Archived Content

Information identified as archived on the Web is for reference, research or recordkeeping purposes. It has not been altered or updated after the date of archiving. Web pages that are archived on the Web are not subject to the Government of Canada Web Standards. As per the Communications Policy of the Government of Canada, you can request alternate formats on the "Contact Us" page.

Canadian Forces Transformation

Military Education and The Transformation of the Canadian Forces

by Peter Foot

Astonishingly, nothing said in the Defence Policy Statement issued in April 2005, and very little said since, refers to professional military education in Canada. No guidance is given directly about what is required to change in terms of training and education in order to facilitate and sustain the Transformation of the Canadian Forces (CF). More or less everything has to be inferred from the International Policy Statements taken as a whole, together with the implications of Transformation developments themselves, plus indications given by Chief of the Defence Staff General Rick Hillier in his near-constant round of speeches.¹ For the Canadian Forces College (CFC), the challenge is to accept these implications and indications as defining its contribution to Canadian security by providing, within the Canadian Defence Academy (CDA) vision and available resources, the best professional and most relevant education and training for the Canadian Forces’ mid-career officer corps. This will not be easy to deliver in every particular, but the outline of what is needed – and what is not needed – to give training and education ‘transformational’ substance is already discernible, is being implemented, and rests upon the work already being done at the Canadian Forces College.

Historically, CFC has not always been amenable to rapid change. As is usually the case when managing change in any institution, opinions and policy can adapt easily to a new situation, but culture, attitudes and application tend to take longer. This institutional lag has received aggressive attention: course development and balance, together with delivery methods and student assessment, all involving the role of the permanent teaching staff – these are the focus for redesign. It is certainly not corporate restructuring for its own sake.

However, the reasons for an accelerated impulse for change ought not to obscure those previous, mostly responsible inhibitions against change in the past. The root causes of the lag in implementing or accepting cultural change at CFC are understandable and often honourable. For example, CFC has taken the Officer General Specification (OGS) as the baseline for guidance.² However, the standards laid down in that document are no more than the basis for delivering and assessing professional military competence across the whole of the Canadian Forces. Virtually everything at CFC needs to be pitched significantly higher than that, as befits an institution that is training and educating the best in the Canadian Forces. Problems occur because ‘how much higher’ is not defined anywhere for guidance.

Equally, the lag in reform is reinforced by the military profession’s naturally respectful view of itself. Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington spoke for generations of modern officers when he characterized the ideal officer as patriotic, yet almost above patriotism in the sense of being a part of the brotherhood of arms – a member of a profession that shares characteristics with the other great professions, but remains distinct from them. He argued that there is an unchanging quality about leadership and military expertise:

The peculiar skill of the military officer is universal in the sense that its essence is not affected by changes in time or location. Just as the qualifications of a good surgeon are the same in Zurich as they are in New York, the same standards of professional military competence apply in Russia as in America and in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth.³

That ‘peculiar skill’ – that professional art – is a deeply valued possession to those who hold it. Not unnaturally, together with their acceptance of personally unlimited liability, they see it as something setting them apart. Providing the next generation, by way of staff and war college graduation, with the keys to higher professionalism becomes a constant and inviolable – even sacred – responsibility. No one outside the group that has such responsibilities can know what is required, or can have the skills with which to bestow it upon the men and women in uniform selected for higher command in the service of their country. It is a way of perpetuating the Second World War legacy of Canada’s ‘finest generation’.

It is not in any way to belittle such conservative views by pointing out that this is not the whole story. There is a wider perspective than the one that is internal to the profession of arms and its principled obligation to pass on the torch of high endeavour. Huntington’s theory – what military scholar Eliot Cohen has rightly called “the ‘normal’ theory of civil-military relations” – has always been both a comfort to the profession and strongly opposed by other views, and by observations of fact.⁴ Put another way, there might be, as that strongly pro-military commentator Edward Luttwak put it 10 years ago, “a profound contradiction between the prevailing military mentality...and current contingencies”.⁵ Does a comparable contradiction exist in Canada today? Is there a mismatch between a possibly prevailing set of military assumptions and Canada’s wider domestic and international security needs? And if there is such a mismatch, which should predominate in course design and delivery, and in student assessment, at the Canadian Forces College? Certainly, Hillier’s rhetoric speaks to a mismatch that is to be addressed via Transformation.

Everyone, not least the Canadian taxpayer, wishes to see the maximum output, the best value for money, and the most flexible and professional of results. No one has any interest in producing officers like the colonel played by Sir Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai, who are professionally inspiring, deeply imbued with military virtues and brilliantly competent, but who miss the operational and strategic point. What Michael Howard has called that ‘unique comradeship’ of arms exists for a purpose: it is a means to an end, not – certainly for the officer corps – an end itself. Even very junior officers are going to find themselves operating in remote settings, in some kind of alliance context, dealing with delicate political, ethnic, religious and social conditions. In such situations, courage, tradition, procedures and discipline will all be relevant but “only good sense and mature judgment can save them from making disastrous mistakes”.⁶

It is precisely here that opinions divide. What is good sense and maturity? Everyone agrees that disastrous mistakes, as a minimum, have to be avoided; quite how this is to be achieved is another matter altogether. Not surprisingly, the divisions occur on the overlapping boundaries (or about the definitions) of education and training. In her study of the US Army War College, political scientist Judith Stiehm puts the general point well: “Being prepared is certainly the military’s mission. For what is something of a puzzle.”⁷ The central issue, then, for any staff or war college, is how good sense and mature judgment can be nurtured, exercised and assessed – year after year – to a standard respected by the domestic political leadership, by senior civilians in defence departments, and, more broadly, by the staff and war college graduates of other countries alongside whom they will inevitably work and be deployed.

‘Spartan’ values	‘Athenian’ values
Personal austerity and glory	Learning and high culture
Discipline and self-sacrifice	Creative and critical thinking
Science and technology	Philosophy and history
Patriotism and honour	Cross-cultural sympathies
Personal heroism	Politically post-heroic

Table 1: Athens and Sparta: Suggested Differing Characteristics

Quite rightly, I believe, we are back to the metaphorical but useful Sparta versus Athens debate that has always been a feature of professional military education.⁸ The ending of the Cold War blurred the distinction even more. Table 1 outlines the characteristics of the two ‘classical’ approaches. The lists are not comprehensive, but suggest either end of a spectrum of professional military training and education outcomes. All staff and war colleges are a mixture of the two sides. Indeed, a similar spectrum exists in law, divinity, and medical colleges – between collective uniformity and individual diversity. But it is ‘disastrous mistakes’ made by the military that have the greater capacity to embarrass political leaders in a democracy. For that reason, getting the balance right between the two ends of the professional military education spectrum is a responsibility that is both a national obligation and one that transcends the internal preferences of the profession of arms. Typically, officers progress from predominantly Spartan values to predominantly Athenian ones as they develop in their career. If this progression does not take place, the likelihood of future Somalia outrages, Tailhook events, Basra Road ‘turkey shoots’, abuses of Iraqi prisoners, or unexplained deaths at Deepcut Barracks – increases. One might say that the most obvious exponents and personal embodiments of ‘Spartan’ values today are members of al Qaeda and the suicide bombers of Baghdad.

Sparta teaches mastery of what is known; Athens provides the tools with which to deal with the unknown. The former is training; the latter is education.⁹ This can be expanded, using US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s famous, and wrongly derided, verbal essay on knowns and unknowns.¹⁰ His point was the obvious one that, in today’s post-9/11 security environment, the most danger comes from the last of the potential futures: the unknown unknowns. The problem with these is just that – they are unknown and thus, they fall prey to ignorance, distortion or exaggeration. The other two categories are clearly less of a problem for status quo powers. Western militaries, with their traditional and mandated obligation to prepare pessimistically for the most worrisome future, are obliged to counsel their respective democracies on the potential consequences of ignoring the worst-case scenarios. However, much remains to be done in measuring the liberal economic democracies’ capacity to cope against the unknown unknowns. In the short- to-medium term, if the military are not part of that measurement, it is not easy to see their purpose. In seeking and defining that purpose, nobody wants to be sent off on a fool’s errand. Canada’s armed forces are no exception. Already, should neglect or error be made in the preparation for the unknown, the outlines of institutional regret are discernible. The greatest chance of neglect or error comes where fundamental assumptions are not at least examined, where inertia determines an ‘alter little or nothing’ approach, or where the professional focus remains fixed largely at the tactical level of professional expertise where, in short, Spartan values prevail over Athenian ones.

Futures	Possible Examples	Professional Preparation
Known knowns	Traditional national enemy seeking to invade or disadvantage by military means (India vs. Pakistan or Israel’s usual response to her Arab neighbours)	Spartan
Known unknowns	Known and potential state-based enemies in possession of WMD, to be deterred (the uncertainties of the balance of Cold War terror)	Spartan and Athenian
Unknown unknowns	International system challenged by the consequences of natural disasters, domestic humanitarian outrages, or of failed states and hostile non-state groups, perhaps supported by revisionist states, willing to use large-scale means of mass effect and/or destruction against status quo powers and their interests world-wide	Athenian

Table 2: Divers Futures: Appropriate Preparation

The scale of challenge has been ably outlined by a leading scholar, Philip Bobbitt, and by the British field force commander during the 2003 Iraq War, Air Marshal Sir Brian Burridge. Bobbitt’s canvas is a vast one, as exemplified by his book’s title: The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History. Sir Michael Howard concludes: “Bobbitt believes that mankind could be facing a tragedy without precedent in history. It is not clear that he is wrong.”¹¹ It makes for more than sombre reading. Bobbitt argues that the nation-state – a constitutional construct central to armed forces and their legitimacy – is already being replaced by the ‘market-state’. Just as guns killed off feudalism and the railways ended the ancien régime in Europe, so computers have dealt a fatal blow to the nation-state system that fought and survived two world wars and the Cold War. In its place has risen a looser set of state options – still responsible for security, taxation and law to some extent – that have deep implications for traditional armed forces. Sadly, avoiding war does not seem to be an option in the new, emergent system, any more than it was in the last one. But the varieties of future war and military operations will be demanding of armed forces, because the nature of the state itself is changing. As the nation-state changes, so do international relations. As such, the scope of changes identified as already underway by Bobbitt will affect everyone on the planet: “We are living”, he says, “in one of those relatively rare periods in which the future is unlikely to be very much like the past.”¹²

Facing that uncertainty and ambiguity, Burridge lays out today’s appropriate professional military response to the cliché that generals – and by extension, staff and war colleges – prepare to fight the previous war rather than the next one. Taking his illustration from music, he sets the issue firmly in the context of usable skills: modern militaries have to adapt to the requirements of jazz, not continue their preference for classical orchestral playing. The argument goes like this:

• Orchestral parts, often written a long time ago, define the individual musician’s activity as to what to play and when, within a more-or-less established orchestra structure. The conductor determines tempo and creativity. Repeated practice ensures the whole is performed in perfect harmony.
  
  
• Jazz, on the other hand, is quite different. To begin with, there is no sheet music. All performers adapt to and around a central theme. No two performances are alike; the same tune treated differently each time. The band can be uniquely structured for each performance; conductors are redundant. Tempo will vary. Improvisational skills, not practice, are the key to everything.

Military adaptability to changing international conditions, Burridge argues, is the pre-requisite for applying national or international grand strategy at the military level, using information effectively, taking an effects-based approach, making careful judgments over legality, assessing risk, and being ready to act in a timely fashion.¹³ As with military campaigning, so it is with jazz. Basic skills are vital and are inculcated at an early stage. It is the later exposure to varieties, alternatives and examples that gives the new performer his or her special contribution to the whole.

The analogy should not be taken too far, but the general point is sound. In military terms, the improvisational approach often manifests itself in a clear appreciation of what will happen if traditional methods are applied unthinkingly. A good, recent example of a ‘classical’ commander being saved from disaster by a military ‘jazzman’ is the moment in the Kosovo campaign when the British commander, General Sir Mike Jackson, refused to obey the order of SACEUR, General Wesley Clark, to attack the newly-arrived Russian contingent at Pristina airfield in Kosovo. In his memoirs, Clark reported Jackson as having said: “Sir, I am not going to start the Third World War for you...”.¹⁴ Clark found himself entirely isolated from his US military and political leadership and had to back down. The fact is that senior commanders are not given licence to make errors, although it is entirely to his credit that the confrontation is so freely discussed in his autobiography. Experience was simply not enough in such circumstances. He was, in effect, relieved of his command. Again, too much should not be made of the point, but the two men do differ in a significant way. Clark, though a Rhodes Scholar as a young man and a self-confessed scientifically inclined ‘wannabe’, never returned to academic life, except as an associate professor at the US Army’s West Point, teaching social science. Jackson, by contrast, having been on the Senior Directing Staff at the United Kingdom’s Joint Services Defence College, as a colonel, spent a year reading for a taught and research-based Master of Letters in international studies at Cambridge University.¹⁵

Clark might justly complain that, by staying within the army system for his career, he had been let down institutionally in a way that Jackson had not. Arguably, Clark’s outlook was insufficiently exposed to the fresh air of debate and challenge. He was poorly prepared intellectually for the job of multinational force command in wartime, and professionally out of touch with even his own country’s political constraints. His example is far from unique. It is therefore not surprising that a retired commander of the US Army War College, Major General Robert H. Scales, recently reminded his colleagues, his profession, and his fellow citizens:

War is a thinking man’s game and only those who take the time to study war are likely to fight it competently. Soldiers and Marines need time for reflection, time to learn, teach, research and write. In this new age of warfare we must do more to prepare soldiers to think as well as act.¹⁶

In the context of the argument being advanced in this article, Scales’s recommendation is little more than a restatement of the Michael Howard point made earlier about avoiding ‘disastrous mistakes’. But it is by no means accepted across the American military. The Rand Corporation published a series of Pentagon-financed studies that concentrated on the need to make more defence resources available by narrowing the training and education to a more ‘Spartan’ agenda, perhaps reflecting a certain visceral dislike of the Clinton administration.¹⁷ The ‘box checking’ need to get postgraduate qualifications – regardless of relevance to the military profession – as part of the officer corps promotion process subsequently became a target on its own. In February 2005, the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force (USAF), General John P. Jumper, announced that the USAF “will remove all academic education information, including Bachelor’s degrees, from all ... promotion boards through the rank of colonel”, with the sole exceptions of chaplains and health care professionals. For Jumper, preparing general officers for the upper echelons of American public duty and national service is subsumed beneath the USAF’s highest – but ambiguous – core value of ‘Service before Self’.¹⁸ It is a vivid indication of the renewed vitality of Sparta’s virtues in the United States Air Force. Given the nature of air and space power, this is perhaps understandable, but it is non- transferable to the other service environments. In my view, it certainly has no place in a joint and/or combined setting. As the US Army general commanding the Stabilization Force in Bosnia, Montgomery C. Meigs, articulated it after 9/11:

The [A]rmy has a wonderful ability to adapt to a crisis, but we have to do better than that and adapt to the environment before the crisis hits, because in the 21^st century, the crisis may be so different that you will not be able to adapt quickly enough. Just having good soldiers isn’t going to cut it.¹⁹

This is the ‘jazz’ point again. It is the recognition that strategic change is the determinant here that is core: it propels improvisational skills to the fore. For the US Army, the Marines and the Navy – continuously closer as they are operationally to conditions of crisis, complexity and ambiguity – Jumper’s approach carries the danger of promoting intellectually ill-prepared officers. To remove professionally irrelevant degrees from the promotion process is defendable; to decide that all postgraduate degrees in international relations or war, defence or security studies, defence management or economics fall into the same category is, as a British civil servant might murmur, a very brave decision indeed.²⁰ The same holds true for medium and smaller powers today. The elevation of Spartan ideals to this level of universal professional dominance for line officers carries serious political and military risks, at home and abroad. Such powers do not have the benefit of sheer scale – itself, for the United States, a considerable insurance against mediocrity being promoted. For non-superpowers with all-volunteer forces requiring to operate multinationally in the political, social, ethnic, economic, environmental and religiously sensitive conditions of the 21^st Century’s first decade and beyond, to remove education as indicative of an officer’s intellectual potential for higher rank would be retrograde in every way. In fact, the phrase ‘counter-intuitive’ might have been invented to describe such an initiative.

More generally, minimizing professional military education does not look attractive for any medium power when measured against the Sparta-Athens and Bobbitt-Burridge analyses. Nor does the assertion that greater depth of field experiences more than makes up for professional military education (PME) carry conviction. Education, rather than experience on its own, will ensure that the following do not happen:

• Diminishing quality of military advice to political leadership. Reduced effectiveness over time in relation to civil servants in defence ministries. Perception of a widening gap between the talent in ministries of foreign affairs and in the defence arm of the state.
  
  
• Declining comparability with Allies’ officer corps at all levels. Fewer opportunities for national representation in key postings abroad, UN commands – or Alliance positions – especially where operational experience is limited. Reduced respect from Allies.
  
  
• Growing isolation of the military from its parent society. Limited chances of improving public image of armed forces. Emergence of the Services as self-interested lobby groups rather than as a national resource.²¹ Lowered standards for officer entry on recruitment.
  
  
• Frustration of really able officers manifesting itself in trends towards earlier-than-expected retirement for more fulfilling second careers. Demotivation of career officers committed to providing education to their colleagues.

Canada can take none of these risks. For any medium or smaller power that has few or no aspirations to take international action militarily, these might not be serious developments. NATO has quite a few members, both old and new, for whom sustaining current levels of defence forces, or for being active participants in maintaining peace and international stability, fall a long way down the list of national priorities. For other Alliance members, national self-esteem rests, in part, on active international engagement through the capacities of a respected military establishment, sustaining involvement in peacekeeping and other UN missions, remodeling and re-equipping forces to deal with emergent global conditions more effectively, ensuring a military and political hearing in Alliance circles, and in being seen to be reliable, even when in disagreement with the predominant global power. For those countries, such developments would be very serious over time. And Canada is pre-eminently one of those countries.

Canada’s strategic setting must be the context that determines the kind of professional military education and training delivered at the Canadian Forces College. These, in turn, need to reflect more than the immediate requirements of the officers after they have finished their course. The College is about the higher professionalization, further enhancement and intellectual development of the officer cadre as a whole – in order to have a CF that maximizes the security options open to politicians and officials, within budgetary limits set by Parliament. Just as there is compression in today’s operational environment between the strategic and tactical levels – the now-hackneyed phrase ‘strategic corporal’ sums it up well – so also there is compression between mid-career education and postings with national and international significance. Flatter command structures mean that it is likely to be lieutenant-colonels and commanders who do the main staff work for Flag officers. It is they, therefore, who will carry the working-level responsibility of ensuring that Canada does not become burdened with ‘tactical generals’.²² Those lieutenant- colonels and commanders must, in turn, belong to a process that has inculcated not just the accumulation of information, or even of learning how to learn. They need what Judith Stiehm describes as ‘the habit of learning’.²³ Today’s ‘complex irregular warfare’ cannot be successfully engaged and sustained – and then handed on to civilian agencies and authorities – without it.²⁴ That is why the courses at the Canadian Forces College are changing.