Military grappling with years of underfunding
Sajjan says he won’t make excuses for exaggerating his role in Operation Medusa
OTTAWA— Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan is dangling the promise of “significant” new funding to help Canada’s military dig itself out of a hole caused by years of underfunding that now threaten core capabilities.
But first Sajjan has to dig himself out of a hole of his own making, caused by his own statements overstating his role during a major offensive in Afghanistan.
Sajjan has retracted his controversial claim that he was “architect” of Operation Medusa in 2006 and apologized.
In an interview with the Star Wednesday, Sajjan wouldn’t talk about the term “architect” or say what prompted him to use it to describe his role in the Afghan battle.
“I’m not going to make excuses for it. Rationalizing, giving reason, is about making excuses and I’m not going to do it,” Sajjan said.
The defence minister, who did three tours in Afghanistan, was even guarded about speaking about his time there, this time eager to avoid any hints of boasts.
But he was quick to clarify his role. He says he was not, contrary to many reports, an intelligence officer.
“I’m an armoured reconnaissance officer by trade,” he said.
“I did a lot of different things at different times . . . so a lot of people saw me in different ways,” Sajjan told the Star.
He says he was seen as a liaison with the Afghan police, called a cultural adviser, sometimes mistaken for an interpreter, even a cleaner.
Yet he describes a role gathering information as he worked with the battle group, the provincial reconstruction team and the command team at the multinational brigade at various points, he said.
“We were able to bounce around, do all these things in some very diffi- cult circumstances, in a lot of different villages and find out what was really going on, which helped us immensely for everybody,” he said.
“Because I was involved in so many different things, I began piecing things together and those pieces of information led to a lot of things that I was involved in,” Sajjan said, during the interview on Parliament Hill.
And he says that intelligence paid dividends.
Yet he went further when speaking to an audience in New Delhi last month, telling them that he was the “architect” of that operation, a major offensive to regain ground from the Taliban around Kandahar.
When that characterization was challenged, Sajjan said he felt dismay at his choice of words.
“I was more upset at me that I . . . possibly took anything away from somebody else who had served. I’ve always made it a point to recognize folks who, there are so many people who allowed me to do my work,” he said.
But he had said it before, telling a B.C. interview in 2015. that Gen. Jonathan Vance, the current chief of defence staff who was previously a commander in Afghanistan, saw him as a key figure in the 2006 offensive.
“If I could quote him, he said I was the architect of Operation Medusa,” Sajjan said in that interview almost two years ago.
Asked Wednesday whether Vance would agree with that assessment, Sajjan appeared to back down.
“I made a mistake in characterizing my role in that,” he said.
The controversy has put Sajjan in the crosshairs of Conservative MPs. Again Wednesday, they called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to bounce Sajjan from cabinet. Conservative interim leader Rona Ambrose said the minister’s reputation is “forever tarnished.”
The controversy — which has called Sajjan’s credibility into question — couldn’t come at a worse time, just as the defence minister prepares to sell Canadians on a new vision for Canada’s military — and big investments required to pay for it.
Sajjan used an Ottawa speech Wednesday to deliver a reality check on the state of the military, warning that the army, air force and navy have all been underfunded.
“Governments have not delivered predictable, sustainable, long-term funding for the Canadian Armed Forces,” Sajjan said.
Instead, he said that under successive governments, defence spending has been up and down. Today, with a defence budget of around $19 billion a year, Ottawa spends less on defence than it did in 2005, as a percentage of GDP, Sajjan said, and even that is not enough.
“We are now in the troubling position where status quo spending on defence will not even maintain a status quo of capabilities,” he said.
Sajjan vowed that the coming defence policy review would deliver a strategy and funding to fix those problems.
But the cost of tackling the required upgrades and replacements just to retain existing capabilities has been estimated at “tens of billions of dollars,” according to one senior government official.
Sajjan acknowledged that the funding needs are “significant” and hinted that the Liberals would respond.
Asked whether the controversy has hurt his standing in the eyes of the rank-and-file, Sajjan said they will ultimately judge him on his actions, notably the coming release of defence policy review.