and collective defence is rooted in article 5. There was a suggestion after the First World War that the League of Nations should give an article 5 guarantee to all the other members of the league. That was refused back in 1919. It came back in 1949 with the North Atlantic Treaty and it has worked for a much more limited number of states. Prime Minister Borden was one of those refusing the blanket guarantee back in 1919.

For most of NATO's history it applied to under 20 states. Now it applies to 28 states. Professor Welsh, is it something that has given NATO the capacity to deter, or is it something that's coming under stress in Georgia, in Ukraine, in candidates for membership, and on the border with Turkey? Should we be revisiting this idea? I think our profound view is that it's worked, and that if we deny it forever and a day to countries like Georgia and Ukraine, we make them less stable. You may have a different view.

[Prof. Jennifer Welsh]

Let me clarify my comments. I agree that it has been one of the sources of the deterrent effect, but the way it has been interpreted, particularly after events in Turkey, as being an ironclad guarantee of a response isn't quite right. If you look at the actual article, you see that an attack upon one is equal to an attack upon all; however, for it to be activated, members of NATO have to agree, first, that there has been an attack. It may seem obvious in some cases, but if you go back to your League of Nations example, that was precisely the debate that was had about Manchuria. Was this aggression or not? Was this an attack?

Second, they have to agree that NATO will respond. That's a political decision.

In addition, article 5 doesn't specify the action that will occur. Each member does what it deems necessary. We know that in the case of Afghanistan, countries behaved very differently in response. It is about managing expectations around the type of action that might follow.

I don't at all advocate moving away from or lessening the importance of article 5 for NATO. I think it has been key to deterrence. My point about Georgia was just more caution. With caution has to come credibility, the credibility that you would activate that clause. At present, I don't see the same commitment to the security of those countries that existed for some of the earlier entrances to NATO after the end of the Cold War.

I just sound a note of caution about expansion. You're right that it could have a positive effect, but not if it is thrown around willy-nilly without the accompanying credibility of the commitment.

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

I think we all take your points about the accountability of NATO to the United Nations for operations like Libya when they take place under a UN Security Council mandate. Reporting, human rights, civilian casualties—all these had to be looked at and were looked at. What is the accountability and what is the recourse of NATO countries when the UN doesn't act, as in the case of Syria, and doesn't give a mandate, and the death toll rises above 30,000, as we know to be the case right now?

Building on that, you gestured at the defence reductions taking place in Europe—€50 billion was taken out of defence budgets in the last four years in Europe—in suggesting that we may, as Canada, be better served not to just have niche capabilities but to be able to deliver combat capabilities on a viable scale when required. What do you see those combat capabilities for Canada looking like in 2012 and beyond, as the pressure is on us to be a leading player in support of international peace and security only builds?

[Prof. Jennifer Welsh]

Let me take the first question first, because they're two different questions.

Your question about what NATO should do if the Security Council is paralyzed, I think, is highly relevant. I foresee a very difficult period ahead for the Security Council, but currently we have no other form of accountability for the council other than political accountability. It was very interesting, for example, that you saw the UN General Assembly in August passing a resolution that was incredibly strongly worded, criticizing the council for the failure to act. The council needs to manage the downside that comes with the failure to meet the expectations of the UN membership. That's unfortunately the strongest stick we have.

I am one who believes that it doesn't mean there can never be any action. I think we need to begin to investigate those alternatives, and to simply say it's either Security Council authorization or nothing is really not to address the problem. We may be going back to an era not unlike what we saw in the 1980s, with the council unable to fulfill the weight of expectation that's been placed upon it. Let's think back to the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, back to India-Pakistan, years where the council did nothing.

The council's longer trajectory has been inaction, not action; this needs to be seriously considered by NATO countries in particular, but also by other regional actors.

On your second point about what combat-capable forces would look like, I do think from the perspective of an optimist that Afghanistan, while it is derided, did provide an opportunity for the Canadian Forces to develop an adaptable, flexible army. That is, I think, a highly prized capability that should not be squandered lightly. I do think that is an important capability that would be traded off if we're in a world of fixed resources whereby an investment in something like the F-35 means that instead we're banking on having interoperable air capacity.

I come back to my point about Libya: can you protect solely from the air? If the kinds of operations we're thinking about do include civilian protection, then it may be that we have to consider what kind of land forces we could actually mobilize.

There is, of course, the whole other dimension of what we need on the North American continent, but I think your question was more directed at what we need to do globally.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

The time has expired.

Mr. McKay, you have the last of the seven-minute round.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to you both for very excellent presentations.

Mr. Alexander, in some respects, anticipated a question I was interested in. The article 5 obligations under NATO and the responsibility to protect doctrine meet each other at the Turkish-Syrian border and at this point seem to be paralyzed by UN inaction or the inability of the UN to focus on a resolution, yet, ironically, the inability or unwillingness of the international community to intervene in Syria actually escalates the threat to Turkey. If the threat is escalated to Turkey, then presumably calls under section 5 might actually increase and get louder and louder.

My first question to you is this, Professor Welsh. What elements of the responsibility to protect doctrine or the new variation, which is responsibility while protecting, actually could be implemented now, absent a UN-sanctioned mandate?

[Prof. Jennifer Welsh]

You raise a very general question about the responsibility to protect that I think is important to clarify. It is a principle that encompasses a broad range of measures that in some ways, if you think about the spectrum, including prevention, can even be non-coercive at a very early stage.

Very interestingly—this is just a bit of a tangent, because I was struck by that statement in the strategic concept about prevention—all of the world's watch lists about countries that were prone to either mass atrocities or conflict prior to 2011 included Syria in their top 10. None of them included Libya. Now, what does that tell us about our current capacity to monitor situations of concern and feed that information through to policy-makers and then act on the information we have?

Syria was consistently on these lists. That's my point about prevention. If we're serious about it, are we actually prepared to consider a range of actions? By the way, just because they're preventive doesn't mean they won't be threatening to state sovereignty. There's often this assumption that prevention is somehow warm and fuzzy and less difficult, but it can very often be incredibly intrusive.

The responsibility to protect includes a whole host of actions, only one of which includes military force, so to me the failure to authorize military intervention in Syria does not spell the failure of the responsibility to protect. The very fact that we are discussing atrocities, that there have been commissions of inquiry, that there have been very serious financial sanctions put in place, that there are now attempts to try to buttress the opposition and encourage them to consolidate and work together—all of these are ways of implementing the responsibility to protect.

Now, many of you will say, “Ah, but what good are any of them if you don't intervene militarily?” Well, at the end of the day you're making a probabilistic assessment as to whether you can do more harm than good through military intervention, and you have to make a prudent calculation about that. I think up that until very recently the prudent calculation was that intervention might cause more harm than it would actually address, but what we've been seeing over the past few weeks in Turkey is that we have to factor in the costs of inaction. It's precisely what you mentioned: this gradual spillover is now creating a new set of challenges.

Therefore I think that when policy-makers make those probabilistic assessments—which, by the way, are part of the responsibility to protect but also are part of good policy-making in NATO—they have to consider the implications of both action and inaction.

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

Yes, a lot of the inaction in the past few months has led to very predictable consequences. The fear among some is that those predictable consequences are going to become larger and greater, and then the ability to actually intervene in any non-military way diminishes very quickly.

I appreciate your concern—

[Prof. Jennifer Welsh]

I think that is where diplomacy is very important. Think back to Libya. One of biggest enabling factors for a council-authorized action was the request from the Arab League. Now, in retrospect, there's been lots of analysis of why that request was made and what the configuration was in the league; nonetheless, the fact that regional actors wanted action was huge.

The question is on the table: if the League of Arab States were to make a particular request in a particular way, with particular momentum behind it, would that change dynamics on the council? I can't say for sure, but those are the kinds of avenues we need to be exploring, and we need to be exploring what is it is possible to do short of a Security Council-authorized action.

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

I have one final question for Professor Ingram, and that has to do with a report that Russia is withdrawing from a decommissioning of weapons. Now, I don't know whether that's a decommissioning of nuclear weapons, but they apparently have put the Americans on notice that come May of next year, they will no longer participate in this decommissioning exercise that's been going on for 20 years.

Do you have any observations with respect to that?

[Paul Ingram]

Just to clarify, this is the cooperative threat reduction program, otherwise known, more popularly, as the Nunn–Lugar initiative. This is an initiative that, as you say, has been going on for 20 years, whereby the Americans have been providing capital to decommission many of the excess Russian nuclear warheads, and indeed take a lot of the fissile material and burn it in reactors in the United States to produce electricity: atoms for peace, you could say.

My observation is that this is a symptom of the declining trust that the Russians have of the whole process. They're spiking their noses, frankly, on this, because the types of warheads that are being decommissioned are very outdated and far from being relevant to any kind of Russian security, whatever one's opinion is of what's good for Russian security.

I think it's a political football rather than a strong objection within Russia to the program itself. I'm not aware of those objections being present other than the fact that it is part of the indication that the Americans won the Cold War, and it's symbolic, therefore, within Russia. This withdrawal from the program I perceive to be a negative symbol of the potential for Russian cooperation, and it doesn't bode well for the future.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

We're going to move on to our five-minute round. Mr. Strahl will begin.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Thank you very much.

I appreciate this opportunity and the testimony we've heard so far.

I have a couple of questions. Going back to smart defence, we talked a lot about that in this study. We even got into it a bit on our previous study on readiness.

I just want to flesh out a little bit more, Dr. Welsh, your comments on the F-35 in particular. Some would say that in order for us to have smart defence, we need to be interoperable with our allies going forward, and that we're going to spend the capital on a replacement for our CF-18 regardless of what choice is made there.

Do you see advantages or disadvantages, or are you talking about a reduction in our expeditionary air force capability in order to focus more on the land forces that you spoke about earlier?

You ran out of time when you were mentioning that, and I'd like some more comments on that particular part of your presentation.