The hunt for Canada’s next top soldier
During lean times, new chief of defence should be an administrator, not a warrior, experts say
OTTAWA— Gen. Rick Hillier built a Canadian military able to wage war after years of neglect.
Gen. Walter Natynczyk, his successor, guided that force through an intensity of operations unseen since Korea — at one point juggling the Afghan war, Olympic security and evacuations from Haiti, all while Canada prepared to host world leaders at the 2010 G8 and G20 summits.
As Prime Minister Stephen Harper begins searching for the next chief of defence staff, experts say the marching orders for the person picked will be much less glamorous, but no less important.
“It doesn’t need a visionary. It doesn’t need a warrior,” said Philippe Lagasse, an associate professor and defence policy researcher at the University of Ottawa.
“It needs an administrator, somebody who is able to cope with an organization that is very ambitious but has very limited means and is in a period of uncertainty in terms of what it should be doing.”
Afghanistan will be confined to Canadian history books in 2014, the defence budget is being scaled back and Conservative pledges to spend billions on new airplanes, ships and vehicles are being rewritten to fit within the new fiscal reality. At the same time, the force is teeming with young, eager and war-hardened troops who may have to wait longer than they would like for their next deployment.
Canada’s next top soldier will have to wade between those two realities. He (and it is almost certain the successful candidate will be a man) will need to be both a creative accountant and cheerleader-in-chief.
“I think there will be a period of uncertainty in the next couple of years until the government has paid all of its debt,” said Alain Pellerin, a retired colonel who runs the promilitary Conference of Defence Associations.
“People will talk about the decade of darkness and are we entering another decade of darkness. Whoever is the chief will have to manage these issues.”
Both Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Natynczyk, the current chief of defence staff, will recommend a replacement to the prime minister, as will an independent panel of deputy ministers.
Leading most of the speculative shortlists is Vice-Admiral Bruce Donaldson, the current vice-chief of defence staff. In that role, he is responsible for the billions of dollars allotted annually to the military, and acts as the link between the uniformed and civilian flanks of the defence department.
The naval officer has also been responsible for the cost-cutting exercises that are underway in the wake of a report by retired Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie that spelled out a path to shave $1 billion from the defence budget, said Doug Bland, chair of Queen’s University’s Defence Management Studies Pro- gram. His previous posting had him in charge of operations on Canadian soil, where he oversaw planning and execution of security for the Vancouver Olympics and 2010 summits in Muskoka and Toronto. Though there is no set tradition of rotating between the army, navy and air force, many feel it is time for another service to take command after Hillier and Natynczyk, both army officers. Air Force chief Lt.-Gen. André Deschamps is, therefore, another contender, as is naval chief ViceAdmiral Paul Maddison. But Deschamps’s appointment would be politically toxic as his voice has been loud in support of the costly and long-delayed F-35 fighter jet program. If he’s named to the post, Harper would be thumbing his nose at opposition parties over a purchase that even the Tories have been trying to distance themselves from. There are a few other names seen as possible candidates. They include Leslie, the now retired army chief who Tories once viewed as a Liberal darling. He has gained favour thanks to his cost-cutting road map delivered to the government before he quit for a private-sector job. Lt.-Gen. Stuart Beare, the former deputy commander of NATO’s police college in Afghanistan, has also emerged, though he was just recently appointed to head up the unit governing the force’s overseas operations.
Like any speculation about what will ultimately be a private decision made by the prime minister, trying to divine the future is “a mug’s game,” says Pellerin.
But it will give Canadians an indication of the direction in which the Conservatives want to take their military.
“I just think the signal they want to send is change — from Afghanistan and Bosnia and all these army deployments. Perhaps that’s why the first (operation) they set up was Libya, which was air and naval operations,” Bland said. “If you’re going to have that, if you want to show a difference, you have some admiral wandering around downtown at the meetings.”