National Defence committee  When I was in Rwanda, I saw child soldiers on all sides, but I didn't see them. I just saw them as combatants, and if I saw them as combatants, then I would have acted accordingly. Realizing that these were kids being used as combatants, finally, changed the whole nature of what

National Defence committee  How many fights have continued since the catastrophic failure of Mali to kill civilians by the villageful? How many slaughters have been continuing to go on? What's the scale of destruction of the human beings? How many more refugees and internally displaced are being moved aroun

National Defence committee  Potentially.

National Defence committee  As I told you earlier on, “peacekeeping” is a term of another era. You might get away with “peace support operations” as such, but we're into conflict resolution that does call for security forces to potentially have to be engaged in extremis to be able to use force to stabilize

National Defence committee  You've hit exactly the stuff that we are doing at the tactical level to give the skill sets to the forces and all that Shelly explained. That is, in fact, one of our scenarios.

National Defence committee  It's interesting, because my concern has been the Baha'is in Iran and how they as a group are being oppressed and even facing genocidal actions. I have to stay to some of the ones that I'm at ease with, such as Myanmar, where a genocide is in motion and we are watching it happe

National Defence committee  I'll say one word and then give it to Dr. Whitman. It is about the underestimation of the force multiplier that women provide in peace support and conflict resolution. It is an underestimated capability, and their presence in the field is critical, because they're bringing a whol

National Defence committee  All this leads to prevention, which then reduces the conflict and reduces the ability to sustain, and also makes the mobilization base of the belligerents much smaller. If they can't use children because they are rendered ineffective, then they will have to look at another option

National Defence committee  It's set within the context of a multi-faceted, multidisciplinary solution to a state that is nearly stateless. How do you establish a reasonable framework, from a peace agreement that is flawed, in order to protect the civilians and bring in capacity to build that nation's abili

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  I made mistakes in the field, and they made mistakes in the field, but the biggest mistakes to come out of that weren't by the UN. They were by every sovereign state that watched this thing happen and didn't do a damned thing to give us the capabilities to solve it. There was not

National Defence committee  Part of the reforms that Kofi Annan tried to bring in, which Ambassador Bolton—who's now at NSA in the United States—crashed in 2005, was to build command and control capability and contingency planning and implementation for the Security Council, because DPKO is really a force g

National Defence committee  Yes. At the time, I said I would not send field troops—ground troops—into peacekeeping operations in Mali. You're quite correct. In fact, I was concentrating far more on the avoidance of a genocide going on in Central African Republic, where we could build from scratch a capabili

National Defence committee  I don't see a role for Canadian battalions to go fight in Mali. I do not see the Canadian battalions doing peacekeeping. What I do see is Canadian instructors preparing African Union forces to enable them to take on that capability. We were in Nigeria, which had Boko Haram, and

National Defence committee  When I served in the Senate, we discussed cyber warfare becoming an operational capability and not a military procedure. Canada does not have a command structure that can manage that whole aspect of future conflicts. Canada is tremendously vulnerable not only in terms of its infr