MILITARY RESPONSE UNEVEN
Reservists are on the front lines of care-home disaster, Robert Smol says.
When it comes to Operation Laser, the military response to the COVID-19 pandemic, you might rightfully assume our regular, full-time professional military are front-andcentre. Well, they are not.
Instead, the overwhelming majority of the military personnel risking their lives trying to clean up and service infected, underfunded and unprepared long-term care facilities are actually parttime reservists.
While these figures are constantly changing, the latest update provided from National Defence has 9,500 personnel deployed, of which 8,069 are reservists.
That means approximately 85 per cent of those in uniform risking their lives in the fight against COVID-19 are military “temps.”
Such a reliance on reserves would certainly make sense if our regular army, navy, and air force were overextended on operations overseas, or were now congregating in large numbers to undergo high-level operational training at home. But that is largely not the case.
So why aren’t more regular military personnel helping in this operation?
The answer, simply put, is that when it comes to planning for such contingencies, there is an inherent value hierarchy of military deployments and taskings, with the less “career sexy,” non-combat, non-medal-worthy ones at home typically going to the reserves.
Of course, regular force deployments overseas often involve a high degree of personal risk and separation from family. But they are also essential to the military’s raison d’être and, for those who choose to make the military their career, they are a foundational part of any serious career progression. These days, you do not see many senior officers or non-commissioned officers with only one or two medals.
At the very bottom of the career-enhancing hierarchy are non-combat, aid-to-civilpower or “boy scout” initiatives that do not result in any medals, and do not have the same trappings and career “bragging rights” as, say, deployments overseas with the United States and NATO.
In the larger scheme of things, non-combat community service deployments do not necessarily help or hinder one’s career. So it only makes sense to the military, as with any institution, that the “lesser” important tasks go to the lesser important, temporary employees. The reserves.
Let’s face it, nobody joins the regular or reserve force to be an emergency custodian or personal support worker in an overwhelmed, COVID-19-infested longterm care facility. Certainly, you can feel good about what you did. But saying that, as a member of the military, you helped clean and sanitize a filthy, infected seniors’ home that should already have had such measures in place before the pandemic hit will unfortunately not make you, your sacrifice, or the risks you took stand out come Remembrance Day.
So why not give it to the reserves?
It is quite true, and certainly about time, that the gap between the reserves and regular force has narrowed over the years when it comes personnel support matters, as well as pay and benefits. For example, today’s reservists can finally earn a military pension. That did not exist for most of my service in the reserves.
But the decision to send mostly reserves into COVID-19-infested facilities shows there is still an institutional command-level bias toward reservists as temporary, expendable “proles” better suited for the dirty, cumbersome, “fatigue duty” jobs that generate no real operational credit to a well-defined career progression and standard set by senior regular force personnel.
Yet there is a significant difference to Operation Laser that calls out and shames any lingering command prejudice toward the reserves, which is that the service personnel performing emergency personal support worker and other public health and custodial duties are getting wounded — yes, wounded in large numbers. Let’s not for a moment assume that the numerous confirmed COVID-19-infected soldiers coming out of Operation Laser just have really, really bad colds.
Further, based on the squalid conditions in the homes the military recently divulged, the risk seems quite high that one of these COVID-19 wounded reservists will die in the course of their duties.
Should this happen, will the reservists get the “highway hero treatment”? I hope so, but am not holding my breath. Nonetheless, that decision rests with the career-conscious regular force commanders and senior staff sitting behind their desks in Ottawa.
Robert Smol served for more than 20 years in the Canadian Armed Forces and is currently studying law. rmsmol@gmail.com