ON TARGET: Before Casting Stones ... We Should Look Closer At Our Own Glass House

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladimir_Putin_(2017-01-17).jpg

By Scott Taylor

Sometimes it is important to take a good look in the mirror and judge ourselves by the same yardstick by which we judge others.

We have determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin is bad and we have a long list of his recent evildoings to make that case.

For example: In 2014, he annexed the Crimea. Since that juncture Russia has also supported the separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine with weapons and trainers and Russian intelligence meddled in the U.S. elections, thereby making Donald Trump the President. All very bad things.

To add insult to injury, Putin also went ahead and constructed what is known as the Crimea Bridge to connect his annexed territory to the Russian mainland.

This 18.1km span across the Kerch Straight was completed in just three years – from May 2015 till May 2018 at a cost of approximately $5 billion (USD). In addition to four lanes of vehicle traffic, the Crimea Bridge also includes two railway tracks. While everyone agrees that this was a major feat of engineering, the problem is that Putin did not ask permission to build this from the regime in Kiev. As the world has not recognized Putin’s annexation of Crimea, he has technically built a bridge to Ukraine sovereign territory. Again, pretty bad stuff.

Russia’s stated objective for building this lengthy span was to bring increased commerce and trade to the traditionally impoverished Crimea. In 2014 the average annual income of a Crimean resident was just $3,000 (USD), which was roughly 14% lower than the rest of Ukraine. It is Putin’s stated objective to bring his Crimean subjects up to an annual income of $15,000 and put them on par with the rest of Russia.

This could explain, in part, why the Crimeans voted so overwhelmingly in favor of joining Russia in the 2014 referendum.

For Putin, the reason to seize the Crimea was considered to be a strategic one. Since the time of the Czars, Russia’s Black Sea fleet has been based in the Crimean port of Sevastopol.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Crimea was an autonomous region within the Republic of Ukraine, so Russia negotiated a long-term lease for Sevastopol. In 2010, Russia had extended that lease to 2042 with another five year option after that.

However, when the pro-West regime took control in Kiev in 2014, Ukraine threatened to cancel the deal and evict the Russian fleet. Hence the Russians were able to almost bloodlessly take military control of a military base, which they were already leasing.

Putin was, nevertheless, roundly denounced for this move, drawing the ire of then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who declared: “You can’t just redraw the map of Europe.”

This was ironic in the extreme coming from Clinton because in 1999 her husband, then President Bill, did just that. In support of Albanian separatists the U.S. led a NATO 78-day air campaign bombing against Serbia.

The defiant Serbs refused to submit, and NATO had no stomach for a ground offensive. As a result, UN Resolution 1244 was signed wherein it was recognized that the disputed province of Kosovo would remain sovereign Serbian territory. Serbian security forces were withdrawn to allow NATO forces to provide interim security. The U.S. never had any intention of honouring the agreement and they immediately began building a massive military base in Kosovo. By August of 1999, two months after the ceasefire was signed, Camp Bondsteel was in full operation, complete with a huge post exchange (PX), a hospital, two gyms, two recreation centers, a Burger King, Taco Bell and an Anthony’s Pizza.

Despite this being Serbian sovereign territory, nobody asked the Serbs for permission to build it. In February 2008, Kosovo – without any referendum – made a unilateral declaration of independence. The U.S. was the first to recognize Kosovo as a nation, but there is no plan to remove Camp Bondsteel. In fact it has become a controversial detention center for the U.S. to hold what it terms to be “illegal combatants”, similar to the infamous base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In other words you can redraw the map of Europe, and you can build infrastructure on foreign soil without permission, as long as you are the U.S.

As for interfering in the Ukrainian civil war, how can Putin be evil for assisting one side while we pride ourselves on doing the exact same thing on the other? Canada in particular could have assumed a greater role as a mediator in Ukraine given our own experience with minority rights and our substantial community of ethnic Ukrainians. Instead, we have taken sides.

As for meddling with elections, the West doesn’t even pretend to be subtle. In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, toppled the Taliban and installed a puppet President of their choosing. In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq, killed Saddam Hussein, and then failed miserably to establish a democracy. In 2011, the U.S. led assault in Libya helped the rebels depose and murder President Muammar Gadhafi. We didn’t even bother to try and establish a replacement government. All three of those nations remain engulfed in violent anarchy with millions of people dead as a result.

Now that is meddling.

Those idiot Russians are playing about on Facebook with fake news, making U.S. voters choose Trump over Clinton?

Bad guys indeed.

ON TARGET: No Question About It: We Lost The War In Afghanistan

By Scott Taylor

Last Tuesday, a senior U.S. military official gave some startling testimony before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. According to Lieutenant-General Kenneth McKenzie, the current rate of battlefield casualties among the Afghan security forces is “unsustainable” in the ongoing conflict with the Taliban.

While the Kabul regime no longer publishes exact casualty numbers, it is estimated that the Afghan Army is losing at least 500 soldiers killed and hundreds more wounded every month.

In an earlier statement, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani admitted that between 2015 and the present, over 28,000 Afghan troops have been killed in battle.

At present, the U.S. maintains a force of 14,000 – mostly elite Special Forces and aircrew – in Afghanistan. McKenzie told the Senate Committee that without this U.S. commitment the Afghan security forces would be crushed in no time. “If we left precipitously right now, I do not believe they would be able to successfully defend their country”, McKenzie testified.

This U.S. general believes that what is required is more training and more equipment for the Afghan security forces, and most importantly more time for these Afghans to become a self-sufficient military force. Unfortunately, McKenzie could not predict or even give a reasonable estimate as to how long this international commitment will be required.

To put a little perspective on this latest assessment we need to remind ourselves that seventeen years ago, in December 2001, the U.S. declared that they had defeated the Taliban.

A corrupt unelected regime of former warlords was then installed in Kabul and the Americans called on their allies to help rebuild a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

The NATO led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), to which Canada contributed a sizeable contingent, was only ever meant to be an interim measure to maintain order until the Afghan security forces were trained and equipped to self-sufficiency.

Along the way, objectives got blurred, the Taliban re-emerged, the insurgency flared up, and ISAF troops – including Canadians – found themselves fighting and dying to prop up the most corrupt regime on the planet.

For some reason no one in our senior military leadership – not even U.S. LGen McKenzie – has figured out that what the Afghan security forces lack is not training or equipment. The missing ingredient is motivation.

There is no question that Afghans are fierce and determined fighters. The Taliban have been waging a bloody David versus Goliath campaign with a heroic determination that would be applauded were we not in Goliath’s camp. To date, a force of illiterate Afghan fighters with small arms and improvised explosive devices have been able to withstand the most technologically advanced military alliance ever deployed to a battlefield.

The one category in which the allied command structure has been consistent is there inability to correctly assess the true situation on the ground.

In December 2013, I interviewed Major-General Dean Milner at the ISAF base in Kabul. At that juncture, Canadian troops were winding down their three-year training mission, and Milner considered our work to be a success. “We have built that [Afghan security] force to those numbers and with the professional capability to beat the Taliban”, said Milner.

Whoops. Five years later that security force is taking unsustainable casualties at the hands of a Taliban that was pronounced defeated seventeen years ago.

Even with the benefit of hindsight, it would seem that Canadian generals and historians cannot grasp what has actually transpired. One prime example of this is a book written by Major-General David Fraser, which was released earlier this year. The title is Operation Medusa: The Furious Battle that Saved Afghanistan from the Taliban.

According to L Gen McKenzie’s testimony, that battle to save Afghanistan has yet to be fought and the Taliban remain a very clear and present danger.

Similarly delusional was a statement by historian David Bercuson in an article written in a recent Legion magazine. The gist of Bercuson’s op-ed was a comparison of Canada’s current policy of maintaining a series of penny packet military deployments – Mali, Latvia, Iraq, Ukraine and Romania, versus the good old days when we had all of our combat eggs in a basket called Kandahar.

Bercuson wrote of the Afghan mission; “It will be up to the historians and political scientists to show, over time, whether there was any merit to that approach.”

I personally do not think we need any more time to pass to conclude that we failed in Afghanistan. What we need is a full parliamentary inquiry into how it was that our political and military leadership could have gotten it so wrong for so long. The sacrifice of our soldiers to a cause that could not be ‘won’ demands answers in order to prevent a future fiasco.

Re-writing history will not change the truth. We lost the war.

ON TARGET: Russia Swallows Poroshenko's Dangling Bait

Photo from: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-russian-ship-rams-navy-tugboat-off-crimea-azov/29619665.html

By Scott Taylor

Last Thursday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called upon NATO to dispatch warships to the Sea of Azov in order to ‘provide security’ in the wake of an incident involving Russian security forces.

On Sunday, November 24, three Ukrainian naval vessels – two small patrol craft and a tugboat – transited the Kerch Strait enroute to the Ukrainian port city Mariupol. Russian naval vessels ordered them to halt, then opened fire and eventually boarded the Ukrainian ships.

All three Ukrainian ships were captured along with their 24 crewmembers. Six of the Ukrainian sailors were reported wounded during this seizure by force in the Sea of Azov.

Russia has claimed that the incident was a deliberate provocation on the part of Ukraine in general, and President Poroshenko in particular. Poroshenko describes the capture of the three ships as an act of Russian aggression and he immediately declared a 30-day period of martial law in the 10 Ukrainian districts which border Russia.

Following the incident, Russia has allegedly barred all Ukrainian shipping from entering or exiting the Sea of Azov through the Kerch Straits. Hence the frantic call from Poroshenko to bring in the NATO armada to settle the issue by igniting World War Three.

This call to arms led to the usual chorus from the Colonel Blimp Brigade, thumping their tubs and urging NATO leaders to heed the call and have our ships blast open a corridor into the Sea of Azov. To heighten the tension, one war mongering pundit described the now temporarily closed Kerch Straits as a ‘strategic waterway’.

For those not exactly familiar with the Sea of Azov here are a few basic facts: It is essentially a small extension of the eastern most end of the Black Sea. The only access point is via the Kerch Straits, which sit between Russia’s Taman peninsula and the Russian annexed, autonomous region of the Crimea.

The only two countries that border this body of water are Ukraine and Russia. In addition to some fishing villages, Ukraine has the two small port cities of Mariupol and Berdyansk, through which passes approximately 20% of Ukraine’s steel exports and 5% of their grain and wheat exports.

The scale of shipping is extremely limited – not by the height of the bridge, which Russia recently constructed across the 15-kilometer span of the Kerch Straits, but by the fact that the Sea of Azov is the world’s shallowest sea.

The average depth is only 9 meters, with much of this tiny sea being barely a metre deep. In other words, this is not a major international trade conduit and it is certainly not a strategic waterway in league with the Suez and Panama canals or the Bosporus Strait.

For NATO to heed Poroshenko’s request and to escalate the tension by deploying warships to the region would be foolhardy.

That does not mean that Russia’s actions in this incident should be condoned or ignored. If, as the Russian’s claim, Poroshenko and his regime in Kiev sent the three small warships as a deliberate provocation, why were the Russians dumb enough to take the bait?

The two gunboats and a single tugboat, even if they were able to transit to Mariupol, would hardly tip the strategic scales in the Sea of Azov. By sitting astride the Kerch Straits, Russia controls all access, as they have now clearly demonstrated.

By opening fire and capturing the three Ukrainian vessels, Russia committed an act of war against the navy of a sovereign state, operating on a shared body of water.

The Russian state media are broadcasting apparent confessions from the captured Ukrainian sailors wherein they claim they had direct orders to provoke a Russian response.

The problem with this scenario is that the Russians did allow themselves to be provoked into escalating the hostilities – and in doing so, would have therefore played right into Poroshenko’s hand.

Following the Sea of Azov incident and Poroshenko’s subsequent call for NATO action, German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered a reassuring voice of reason: “There is no military solution to the problem … we must emphasize that.”, she told a Berlin forum.

As a first step in de-escalating the crisis, Russia needs to return the warships and the sailors and reopen the Kerch Straits to Ukrainian shipping.

ON TARGET: RCAF Is In Deep Trouble: Auditor General Report

By Scott Taylor

There was a lot of buzz last week following the release of the auditor general’s report. Of particular note was his conclusion about the present state of the Royal Canadian Air Force, which noted; there is a chronic shortage of pilots and technicians, and the advanced age of our CF-18 combat planes will soon render the entire fleet obsolete.

The current shortage of personnel means that there are not enough pilots or mechanics to operate the 76 CF-18’s presently in Canadian service. The government’s answer to this shortfall in personnel was to seek the acquisition of additional fighter planes.

First it was the November, 2016 announcement of a sole-source purchase of 18 new Boeing Super Hornets. This deal fell apart over Boeing’s unrelated trade tribunal challenge against Bombardier, which led the Liberal government to claim Boeing was no longer a ‘trusted partner’.

To justify the sole sourcing of the Super Hornets, the government had to announce there was an urgent ‘capability gap’ within the RCAF which they needed to address pronto, hence there was no time to stage a competition for the new fighters.

Access to information searches have since failed to produce a single Air Force briefing note mentioning any ‘capability gap’ within the RCAF in the two years prior to the announcement of the Super Hornet deal.

However, once committed, the Liberals had to come up with an alternative solution to fill in the RCAF ‘capability gap’ which they had claimed they needed to fix ASAP.

Instead of buying 18 new, more capable Super Hornets, Canada has now negotiated a deal to acquire 25 used Australian Air force F-18’s of the same vintage as the ones currently in Canadian service.

Buying the mothballed Aussie fighters comes with a $500 million price tag, and that does not include the cost to upgrade them or to give them a life extension overhaul.

According to the auditor general, this half-billion dollar expenditure will do nothing to solve the current problems of the RCAF. The audit noted, “The department stated that it needed more qualified technicians and pilots, not more fighter aircraft.”

So, the government buys them 25 more, used fighter jets instead.

The root problem for the personnel shortage is retention. With commercial airlines paying lucrative salaries, not to mention well paid training positions with Middle Eastern air forces, Canadian pilots and technicians are leaving the service faster than new personnel can be trained.

On a frightening note, the auditor general concludes that “If CF-18 pilots continue to leave at the current rate, there will not be enough pilots to train the next generation of fighter pilots.”

Last December it was announced by the Liberal government that Canada would hold a competition to purchase 88 fighters to eventually replace the aging CF-18 fleet. However, given the timelines on that project, the new jets would not enter frontline service until around 2032.

One Canadian pundit keeps opining that Canada’s failure to quickly replace the old CF’18’s is a contributing factor in the RCAF’s failure to retain enough experienced pilots.

In a recent paper published by the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, Fellow Matt Fisher wrote “Some Canadian pilots have been considering whether to join the Royal Australian Air force because it would give them a chance to fly highly advanced F-35 fighter jets.”

From my experience those Canadian men and women who enlist in the RCAF share the same service-before-self patriotism as those in the Navy, and Army. While there may in fact be the odd individual who would rather wear an Australian uniform just so they could fly a different model of aircraft. I believe the vast majority of our pilots proudly wear the maple leaf on their flight suits.

It is also worth noting that the CF-18 has more than proved it’s worth over it’s three decades of service.

Since 1990, our Hornets have flown in four conflicts – the First Gulf War (1990-91), the 78-day bombing of Serbia and Kosovo (1999), the intervention in Libya (2011) and the campaign against Daesh (aka ISIS or ISIL) in Iraq and Syria (2014-2016).

In all of those thousands of combat sorties, which were flown in those four wars, our CF-18’s emerged without a single scratch.

The may be aging, but if we are employing them against semi-defenseless opponents they remain more than up to the task.

If we ever have to employ them against a first-rate, nuclear equipped enemy, then god help us all.

ON TARGET: Chanak Crisis 1922: When Canada Said ‘No’ to Britain is When Canada became a Nation

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lyon_Mackenzie_King

By Scott Taylor

Once again this year Remembrance Day ceremonies – now stretched into what is termed Remembrance Week – proved to be a lightening rod for the usual cabal of ‘death or glory’ historians to whinge to the media about how we don’t give enough gravitas to Canada’s Great War effort.

“I think the government of Canada botched commemoration of the First World War” complained Jack Granatstein, prolific author and full time cheerleader of war and destruction, to the Canadian Press. “Other than the Vimy Ridge [100th anniversary] celebration in 2017, I think they have done a very bad job”.

Echoing Granatstein’s sentiments was University of Calgary historian David Bercuson who lamented about Canada having missed an opportunity to herald the end of the war to end all wars. “When are we ever going to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the armistice again?” whined Bercuson.

That’s right folks, the word he chose to use was ‘celebrate’ not ‘reflect’ or ‘mourn’. The senseless slaughter and the horrors of trench warfare are not something to celebrate, and we need to clarify that our soldiers did not fight that war for democracy and human rights. No, they fought instead to advance the economic aims of the British Empire.

An initiative was founded in Canada in 1996 called the Vimy Foundation, and since that juncture they have been wildly successful in convincing Canadians that it was upon the bloody slopes of Vimy Ridge that Canada came of age as a nation on April 9, 1917.

Canadian school children and tourists make Vimy Ridge visits into a virtual pilgrimage, and as Granatstein mentioned, last year Canada staged a massive display of military pomp and ceremony at the battle site memorial in France, to ‘celebrate’ the 100th anniversary.

The rationale for declaring this Canada’s birthplace has always been a bit of a stretch for me. Yes, it was the first time Canadian troops fought together as a single corps, but they were still under British command of Sir Julian Byng. Yes, Canadians captured the ridge – after British and French troops had failed – but the entire attack was staged at Vimy Ridge as part of a diversion for a French offensive further south, which ultimately failed.

The First World War would continue its bloody stalemate for another 18 months before Germany finally capitulated.

Some Canadian historians have argued that the Battle of Hill 70 would be a more fitting birthplace of Canada. This engagement was fought in August 1917 by the Canadian Corps, then under command of Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie. They captured the objective and suffered fewer casualties than at Vimy. However, the same argument can be made that Canada was still part of a larger British formation, fighting in a war in which the original Canadian recruiting posters read “Britons: Your Empire Needs You”.

In my opinion, the defining moment when Canada emerged as an independent nation was in September 1922. This was when Prime Minister Mackenzie King said “no” to a British request to send Canadian troops to yet another senseless war.

It was known at the time as the Chanak Crisis and it resulted from Britain’s heavy-handed dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following the 1918 Armistice.

The British has initially supported a Greek military expedition into Anatolia. Taking advantage of the disorganized and defeated Ottoman forces, the Greeks had pushed forward all the way to Ankara. Here, the Turks regrouped under a dynamic General, Mustafa Kemal and the tables were soon turned.

The routed Greeks were soon bottled up in two desperate bridgeheads on the Anatolian mainland – Chanak and Smyrna.

Not wishing to abandon the Greeks, and not willing to put the onus of a military intervention only upon the war weary British public, the London War Office put the call out to the British Dominions to join in the fight.

New Zealand said ‘ready aye ready’ while Australia and South Africa delayed their response. Canada’s Mackenzie King said ‘no’ and this ended any indecision on the part of Australia and South Africa, as they too soon echoed our ‘no’.

Without allies, Britain signed the Treaty of Lausanne with the Turks, Allied troops withdrew from Anatolia and Turkey emerged as a modern nation under the most dynamic leader in their history – Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Father of Turkey).

This Canadian decision to opt out of a military campaign therefore had an immediate consequence in world events. It tipped the balance for the other dominions, which forced Britain to conclude a peace.

That is far more than what can be said for the aftermath of Canadian troops, under British command, capturing a few hundred yards of trenches at Vimy Ridge.

ON TARGET: War is Never Glorious

By Scott Taylor

We have just commemorated the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice, which brought hostilities to a cessation on the Western Front of the conflict known alternatively as ‘World War One’, ‘the Great War’ and by those who fought and survived its horrors, as ‘the War to end all Wars’.

With the passage of time, those horrors of trench warfare have been all but forgotten, and the usual cabal of ‘Drums and Bugles’ historians would have us all believe that it was a glorious affair worthy of national celebration one century later.

True to form, last week Canada’s leading glorifier of all things military – historian Jack Granatstein penned an editorial chastising Prime Minister Trudeau for not bringing enough public attention to the battlefield exploits of the Canadian Corps during their offensive in the final ‘100 Days’ of the Great War.

According to Granatstein, all Canadians should reflect upon the sacrifice made by those brave warriors in that campaign – 30,000 dead another 210,000 wounded – as we attend our Remembrance Day ceremonies this year.

Personally, I fully support the notion that every November 11, Canadians mourn those who paid the ultimate price while serving Canada in foreign wars. However, rather than glorifying those conflicts, we should use this occasion to reflect upon the suffering and sacrifice made by those veterans.

While the guns may have gone silent in Flanders at the eleventh hour, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the truth is that this did not result in an instant euphoric homecoming for our troops.

According to the Official History of the Canadian Army, written by Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson, there were a total of thirteen instances of violent disturbances by Canadian troops in the U.K. awaiting repatriation between November 1918 and June 1919. The most serious of these was a two-day mutinous riot in Kinmel Park, Wales.

Four months after the end of the war, there were 15,000 Canadian troops still based at Kinmel Park. Due to a shortage of supply ships, they were existing on half-rations, there was no coal for their stoves to stave off the biting damp cold of a Welsh winter, they were crammed forty-two men per hut meant for only thirty and they had not been paid for over a month.

As a result of these deplorable conditions, riots broke out on March 4, 1919, and the authorities were compelled to allow the provost marshals to use lethal force in order to restore discipline.

When the dust settled, five Canadian soldiers were dead, 23 wounded and seventy-eight mutineers had been arrested. A total of twenty-five were tried and convicted of mutiny.

Then there was the little told tale of Canada’s Siberian Expeditionary Force, which first deployed to Vladivostok, Russia in August 1918.

At that juncture it was hoped that an allied-force – including 4,200 Canadians – could assist the White Russians to defeat the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War in order to bring Russia back into the war against Germany.

With Germany’s capitulation in November 1918, this exercise became nothing more than an international anti-communist intervention in Russia.

This point was not lost on two rifle companies of the 259th Battalion who were being embarked in Victoria, B.C. on December 21, 1918 enroute to Vladivostok.

The mostly French Canadian conscripts mutined in the streets of Victoria to express their extreme displeasure at being sent off to fight in a Russian Civil War.

Officers fired their pistols in the air to bring the mutineers into line and when that failed, other – still obedient - Canadian soldiers (mostly from Ontario) beat the French Canadians into submission with their canvas web belts.

Once aboard the SS Teesta and finally enroute to Vladivostok, a dozen of the Quebecois ringleaders were charged and convicted of mutiny.

These sentences were later overturned on the basis that the deployment to Russia did not meet the legal requirement under the Military Service Act of the soldiers’ conscripted service being necessary for the “defence of the realm”.

Nonetheless, a total of 17 Canadians paid the ultimate price during this failed intervention in Russia, before the last of our soldiers were repatriated in June 1919.

If more historical focus were directed at these admittedly less than glorious chapters in our history, it would be easier to understand the similar failures by current governments.

The veterans of our twelve year failed intervention in Afghanistan were not left starving and shivering in the mud of northern Wales, but they have been forced to take drastic measures to demand the resources and medical support they need in the aftermath of being deployed on a doomed expedition.

As the old saying goes, “It ain’t like the good old days – and it never was.”

ON TARGET: Canada Needs Answers About Failed Afghanistan Mission

By Scott Taylor

For some time now, I have been suggesting a full-scale parliamentary inquiry into how Canada got involved in the failed mission in Afghanistan.

The British were brave enough to conduct such a reflective exercise on their joint venture, along with the U.S., to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The British inquiry laid blame squarely on the shoulders of former Prime Minister Tony Blair for helping former U.S. President George Bush convince their respective citizens that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and they were simply invading a sovereign state as an act of self defence.

Saddam did not possess WMD’s and for the past fifteen years the Iraqi people have been subjected to an orgy of violence, anarchy and inter-factional civil strife as a result of that lie.

While no punishment or war crime charges were ever leveled against Blair or Bush, at least the Brits had the guts to probe their own guilt.

For our part, Canada spent the better part of twelve years in Afghanistan as a part of the NATO led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). By the time the first Canadian combat boots were officially on the ground in 2002, the Taliban had been declared defeated and the mission was sold to Canadians as an effort to transition and rebuild Afghanistan into a thriving democracy.

The original timeline was to have the ISAF Commanders hand off their authority to a self-sufficient Afghan security force in 2005.

By the time we withdrew the last of our soldiers in 2014, Canada had lost 158 soldiers and 7 civilians killed, over 2,000 soldiers physically wounded or injured, untold thousands more of our warriors scarred by the invisible wounds of PTSD, and at a cost to Canadian taxpayers which is expected to top $22 billion, once we factor in the long-term care and treatment of our veterans.

So how could Canadian planners have gotten things so wrong?

A partial clue to this question was revealed recently in an article published in the October 22 edition of The Hill Times. In that article, former Conservative Member of Parliament Chris Alexander bemoaned the 2011 decision by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to – in Alexander’s words – “cut and run” from the Afghanistan mission.

In his interview with Hill Times, Alexander said that Harper’s decision to withdraw our troops made him “consider resigning as Parliamentary Secretary for National Defence and even as a Member of Parliament.”

In the end, Alexander’s ambition overcame his thoughts of resignation. He towed the party line of winding down the Afghan mission during his successful re-election in 2011 and then was ultimately retired from politics by the electorate in the 2015 campaign.

However, what remains to be probed is Alexander’s utter failure to gauge the situation in Afghanistan when he served there, first as Canada’s Ambassador from 2003-2005 and then as a deputy special representative for the UN Secretary General from 2005-2009.

Those were crucial years, particularly 2005 when Ambassador Alexander helped negotiate the redeployment of our battle group from the relatively quiet Kabul sector to the insurgent hotbed of Kandahar.

Alexander was young – Canada’s youngest Ambassador ever – ambitious, and as history clearly shows, naïve and well out of his depth. During his tenure in Afghanistan in both of his official capacities, Alexander would tell any journalist who would listen that the Afghan mission was on the verge of success… one schoolhouse being built away from victory… stay the course… more money… more time… more soldier’s lives.

During a reporting trip to Kabul in 2007 Alexander told me that I had wasted my time interviewing the notorious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum because he was irrelevant in the new democratic Afghanistan. For the record, Dostum is currently still serving as that country’s Vice-President.

As for the present state of affairs in Afghanistan, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued yet another damning assessment last week. At present it is estimated that U.S. assisted Afghan security forces control just 55% of Afghanistan’s districts – that is 16% less than one year ago.

Violence levels are at the highest since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Despite spending over $1.5 million a day – every day – since 2002 to eradicate the illegal drug trade, production and sale of opium is up 400% since this effort began sixteen years ago.

Even the U.S. top Commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Miller – who narrowly avoided a brazen suicide attack last month in Kandahar – now admits there will be no military victory in this campaign.

In other words, things in Afghanistan have only gotten worse since Harper “cut and ran” in 2014. Yet Alexander still thinks we should be in that quagmire – mired in a futile intervention propping up the warlords that he himself declared irrelevant ten years ago.

Alexander’s continued failure to grasp even the basics about Afghanistan, and willingness to continue to commit resources to a failed cause is exactly why we need his role – and that of other Canadian planners at the time – to be thoroughly investigated.

Our soldiers’ valiant sacrifice in a hopeless cause deserves no less.

ON TARGET: Kill The Saudi Arms Deal

By Scott Taylor

In the bizarre world of international espionage it would seem that foreign spy agencies are more bungling than Hollywood comedy characters Austin Powers and Johnny English.

First it was the alleged Russian assassination attempt on a former double agent. According to the latest account from the UK authorities, President Vladimir Putin dispatched two of Russia’s top operatives to Salisbury, England to eliminate Sergei Skripal.

The cover story for the two Russian assassins was that they were interested in seeing some churches in this scenic town in southern England.

Rather than simply shooting or stabbing Skripal and making it appear to be a random robbery in order to deflect responsibility, the dynamic duo allegedly coated the door handle of Skripal’s house with the deadly nerve agent called Novichok. After leaving the Skripal residence, the two Russian agents went to a park several kilometers away and carelessly disposed of the remaining Novichok, which was allegedly transported in a perfume bottle.

The result of this elaborate plot was that though Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia got ill from their exposure to the deadly Novichok both of them survived.

Not so lucky was Dawn Sturgess, a lifetime drug addict who found the not-so-empty perfume bottle, exposed herself to the toxic substance, and died 8 days later.

To summarize;  the intended target survived, an innocent bystander died, and the use of Novichok directly implicates the Russian state.

Then we have the tragic death of Saudi Arabian columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of a Saudi Intelligence death squad. The storyline on this one makes the keystone cops look like an elite SWAT unit.

According to official Turkish sources a team of eighteen Saudi operatives was dispatched to the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul.

Khashoggi arrived at the consulate intending to tidy up some divorce paperwork in order to allow him to remarry. Khashoggi was filmed entering the consulate while his fiancé waited outside. When Khashoggi failed to exit the consulate, the fiancé cried foul and alarm bells started going off.

Initially the Saudis claimed that Khashoggi – a harsh critic of the Saudi regime in general, and even harsher critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in particular – had left the consulate safe and sound.

The Turks weren’t buying that line and neither was the fiancé. It was alleged that the eighteen-man death squad had included a pathologist and a body double intended to fake Khashoggi’s exit from the consulate.

There is apparently audio recordings of Khashoggi being tortured and the Turks further allege that a bone saw was used to dismember the unfortunate columnist/dissident. The remains are purportedly scattered in some woods outside the sprawling suburbs of Istanbul.

The Saudis stuck to their story – that Khashoggi walked out upright – for about two weeks. Then they suddenly admitted that the journalist in question had indeed died inside the consulate, but that it was the result of an accident following a fistfight.

To believe the new Saudi version we would need to assume that deaths from fistfights are so commonplace that Khashoggi’s incident simply slipped the minds through fourteen days of repeated questions as to his whereabouts.

“Oh, you mean that Khashoggi? Yeah well maybe he was that guy who died in a fistfight, so we cut him up and threw his remains into the forest. Now it rings a bell.”

In response to this nonsense, Canada’s Foreign Ministry has called for more answers and is demanding an investigation into Khashoggi’s death, yet no one in Trudeau’s Liberal government wants to pull the plug on an arms deal worth a reported $15 billion.

Trudeau claims that cancelling the deal would cost Canada billions of dollars and he puts blame on the previous Harper government for having signed the contract in the first place.

Canada brazenly chastises the Saudis for their human rights abuses – Khashoggi’s murder being only the latest incident in a long list that includes the Saudi military intervention in Yemen that has left some 14,000 dead and a further 3 million displaced.

The continued sale of Canadian made Light Armoured Vehicles to the Saudi regime illustrates the hypocrisy of the Trudeau government.

These are not washing machines or medical devices – they are the very means of death and oppression for which we criticize the Saudis.

The cancellation will cost us dollars and jobs – the continued sale of weapons to the Saudis costs us our international credibility and integrity.

ON TARGET: Sometimes A Son Of A Gun, Is Just A Son Of A Gun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Raziq_Achakzai

By Scott Taylor

Last Thursday there was a brazen attack in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. Provincial police chief Lt.-Gen. Abdul Raziq Achakzai and local Afghan intelligence commander Abdul Mohmin were gunned down in cold blood by a Taliban extremist.

Kandahar Gov. Zalmay Wesa was also badly wounded in the attack, and U.S. Gen. Scott Miller, the top American commander in Afghanistan, survived unscathed.

The Taliban assailant had posed as a police official in order to gain access to a top-level meeting. He was subsequently killed by actual Afghan security officers.

In the immediate wake of his killing, accolades poured in for Gen. Raziq, who was proclaimed to be a fierce anti-Taliban fighter. Most importantly, he was viewed as a loyal American ally who had single-handedly secured the volatile province of Kandahar.

“Today I lost a great friend (Lt.-Gen.) Raziq. We had served together for many years,” wrote Gen. Scott Miller. “Afghanistan lost a patriot, my condolences to the people of Afghanistan. The good he did for Afghanistan and the people of Afghanistan cannot be undone.”

Those are powerful words and one hell of an epitaph; the only problem being that none of it is true.

What part about Raziq being gunned down in broad daylight offers you the first clue that he had by no means secured Kandahar province? Hell, his own guards could not protect him from the Taliban inside the governor’s heavily protected compound.

The present levels of violence in Afghanistan are the highest they have been since the U.S. invasion in 2001 and the Taliban now control more territory than at any point since then.

While no one can dispute that Raziq ran an effective campaign against the Taliban, many human rights groups have questioned his dubious methods.

It turns out that America’s golden boy had a penchant for detaining, torturing and disappearing his enemies. He was even dubbed the “Torturer-in-Chief” by the New York based Human Rights Watch, and in 2017 the United Nations committee on torture was intent on prosecuting Raziq on charges of torture and enforced disappearances.

According to the UN, Raziq was “operating secret detention centers,” where prisoners were tortured. Then there was an incident involving the discovery of mutilated corpses linked back to individuals who had been under Raziq’s detention.

None of this should have come as any surprise to U.S. authorities, as over a decade ago when Raziq was a junior officer with the border police, he was already considered to be both brutal and corrupt. Fast forward a decade and that same brutal, corrupt officer — still only 39 — had been promoted to lieutenant-general and left to rule Kandahar with an iron fist.

According to the Human Rights Watch report, Raziq’s stock in trade methods of torture included “suffocation, crushing testicles, water forcibly pumped into the stomach and electric shocks.”

To round out his resume, Raziq was also accused of hugely profiting from the illegal drug trade. These allegations were documented by Canadian journalist Matthieu Aikins in a 2009 piece published in Harper’s Magazine, and the notion that Raziq was profiting from the opium and heroin trade was supported by then Brig.-Gen. Jonathan Vance.

At the time, Vance was NATO’s regional commander in southern Afghanistan, and he is currently Canada’s chief of defence staff.

Raziq took over his role as Kandahar’s police chief in 2011 when his predecessor — Khan Mahammad Mojayed — was killed in a suicide attack in April of that year.

That means that for more than eight months, Canadian soldiers were deployed in direct combat support of this ruthless, illiterate, drug-dealing, torturing murderer.

His death at the hands of the Taliban should not afford him some glorious legacy. He was a brutal thug, and it is too easy to shrug and simply say ‘he was a son of bitch, but he was our son of a bitch.’

We sold the Afghanistan mission as an altruistic endeavour to bring a better life to the Afghan people, not to subject them to the whims of a crazy warlord, no matter how loyal he was to the Americans.

ON TARGET: Canada’s Mission In Mali: Modern Colonialism

Canadian, Dutch and German forces exercise the aeromedical evacuation role at Camp Castor in Gao, Mali Operation PRESENCE - Mali on September 1, 2018.

By Scott Taylor

There was a news story last week about Canada’s United Nations peacekeeping mission to Mali wherein an internal UN report noted that the violence level in that war-torn African nation has actually increased since Canadian troops first deployed in August.

Now probably even the most self-delusional of Canada’s defence pundits would have realized that the comparative handful of troops and equipment that we have committed — four Chinook heavy lift helicopters, four Griffon utility helicopters and about 250 personnel — were going to tip the balance in Mali as soon as they arrived on the ground.

This flareup of violence in Mali ignited in 2012 and the UN stood up the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) in 2013. There are 56 nations contributing nearly 15,500 personnel to this peacekeeping mission, which is considered the most dangerous of all current UN operations.

Given that Canada’s military role in this complex conflict — with its core issues of dispute dating back centuries — is simply to provide medical evacuations for the UN force, means that no one should expect our contribution to affect either the tactical or strategic outlook in Mali.

What Canada’s one-year, $400 million commitment to Mali does achieve is a high profile, relatively low risk demonstration of the Trudeau Liberal government’s promise to return our nation to the good old days of peacekeeping in blue helmets, under the UN flag.

On a more practical note, it could be said that Canada has a vested interest in protecting Canadian mining assets in Mali. There are over 70 Canadian companies currently involved in extracting Malian gold, the largest of which being a firm called Iamgold.

The revenue from Mali’s gold production represents roughly eight per cent of that country’s impoverished economy. The Malian government is partnered with the international mining companies and they receive about 18 per cent of the gross revenue. When you factor in infrastructure and labour costs disbursed in Mali and the actual extraction of this valuable commodity, about 40 per cent of all revenue remains in the country. That means that 60 per cent of Mali’s gold returns, or 4.8 per cent of that nation’s GDP, flow out as profit for the international mining companies and their investors. In the case of Iamgold, its two shared mine holdings produce roughly half of all Mali’s gold annually.

Coincidently, investors in Iamgold include both of Canada’s public pension funds.

This means that essentially every Canadian will benefit from maintaining the status quo in Mali, so long as it secures these lucrative mining interests.

The idea that Canada is sucking profits out of a struggling Third World country in Africa is certainly not how this mission is being billed.

On the contrary, we are being led to believe that this is part of some altruistic effort to bring peace and stability to a poor African nation that could use a helping hand.

On the domestic front, Trudeau and the Liberals can point to the 250 blue helmets shining under the Malian sun and proclaim their 2015 election promise of a ‘return to peacekeeping’ to have been fulfilled (just in time to enter the 2019 election campaign).

Sending troops to Africa with the purpose of securing mining profits from the exploitation of the nation’s natural resource (and to shore up our government coffers in the form of public pension funds) sounds so much more like modern colonialism.

ON TARGET: Missions A Massive Waste

Gao, Mali. July 18, 2018 – Photo has been digitally altered for operational security. Members of the CH-147 Chinook medical team practice exiting the helicopter under the watchful eye of the force protection team in support of Operation PRESENCE - Mali around Gao, Mali. (Photo: MCpl Jennifer Kusche)

By Scott Taylor

The Canadian Armed Forces are currently committed and deployed on five oversees missions, none of which have a clear cut or achievable objective.

Of course, the old Cold War warhorses will claim that our battle group stationed in Latvia has been successfully deterring Russian aggression into the Baltic States. One could similarly argue that a tinfoil cap is proper protection against alien brain removal, proven by the fact that you still have your brain.

I would think that Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania’s membership in NATO, with that alliance’s pledge of collective defence, coupled with the nuclear arsenals of the U.S., U.K. and France would serve as ample deterrent to even the most ambitious of Russian dictators.

Canadian officers who have served in Latvia know that it was nothing like our decade-long experience in Afghanistan. There will be no letters to the next-of-kin to inform them of a soldier’s death in combat. If the Russians don’t attack, nobody gets killed, and if Russia does trigger nuclear conflagration with NATO in the Baltic, there will be no one left alive to write the letters.

Keeping a battalion of Canadian soldiers in Latvia is an unnecessary waste of $400 million per year, and an added strain on the family lives of those personnel deployed abroad, unaccompanied, for either six months or one year.

We also have about 200 Canadian soldiers deployed in Ukraine as trainers. This is a bit of a sticky wicket (as the cricketers say) in that Ukraine is not a NATO member. Since 2014 Ukraine has been embroiled in a simmering civil war between the Western-backed regime in Kiev and the largely ethnic Russian breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been soundly demonized for supplying military personnel, weapons and equipment to the ethnic Russian separatists. If Putin is evil for interfering militarily in a civil war in a neighbouring country in support of rebels of Russian ethnicity, how can we paint ourselves as angels for training and equipping more young Ukrainian men to kill in that same civil war?

Then we have not one, but two separate missions committed to the mess that once was the nation of Iraq.

One group of special forces operatives and helicopters remain in support of the U.S.-led alliance to defeat Daesh (aka ISIS or ISIL) while the second mission will be a Canadian-led, NATO effort to train more young Iraqi men how to kill. These Iraqis will in turn prop the corrupt regime in Baghdad.

For the record, and to silence those who prattle on about how the West is democratizing Iraq, the last round of elections failed to produce a verifiable result. A recount was ordered, but before that could happen, somehow, the warehouse containing the ballots burned down. You could not make this stuff up. As a result, the next regime will be headed up by a Shiite cleric and warlord named Muqtada Al-Sadr.

In 2004, this guy was considered public enemy No. 1 by the U.S. when he mobilized his militia to combat the American occupation.

Canada has no seat at the big boy table that will eventually seek to resolve the multifaceted conflict that engulfs Syria, Iraq and eastern Turkey. It will probably require a redrawing of existing maps and perhaps even the creation of new states, but none of that will be concluded with any Canadian say in the matter. In the meantime, we somehow justify the fact that our elite soldiers are teaching more young Iraqi men to kill more effectively.

In Mali, we can at least boast that we are under the UN banner, wearing blue berets, and using our helicopters for medical evacuation missions.

Unfortunately there is also no end game objective in Mali. Canada’s present commitment of one year will expire long before the fundamental causes of the Malian conflict have been resolved. In other words, our Canadian troops are doing a lot all around the world but achieving very little.

ON TARGET: Facing Facts in the Modern World

By Scott Taylor

It was announced last week that the Canadian Armed Forces is going to relax the ban on beards and allow soldiers, sailors and airmen to grow facial hair. Under the terms of the previous regulations, only sailors assigned to shore duty and infantrymen serving in specialized Pioneer units were allowed to sport beards.

There were also exceptions made for those whose religious faith forbids shaving, and in Afghanistan and Iraq beards were increasingly common among both Canadian Special Forces and regular troops.

Of course this being the military, there are still a number of rules defining what can and cannot be grown on one’s face.

For instance, beards need to be neatly trimmed as opposed to having a full on hipster look. The beard must also be accompanied by a moustache. It is also noted that in circumstances where personnel are required to wear either fire-fighting gear or protective gas masks, the beards must be shaved off.

All in all, it is a very minor adjustment to the existing policy, but what grabbed my attention was the official rationale for making this change. According to Chief Warrant Officer Alain Guimond, the CAF’s senior non-commissioned officer, the decision to allow beards is aimed at improving morale and attracting more recruits.

I find it difficult to believe that someone considering joining the military would be prepared to conform to the strict discipline, meet the physical challenge and be willing to die for his country, but draws the line at shaving off his beard.

It is equally hard to envision that someone who has served in the military and is now prepared to transition to a civilian life, would suddenly reverse course and stay in uniform just because they can now grow a set of whiskers.

The military began sliding down the slippery slope of relaxed standards over a decade ago when they removed even the most basic of fitness tests for new recruits. In order to not eliminate a candidate who might indeed one day make a professional service member, recruits were enrolled even though they were obese and unfit. They were put into what is essentially a weight loss program to prepare them to begin basic training when and if they can get into shape.

At the same time, the Canadian military became increasingly lax at enforcing the ‘universality of service’ requirement of a minimum level of fitness for serving personnel.

On October 29, 2016, the Washington Post ran a story entitled “The Battle of the Bulge: Many of Canada’s Troops are Fat”, in which it was reported that 49 percent of all Regular Force personnel were considered overweight and 25 percent were considered obese.

These statistics were taken from a survey conducted by the Canadian military. That survey concluded that the continued increase in obesity – 6.1 percent were considered morbidly obese – was a result of too much sitting around and bad eating habits.

In other words, the obesity in the Canadian military is something easily remedied with fitness and self-discipline – two qualities one would expect military personnel to possess in abundance.

However, instead of enforcing the policy of demanding that personnel keep themselves fit enough to be deployable – in 2016, 17.4 percent of Canada’s soldiers were unable to meet that mark – the Canadian Forces initiated a program to provide weight loss surgery to the morbidly obese. It was estimated that DND spends over $200,000 a year doing stomach-stapling operations on an average of a dozen soldiers.

There is no corresponding evidence to suggest that the relaxing of fitness standards, or the accommodation of the excessively obese has in any way led to increased recruitment or any improvement in morale.

The allowance of facial hair is a minor step, but it is a step. Now, with the legalization of marijuana, I fear that the future Canadian military will be overweight, dope-smoking hairy-faced hipsters.

For the record, I have long maintained that the Canadian military is not ‘among’ the best in the world, they are the best in the world. Let’s hope they remain an institution all Canadians can take pride in.

ON TARGET: Time To Rethink Relationship With U.S.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/27484886630

By Scott Taylor

With the U.S.-Canada NAFTA trade talks currently at an impasse, maybe it is time that we as Canadians do a little rethinking as to how we appease our major trading partner. It has long been something of a given that Canada either supports or refrains from condemning U.S. military adventures around the globe, in the belief that this will garner us favours from our giant neighbour to the south.

We may have refrained from joining President George W. Bush and his tiny ‘coalition of the willing’ when America invaded Iraq in 2003. However, once it was abundantly clear that both the U.S, and UK intelligence agencies had lied about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to justify their attack in the name of self-defence. Canada and the rest of the international community remained silent.

Our two biggest allies falsified a threat to invade a sovereign country, which subsequently was plunged into violent anarchy, which continues to this day, and we uttered not a single word of admonishment. President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair committed a blatant war crime, which given their subsequent failure to resolve the unchecked, ongoing violence continues to grow in magnitude.

As we held back from Iraq, Canada chose instead to double down on our efforts in Afghanistan. As part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) under a NATO command structure, Canada had a relatively minor role in Kabul from 2002-2004. Then we made the move south to Kandahar and increased our contingent to a full battle group.

Canadian soldiers were fighting to prop up the corrupt Afghan regime, which Americans had installed in Kabul in the misguided pursuit of democratizing Afghanistan.

During our 11-year commitment to that fool’s errand, Canada lost 158 soldiers killed, over 2,000 wounded or physically injured and an untold number of veterans still suffering from the invisible wounds of PTSD.

For the Colonel Blimps and tub thumpers in Canadian defence circles it mattered not that we had no chance to win in Afghanistan – the eventual solution will not be a military one – it was simply the notion that Canada’s brave sons and daughters were fighting the good fight and dying alongside those troops of our greatest trading partner – the U.S.

That sort of sacrifice was bound to generate good will for us at the trade negotiation table, no?

Well, now we have two separate contingents deployed into Iraq, one as part of a NATO training mission, and the other a Special Forces led initiative to fight the bad guys (whoever they may be this week).

One of the ironies of this current situation is that we have our boots on the ground in Iraq, because Canadians would not accept us sending our soldiers back into Afghanistan.

It was in fact Afghanistan that NATO wanted Canada to recommit to, but we chose instead to lead a futile mission to train yet more Iraqi young men how to kill in order to end the now fifteen year ongoing cycle of violence.

In 2003 we chose Afghanistan because it was not Iraq, and now we are choosing Iraq because it is not Afghanistan.

However, as events unfold at the NAFTA table, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is discovering that our soldiers’ sacrifice in the name of U.S.  military adventurism amounts to jack squat when it comes to trade.

Mexico has its own bilateral trade agreement with the U.S. and they sent exactly zero soldiers to either Iraq or Afghanistan. They have also steadily increased their trade with the U.S. over the past fifteen years, without spending the estimated  $20 billion that Canada will have spent on the Afghanistan mission alone, once you factor in the long-term health care costs of our veterans.

In 2015, it was China that elbowed Canada out of the pole-position as America’s number one trading partner, and they too, have committed not a single soldier to support U.S. military interventions.

As for Canada thinking we need to appease Donald Trump in his demand that NATO countries spend of 2% of their GDP on defence, let’s keep in mind that while Canada currently spends 1.32 on defence, Mexico spends only 0.7% of GDP on their military.

They have a signed trade deal. We don’t.

It is time to rethink the relationship.

ON TARGET: Cost-Cutting To Take Hold At DND

By Scott Taylor

There was a recent National Post exclusive story that revealed how the military brass had been reined in by a cost conscious senior bureaucrat. Internal DND documents forwarded to reporter David Pugliese show that the original budget for a Change of Command ceremony for the head of the RCAF was pegged at $107,000.

Deputy Minister of National Defence Jody Thomas balked at the steep price tag and told the Air Force planners to sharpen their pencils. A second proposal was submitted with a revised cost of $80,000 and once again Thomas refused to authorize such an extravagant expense.

In the end, outgoing Commander Lieutenant-General Micheal Hood passed the torch to his successor, Lieutenant-General Al Meinzinger at a more modest event which set back the public purse roughly $24,000.

Many critics still thought this to be a lot of taxpayer dollars to watch two men switch position; the fact is that commanding a branch of the Armed Forces is not the same as simply occupying a similar level executive position within the public service. Pomp and ceremony are longstanding military traditions, and they don’t come cheap. That said, I offer kudos to Deputy Minister Thomas for cutting the cost by nearly 80%.

In his news story, Pugliese also referenced a 1996 incident wherein similar sage advice about public perception of costs for parades was ignored with dire results. On that occasion it was Major-General Archibald MacInnes who was retiring and handing over command of the Land Forces Atlantic Area to Major-General Ray Crabbe.

MacInnes wanted a lavish affair complete with a mock UN observation tower and a vehicle roll past of armoured vehicles.

At that juncture the military was hard pressed financially, training funds were stretched to the point that blank ammunition was almost non-existent, and cash strapped soldiers with frozen salaries were going to food banks and taking second jobs delivering pizza.

When MacInnes’ public affairs officer Major Brett Boudreau saw that the proposed parade budget was in excess of $100,000, he warned his commander that the taxpaying public and his own soldiers would be infuriated if they learned of such extravagance.

The response from MacInnes’ Chief of Staff to Boudreau regarding his concern for the public was a crude “F*ck them!” That email exchange was subsequently forwarded via brown envelope to the office of Esprit de Corps Magazine and the following day “F*ck them” was the headline in newspapers all across Canada.

Times have therefore changed to the point where bureaucrats can now curb the brass.

However, we need only go back to 2011 to revisit an increasingly embarrassing public expenditure on a public display of martial prowess. I refer to the November 24, 2011 Victory Parade held on Parliament Hill to commemorate Canada’s leading role in the allied victory over Libya.

Canadian Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard had been commander of the allied forces, Canadian fighter jets were among the first to bomb Libya, and we were proud to boast that as a nation Canada had “punched above her weight”.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper wanted to mark this occasion with a suitable military spectacle, which included a fly-past of numerous aircraft, a detachment from the Canadian Special Operations Regiment (CSOR) and the ship’s company of HMCS Charlottetown. Essentially everyone who took part in the Libya conflict got to participate in the Victory Parade. The cost of the fly-past alone is estimated to have been $850,000. Harper’s statement that day proclaimed: “History show us this; that freedom seldom flowers in undisturbed ground. Our job in Libya has been done, and done well’”.

Unfortunately for Harper, it turns out that by deposing and murdering Libyan President           Moammar Gadhaffi, we brought anarchy and violence to Libya rather than freedom. Since we declared ‘victory’ in Libya that nation has devolved into a failed state rife with violent anarchy.

In 2012 the ‘victory’ in Libya spilled over into neighbouring Mali in the form of Tuareg separatists and al-Qaeda extremists armed from the unsecured arsenals in the wake of Gadhaffi’s death.

Canadian troops are now deployed to Mali to deal with that ongoing crisis, while no one even talks about a second intervention into Libya to restore law and order. Freedom is not flowering there, unless one considers anarchy freedom.

ON TARGET: Freedom Fighter & Terrorist All In One

Jalaluddin Haqqani

By Scott Taylor

On Tuesday, September 4, it was reported that Jalaluddin Haqqani had died in Afghanistan. His claim to fame was the founding of a militant network that is considered to be the most effective fighting element of the Taliban. Believed to be in his early 70’s, Haqqani’s passing will in no way affect the combat capability of his network, as he relinquished command of his fanatical fighters to his son Sirajuddin a decade ago.

The western media coverage of Haqqani’s death serves as a perfect example of just how delusional we are when it comes to judging how we are perceived by others, and in turn how we perceive them, when perspectives change.

As the old saying goes, one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist – in Haqqani’s case, the man was both.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, it did so at the request of the Afghan communist regime of President Mohammad Najibullah. The Soviets conscripted, trained and equipped hundreds of thousands of Afghan troops to support them in quelling an insurgency led by Islamic extremists.

A young Jalaluddin Haqqani was one of those Mujahadeen fighters and he earned a reputation for his fierce engagement of Soviet and Afghan security forces. The evil communists wanted to educate the Afghan population – including the women - build roads, hospitals etc, and Haqqani and the Islamic extremists were fighting to the death to make sure that did not happen.

Through Pakistan, the U.S. covertly armed and equipped these Afghan mujahedeen with sophisticated weaponry such as the Stinger ground-to-air anti-aircraft missiles. The U.S. even facilitated the deployment of Islamic extremist foreign fighters into Afghanistan, the most notorious of them being Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden.

As they were both fighting together in the same Jihad – Holy War, to oust the evil communists, Haqqani and bin Laden became friends.

This was the height of the Cold War and in America’s eyes, anyone inflicting damage on the Soviet Union was to be heralded as a friend. In1988, Hollywood gave us the blockbuster Rambo III in which the hero deploys to Kandahar to help locals kill evil Soviets.

The final credits in that film dedicate the movie to “The Brave Mujahadeen of Afghanistan”.

President Ronald Reagan singled out Haqqani for personal praise as a ‘freedom fighter’ and U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson, the single most influential American securing aid and weapons for the Afghan mujahedeen, called Haqqani “goodness personified”.

Then came the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.

In response to that attack against Americans by bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. The Americans were not invited in by the Taliban regime. The Taliban were instead to be toppled instead for having provided bin Laden with a safe haven. Fair enough.

Then the parameters shifted and the U.S. decided to lead an international effort to ‘rebuild’ Afghanistan into country that it never was.

The west installed a puppet regime under President Hamid Karzai which included a number of former anti-Taliban warlords.

Under the guise of propping up this corrupt cabal, the U.S. mirrored the Soviets by recruiting, training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan soldiers to help them battle a stubborn insurgency waged by those Islamic extremists still loyal to the ousted Taliban.

Haqqani and his network were the most effective unit battling the U.S. led coalition that included, of course, thousands of our very own Canadian troops.

In 2012, Haqqani was considered to be ‘public enemy number one’ and his Taliban-allied unit was responsible for killing the most NATO soldiers.

We knew from the get –go that the Karzai government was the most corrupt on the planet, but we also felt that our intentions were rooted in good. We wanted to educate the Afghan population – including women - build roads, hospitals etc.

When Haqqani fought the Soviets to prevent such progress, we hailed him as a hero; when he fought us to prevent the exact same development, we labelled him a terrorist.

Haqqani fought his entire life for freedom from foreign occupiers. He didn’t change sides, we did. We became the occupiers.

ON TARGET: Canada Remains Clueless In Iraq

By Scott Taylor

Last week, the Department of National Defence conducted a round of media interviews to introduce Major-General Dany Fortin as the new commander of a Canadian led training mission in Iraq. It was announced on July 11 following the NATO Leaders’ Summit that Canada would provide headquarters personnel, four Griffon helicopters and up to 250 soldiers to form the nucleus of a NATO training base near Baghdad.

This new contingent is in addition to the approximately 200 Special Forces operatives and four Griffon helicopters that are already deployed to Iraq. The original role for our special forces in Iraq was to train the Kurdish militia to combat Daesh (aka ISI or ISIL). However, once the last Daesh stronghold of Mosul was recaptured by the alliance last October, the Canadian trained Kurds embarrassingly began battling the Iraqi National Army.

The Kurds had always been honest about their intention of fighting for an independent Kurdistan. They wore the flag of Kurdistan on their uniforms and duped the Canadian trainers into wearing them on their uniforms too.

The Canadian military leadership was so naïve, that they allowed our soldiers to wear the symbol of Kurdistan, an unrecognized state within a federal Iraq. For the record, Global Affairs Canada has always maintained its full support for a unified Iraq under a central government in Baghdad. Oops.

Now we have Major-General Fortin displaying a similar degree of willful blindness or just plain ignorance as he prepares to assume his new role in Iraq.

In response to reporters questions Fortin expressed his confidence that somehow he and his NATO colleagues would be able to weed out any Iraqi war criminals, or factional zealots. “I think we have a pretty good vetting process in place to screen out those potential instructors to ensure we have quality people, that they – the Iraqi government feel confident with.” Fortin told the CBC’s Murray Brewster.

Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq has been awash in a complex, multi-factional civil war and insurgency. The U.S. spent more than a decade pouring billions of dollars into arming and training hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Security Forces.

In the summer of 2014 this American built force collapsed like a cheap suitcase under a gorrila’s foot the minute the Deash evildoers swarmed in from Syria.

A similar collapse of fighting-will happened in the fall of 2004 when Iraqi insurgents took control of the city of Mosul for more than three days. The U.S. paid and equipped Iraqis simply deserted their posts and handed their weapons and vehicles over to the insurgents.

In 2006, al-Qaeda extremists had seized control of Iraq’s Sunni triangle, with popular support from the marginalized Sunni Arab leaders. The so-called surge strategy employed by the Americans to oust the al-Qaeda extremists from the Sunni triangle involved cash payments and arms being given to the local tribal leaders.

With the U.S. promise that the payments and improved status would continue, the Sunni moderates forced the al-Qaeda from their midst.

Following the U.S. departure from Iraq in 2011, Shiite President Nouri al-Maliki ignored his U.S. advisors and stopped payments to the Sunni tribes. Hence, once again feeling shunned, the Sunni tribes welcomed the Daesh extremists when they arrived in 2014.

This past May, Iraq held a new round of parliamentary elections, wherein Muqtada al-Sadr’s party won the majority of the seats. Muqtada is not only a Shiite cleric; he is also a fanatical warlord.

In April 2004 he ordered his military to attack U.S. troops and for a long period of time he was considered to be America’s number one enemy. He posted billboards to taunt the U.S. soldiers featuring his image and the words – in English – “All men belong to me.” This guy is a raving nutter.

Now he is to be Iraq’s new leader, and a Canadian led NATO mission will be training troops to prop up his regime.

But don’t worry folks; Major-General Fortin is confident that this time around he will be able to tell the good guys from the bad guys in Iraq.

Note to Fortin, I cannot wish you success in your mission because you are embarked on a fool’s errand: Training more Iraqi’s to kill in the name of a corrupt regime is insane.

However, I will hope and pray for the safe return of all Canadians from this dangerous venture, one which we should never have agreed to become involved with in the first place.

ON TARGET: Fear not: Daesh is not a Threat to Canada

By Scott Taylor

Last week there was a media flurry in Canada over a new audiotape allegedly released by the sinister evildoer, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic extremist group known as Daesh (aka ISIS or ISIL).

The only reason al-Baghdadi’s comments garnered any attention in Canada was that in his latest diatribe he once again includes Canada by name in his list of potential targets.

For the fear mongers among us, this is the stuff of their wildest dreams. The Daesh leader personally calling on his ‘striking lions’ to “carry out the kind of strikes that terrorize the hearts and minds and sends the brains flying”. In particular, al-Baghdadi reminded his suicidal followers to “not ignore running over people on the roads”.

This would be scary stuff if indeed al-Baghdadi had some sort of legion of sleepers waiting to rise up and strike us down following his latest ‘call to arms’.

The fact is that no one can confirm if al-Baghdadi is even still alive. He was last seen at a public event in the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014. That was when Daesh was at its evil-doing zenith. They had captured a vast swath of Syria and Iraq and al-Baghdadi proclaimed his conquered territory to be the new caliphate.

His fanatical followers made graphic videos of Daesh beheading prisoners, setting captives on fire and driving accused heretics en masse off of tall buildings.

That was then, but a lot has changed over the past four years. Attacked relentlessly by an improbable alliance that included the U.S., Iran, Iraqi Shiite militia, Syrian forces allied to President Bashar al-Assad, Russia, Kurdish separatists and even Canada – Daesh was systematically destroyed on the battlefield.

As the end drew near, many of al-Baghdadi’s supporters began to have their doubts. It was reported that in the besieged city of Mosul, Daesh enforced loyalty by lopping off the ears of those they suspected of possible desertion.

Now that the caliphate is no more, many of those foreign volunteers who fought for Daesh and then surrendered to the allies, now want to return home. This destruction of his forces and subsequent fizzling out of his fighters’ loyalty is hardly an inspiration for these so called ‘striking lions’ to kill us here in Canada.

The fact is that despite Daesh claiming responsibility for attacks in Canada, there have not been any attacks to date.

The closest association to such incidents can be at best described as having been ‘Daesh inspired’. These both occurred in 2014. The first was on October 20 when Martin Couture-Rouleau used his vehicle to kill Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent and to injure a second soldier. Two days later, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot and killed Corporal Nathan Cirillo as he stood guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Bibeau then went on a one-man shooting spree on Parliament Hill. Both Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau were killed by security personnel. Neither of these men were actual Daesh followers, and Bibeau had a history of mental health issues and drug addiction.

More recently, Daesh claimed that the July 22 attack on Danforth Avenue was perpetrated by one of their striking lions. However, while he managed to kill two victims and wound thirteen more before being killed himself, Faisal Hussain was apparently a lapsed Muslim who did not attend prayers, let alone exhibit a tendency to Daesh-style extremism.

As for “running over people on the roads” as al-Baghdadi has urged his followers to do, one immediately thinks of that tragic van attack in Toronto last April. Ten victims were killed and sixteen injured when Alek Minassian drove a rented minivan down a crowded Yonge street in the middle of the afternoon.

Minassian was not heeding al-Baghdadi’s orders, as he is not a Muslim, he is an Armenian Orthodox Christian. His suspected motive for the attack was to start the ‘incel revolution’. The ‘incels’ are apparently those who are involuntarily celibate.

Of course nobody took Minassian’s ‘incel revolution’ to be any thing more than the ravings of a lunatic.

We should put al-Baghdadi’s warnings in the same category. Followers of Islam are not coming to get us, but there are individual whack jobs of all faiths and persuasion who can and will commit random acts of violence.

ON TARGET: Deployments Don’t Result In Public Recognition For Canadian Military

CORPORAL JEAN-ROCH CHABOT/CANADIAN ARMED FORCES

By Scott Taylor

The results of a recent survey show that the Canadian military has a serious image problem in that the majority of the population are unaware that they even exist. According to the findings of an extensive poll conducted by the Earnscliffe Strategy Group, fewer than 26 percent of Canadians felt that they had some awareness of what the Canadian Armed Forces had been doing in the previous year, while only 42 percent considered themselves to be “somewhat familiar” with Canada’s recent military activity.

An astounding 58% admitted to having little to zero knowledge of what our troops are doing around the globe, or on domestic operations. The level of ignorance was particularly high among the younger generations.

For those in uniform, these stats must come as quite a shock as just twelve short years ago the Canadian soldier was named “newsmaker of the year” by Canadian Press as the result of the almost continuous mainstream media coverage of Canada’s military intervention in Afghanistan.

Of course the Colonel Blimps, tub-thumpers and rabid warmongers out there, still lament the fact that Canada ‘cut and ran’ from the doomed NATO campaign in Afghanistan back in 2014. However, all of the recent news out of that failed state would indicate that the U.S. led forces are no closer to a victory parade a full four years after we cut our losses.

That said, the dearth of media coverage for our troops must not be blamed on a shortage of deployments. In fact, we have so many current operations that it is difficult to even keep track without a scorecard.

To wit, we already have a total of eight helicopters and 250 personnel deployed to assist the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali. The initial commitment is for twelve months, but no one in their right mind thinks that the deeply rooted conflict issues of Mali will be resolved within that limited timeframe. At present, Mali is considered the most dangerous of all UN peacekeeping missions.

Then we have our battle group, which has been based in Latvia since the summer of 2017. Originally 450 strong, that number has recently been bumped up to 540 personnel, and the commitment extended until 2023.

Ostensibly this forward presence of our combat troops - in conjunction with a number of NATO allies - is to keep Russia from invading the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia.

However, as all three of those nations are full-fledged members of the NATO alliance, and as article five of the NATO Charter assures members of a collective defence, there is no actual need for us to provide a ‘tripwire’ deterrent in Latvia. The Latvia commitment is simply adding stress through extended separation to the families of 540 soldiers – not to mention the $400 million incremental deployment cost per year that could be put to better use improving domestic infrastructure on Canadian bases.

Then there is Iraq. It was announced in July that Canada would be sending 250 personnel and four helicopters to assist in a NATO training mission, which will begin this fall and last an initial twelve months. This force will be in addition to the approximately 120 Special Forces soldiers and four helicopters already deployed to Iraq.

No one can quite explain what these elite solders are still doing in Iraq since they were originally sent in to train Kurds to fight Daesh (aka ISIS or ISIL). Once Daesh was defeated last October, the Canadian trained Kurds began fighting Iraq’s security forces. Somewhat embarrassingly, it is a unified Iraq – not an independent Kurdistan, which Canada officially supports. As for us helping to train more young Iraqis to kill, do not expect that to secure peace in Iraq by 2019.

We also have 200 trainers in Ukraine, the frigate HMCS Ville de Quebec deployed with the NATO squadron and we are sending five CF-18 fighter jets and 150 personnel to Romania as part of our overall effort to keep the big bad Russian genie in the bottle.

All told, that is a lot of forward deployed troops for the majority of the Canadian public not to be aware of. But as they say in the media business “If it bleeds, it leads” and it was the 158 dead and over 2000 wounded in Afghanistan that made our military the top topic at the water cooler.

I, for one, hope that the present trend of obscurity continues, and our soldiers remain safe.

ON TARGET: Let’s Cut Out The Hypocrisy Over Saudi Arabia And Cancel The Armoured Vehicle Deal

By Scott Taylor

There was a very disturbing news story last week about a Saudi Arabian airstrike that killed 50 civilians and injured a further 77. What was particularly upsetting about this incident was that the primary target had been a school bus and the majority of the victims were young children. The graphic photographs that appeared in media reports showed bloodied and bewildered innocent youngsters.

I have no doubt that the current diplomatic spat between Canada and Saudi Arabia helped to propel this story into the headlines of national Canadian newspapers as opposed to it being yet another global tragedy buried in the back of the World Section.

However, the killing of innocent Yemeni children in an errant airstrike is certainly a clear illustration of the hypocrisy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The initial spat with Canada began over a couple of careless tweets wherein Global Affairs Canada admonished Saudi Arabian officials for having arrested some human rights activists and then demanded the “immediate release” of these same Saudi activists.

The Saudis launched a twitter counter-attack, criticizing Canada for our “overt and blatant interference in the internal affairs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”. Then the Saudis went completely bonkers – ordering Canada’s Ambassador out of Riyadh, recalling their Ambassador to Ottawa, ordering the immediate repatriation of some 16,000 Saudi nationals, currently enrolled in Canadian universities, suspending flights to Canada by their state airline and cancelling any new trade initiatives.

Then we were presented with this grim reminder in the form of Yemeni children blasted apart by a Saudi bomb, that Saudi Arabia has no qualms about overtly and blatantly interfering in the internal affairs of foreign sovereign states.

Since March 25, 2015, the Royal Saudi Arabian air force has been waging a relentless bombing campaign in neighbouring Yemen. This air campaign is being conducted with the full support of the U.S. intelligence apparatus and a number of allied Gulf Arab States. The official line is that they are bombing the Houthi rebels in support of Yemen’s President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.

The truth is that the Houthi rebels under the leadership of Sayyid Abdul-Malik Badreddin al-Houthi and allied with supporters of a former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, defeated President Hadi’s forces in March 2015.

It was immediately after Hadi fled into exile that the Saudi air force began bombing the Houthis. In other words they are not rebels any more if they are victors.

The perpetuation of the civil war in Yemen by Saudi forces has killed an estimated 5,200 innocent civilians to date, with another 50,000 having died of starvation. It is estimated that since March 2015, over 3.1 million Yemenis have been displaced by the ongoing conflict.

Unlike a couple of impolite tweets, Saudi Arabia’s blatant and overt interference in Yemen has had a very deadly impact.

Then there was the March 2011 uprising in Bahrain by the Shiite majority, challenging the reign of the Sunni Royal family. While the U.S. was eagerly fanning the flames of the so-called Arab spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya, the Americans did not want the apple cart to be upset in Bahrain.

As a result, Saudi military forces were brought in to disperse in the Shiite demonstrators and to shore up the Bahraini monarch. Coincidentally, the U.S. 5th fleet has long been based in Bahrain, from which it can strategically dominate the Persian Gulf. But I digress.

Getting back to the Canada-Saudi dispute, one of the things Canadian pundits are feverishly speculating about is whether or not the Saudis will punish Canada further by cancelling their current purchase of an armoured vehicle fleet from General Dynamics Land Systems of London, Ontario.

The deal is reportedly worth a whopping $15 billion and creates over 7,000 high-tech jobs in southern Ontario. That deal was brokered by the Harper conservatives in 2015, and ratified by Trudeau’s liberals after they were elected in October 2015. In other words, the armoured vehicle deal was signed well after Saudi Arabia began its overt and blatant interference in Yemen.

Instead of waiting for the Saudis to drop the other shoe, we should correct our pervious hypocrisy and cancel this deal ourselves. It is embarrassing to watch Chrystia Freeland preach about defending human rights, while she simultaneously fears the cancellation of a contract to supply a repressive regime with the combat capability to commit further repression.

Cancel the Saudi deal, bite the bullet and contract General Dynamics to build a Light Armoured Vehicle fleet for the Canadian militia instead. We would keep our integrity, boost our reserve forces’ capability, save high-tech jobs, and we would please Donald Trump by increasing our defence budget.

ON TARGET: Protectors Of Canada Deserve Our Respect

photo from: http://www.vintagewings.ca/VintageNews/Stories/tabid/116/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/369/Weve-Got-You-Covered.aspx

By Scott Taylor

There is currently a debate raging throughout the British Columbia military community as to whether or not retired members of the RCMP should be entitled to special veteran vehicle licence plates.

The Royal Canadian Legion grants provincial governments the authority to use their trademark poppy symbol on licence plates to signify the driver is a veteran. By the Legion’s definition of what constitutes a ‘veteran’ that status includes those who were members of the RCMP.

Former Mounties in Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia qualify for the poppy adorned licence plates and British Colombia is currently running a public consultation on the issue. Somewhat surprisingly, the move to include the RCMP has blown up into a storm of anger amongst some military veterans groups who are vehemently opposed to the idea.

Some angry vets have threatened to turn in their own veteran licence plates rather than share the honor with the RCMP, while others have taken to social media urging a countrywide boycott of the Legion.

There is no tangible benefit to these plates other than the fact that a few communities allow free parking for the drivers on Remembrance Day. However it is a token symbol of respect for those who have served to protect Canada and Canadians.

The fact is that all military service is not created equal. For instance a part-time reservist might have completed a couple of tours in Afghanistan and been engaged in several combat firefights, whereas a 38 year regular force veteran, depending on their trade qualifications might have never deployed outside of Canada. Who decides which of the two provided a greater service to our country?

Over the past three decades, RCMP officers have been deployed on numerous UN peacekeeping missions, facing the same dangers as our troops. In the field there is always a mutual respect between soldiers and their RCMP counterparts, which is why I find it strange that some military veterans are so enraged by the licence plate issue.

Both the military and the RCMP protect the interests of Canada at home and abroad, so why not honour them both equally?

In more practical terms, we should use this opportunity to placate U.S. President Donald Trump by restructuring our national security resources. The Donald has chastised NATO in general and Canada in particular for not spending 2% of the GDP on defence. Canada currently spends approximately 1.2% of our GDP, with plans to grow that budget slowly over the next decade.

At present, we only include the money spent on the Canadian Armed Forces in our annual defence budget. With a little more creativity and imagination we should rebrand the RCMP as a national gendarmerie. The origin and traditions of the force are that of a paramilitary unit, and their current role has them in the frontline in the domestic war on terrorism.

Moving the RCMP’s $2.3 billion budget and 22,500 personnel into the ‘defence’ category would give us a substantial boost.

While we are at it, why not throw in the Canada Border Services Agency as well? They too are a vital part of Canada’s protective umbrella with a $1.2 billion budget and over 10,200 personnel in uniform.

Then there is of course the Canadian Coast Guard. This is traditionally a civilian organization in Canada, but in the U.S. it is considered to be the fourth service branch after the Navy, Army and Air force. With an operating fleet of 119 vessels, 22 helicopters and over 5,000 personnel, the Coast Guard would be another sizable boost in our ‘defence’ contribution.

Technically, the Coast Guard’s annual budget is only around $285 million, but that does not include equipment acquisitions, because unlike the defence department they do not have a separate procurement budget.

At present Seaspan shipyards in Vancouver has an order list of up to 15 new vessels for the Coast Guard ranging from offshore patrol vessels to a Polar Class Icebreaker.

Throw these shipbuilding costs into the defence budget, tally up municipal expenditures on specialized police tactical squads, and for good measure add long term health care costs for our injured veterans, and lo and behold, we are well above the Donald’s 2% goal. Without spending an additional nickel.

As for the licence plate debate, let’s rename it the ‘Protector’s of Canada plate’ and include all retired military, police, firefighters and paramedics to own one. They all deserve our respect.