National Defence committee  Hello. I am retired Major-General Denis Thompson. I am delighted to be here to share my thoughts about peacekeeping. Since I have only 10 minutes, I will speak in English. That will probably save you from listening to my horrible accent. I had the good fortune of serving 39

National Defence committee  In short, I'm a practitioner, although what I'm about to tell you is vaguely academic. Peacekeeping is imperfect. There are no rainbows, butterflies, or unicorns in the world that is inhabited by peacekeepers. It's ugly, it's violent, it's arbitrary, and at times, it's blatantly

National Defence committee  If I understood your question correctly, again, I wasn't a force commander on a UN mission. I know that UN missions are constructed in a fashion that doesn't actually lead to any sort of efficiency. In other words, the SRSG, the head of logistics in a UN mission, reports to the

National Defence committee  I didn't get a chance to serve in UNPROFOR with General MacKenzie, although I was in the third battalion. I left the third battalion just as Peter Devlin joined the fray in Sarajevo. He can certainly speak to the quality of the soldiers I served with. I arrived in Bosnia on New

National Defence committee  You just need to make sure the UN is going to front up with all that stuff. You can be part of, as I was, a multinational battle group, a company inside of a battle group, or you can show up with an entire battle group, or you can turn up with a brigade, or be a part of a brigade

National Defence committee  Another example, if I may say, is Sierra Leone, just next door to Côte d'Ivoire, with the same circumstances. There was a UN mission. It failed or was failing. They were backed up by the British. The British stabilized the area, along with, unfortunately, some mercenaries, but th

National Defence committee  Canadian troops are largely regarded as well-trained and, therefore, properly suited to peacekeeping operations. The second point is that we have no colonial baggage, and that's important to many of these belligerents. When we turn up some place, they'll often ask, as I was aske

National Defence committee  We're coming back from an era when we used to.... I think today on UN operations we might have 30 people. It's a ridiculously low number. Even if we count the people who are in the MFO, who aren't counted against the UN number, that's 68, and we're not anywhere near where we used

National Defence committee  Of course, if you don't put boots on the ground and skin in the game, then no one is going to give you the time of day. You don't have any credibility. That's the issue.

National Defence committee  Nonsense. What I would say is exactly what General Mitchell said, that peacekeeping—if you want to use the word—has transitioned from what it used to be to counter-insurgency, basically. Unless you put sufficient resources on the ground, you cannot stabilize the situation. You mi

National Defence committee  Yes. The comprehensive approach, which isn't just military, but also involves police and civilians, needs to have sufficient folks on the ground, quality density from top to bottom, from across the international community in order to make it happen. If Canada wants to play a part

National Defence committee  As I think you know, my wife was the ambassador in Mali from 2005 to 2008—Madame Isabelle Roy. I know Mali very well. I've been there probably more than half a dozen times. I actually went from Timbuktu to Gao on the river. It took me three days. It was a lot of fun, but you can'

National Defence committee  The terrain is entirely different. The population density is entirely different. The whole physical geography is completely different, so the military problem set is different as well. Plus, this was organized slaughter in Rwanda. You were talking about multiple insurgent group

National Defence committee  Very briefly, I think the big change has been a shift from a lot of chapter VI missions to chapter VII missions, and the inclusion in those mandates of such things as protection of civilians. When you give a UN force a “protection of civilians” mandate, you're taxing them quite c

National Defence committee  I'm no UN expert, but I will just quickly add that MFO civilian headquarters in Rome has 12 professionals in it. I knew them all by their first names. If I needed something, I just picked up the phone and called them. That's in stark contrast to what these two gentlemen had to de