The sad story of Canada’s unmanageable military

Last year, as the F-35 fighter procurement process began to fall apart, troubling questions emerged concerning how good a job the military was doing keeping its civilian masters in-the-know.  Now, a new report has raised that troubling question again. Our civilian leaders can’t run the military if they don’t understand what’s going on inside it. And there’s reason to question whether they do.

Our military is impressive, but small. Most Canadians will never serve in it, will have no relatives in the military and will have no close friends in uniform. The military remains a vital part of Canadian society in some parts of the country (near bases, mainly). But most of us don’t know much about it, and that includes politicians.

This makes effective oversight a nightmare. Whenever a new minister is sworn in, there is a mad scramble by military officials to give their new boss a crash course in all things military. The problem with this arrangement, of course, is that it is not always the job of the civilian leadership to be the military’s cheerleader. They have to say no sometimes. And if everything you know about the military was taught to you by the military in as big a hurry as possible, you can’t blame the civilians for sometimes not knowing any better than to just go with whatever the brass says.

This was part of Auditor-General Michael Ferguson’s findings in his F-35 procurement report, published last April. He found that the military was honest, if selective, with what information it would provide. Best-case scenarios were presented to Defence officials. The possible industrial benefits to Canada were, if not quite exaggerated, certainly emphasized. The military has never tried to hide its preference for the F-35, but a lack of informed, competent oversight has a way of turning military preferences into government priorities.

And then there’s the new report, by the CBC’s Greg Weston, detailing the sad story of faulty electronics that made their way into Canada’s new C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft.

The American Senate Armed Services Committee revealed in 2012 that Chinese-built counterfeits of computer chips had found their way into numerous American weapons and military vehicles, including the C-130J. The chips work when first activated. But they don’t come close to matching the reliability of the originals. And when they fail, they can trigger potentially disastrous crashes of larger systems. In the case of the C-130J, the chips could shut down the plane’s electronic controls (as did happen on a U.S. plane, which was able to land safely).

An aircraft filled with troops or weapons that cannot be controlled by its flight crew is cause for some concern. Canada has acquired 17 of the new aircraft, part of a badly needed modernization of our Air Force’s transport capabilities. When the reports emerged of problems with the planes in the U.S., media in Canada was quick to ask our military if Canada’s new C-130Js were also equipped with counterfeit electronics. Julian Fantino, then Associate Minister of National Defence, had the answer to that: Nope!

Appearing on CBC News, Fantino assured Canadians that there were no counterfeit parts in Canadian aircraft. The problem is, there were. And the military knew about it. And the Defence Department knew about it. But no one told Fantino.

Weston’s report goes into the bizarrely complex layers of bureaucracy at Defence in some detail, but the short version is this: Even as the elected Fantino, a cabinet minister assigned responsibility for military procurement, was telling the media that he had a report in hand showing that there were no counterfeit parts in Canadian planes, his staff at Defence had not told him that more recent reports indicated that the initial assessment was wrong. There were fake parts, but no one told the minister. As Weston put it, “Fantino wasn’t telling the truth — but he wasn’t lying either.” Indeed.

Bureaucrats not keeping ministers fully informed isn’t a new problem, nor one unique to Canada or its military. It’s more a truism, really. But both cases cited above speak to the broader problem of civilian oversight of Canada’s armed forces. Even well-intentioned politicians, acting in good faith, can’t do their jobs if they don’t know the file (or, in Fantino’s case, accurately know the file).

Canada needs a military, and it needs an effective, capable one. But that requires civilian oversight, as much for the military’s benefit as the taxpayers’. It seems increasingly clear that right now, we don’t have that. And it’s hard to see how that will change any time soon.

Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com
Author: Matt Gurney