Perception, Deception And The Art Of War: When wishing doesn't make it so.

(Volume 25 Issue 7)

By Col. (Ret’d) Pat Stogran

At the risk of subjecting myself to all sorts of hate mail and history lessons I am going to touch on a very sensitive issue in this article – the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I front end load this submission with a pronouncement that I consciously and deliberately try to remain neutral on the issue because people are willing to die for their beliefs, which I whole-heartedly respect, and just as willing to kill, which I respect just as much but in a different way.

On my Facebook Page I like to engage my friends and followers, those who are interested, in discussions about issues related to our national security. I try to conduct these discussions the way most military educational systems in the world as well as Ivy League Universities do.  This constructivist approach to learning employs the Socratic method whereby students are assigned topics that they are to be prepared to discuss with their peers. The professor acts as a facilitator by compelling students to challenge the evidence, assumptions and reasoning associated with the subject matter.  

The success of this method depends upon students who are highly motivated to learn and willing to engage and practice their analytical or critical thinking or problem-solving skills.  As Major General J.F.C. Fuller described the system at the British Army’s Staff College in Camberley, “We shall teach each other: first, because we have a vast amount of experience behind us, and secondly, in my opinion, it is only through free criticism of each other’s ideas that truth can be thrashed out.” This is a very useful exercise especially in these trying times with all the fake news and wild opinions that proliferate online.

Recently I was challenged on my Facebook page regarding my personal position of neutrality on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  One of my fellow Facebook learners used as evidence for his assertion the statement made by British Army Colonel Richard Kemp to the United Nations Watch organization. The Colonel is a hugely experienced war-fighter whose CV would be the envy of any committed warrior, myself included.  Colonel Kemp came out with a pretty categorical and decidedly one-sided estimate of the situation vis-à-vis who is culpable in the recent protests in Gaza that led to Israeli killing 58 protestors who had closed with the boundary fence and wounding many others.  

With all due respect to his war-fighting credentials his opinion is no more compelling than any others and most certainly does not shed any new light in terms of solid evidence that one side to that conflict are “good guys” and the other “bad”. Sure, the Palestinians were herded to the fences and stoked up to protest violently against the move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.  There remains no doubt in my mind that they did so not merely to demonstrate to international community their discontent with President Trump’s unilateral action but in order to goad Israeli Defence Forces into killing a whole bunch of their citizens so as to attract world-wide condemnation of Israel.  

But so what?  Such is war!  It was especially instructive when CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti was interviewing an Israeli Official who had justified the IDF seemingly excessive use of lethal force by describing the Palestinian intent behind the protests of discrediting Israel.  Ms. Tremonti countered by asking if the IDF didn’t play into the Palestinian plot by exercising an excessive use of force, to which the spokesperson’s reply amounted to little more than a shrug of the shoulders and the utterance of an unapologetic “Meh!?” Now before I am inundated by accusations of partiality I hasten to add that I don’t believe the Israeli reaction is any more or less reprehensible than the alleged Palestinian scheme.  

They are at war and war is hell!  Who amongst my comrades-in-arms that served in Bosnia during the gunslinging days didn’t experience civilian protests that were obviously provoked by the respective government?  In war, I am sorry to say, civilians are expendable!  Who can forget the Sarajevo market massacre?  Granted the jury may be deadlocked as to who the cruel perpetrators of that heinous act were — I am not because I was associated with the on-site investigation and witnessed the way our results were bandied about by United Nations and the international community — but I can say that both warring parties gained yardage from the atrocity.  Ceasefires that were announced with great fanfare and optimism would seldom lead to any sort of cessation of attacks on the ground, more often than not they would prove to be nothing more than a ploy by one or both sides to gain an advantage over their adversary.  In deference to the good Colonel’s experience and opinion, if I learned anything in Bosnia it was to believe none of what you read or hear and to be very careful not to read anything into what you actually see. 

In the years that followed my sabbatical in Bosnia, I set out to learn and practice critical thinking skills. I really enjoy engaging in wars of words, not just to satisfy an innate penchant for confrontation but as a means of clarifying my personal understanding. Admittedly I am characteristically impetuous, hot-headed, and outspoken when it comes to expressing my point of view, but what is not as apparent is that I constantly revise my inferences and opinions based on new evidence, incorrect assumptions I might make, or biases I harbour unconsciously or otherwise that become apparent via debate.  Like J.F.C. Fuller said discussions can be a great way to thrash out the truth.  

In consideration of what ground truth is, however, I often parrot an axiom I believe to be one of General George Patton’s: “God is truth, and don’t forget that.”  Interestingly, Mahatma Gandhi said something similar, “Truth is God.”  I interpret that to mean that Truth is so complex and nuanced that it is beyond the capacity of the human mind to actually process it.  Our perception is reality, and nowhere is perception management, or more correctly ‘perception manipulation,’ more pronounced than in war.  And in war your perception is likely to be handed back to you along with your ass after the enemy has had their way with you. 

In war, you should believe none of what you hear or see unless you can corroborate your evidence, and even then, you must be very careful of what inferences you might draw from the evidence before you act on it.  As Sun Tsu said, “All warfare is based on deception.”  It can be expected that all sides to any conflict will be actively engaged in spreading disinformation in order to lend credibility to and garner support for their cause. To confuse the issue even more, nowadays domestic politics has become so divisive and disingenuous that it is tantamount to propaganda.  I refer to my comments previously regarding our military mission In Iraq that the government, the Prime Minister himself and vehemently supported by his Chief of Defence Staff, advertised as non-combat. We all should be concerned that when the current Chief of Defence Staff was first appointed he expressed the intent to weaponize public affairs.  

The situation is complicated even more by the hawks here in Canada who want to see and even be a part of a forced solution. To my fellow warriors out there who advocate for military action of any sort, shame on you! You will have witnessed during your career the devastating effects that war has even for the victors, but more importantly shame on you for assuming that the people fighting for their lives and families would turtle up and a military engagement would be a cake walk. And for the civilians here acting like cheerleaders and want Canada to take a stand in the region, I am sure that the warring parties are recruiting! 

In this day and age of information warfare we are all combatants.  We are the targets of the fake news, domestic and foreign propaganda, and social media that turns everybody and anybody into an Andrew Coyne or Rex Murphy, whose opinions are not much more relevant than anybody else’s except they get paid for them.  It behoves us to be very careful of what we believe and more importantly what we espouse as truth. Most importantly we must be very careful of what action we take or insist our government takes based on our beliefs, otherwise our adversaries are likely to hand those perceptions they had manufactured for us back to us along with our asses.

PEACEKEEPING BY THE BOOK: Surely There Are Better Ways To Ensure Peace?

By Col. (ret’d) Pat Stogran

Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General to the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961, once said “Peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but only soldiers can do it.” That statement was considered profound back in the day but has long since lost its meaning.

Peacekeeping as it was conceived and practiced during the latter half of the 20th Century were operations conducted by conventional forces under the auspices of the United Nations; however, it was a misnomer. Peacekeeping was invariably conducted in active theatres of war where there was no peace to keep.  It was generally agreed that the situation had to be relatively stable and the warring parties, which were normally sovereign states and most often members of the UN General Assembly, had to agree to the deployment of peacekeeping forces.  Those conditions were more-or-less universally present in peacekeeping missions although the objectives, methods, and configurations varied wildly. Peacekeeping was but a label for almost any military operation conducted in a conflict area other than war.

If we take the term in its literal sense of “preserving peace”, however, it most certainly is a job for soldiers.  More than one intellectual has suggested that readiness for war is a way of preserving the peace. When Canada joined battle in the World Wars it was to re-establish the peace that had already been violated by German aggression.  Similarly, we joined the war in Korea in response to an act of aggression by Soviet-backed troops of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea when they invaded the pro-Western Republic of Korea in the south of the Korean Peninsula.  Our contribution to United States Operation ENDURING FREEDOM was also a manifestation of that ethos, in that peace was violated on 11 September. Normally as soon as peace was reestablished we would pick up our pieces and go home, except in Afghanistan we were forced out long before there was any sign of a peaceful outcome.

Our deployment to Afghanistan represented the end of the peacekeeping tradition.  Under the so-called “Bush Doctrine” the United States left the operation in Afghanistan to languish and turned its attention to invading Iraq and six other countries in the region.  The government of Canada adroitly managed to avoid participating with the initial US act of aggression in Iraq but with the operation to rid Libya of the Qaddafi regime we became full-fledged partners of the Imperial powers, at least in the eyes of the indigenous population.  The Trudeau government contributed to the combat operations but also promised to roll the clock back and re-establish the perception of Canada as a peace-loving nation, graciously offering up 600 troops to the UN to embark on a peacekeeping mission. The offer was quickly accepted, but not before stirring up the hornets’ nest of pundits and military professionals here at home who were adamant that peacekeeping missions are a thing of the past. 

It didn’t take long for the Trudeau government to realize that it may have made a misstep, that any contemporary military intervention would be exceedingly dangerous, nothing like the relatively bloodless offerings of 20th Century.  Notwithstanding, they went through the reconnaissance and consultation process but it was taking so long that it became apparent the government was dragging its feet.  Then in March 2018 they announced Canada would deploy two Chinook helicopters for airlift and four armed Griffon helicopters for escort operations to the United Nations mission in Mali.  It is expected that 200 to 250 personnel could be deployed as air crews, medical crews, support staff and, of course, special forces.  With the exception of the latter it amounts to a pretty pedestrian deployment, although the government is quick to point out they include specialist’s skills and aircraft that are key enablers and force multipliers the United Nations is in desperate need of.

The other problem with Secretary General Hammarskjold’s depiction of peacekeeping is that it is no longer a job that only soldiers can do. Civilian police have become key players for contemporary peace operations and, while I have been critical of how conventional forces have continued to fight industrial-style battles while the threat of this digital age has become more of an asymmetric global insurgency,non-government organizations have continued to develop non-violent ways of resolving conflict that are relevant in this new security environment.  General Dallaire’s initiative to eradicate the employment of child soldiers is an example of doctrines that developed and practiced by NGOs known as DDR, or Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration.  

As the threat has become increasingly non-conventional in a military sense the scope of DDR doctrines has expanded to include protocols to prevent and counter violent extremism (PVE/CVE). In Haiti the U.N. have taken the concept further with a Community Violence Reduction programme.  CVR was so successful in that theatre of operations that they have expanded it to five other peacekeeping missions in the Central African Republic (CAR), Mali, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan and Cote d’Ivoire.

On the heels of the announcement of our deployment to Mali and representing the Canadian Peacekeeping Veterans Association at the Standing Committee on National Defence for the 42nd Parliament, retired Brigadier General Gregory Mitchell — one of my warfighter role models as a young officer — stressed the importance of quality leadership at all levels of peace support operations.  He recommended Canada develop an international peace support training centre and went on to reflect on the great utility that the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, (PPC) which really resonated with me.

I was seconded briefly as the Vice President of the PPC along with a half dozen military officers just as the Canadian Armed Forces were ramping up operations in Kandahar in 2004/2005.  Working in civilian attire alongside civilians dedicated to conflict resolution operations I was impressed with the expertise within the PPC and the influence we enjoyed in the NGO community. PPC played a key role in the research and development of conflict resolution doctrine and provided a vast array of training for military and civilian audiences. Police were also an important client of the Centre because, unlike military forces who maintain a huge capacity to train and develop doctrine for themselves, few police services possess such a luxury. Unfortunately, the Harper government was determined to get rid of the Centre.  

I was so taken by the potential that PPC offered as a sort of a multidisciplinary and interagency “staff college” for the whole-of-government operations in Afghanistan and the NGO community, (who are reticent to be seen co-operating with military forces in a mission area), that I approached the then Conservative government to relay my impressions. I marched myself in to meet with then-Minister of Defence Gordon O’Connor, the Chief of Staff to Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter MacKay, Robert Fonberg in his capacity as a deputy secretary to Cabinet (Operations) at the Privy Council Office, David Mulroney who was the Deputy Minister responsible for overseeing inter-departmental coordination of all aspects of Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan, and then-Lieutenant General Walt Natynczyk who was the Vice Chief of Defence Staff at the time.  As can be expected my sales pitch fell upon deaf ears, but General Natynczyk’s response was especially disappointing. “Pat,” he said, “I can’t afford to put fuel in the bellies of our CF-18s or send ships to sea, so I can’t support keeping Pearson Peacekeeping Centre.” My aim was to help win a war, not balance a budget.

So, with the lack of innovation that seems to characterize senior management in the CAF National Defence Headquarters sought to satisfy the desire of their political masters to be seen to doing “peacekeeping” without stepping too far from their personal comfort zones.  It is ironic that they seemed to trip over themselves to mount combat operations in accordance with the Bush or Weinberger Doctrines (the latter of which I wrote about in a previous article) like their American colleagues, but incapable of designing campaigns that reflect a Canadian ethos, our place and potential as a middle power in the world.  

No doubt that our troops going over to Mali will do an outstanding job! It is just too bad they are a fire-and-forget asset dispatched by a system that cares more about managing perceptions than preserving peace. W

A DELICATE BALANCE: Knowing When To Use Tact Instead Of Bullets

A Canadian soldier receives medical attention after being injured by a mortar round in Bosnia. Casualty reports were not always made immediately public back in Canada for fear of a negative public impression as the bloody side of “peacekeeping” was not the image the government wanted to promote. (dnd photo)

(Volume 25-02)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

In my younger years as a professional soldier, I bought in to the Army position that peacekeeping was a backwater, a distraction from our heroic effort to prepare for war. Indeed, in 1994, after a year in Bosnia, I hated the term “peacekeeping.” Hitherto I had believed that so-called “peacekeeping” was a typically disingenuous initiative of our federal government to grandstand to the world our nation’s commitment to global peace and security while promoting the illusion to the People of Canada that it was a bloodless offering, that our sons and daughters were not being offered as sacrificial lambs to draw attention away from their systematic dismantling of Canada’s war fighting capability. In my estimation, having been seconded to the United Nations as an unarmed military observer in Bosnia, I had been to war!

Years later, Canada’s mission in Kandahar, Afghanistan, was reported as the first time since the Korean War that our government committed ground forces against a declared enemy. Although Canada never formally declared war, Kandahar 2002 was very much a combat mission, so much so that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), a special operating agency of the federal government, would have nothing to do with the operations, presumably because it would compromise the Agency’s legitimacy in the community of humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

I arrived in Kandahar early in January 2002, shortly after it was announced that a 3 PPCLI task force would be attached to the United States 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) to relieve the Marines who had captured the airfield. That was when I first met General Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, who at the time was their commander at the rank of Brigadier General. He greeted me saying, “Good to have your unit on board. There’s a lot of killing to be done around here.” That impressed the hell out of me. “Finally!” I thought to myself, “I’ve arrived at my calling!” Having endured a military career of bureaucratic bosses and politically correct force determinants, I thought, “The gloves are off and I am going to war!”

However, this was not going to be the kind of war that had been bubble-wrapped and marketed to us in our command and staff colleges. This operation would not be one of Patton/Rommel-style sweeps and clashes between tanks and artillery across the deserts of North Africa that I had been brought up to expect! Very early on in our mission I realized this was going to a counterinsurgency operation, something that my training had not prepared me for. That was not the only new thing I encountered in Kandahar. Fortunately, I was also introduced to Google — it is hard to believe a time ever existed when the world did not have virtually ubiquitous access to such a wealth of information and knowledge — and I spent many, many hours in my office surfing the net to learn as much as I could about relevant precedents and related doctrines for the insurgency that I expected would erupt around us in Afghanistan in 2002.

An American soldier injured during a firefight in Afghanistan is helped to safety. Although the mission to Afghanistan certainly provided, in the words of U.S. Marines commander BGen Jim Mattis, opportunities to do “a lot of killing” of the enemy in a “real” war zone. However, as Col Stogran soon realized, countering an insurgency often requires more tact than bullets.

I very soon realized that countering an insurgency was not all about killing, as Mattis had emphasized. To the contrary, in fact, it dawned on me that the essence of so-called “peacekeeping” is very similar to how conventional forces should approach counterinsurgency interventions: using force by exception and with minimal collateral damage in order to build the trust and confidence of the local population while enhancing the capacity of the host nation government to manage the crisis themselves.

Our so-called “peacekeepers” very quickly demonstrated they were going to be inordinately well suited for operations in Kandahar. Having deployed on countless peacekeeping missions, they had become accustomed to effecting a very delicate balance between being appreciated by local civilians for not disrupting their lives in the area of operations and being capable of rapidly escalating to overwhelming destructive force in the face of a developing threat, individually as we would expect of any police officer in Canada in a life-and-death scenario and, collectively, against manifestations of massed lethal force the likes of which few if any police forces could ever be expected to contend with.

It was my experience in Afghanistan that Canadian troops on their own initiative and without any support of any kind from Ottawa or NGOs participated in soccer games with the locals and “social patrols,” built schools and drilled water wells. They seemed to have a natural proclivity to contribute to the local community. My American boss, however, a veteran of several other American invasions, thought this was a strange way for a combat force to operate. He nevertheless allowed us freedom of action. We were winning the hearts and minds of our Afghan hosts, but had our troops not demonstrated that they were also world-class warriors (read, willing and able to close with and destroy the enemy at a moment’s notice), our task force would not have had any credibility with our American comrades, warlords and local authorities. It was not long before the U.S. military recognized the importance of the soft skills a military must employ to counter an insurgency so, in typical fashion, deployed a huge array of civil affairs assets to fill this cultural void in their combat units.

A couple of months ago I penned an article for Esprit de Corps (Peacekeeping: Is It Worth the Cost for Canada in the 21st Century? Volume 24 Issue 12, January 2018) that was critical of one published in the Globe and Mail by retired Canadian Lieutenant General Mike Day, which questioned whether peacekeeping, given our prime minister’s ridiculously naive intention to return to our glory days of the past, is worth the cost. I know Mike Day extremely well, enough to say that his peacekeeping experiences would have been limited to the frustrating experiences of being a member of armed contingents in Cyprus and Bosnia. In Kandahar, then-Lieutenant-Colonel Day commanded the Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) detachment whose base was just down the street from ours on the airfield. Their experience on that operation was very different from ours as they focused on strategic reconnaissance and direct action, capturing and killing bad guys. That experience set the context for his article, the bias of which stands in stark contrast to that of the very experienced peacekeeper and my former boss from Bosnia, Major (ret’d) Roy Thomas (‘Peacekeeping’ a Misnomer, Volume 25 Issue 1, February 2018).

Thomas expertly describes an array of operations conducted under the banner of peacekeeping that is so broad and convoluted that they alone render any such single, all-encompassing label virtually meaningless. Coincidentally, in his article Thomas shared the same disdain I once had for the misnomer that peacekeeping is. Notwithstanding, it’s hard to argue that the stability offered by such operations did not save many, many thousands of lives and limited the devastation that all-out combat would have inflicted. Despite the casualties that peacekeeping forces endured, peacekeeping was definitely worth the cost in those situations. I would argue the opposite in Afghanistan, however; that our extended presence, the 158 KIA (killed in action) and countless Canadian lives that were ruined for questionable results of any kind were definitely not worth the cost, and we are tripling down on that failure with our operations in Iraq today. It is clear that our military has lost its way and senior management in government lacks the tools necessary to design and execute operations that satisfy the policy objectives of the government of the People of Canada.

I believe peacekeeping has been wrongly characterized as a type of operation; it is more appropriately viewed as a strategy. Strategy, however, is an elusive concept, and although our elected officials are incessantly preoccupied by strategizing on the political front, they have been derelict in their duties by treating our military like fire-and-forget missiles, plugging them into campaigns orchestrated by the United Nations or another lead nation in a coalition. As a product of higher command and staff training in Canada, the U.S. and the United Kingdom, I found the professional development of our senior military officers as strategist to be severely lacking. On the job I was often critical of what was often referred to as strategies because, in my opinion, the strategies that I witnessed in the military amounted to nothing more than very long-term plans, often times with vague or flexible goals or objectives. Those kinds of “strategies” have their place in corporations, but they aren’t the kind of strategies that win wars.

The best definition I have come across for strategy is the art of advantage. In earlier articles I introduced the tenets of manoeuvre warfare as elements of strategy that were packaged for the mechanized warfare that has consumed our consciousness for the last century. In his classic book The Strategy of Conflict, Thomas Schelling describes strategy in the context of game theory, emphasizing the interdependence of the decisions and expectations of adversaries. The strategy of peacekeeping was based on the presumption that neutral, objective third parties to conflicts — those who pose no threat to any of the belligerent parties — could stabilize the situation and allow negotiation and mediation a better chance of resolving the conflict. Limiting the use of force mainly to incidents of self-defence or to protect non-combatants would prevent as much as possible the peacekeepers from becoming part of the problem. While we peacekeepers on the ground often felt we were victims of neglect from our strategic masters, our presence on the ground as impartial intermediaries between the combatants was supremely advantageous to their efforts to resolve crises.

I believe that our military has, to a large extent, abandoned its traditions in order to emulate the ethos of the U.S. military that was implicit in Mattis’s greeting to me in Kandahar in 2002.

I also believe that the People of Canada and their government would be far better served if senior management in government, the Canadian Armed Forces in particular, was better schooled in the ways of strategy. Next month, I intend to ‘peel that orange’ by positing how it might be possible to satisfy the prime minister’s intent to return to the ‘sunny ways of peacekeeping’ with a strategy that is more appropriate to the contemporary security environment.

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED: Canadian Government Should Not Be Complacent When It Comes To Security

The threat to governments’ and individuals’ security are expanding, with none being safe from anonymous hackers. In the 21st century, unscrupulous governments and their agencies are now seemingly recruiting such wild card militants for espionage purposes. (pixabay)

(Volume 25-01)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

This is a good era to be a militant activist. Nowadays, modern technologies have empowered independent antagonists so much that they alone can pose a real and serious threat to the security of powerful nation states. I would submit that the longer-term prognosis is more buoyant for the antagonists because they are not as constrained as their counterparts in government who are responsible for countering them are with political, bureaucratic and career imperatives. Moreover, there is mounting evidence that some unsavoury nations or agencies within seemingly legitimate governments are recruiting the assistance of these wild card militants to carry out acts of espionage.

While my heart still lies with the troops who do the hard yards in the face of the enemy overseas, since my retirement I have been much more open-minded in my outlook on contemporary conflict than I probably was while I was in uniform. This led me to the realization that social issues in Canada pose a legitimate and grossly underestimated threat to national security, which actually compelled me to act in a way I never would have imagined in my previous life as a warrior. I became involved in federal politics — briefly. I described that metamorphosis in an earlier article.

Since leaving the military, my study and commentary have focused more on contemporary forms of warfare — namely information and, as yet to a lesser degree to date, cyber warfare — than the kinetic operations that characterize industrial warfare. At the same time, our neighbours to the south began spiralling out of control in the lead-up to presidential elections with campaigns that are alleged to have been hacked and manipulated by Russia. It is apparent that the United States has been the victim of what has since been assessed as a full-on campaign of what is being called New Generation Warfare — not to be confused with Fourth Generation Warfare, which has been a recurring theme in earlier articles. As Dr. Janis Berzins describes it in Russia’s New Generation Warfare in Ukraine, (National Defense Academy of Latvia, April 2014):

“... the Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare in order to achieve superiority in troops and weapons control, morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population.”

I think here in Canada we have a great deal to be concerned about because we have not articulated any such threats to our security and I don’t believe our government has the capacity to deal with them. We need not be concerned with what we know we don’t know, such as what acts of insanity the president-elect is going to come up with and how it will impact on Canada — those we can plan for and react to subsequently before the fallout becomes insurmountable. From a national security perspective, we must be far more concerned with information that we don’t know we don’t know because, strategically, that is far more dangerous.

Clandestine operations are fundamental to New Generation Warfare. A common tactic has foreign provocateurs exploiting the individual frailties of government officials, such as addictions to sex, drugs, alcohol and gambling, greed, narcissism, poor judgement, or deviant behaviour. These personality traits in public officials make them vulnerable to coercion, and foreign agents may entice potential targets by creating situations where they might act in an inappropriate and compromising manner; these are known as “honey traps.” It appears that Vladimir Putin had been grooming Donald Trump and his associates to assume the office of the U.S. presidency for years, and pulled out all of the stops during the presidential primaries right up to the actual elections. Anybody who has worked with senior military officers in the United States and witnessed their almost pathological patriotism will know that the apparent collusion of Lieutenant General Mike Flynn with Russia is an illustration of just how effective the Russians are at New Generation Warfare.

We have heard little about foreign powers meddling in the democratic affairs of Canada, but that doesn’t mean we should be complacent about the threat. We have witnessed moments when the prime minister (PM) himself has displayed the behaviour of a senior official who could be susceptible to coercion by foreign agents. He has demonstrated a distinct tendency to be less than truthful, and committed an act that very clearly violated the law governing conflicts of interest amongst government officials. Numerous times in the House of Commons he demonstrated impetuousness that causes one to wonder about the soundness of the PM’s judgement under pressure, such as yelling obscenities when he was a backbencher and later, as PM, elbowing a female colleague on the floor of the House of Commons. These acts were so egregious that he was forced to apologize for them, publicly, afterwards. Following the passing of the communist dictator Fidel Castro, the grief he expressed was so curiously heartfelt for a representative of a Western nation that it alarmed many Canadians and observers around the world. It calls into question as to where the PM’s real loyalties might lie. These all amount to indications of personality traits that could be ripe for exploitation by foreign agents.

This in and of itself should be even more disconcerting given that the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is one of the most autocratic and unaccountable governments in the so-called free world. In a controversial article in The Washington Post entitled “Canada is not a great democracy, but do we care?” (April 2017), J.J. McCullough, a global opinions contributing writer out of Vancouver, described how the majority of the autocratic reforms that the president of Turkey imposed in the aftermath of a failed coup attempt in that country are not dissimilar to those enjoyed by the PM of Canada as a matter of course. This article contextualizes the actions of the Turkish government that, at the time, were being editorialized as dictatorial, but it also stands as an indictment of the democratic affairs of Canada.

It has long been recognized that the so-called “Official Opposition” and the Senate offer little in the form of a check or balance to the omnipotence of the PMO. In recent years we have seen how PMs will marginalize their caucus and even the majority of their cabinet members in order to force their private agenda. Even the ultimate arbiter for Canadian democracy, the Governor General, is but a paper tiger that is beholden to the PM. And when you have a finance minister who, like his boss, has demonstrated no compunction after having danced around the conflict of interest laws for his own benefit, we can only imagine how the small army to the great unwashed MPs are behaving in the wings.

On top of that, senior management has demonstrated a propensity not only to turn a blind eye to the malfeasance of their political masters, but we have also witnessed senior bureaucrats, RCMP commissioners and chiefs of defence staff actually engaging in the political rhetoric and manoeuvre of the government of the day. Some have been caught red-handed indulging in malfeasance of their own. The former government’s Integrity Commissioner, Christiane Ouimet, was forced to retire in disgrace for not investigating almost 200 whistleblower complaints as was her duty to do, and more recently Conflict of Interest Commissioner Mary Dawson levied a laughably paltry $200 fine against a multi-millionaire senior cabinet minister whose alleged indiscretions might have netted his estate small fortunes. These are but two examples of a seemingly never-ending tide of institutionalized sycophancy in the senior echelons of the public service that should lead the informed, impartial observer to realize that the potential for foreign interference in our government is significant.

Not dark and dirty enough to convince you, or too much so for you to consider it to be a legitimate Canadian narrative? I will remind you that not too long ago (2012) former Canadian naval intelligence officer Jeffrey Paul Delisle pleaded guilty to spying and selling secrets to the Russians. He was reported to be the first Canadian to be convicted of spying in decades, but that should not be construed as evidence of the Canadian government’s efficacy in counterespionage operations. Former Vice Chief of Defence Staff Vice-Admiral Mark Norman was relieved of his duties and is currently under investigation by the RCMP for allegedly leaking classified technical information related to the country’s shipbuilding program. The allegations have yet to be specified let alone proven, but the affair still lends itself to the inference that government officials in Canada are just as vulnerable to periodic lapses in judgement as anywhere else in the world.

In warfare, adages such as where there is smoke there is fire and expect the unexpected take on extra meaning. We must learn from what is happening in the United States, not only because it could happen to us but because, in Canada, we don’t have much if any of the checks and balances on the executive authority in government that the American senate, congress, and judicial system seem to be demonstrating with their president despite vigorous partisanship and obstruction.

Until next time remember … War is being waged all around us and the battle space is inside YOUR mind!

PEACEKEEPING: Is It Worth The Cost In The 21st Century For Canada?

Colonel (ret’d) Pat Stogran served on several peacekeeping and other international missions, including most recently Afghanistan (pictured). Following his retirement from the CAF, he was appointed Canada’s first Veterans Ombudsman. In addition to his column, he is also the author of Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans. (photo courtesy stephen thorne, the canadian press)

(Volume 24-12)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

I read with interest a November 13 opinion piece entitled “Is peacekeeping worth the sacrifice?” contributed to the Globe and Mail by retired Lieutenant-General D. Michael Day, former commander of Canada’s Special Operations Forces. In it he draws attention to the so-called Weinberger Doctrine, six points that United States Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger articulated in a speech in 1984.

Our Nation spends an inordinate amount of money in the military to train senior management; an amount that I would contest is too much given the lap-dog role senior serving officers seem to play to their political masters.

While the Weinberger Doctrine is certainly relevant to the Government of Canada in the context of the judicious employment of our limited military assets, it lends nothing to the deliberation of how Canada might be able to reinvigorate its celebrated tradition of what has become known as “peacekeeping.” Canadians deserve better advice from senior managers in the Canadian Armed Forces, those serving and retired.

Canada’s commitment to the concept of peacekeeping was certainly worth the sacrifice in the day. I personally served in Bosnia at the peak of the war and vacationed there subsequently and can attest to the amazing turnaround that region has experienced. The hatred and anxieties still exist amongst the general population, but they are subdued for the most part, seemingly subordinated to a genuine commitment to peace and desire to re-establish normalcy in their lives. Sadly, the government officials whom I had also come to know during the conflict and have remained embedded in the administration and bureaucracy in Sarajevo, are still rabble-rousing and fear-mongering.

I never had the opportunity or pleasure of serving in Cyprus or visiting the island as a tourist — which I did in Afghanistan as well as in Bosnia — but I know enough about the situation today in that crisis area to say categorically that the outcome was worth the cost, even though it became an albatross-like drain of capability around the neck of the Canadian Forces for decades.

In his Manoeuver Warfare Handbook, William S. Lind, one of the founders of the bodies of knowledge known as fourth-generation warfare and manoeuver warfare (these were the topics in earlier columns), asserts that to be effective in contemporary operations military forces should not only be training their officer cadres in what to think, they must be educating them in how to think. Such a rallying cry resonated in the post-Somalia race to smooth the troubled waters of that debacle, which led to the implementation of an educated officer corps in the Canadian Armed Forces.

While a compelling argument can be made for the utility of an educated officer corps, I believe that the groupthink and flawed strategy that was demonstrated by the coalition operations in the Middle East, particularly the American approach to military intervention and emphasis on kinetic operations that our forces have embraced, challenges the legitimacy of the claimed efficacy of education on the modern battlefield.

MGen Lewis MacKenzie headed the Sarajevo Sector in Yugoslavia, 1992, at the height of the Bosnian civil war. (illustration by katherine taylor)

Also, one would expect that the successful implementation of such an education initiative would have resulted in senior officers in the Canadian Armed Forces being able to offer deeper, more constructive suggestions as to how our government might be able to accomplish the intent implicit in their desire to return Canada to its Sunny Way of peacekeeping but with a concept of operations that is more apropos given the modern security environment.

So-called peacekeeping first entered the lexicon of military intervention thanks to the involvement of the United Nations in the Suez Crisis in 1956. An idea that is often attributed to Canadian diplomat and later flag-founding Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, some historians suggest that the concept was actually the brainchild of Lieutenant-General Eedson Louis Millard “Tommy” Burns, CC, DSO, OBE, MC, C.D.

As the story goes, Burns, a celebrated Canadian hero of wartime command in the Second World War, approached Pearson with an idea of how Canada might be able to spearhead an initiative that might maintain a delicate general armistice in the Middle East until a permanent solution to the crisis could be achieved. He reasoned, apparently, that during his service in WWII he came to know many of the key commanders on all sides of the conflict personally, and was confident that Canada had the respect and credibility amongst the antagonists to act as a neutral third party. His personal involvement as chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) in Palestine (1954–56) was key to the success of the armistice, albeit limited because the crisis continues to this day and there have been several outbreaks of fighting in the region in the intervening years.

Witness the alternative today, the wanton destruction of infrastructure and human misery that is manifest in the wake of Western intervention in te Middle East.

What followed were several feverish decades of successively ground-breaking peacekeeping operations. Many of them ended up being dismal and sometimes tragic failures followed by a flurry of academic and philosophical gum-sucking and naval-gazing to describe exactly what this rapidly changing phenomenon known as peacekeeping was. Military professionals and pundits were confounded by the concept, the Secretary General to the United Nations at the time — Swedish diplomat, economist, and author Dag Hammarskjöld — declaring famously that “Peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but only soldiers can do it.” One of Canada’s most famous peacekeepers, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, was dismissive of the peacekeeping role despite his career having been adorned with deployments on many such United Nations deployments, both as a member of armed contingents and as a military observer, describing it as a tedious yet necessary distraction from the military’s roll of training for and fighting wars.

In the face of this condescension and despite it, conflict morphed in lockstep with the evolutions of the industrial and digital ages. The collapse of the Cold War did not signal the end of conflict as many people prognosticated, rather, the eruption of animosity and violence that hitherto had been contained by the influence and coercion of the two superpowers of the United States of America and United Soviet Socialist Republic.

What the pundits and professionals failed to comprehend was that the rules of the game were changing. Whole-scale, unbridled, industrial-style warfare continued to have a place in contemporary conflict, but only in self-defence, and no longer were humanitarian concerns relegated to after the successful completion of military operations. Rules of engagement were introduced and strictly monitored at the highest levels to preserve the apparent neutrality of the intervening forces. The establishment of stability and the rule of law displaced the wholesale destruction of belligerent forces as the desired end-state, and the warring intent of defeating an adversary gave way to building the capacity of the host nation governments — in other words the warring parties — to re-establish normalcy.

Peacekeeping itself was a moving feast, ranging from unarmed observer missions to lightly armed monitoring forces and ultimately the combat forces that intervened in the Balkans. The entirely passive nature of early missions under Chapter Six of the UN Charter gave way to more coercive operations authorized under Chapter Seven, which included the establishment of safe areas and the robust use of force to protect non-combatants. This fuelled the rhetorical war that resulted in all sorts of peacekeeping terms being bandied about such as peacemaking, peace building, peace enforcement, peace support, and stability operations. These were all packaged nicely under the term Operations Other Than War, because the professional militaries were still ignoring reality and fixated on preparing for the Son of World War Two.

It is not to suggest that militaries were incorrect in their assertion that they had to be capable of escalating at a moment’s notice to large-scale high-intensity combat operations, but the business of conflict was clearly becoming much more sophisticated, multidisciplinary, and scrutinized affairs than ever before.

Senior management in the Canadian Armed Forces steadfastly refused to submit to an apparent attempt to dismantle the military, asserting that they would not allow the Forces to be turned into a “constabulary.” That steadfastness reassured the rank and file, but it ignored the fact that the notion of the “Three Block War” had emerged — conflict intervention operations that saw troops conducting humanitarian, stability and security, and high-intensity combat simultaneously in close proximity. Military operations were being called upon to be increasingly discriminatory and minimize collateral damage, and direct action accomplished this in ways that are more akin to raids by law enforcement agencies than attacks by conventional forces. Highly trained and agile special forces troops would become increasingly the “force of choice” for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the precision, speed, and relative anonymity their employment enjoyed compared to their conventional counterparts.

In his op-ed Day has acknowledged the Trudeau government’s desire to return Canada to the Sunny Ways of peacekeeping and the prerogative that civil authority enjoys in employing the Canadian Armed Forces. However he, like his colleagues who are still in uniform, offers nothing to the debate that reflects his education and experience in the Canadian context the way that Burns did. Weinberger’s doctrine certainly throws down a gauntlet in urging elected officials to be pragmatic and responsible in assigning missions to military components, but in a way that absolves senior management in the military of the responsibility to actually contribute critical and creative thought to propose a visionary way to continue Canada’s commitment to peace and stability given the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous security environment we are facing today.

Next month, I intend to develop that theme a little more. As usual, I look forward to comments and constructive criticism from readers. Until next time …  

WEAPONS OF MASS CONSUMPTION: The Information War Is Raging

Information warfare (IW) is described as battlespace use and management of information and communication technology in pursuit of a competitive advantage — information dominance — over others. One thing is clear: IW has become a fundamental element of the 21st century across a number of platforms — political, military, civilian. (stratign.com)

(Volume 24-11)

By Col (Ret'd) Pat Stogran

Sadly, just like my article in the last issue of EdeC, I will start off with an expression of condolence to those affected by another terrible mass shooting in the United States. My thoughts and prayers are with the casualties, families and friends of the latest tragedy in Texas.

I love the CBC! Let me qualify that. I love a lot about the CBC, particularly the documentaries. I listen to a lot of radio — The Current, Quirks and Quarks, Ideas, Day Six, The 180, and Q, just to name a few. I also listen to BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle (English) and National Public Radio out of the United States. I don’t watch much television, but when I do investigative documentary shows like the Fifth Estate are tracked closely on my radar, and Vice, Russian Television and Al Jazeera (English) are my regular channel haunts. French language television in Ontario has some tremendous documentaries and investigative news shows, and of course the Internet is replete with reputable and legitimate sources of news, although I will admit that, as a dinosaur, I am relatively inept at tracking them down. Surfing the net feels to me more like trying to catch a wave in a swamp than carving a path inside a breaker that is barrelling to the beach, so I stick to the sites that I know to be credible or are referred to me from people I trust. I subscribe to as many or more noteworthy independent new outlets on the web, like Canadaland, The Tyee, APTN, and the National Observer, to name just a few.

You may wonder why I am offering comment on my news consumption in a column that is supposed to be about war, warfare, and military theory and doctrine. Last month I talked about terrorism, emphasizing that it should be considered an act of war and not just another word for seemingly senseless violence. That article was in keeping with a theme in this column that we must be more sensitive to the revolution in military affairs, that we are in the midst of a revolution that the military-industrial complex is acutely aware of but either incapable or unwilling to deal with. My narrative has entered into a discussion of information and cyber warfare, so I think it is useful to introduce readers to the relevant battlespace. That battlespace is inside your head!

Some people have been critical of the eclectic array of news sources I follow, particularly RTV and Al Jazeera, even CBC, arguing that I am consuming propaganda. I would submit, however, that would only be the case if I was to take anything any source has to say as ground truth. Information is as much a matter of perspective as it is accuracy and honesty of the source, so it requires an iterative process with continuous feedback and course corrections on the part of the consumer to rise above raw data and information to a modicum of understanding and ultimately wisdom and sound judgement (for more on this see my column on the DIKW pyramid in Volume 24 Issue 8).

On CBC, I dismiss everything to do with politics and politicians unless there is corroborating evidence from other sources. However, I find that the vast majority of their programming, particularly on the radio, whether it is economics, culture, crime and corruption, national security, and even the arts, offers their audience tremendous insight into the changes and challenges to our society. I look to Russian Television and Al Jazeera to tell us everything that our own governments and corporate media outlets are reticent to tell us, just as I check in on MSNBC to find out what Russia is up to in their information and cyber operations against the United States. Of course, that information is revealed through criticism of their presidential incumbent and cries of foul against Vladimir Putin. I take everything I see and hear with a grain of salt, and everything that RTV says about Ukraine and the Baltic States is treated with a pound of salt.

I am always on a quest to increase my knowledge and understanding of the issues and therefore ready to modify my opinions when new evidence is presented or when someone points out flaws in my reasoning. Consequently, my opinions and inferences are as fluid and flexible as my sources might appear to be obscure or unorthodox, and often critical of and contrarian to status quo to the point of being considered by some as unreasonable. Mais, c’est la guerre!

From my interactions on social media, particularly Facebook, I like to see what issues are pertinent to my friends, fans and followers. I am grateful for the array of articles they share on various issues, some of which are hugely informative, but a great deal of which is clearly biased and of dubious credibility. The problem is that biased and incredible information is virtually an epidemic in the world today. Indeed, anybody with a smartphone and a Google account can establish a web presence that appears on the surface to be highly credible while, in reality, they are often sources of misinformation and disinformation. The former refers to information that is deemed by the originator as accurate although incorrectly so, and the latter are utterances made knowing full well they are false with the intent to deceive. I admit to having been caught sharing what amounts to “fake news” and recycling old news, but that has become part of the learning process.

A predisposition for or against certain facts or evidence makes a person vulnerable to deception, which is compounded by a propensity for people to make unreasonable inferences. For this reason I find it particularly distressing that ignorance and unreasonableness is widespread when it comes to information consumption. I don’t know how many times I have seen posts that are so biased on the surface that they are not to be believed. More often than not people allow themselves to fall victim to their own confirmation bias by ignoring data and information that might be contrary to one’s extant opinion. Indeed, the human mind has developed some complex mechanisms to protect it from information overload and cognitive dissonance — where one’s reality and behaviour differs from one’s fundamental beliefs. It takes mental discipline to make sure those defence mechanisms do not pervert our perceptions.

While the old garbage-in/garbage-out dictum applies to human decision-making, the quality and diversity on the information feeding the process is not the only critical vulnerability being exploited in information warfare.  Unreasonable, illogical thought processes are an insidious and pervasive threat. Indeed, a person should not need a PhD in philosophy to understand that false dichotomies are a type of logical fallacy, one that is at the centre of the Left Wing versus Right Wing divide upon which politics is based. Inductive reasoning abounds, whereby broad conclusions are drawn from specific observations, but it is a process that is far from infallible and much less certain than deductive reasoning. And of course non sequitur logic fallacies fuel governments’ false dichotomies of binary solutions to very complex problems. While the assertion that fighting ISIS on the ground in Iraq will prevent them from launching terror attacks might not be completely false, it is most certainly an unreasonable expectation in the face of the terror attacks that continue to plague Western democracies. When factored in with the phenomenon of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, it is no wonder that the Vulcan Star Fleet Officer Spock had such a terrible time tolerating the illogical behaviour of his human colleagues.

Another critical vulnerability that information operations seek to exploit is that of crowd behaviour and groupthink. Whether it is a price war that once pushed the per unit price of tulip bulbs to the equivalent of thousands of dollars, or the referendum that compelled the United Kingdom to exit the European Union that was then followed by a flood of enquiries on Google by Britons wondering as a consequence what they got themselves into, it is widely accepted that groups of people tend to act and react irrationally. And with the plethora of information technologies and platforms, it is increasingly easy for insurgents to set up cognition minefields and booby traps in the battlespace of our brain-boxes.

While our presumed adversaries may have had a field day with the last elections in the United States, our politicians are equally adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities in the general population that are posed by crowd behaviour and groupthink. What is alarming in this day and age is that, in order to win, politicians have progressed well beyond from simply twisting the truth to articulating planks for their platforms that are ambitious to the point of unachievable to the point of outright lying and provocative actions.

Military forces have traditionally liked to lay solitary claim to being masters of the battlefield, but I would submit that, today, there are many, many new and very powerful actors in that domain. Mainstream media has in large part been guilty of bias such that they and the digital-industrial complex have become full-fledged combatants in the information war. The U.S. government has also claimed that one of the weapons that Russia used to interfere in the last presidential election was the promotion of propaganda through social media giants within the United States. I would submit that the digital-industrial complex has become so large and adept at dragging for data and sensitive information that, collectively, they pose a critical vulnerability to the security of the United States and Canada. It seems to me that, in the U.S., a major breech of huge private databases is almost as regular an occurrence as the mass shootings of innocent civilians. However, not only do our governments seem to be reticent to regulate those multinationals in order to protect that vulnerability, but in the United States they have established a monstrously huge network of fusion centres to exploit the information themselves.

When you add to that the thousands of computer geeks, who are arguably as inept socially as they are socially conscientious and have set out to defeat government and the corporate oligarchs they perceive are subjugating and exploiting the masses, I think it is reasonable to infer that the information war is raging, and we are all the target audience for those operations.

As usual I look forward to your comments and critiques. Until next time ...

DEFINING TERRORISM: Violence In The Pursuit Of Political Aims

: A screen shot from Global News coverage following the stabbing of an Edmonton police officer. The accused, a Somali refugee, could also face terrorism-related charges after the vehicle he was driving plowed through pedestrians following a high-speed police chase. But labelling every senseless act of mass violence as “terrorism” makes it far more difficult to address the root causes.

(Volume 24-10)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

As I embark on another instalment of my EdeC column, I wish to express my sincerest condolences to all of the victims, their families and friends of the tragedies in Las Vegas and Edmonton. Although the magnitude of the horror of the latter pales in comparison to the former, they are indeed both tragedies in their own right and examples of the very worst of the human experience.

With these horrendous acts of seemingly senseless violence, governments’ knee-jerk reaction is to declare them acts of terrorism. Acts such as these do in fact strike terror into the hearts and minds of anybody and everybody who merely hears tell of them, and one can only imagine how irreparably traumatizing it is for the victims, but I submit that senior management in our society should use their discretion before defaulting to terrorism for every seemingly senseless act of mass violence. It clouds the general understanding of actual terrorism and hence makes it far more difficult to address the root causes.

The cover of the September 6, 1972 edition of The Sun newspaper. The Munich Olympics, the first time the Games were held in a German city since 1936, were marred by the assassination of 11 Israeli team members by when eight Palestinian militants on September 5, 1972. 

Formal definitions of terrorism abound, but the most relevant of these for the purpose of this discussion should reside in the Criminal Code of Canada. Section 83.01(1) (b) (i) defines terrorism as an act or omission, in or outside Canada, that is committed for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause in order to intimidate the public and compel a person, government or a domestic or an international organization to do or not do something. That, however, is such a broad all-encompassing definition that, while it may satisfy the requirement for name-calling and fear-mongering by elected officials and possibly even give cause to the law enforcement community to react in a more extreme fashion than would otherwise be considered acceptable, it could actually be counterproductive.

Importantly, the vague, even ambiguous depiction of terrorism as simply a form of mindless violence perpetrated against innocent civilians “to force someone to do something” makes it unlikely that government officials will be able to counter the proliferation of such acts. A cursory search on the Internet reveals a definition of terrorism that is, in my opinion, far more useful: that terrorism amounts to the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims (emphasis is my own). Based on my military upbringing, “terrorism” has been, since time immemorial, an act of war. Conventional armies since the beginning of time have terrorized populations in order to bring about the capitulation of their sovereign state, in the form of mass rapes and murders, public executions, destroying crops and infrastructure or poisoning wells and water supplies. Hell, accusations of terrorism have even been levelled retroactively against the Allies during the Second World War with their strategic bombing of the German population as a means of forcing the surrender of the Nazi regime.

At the same time, terrorism has been the strategy of unconventional forces pitted against the massively superior conventional forces of nation states. In his epic book Inside Terrorism (Columbia Press 2006), author Bruce Hoffman tells us that terrorism became a household term on July 22, 1968 when a Palestinian group hijacked an El Al flight en route from Rome to Tel Aviv. Subsequent to that event, alarming reports of bloody airliner hijackings and airport shootouts became all too frequent. Terrorism reached a crescendo when Palestinian gunmen launched a deadly attack against Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. As Hoffman points out, international terrorism demonstrated its utility when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was subsequently granted observer status at the United Nations and its leader at the time, Yasser Arafat, was invited to address the General Assembly. Hoffman remarks, “It is doubtful whether the P.L.O. could ever have achieved this success had it not resorted to international terrorism.’’

Readers must understand that in a terrorist attack the physical casualties are not the intended target. Terror strategists unwittingly employ manoeuvre theory by avoiding the military might of their adversaries and focusing their limited resources in order to achieve a disproportionately advantageous effect. The intent is to attack the confidence and moral resolve of the general population as the critical vulnerability of their national government. Successful attacks against soft targets make the respective government look weak, build the credibility of the terrorist organization as a capable adversary, and draw attention to their cause. Consequently, when fear and confusion erupt amongst the general population, government bears the brunt. Indeed, terrorist attacks are even more successful when a government is perceived to lose control and said fear and confusion cause the populace to break down into civil disobedience, open bigotry and reactionary violence.

On October 11, 2017, the Intercept, an online media organization committed to reporting on well-intentioned whistleblowers who otherwise might not get the coverage they merit from mainstream media outlets, reported on a would-be bomber whose plot was foiled with little fanfare in the press. Apparently on the 6th of October, officials discovered a device consisting of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives with nails and ball bearings as projectiles in the Asheville Regional Airport in North Carolina before it could be detonated. The reporter speculated that “[t]he story didn’t go viral and Trump didn’t tweet about it because the bomb was not placed by an immigrant, or a Muslim, or a Mexican. It was placed there by a good ol’ white man.” That may be so, but there are also some very good reasons not to draw attention to terrorist attempts.

Acquaintances of mine in law enforcement have told me about incidents in major Canadian urban centres whereby officials have quietly neutralized pipe-bombs before they were detonated or after they failed to detonate without alarming the public, deliberately to prevent the group suspected of being behind the plots from gaining the notoriety and reactions they were looking for. Now there is a delicate balance between depriving the public of their right to know and denying the terrorists’ intent of instilling fear within a broader target audience in order to sway public opinion or coerce their government to act.  At the very least, government officials should display calm and resolve to reassure the general population rather than raise anxieties and potentially adverse reactions by running around crying that ‘the sky is falling.’  

In 2016, Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff asserted that Canada is not “legally” at war with the Daesh (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) nor are our troops in the region engaged in combat operations. Notwithstanding that statement, the Canadian Armed Forces reported that a sniper with Canada’s elite Joint Task Force 2 in Iraq shattered the world record for the longest confirmed kill at a range of 3,540 metres, an astounding accomplishment especially in a non-combat role. The so-called jihadists have declared war on Canada and have been directly associated with acts of war—terrorism – perpetrated on Canadian soil. One has to wonder whether this is demonstrative of the government’s lack of understanding of asymmetric or irregular warfare and how to deal with it, or that elected officials are more interested in exploiting the political advantages that terrorism might offer their careers.

As usual, I look forward to hearing from readers on other ideas, points of view or constructive criticism of the thoughts I have shared here. Until next month …

MODERN MILITARY LEADERSHIP: Getting Caught In The Groupthink Trap

Poor leadership in matters dealing with ethnic, religious, and geopolitical complexities on international missions such as Bosnia led to Col Stogran’s “leadership” bubble bursting. (still from “stop genocide—bosnia and darfur”)

(Volume 24-09)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

I have spent my entire adult life trying to practice the craft of leadership. That was a formidable task for me because, in my opinion, I was blessed with few of the attributes that we have come to expect of our leaders, but I worked hard to develop them.

Then in mid-stream of my professional development as a combat leader in 1994 I had a “Come to Momma” moment in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, when the so-called leaders of the so-called international community failed big time in living up to the expectations of them by people being murdered by the hundreds in my experience in Bosnia, or by the tens, even hundreds of thousands in Rwanda that they would be protected. This caused me to rethink much of what we understand leadership to be, and who we think the “Leaders” in our society truly are. That experience caused me to separate leaders from extremely ambitious people — those who are inordinately successful in climbing to the top of the food chain in their chosen fields.

Leaders, like careerists, are normally found at or near the top of their respective organizations, like the generals and flag officers of the CAF; that, however, is where the similarities between the popular interpretation of leadership and my personal model ends. In my opinion, a leader does not need to be popular or charismatic, although he/she must have the ability to inspire others. A leader does not have to be a saint — an unreal expectation because nobody is perfect. Moreover, I believe that leadership is not necessarily transportable — a right of passage that once you have successfully “led” an organization that you become, from that time forward, known as a leader and can be expected to move to another organization and repeat the success.

As I reflected in the aftermath of having my leadership bubble burst in Bosnia, I wondered how I might have been able to admire what I perceived to be the strong leadership of general officers in the former Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, as they were leaders in murderous, despotic regimes. I reasoned that if the Nazis or Soviets had won the Second World War or the Cold War respectively, then society would have universally lauded those people as great leaders. So one of the attributes I embraced for my revised personal leadership model is that “Leaders” are winners. One cannot have a winner without competition and war is competition in the extreme, so such a canon would appear to be appropriate. And had one of those despotic regimes won, there is no doubt in my mind that we all would be celebrating those generals as great leaders. So a corollary that fell out of that theorem for me is that leaders serve a greater good. Beyond one’s personal successes, the achievements of good “Leaders” serve the welfare of the team and the fans as much as or more than they seek to satisfy their own ambitions.

At the top of his respective field, Wayne Gretzky, The Great One, should be considered the embodiment of a leader before another accomplished sports leader in the field of athletics, Ben Johnson. In the case of Gretzky, his team as a whole benefitted from his contribution on the ice and the sport as a whole benefitted greatly from Gretzky as a hockey icon. Note that this is just an analogy because it can be argued that Johnson’s accomplishments as a sprinter, despite the doping scandal, offered collateral benefits to the sport and other runners.

What makes a good leader? People have committed atrocities by “buying” what a charismatic leader sells them. Stogran posits: Had Adolf Hitler won the Second World War, would we be celebrating his despotic regime as an example of good leadership? (roger viollet collection) 

I left the Canadian Armed Forces because it was clear to me that we were going to have our asses handed to us in Kandahar. We were bound to fail there for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which was groupthink. A trued “Leader” would have thought critically, had the courage to tell the powers-that-be that we were failing, and come up with some new ideas in order to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan. American LGen Stanley A. McChrystal crossed that Rubicon in 2009, but it was too little, too late, and overshadowed by his subsequent firing for dissing his commander-in-chief. A deduction that falls from this hypothesis is that “Leaders” think differently from the rest of the crowd. A lot of very rich theory has been written in recent years about thought leaders, a term that I believe is redundant because what distinguishes “Leaders” from the mindless masses is how they think.

After I left the military I became much more eclectic in my study of leaderology, a term I embrace because leadership is such a misrepresented phenomenon. One of the first books I read was The Leaderless Revolution, by Carne Ross, a former British diplomat to Iraq who resigned over the U.S.-led invasion of that country. With his vast knowledge and experience in international affairs he examines phenomena like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring and offers the theory that modern technology has empowered ordinary people to challenge the status quo and suggests that they will be able to take power and change politics in the 21st century.

Although his premise can certainly be challenged by the brutal way tyrants have since dealt with the Arab Spring and how the Occupy movement seems to have withered on the vine, what I found compelling was that the revolutions Ross speaks about were anything but leaderless. To the contrary, in fact, I would submit that there were many, many “Leaders” in each instance. Modern technology simply harmonized the efforts of local leaders who in previous times would have fought their fight for the greater good in isolation, completely unaware that there were people leading similar local movements all over the place.

I have come to realize that activists are the real “Leaders” in our society, and that many of those people we like to characterize as leaders are nothing but the most successful conformists. War is raging in the world, and it seems to me that our so-called leadership is desperately clinging to the status quo.

Notwithstanding the industrial wars that are raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, Canadians seem to have tucked them away in their consciousness as isolated incidents that if we engage in them over there, we won’t be affected here at home. North Korea fires a couple of missiles into the ocean and it sends our populace into a tizzy about ballistic missile defence, and the military industrial complex is laughing all the way to the bank.

Meanwhile cyber wars, information wars, race wars and class wars are threatening us all in our homes while our so-called leadership seems to be as oblivious to that as the world was to gravity before Newton wondered why an apple fell to the ground. If we reverse-engineer the Trump phenomenon in the United States, we can see how Putin’s Russia seems to have been actively engaged in what has come to be known as a “hybrid war” or the Gerasimov Doctrine, named after Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov.

Russia’s engagement in the industrial wars that erupted in Ukraine and Syria, the hacking of the emails of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, the planting of fake news and commandeering of Facebook advertisements have also captured our attention of late, but I believe we are failing to see the seriousness of what we are witnessing beyond the flood of refugees across our shared border. We can be sure that Putin has been courting Trump’s ego and enticing the likes of retired U.S. Army LGen Michael Flynn to turn on his country for years now, which has thrown the United States government into a tailspin of potentially catastrophic proportions.

As sure as we can be about that, it would be irresponsible for our leaders not to assume that the Russians are capable of closing down the North American power grid at a time of crisis and flooding our corporate and social media outlets with overwhelmingly confusing propaganda and reams of private and financial information in time of crisis and prepare accordingly.

As I mentioned last month, it appears, the Canadian government is embarking on some form of offensive cyber capability, but it is too little, too late. No leadership there — totally reactive. Real leaders should be constantly looking for ways of gaining an edge over their adversaries, not seeking to explain their past failures and doing the same thing we have always been doing, just more vigorously.

As Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” In my opinion the real “Leaders” today manifest themselves in the form of the Edward Snowdons of this world and the pimply-faced nerdy computer geeks in the Anonymous-like entities on the Internet that are taking on the corporate elite on behalf of the masses. Whether or not they are actually working for a greater good or out of selfishness and are harbouring ulterior motives remains be seen, and we may never know if “they” are not the ultimate winners.

Let’s hope that happens, because until our leadership stops putting getting promoted or elected ahead of the greater good of human kind and the way we reflect that as Canadians and as a Nation, things are likely going to get a lot worse before there is any hope of them getting better.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER: War In the Information Domain Shaping Up To Become The Battlefield Of Future

(Volume 24-08)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

Last month I introduced readers to the concept of Information Operations (IO). Back when I was still serving in the military the doctrine for IO was still in development. I had embraced the concept as an operational commander, but I became a real student of the phenomenon after I retired and the world witnessed the Arab Spring.

Of course, that event preceded the emergence of ISIL and the war in Ukraine, which I believe have marked the eruption of full-scale information and cyber warfare. The latter could be considered the domain of geeks, techno-wizards and pencil-necks for the time being, but in the information war that is raging everybody is being bombarded everyday with salvoes from both sides. Over the next couple for articles I intend to unpack the concept of war in the information domain.

To comprehend IO it is useful to understand the so-called Information Hierarchy, also known as the DIKW pyramid. The hierarchy begins with data at the bottom of the pyramid, with information at the next level, knowledge above that, and topped off with wisdom (see diagram above). Like other doctrine that emanates from sound, sophisticated theory generated from a few enlightened intellects in the military but fails to take hold with the great unwashed, reams have been written on the significance of this model and the four components. I believe it is best understood by comparing the DIKW to what is known as the Johnson Criteria that are used to describe the ability of observers to perform visual tasks using image intensifier technology: detection, recognition, and identification.

Adapted from U.S. Army FM 34-130 Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield. The enemy’s doctrinal template applied to a terrain analysis to identify battalion-size Mobility Corridors and deduce a regimental Avenue of Approach in order to predict where High Value Targets and High Payoff Targets might concentrate during the battle.

In the physical domain, detection means being able to separate a target from the background noise to ascertain its presence. With greater resolution an observer can recognize what the target is, but more yet is required to identify whether the target is friend or foe. In this example, let’s say the target is a tank. Very little granularity is required to detect the presence of any tank-like object. Greater resolution is required to enable the observer to recognize the object as a tank, not just an automobile or truck. The observer requires even more detail about the object to identify it as either an M1 Abrams or Russian T-90 tank. At that point the observer requires even more information to decide what to do about the object, but a different sort of information such as rules of engagement, opening fire policies or the like.

On operations a unit or formation collects a massive amount of data on their environment in terms of terrain, weather, infrastructure, people and activities. This data requires processing to separate what is operationally relevant from the background ambient noise. Analysts will contextualize data, juxtaposing and comparing it with data from other sources, known as data fusion, in order to recognize its relevance vis-à-vis military operations. Hence data is transformed into information, and with further contextualizing in terms of intent and purpose — what the enemy might want to do and why — the information becomes useful knowledge to friendly forces. The Collins dictionary defines wisdom as “the ability or result of an ability to think and act utilizing knowledge, understanding, common sense and insight.” In the military, such “wise” decision-making requires thoroughly contextualized and holistic information to enable commanders to prosecute the enemy in accordance with their higher commander’s intent and for the desired effect, which is the essence of so-called military intelligence.

I believe there was a distinct lack of understanding of the difference between information and intelligence. That is borne out, in my opinion, in the use of the term “actionable intelligence” because I was brought up in the military to believe that all “intelligence” is “actionable,” that being the discriminating factor between information and intelligence. Intelligence is intuitive knowledge, information that has been collected, collated, and analyzed to assign relevance to the current operation before it is disseminated for subsequent actions.

This information hierarchy is reflected in the Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) process that we were taught in the bad ole days of the Cold War. It was a highly structured process that was well suited for the regimented mechanized and armoured forces of the Soviet Union that we were squared off against. Given a mission, the staff would consider the enemy’s doctrine and intentions in the context of the area of operations. Starting with a map that was annotated as Go, Slow-go and No-go areas for mechanized vehicles, staff would lay a template of the enemy’s deployment doctrine and norms depicting groupings, formations, vehicles and weapon systems, distances, and ranges and fit them to the terrain to depict pictorially the likely courses of action for the enemy to manoeuvre their forces on the ground. Targets that could appear on the battlefield were identified in advance. Those that had the potential of seriously degrading the enemy’s capabilities were designated High Value Targets and those that could be decisive in the friendly force’s mission were designated High Payoff Targets (HPTs) and formed the basis of the commander’s Priority Intelligence Requirements, or PIRs.

The planning staff would then create an Information Collection Plan, or ICP, and assign surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (STAR) assets to cover the avenues of approach and mobility corridors identified in the templating process. As a young officer in training our instructors would correct us for wrongly referring to ICPs as Intelligence Collection Plans, although I see increased use of the term today. Notwithstanding, these plans apportion STAR assets to collect data and information that is referred to as “indictors” to build the intelligence picture. When I was the Task Force Commander in Kandahar in 2002 one of my mantras was “Intelligence that is not actionable is not intelligence, it’s news.”

Back in the 20th century, when the world was gripped with a potential industrial war of fire and manoeuvre, the IPB as a rote process was highly useful and intelligence was understood to be actionable. In this day and age of fourth generation warfare, the IPB process is by necessity far less mechanical and much, much more cerebral. Due to the clandestine nature of warfare, the mobility of the antagonists and the abundance of vulnerable potential targets, it is much, much harder for security forces to generate the intelligence required to acquire and engage high value targets, such as the masterminds behind terrorist attacks or bomb-makers, but virtually impossible to interdict the designated perpetrators once they are vectoring in to attack their intended victims. In this kind of war HPTs, individual targets that might be the linchpins of defeating terrorist movements, arguably do not even exist.

Today, information is indeed a weapon, and the misinformation and disinformation promulgated and passed on by our adversaries and their allies pose a real and present danger to us. At the same time, however, I submit that in this Information Age we are in greater danger from the harmful information generated by our own government, harmful information in terms of images and narratives conveyed by our military operations abroad, the reactions of bigots and belligerents at home in reaction to the perceived threat, and the propaganda generated by self-serving politicians hoping to capitalize on the fears and apprehensions of mainstream Canadians that actually fuel our enemies’ antagonism towards us.

More on that in upcoming columns. As per usual, I eagerly solicit your comments on my column, and offer a copy of my book Rude Awakening: The Government of Canada’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans to readers whose comments fuel discussion in upcoming issues.

TRAINING TO MEET THE CYBER THREAT: We Are Going To Do Great If The Next Conflict Is Simply A Repeat Of The Second World War

 Cyber warfare is fast becoming popular with smaller nations that cannot match the weaponry and force of larger powers. By attacking military and civilian systems, smaller nations have the potential to bring world powers to their knees. The 2010 Stuxnet malicious computer worm that targeted Iran’s nuclear program was the opening salvo and the proverbial tip of iceberg in cyber warfare. (istockphoto.com)

(VOLUME 24-7)

By Col (ret'd) Pat Stogran

The headlines read Canada is going to develop an offensive capability in cyber warfare. For the most part the message was well received by the general public, but for one Armchair Colonel, washed-up warfighter and student of strategy that I am, it confirmed for me the reason I decided my shelf-life in uniform had expired back in 2007 and the inferences that I have been drawing from the unclassified open sources that I am privy to now as a civilian: Canada’s strategy to defeat extremist Islam is either fundamentally flawed or simply non-existent.

Granted, our government does have a National Cyber Security Strategy, created under the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, but not only is that document so passive and reactive to the threat that it can be dismissed as mere window dressing. We should not have much confidence that our government is effecting that strategy any more coherently, as flawed as it is, than they did their Canada First Defence Strategy that was in place while our defence forces were consumed fully with operations in the Middle East.

Back in the good ole days when I was still serving, we used to talk about the profound effect that the emerging technologies of the Information Age were going to have on the way we fought wars. At the time, military theorists were prognosticating that the technological revolution was going to be an impetus for a whole new form of warfare, a sort of global insurgency. Some of the bolder predictions suggested would make conventional warfare obsolete. The intellectually agile doctrinal grey beards in the military were quick to seize on this concept, coining it the “asymmetric threat,” and developed an impressive and pretty comprehensive body of dogma regarding the emerging security environment that they bubble-wrapped and delivered to the trigger pullers.

Operators embraced this theory as a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), but sadly missed the mark in terms of what all this groundbreaking theory meant. Operationally, the focus of effort was on the exploitation of digital technologies, seemingly on precision-guided munitions of hugely devastating potential to be delivered with virtual millimetric accuracy as to destroy pinpoint and moving targets on the other side of the globe. Senior management in the military saw this RMA as a force multiplier that would allow us to disperse our assets over huge swaths of territory in order to enhance their survivability on this “modern battlefield” while concentrating their fires at key times and places to destroy the enemy’s armoured forces before they could figure out what was happening. In other words, the military community was exploiting information technology in order to be the deadliest damn force on the Industrial Age battlefield. If we had to fight World War II over or intervene in Bosnia again, we were going to kick some serious ass.

At the same time, however, a concept called Information Operations (IO) was also being promulgated by doctrine gurus. The United States Army Field Manual 3-13 Information Operations defines it as “the integrated employment, during military operations, of information-related capabilities [IRCs] in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision-making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.” (A breakdown of those IRCs — which amount to a revision of operational functions and concepts that, for the most part, were already resident in military operations — can be found in the sidebar on page 27.) IO consolidated and enshrined them to their rightful context vis-à-vis the physical destruction caused by the combat power that military formations generate by either kinetic attack — the transmission of energy to destroy targets through explosive means or high-velocity projectiles — or non-kinetic attack, such as chemical, electromagnetic, acoustic or light energy, or radiation.

While the profoundness of the RMA was clearly apparent in the devastating effect that information technology had on kinetic operations, I would submit that the importance and hence the full potential of IO doctrine has yet to be realized in theory and in practice.

The military is notorious for pumping out new and plagiarized doctrine as vigorously as putrid water out of the bilges of Canada’s aging warships, but on the ground continues to conduct operations the way it always has, except for the more colourful lexicon. I think there are two reasons why this happens. First, the concepts can become so esoteric and philosophical that they have little relevance for the warfighter. Secondly, if new and emerging doctrine does not take hold within the force, the answer often seems to be to write more rather than write more clearly.

One can see both of these phenomena manifested in the development and application of IO doctrine. Since the turn of the century, IO has been a growth industry for doctrine writers. IO has morphed between one of capturing the philosophies behind and practices associated with the non-physical aspects of combat operations to being subjected to the mission-creep of institutionalizing an entirely new domain the military was referring to as Information ‘and Influence’ Operations. Thankfully, in the latest iteration of Field Manual 13-3 the U.S. Army has dropped the reference to “influence” operations from its title. My reason for this should be readily apparent to regular readers of my column in Esprit de Corps. The whole raison d’être of military forces and their operations is to influence the behaviour of antagonists. As such, physical and information operations in the military should at once be viewed as a continuum of coercion that the military brings to the diplomatic, economic and informational efforts being applied by the government at the national strategic level.

In the meantime, a full-fledged Information War is being waged around the world and our government is only just realizing that Canada requires a full-fledged offensive cyber capability. For some, the Stuxnet viral cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear capability was, for all intents and purposes, an opening salvo of this information war in cyberspace, but we can be very sure that affair was but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Russian cyber attacks that have caused damage to infrastructure and the power grid in Ukraine, fake news, malware detected in a New England power station, the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails: these are all indications of a war that is raging every bit as vigorously in the informational domain as the physical one that is out of control in the Middle East.

In upcoming articles I intend to unpack the theory of Information Operations with a view to discussing how it might lend itself to mitigating the threats as they exist today for Canadians and the Canadian way of life. As usual, I look forward to comments and criticisms from readers to help me with my analysis, and offer a copy of my book Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans to anybody who’s contribution makes its way into my column. Until next month ...

DEFEATING ISIL: We Will Need More Than Just Hammers In The Toolbox

Law enforcement officials made a big deal of gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s relatively recent conversion to Islam, jihadi ravings and desire to go to Syria but downplayed the fact he was a homeless cocaine addict with a history of erratic behaviour who acted alone in his murder of Corporal Nathan Cirillo and subsequent rampage in Parliament’s Centre Block.

(Volume 24-06)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

“A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries — admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness — want to follow it. In this sense, it is also important to set the agenda and attract others in world politics, and not only to force them to change by threatening military force or economic sanctions. This soft power — getting others to want the outcomes that you want — co-opts people rather than coerces them.”

~ Joseph Nye, “Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics”

Thus far in these series of articles, I have proposed what the strategic objectives are specifically for Canada’s engagement in coalition operations in the Middle East today. These include keeping Canadians safe at home and abroad, being seen by our friends and allies to be contributing to a common cause, and satisfying our nation’s moral responsibility to protect people in peril. We have discussed the three levels of military operations, the planning process, and the concept of Centres of Gravity (CofG) and the consideration of war on the moral as well as the physical planes. Also, I introduced readers to a method of CofG analysis proposed by Dr. Strange of the United States Marine Corps War College that, I believe, will lend itself to understanding how Canada should be mobilizing all of the instruments of national power.

Readers are directed to the Letter to the Editor from Joe Fernandez (see page 7), who frequently offers me insightful comments on my columns, for an excellent summary of how the CofG, Critical Requirements, Critical Capabilities and Critical Vulnerabilities framework proposed by Dr. Strange can be applied to our involvement in the Middle East today. Coincidentally, an understanding of Dr. Strange’s framework in the moral domain should enlighten readers on why I dipped my toes into the putrid waters of politics. Let me explain.

At the risk of being overly simplistic, I suggest there are basically three ways to mitigate the risk associated with a threat such as ISIL. The default method for the vast majority of people is to use the military and police. This amounts to preventative or pre-emptive operations directed at eliminating the physical manifestation of the threat. Another method is damage control, given a successful attack against Canadians and Canadian interests.

The aim of terrorism is not as much in the physical domain of killing people, but in the moral domain of injuring the hearts and minds of the general population. ISIL’s ability to recruit miscreants and deviants to attack innocent civilians gives ISIL huge legitimacy in the eyes of their followers and makes sovereign governments look weak or incompetent in the eyes of their own citizens. Importantly, the terror it generates creates civil unrest, hatred and bigotry, reactions that are excessive given the relatively minor risk that the vast majority of the civil population is actually exposed to by these sporadic attacks. This is exactly what the enemy hopes to achieve in such attacks. Such over-reactive and belligerent behaviour fuels the enemy’s cause and ability to rally support, especially in this information age and when it is viewed in the context of the collateral damage that is being inflicted on innocent people in the Middle East.

When the only tools in the box are hammers — police services and military forces — then problems take on the appearance of nails to be driven out of existence. To the uninitiated, killing ISIL and their terrorist elements offers citizens instant gratification and the common misperception of the risk having been mitigated. Politicians are quite happy to exploit those spurious outcomes for their short-term survival or to bolster their prospects of unseating the incumbent government.

We saw former Prime Minister Stephen Harper actually stoking the fire with his very public and inappropriate locker room talk of killing people, choosing sides in the Middle East conflict, and the fear-mongering of warning Canadians that his opponent and, ultimately, his successor was unfit to deal with the extant threat.

Former Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Bob Paulson joined in the fear-mongering with his assertions only days after Michael Zehaf-Bibeau’s murder of Corporal Nathan Cirillo and subsequent failed attempt on the prime minister and his caucus that it was a jihadi attack.

At the same time, it is lost on the People of Canada that our political system has long since abandoned its responsibilities that are uniquely theirs to mitigate the risk to Canadians by the likes of ISIL, whether it be hazard avoidance, or taking actions to disrupt the ability of the threat to project its power. This is what Mr. Fernandez summarizes so eloquently in his Letter to the Editor.

The black market and illicit drug and arms trades are the nexus between crime and terrorism, and they are not impeded by borders or national boundaries. International terrorism is linked symbiotically to transnational crime by the huge amount of money that the latter activity can bring to the former, which in turn is founded in and fuelled by domestic crime.

It is well established that criminal activity at home can be traced to the social ills that our nation is experiencing. These include a mental health epidemic that successive governments pay but lip service to, precarious work, chronic unemployment, growing wealth disparity and poverty, and a host of other social injustices. Addressing such issues constitutes hazard avoidance, the third method of dealing with if not defeating terrorism against Canada and Canadians. Indeed, criminal acts must be dealt with through law enforcement, the judiciary and corrections, but hazard avoidance and damage control remain very much the purview of other government departments, and especially our elected officials.

Mental health care, education, social programmes in arts, athleticism and for general wellbeing, and a vibrant economy, especially as they affect our youth, would make it more difficult for organizations such as ISIL to gain a foothold in Canada. Moreover, leadership by example — by actually endeavouring to live up to the myth of a kinder, gentler Canada that is trying to correct the gross injustices of our colonialist past and distancing ourselves from the imperialist legacy and lingering ambitions of some of our allies — would go a long way to dislocating the CofGs of groups such as ISIL.

Most importantly, we should not allow ourselves to be deluded by our political masters into thinking that these very complex issues have binary solutions that can form the foundation of one political party or the other. When you hear debates in the House of Commons about how our soldiers are conducting their business in some shit-hole in the world, send the members of Parliament an email and tell them to spend more time worrying about doing their own jobs. The government can start by articulating clearly what the strategic goals are for our interventions and assigning operational objectives to ALL of the instruments of national power — diplomatic, military, economic, social and cultural — that are specific, measurable, realistic, achievable, and timely. These are no more silver bullet solutions than pre-emptive and preventative military operations and law enforcement, but they are vital components of a multi-dimensional risk mitigation strategy that our government so desperately lacks.

That was my principle motivation for joining the leadership race for a left-wing political entity, one that requires significant re-engineering if Canadians will ever consider it fit to form government. Unfortunately I failed, but I am not out of the fight. The problem remains with our dysfunctional government. The so-called failure of our “whole-of-government” effort in Afghanistan demonstrated just how incompetent the whole of our government really is.

My book Rude Awakening is but one of the whistleblower texts that give Canadians a snapshot of how bad the system is. We have all heard the horror stories of the suicides and murders committed by injured and abandoned veterans of military service; it is only a matter of time before the seriousness of such incidents intensify in terms of frequency and magnitude. Another book I would recommend strongly is Shiv Chopra’s Corrupt to the Core to get a feeling for just how ready, willing and able our government is to harm Canadians. One more book that Canadians should well consider as fundamental to understanding the importance of resolving social issues here in Canada is that of former Queen’s professor Dr. Douglas Bland. In Time Bomb, Bland discusses the national security implications of the severely dysfunctional relationship between Canada and the First Nations. While these in and of themselves do not offer any silver bullet solutions to any of the problems, they certainly underline the importance of fair, effective government in maintaining the security of Canadians.

As usual, I look forward to hearing from readers on issues related to national security and the management of conflict in the 21st century. I will send a copy of my book Rude Awakening: Canada’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans to any submissions that I can use in upcoming articles.

FOCUS OF EFFORTS: The Importance Of A Force's Centre Of Gravity When Formulating A Campaign Plan

 This graphic provides a general idea of how a Centre of Gravity (CofG) can be disrupted by concentrating combat power against Critical Vulnerabilities (CVs). (pat stogran)

(Volume 24-05)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

In my last article (in Volume 24 Issue 3, April 2017), I discussed the concept of Clauswitzian “Centres of Gravity” (CofGs) in the campaign design process. While I did not offer a strict definition per se, I pointed out that the commonly held interpretation is that of the aspect of a force, organization, group or state’s capability from which it draws its strength, freedom of action, cohesion or will to fight. I argued that the relevance of the concept is not so much in its precise definition, but rather how it fuels the creative process of campaign design, a highly subjective process that I believe is the essence of command genius.

Numerous methods have been proposed of analysing CofGs in campaign design, but Dr. Joe Strange, a professor with the United States Marine Corps War College, offered a theoretical framework that I think is very instructive. Dr. Strange argues that CofGs are dynamic, positive, active “agents” in the physical and moral domains that our enemies can use to their distinct advantage in bringing harm to us. In the physical domains these agents are things like groups, military formations or individuals. In the moral domain they may be less tangible, but they should be, nonetheless, readily discernible given a deep enough understanding of the threat.

And while Dr. Strange agrees that it is useful to consider CofGs at the strategic, operational and tactical levels as a means of dividing and defining a continuum of warfare, he adds that it is wrong to limit the number of CofGs at any level, to expect that a CofG conceived at one level could not be manifest at another, or to think that CofGs might not be subject to change.

This is where Dr. Strange’s CofG analysis protocol becomes really useful, in my opinion. Clearly, the reason why CofGs are relevant is because of the threat they pose to us. How those threats manifest themselves physically, how the enemy can attack us, is what Dr. Strange refers to as Critical Capabilities (CCs). Theoretically, the difference between a CofG and CCs is that the former would be described as a noun, and the latter as a verb. Any given CofG will most likely have several of these CCs. In turn, each CC requires certain conditions in order to be effective, which Dr. Strange labelled appropriately enough as Critical Requirements (CRs). He defined CRs as conditions, resources and means, and would normally be described with the use of a noun. After all that analysis is done, the planners identify Critical Vulnerabilities (CVs) or CRs that, if decisive actions are taken against them, would serve to defeat or neutralize the enemy’s CofG.

Dr. Strange posits that there are three principal ways of defeating or neutralizing a CofG: make it irrelevant, strip it of the support it needs to be successful, or exploit its systemic weaknesses. In my opinion, this is the essence of manoeuvre warfare (MW) theory. The strategy of making CofGs irrelevant is often called dislocation.

In the theory, there are two types of dislocation: positional and technical, which are best illustrated by a physical CofG at the operational/tactical level. Let’s assume that a commander determines that the enemy’s CofG is an armoured formation being held in reserve. Dislocating it “positionally” would be achieved by causing the enemy commander to deploy the reserve prematurely to an area that would prevent it from interfering with the friendly force’s main effort. Dislocating it “technically” could be achieved by electronic warfare at a crucial time to prevent it from being launched at the key moment.

Another manoeuvre technique is disruption: the attack of CVs where a friendly force can generate overwhelming superiority to strip certain CRs from the enemy’s CofG. On the ground, this could be interpreted as destroying soft targets such as the fuels supplies, stripping it of supporting fires, direct action against command nodes, or other ways of breaking up the cohesion of its battlefield operating systems rather than engaging in a battle of attrition against the armoured reserve force itself.

War is about time and space, and imposing delay on the armoured reserve can be just as effective at neutralizing a CofG as destroying it, albeit not as permanent, but less dangerous and costly. Scatterable mines, destroying bridges and setting up ambushes along counterattack routes to delay the ability of the armoured reserves to interfere with our intended main effort may be all that is required in order to be decisive.

The entrance to an abandoned Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team camp in Kandahar, left to go to ruin after NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. (scott taylor)

Two other manoeuvre techniques are deception and simultaneity. Sun Tzu said that all war is deception. What you can see can certainly hurt you, but what you don’t see can certainly hurt you more. Simultaneity is a label for the proverbial “horns of a dilemma,” or several dilemmas. The aim is to prevent the enemy from timely action, reaction or counteraction by fooling them into making a wrong decision of when or where to deploy their CofG, or overwhelming their decision cycle and impeding their ability to make the decision to launch at the right time.

Dr. Strange has reverse-engineered several historical battles to illustrate his theory, which is very compelling, but a little too simplistic. In theory, Dr. Strange’s methodology breaks down into a simple flow chart (see diagram on previous page). In practice, however, it ends up being a tangled, complicated web — a system or systems with lots of overlap, nuance and contradiction. Consequently, the analysis can be so convoluted and time-consuming that it takes on a life of its own and becomes of limited use on the ground in the face of the enemy. The problem becomes, however, how to engineer them in the first instance in the face of a living, breathing, proactive and evolving enemy.

And then, on top of the complexity of manoeuvring combat elements in the battle-space you must mobilize the other instruments of power such as diplomacy and economic, social and cultural leverage. It was hard enough for us to coordinate a whole-of-government effort in Afghanistan; the problem becomes much more acute when a campaign becomes multinational, interdisciplinary, interagency — government and non-governmental — and even inter-faith. These complications, particularly that last element alone, might make it impossible for us to ever come up with a coherent campaign plan to keep Canadians safe at home and abroad, not to mention bringing peace and stability to the region.

Importantly, with all the ulterior motives that exist and manoeuvre techniques being employed by the bad guys and certain coalition partners and allies in the region, is it possible that Canada may be aggravating our security situation by being an unwitting contributor to those less-than-apparent agendas?

As usual, I look forward to hearing from Esprit de Corps readers, and will send out a copy of my book Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War against Canada’s Veterans to the person that contributes a comment, critique or idea that I can use in an upcoming article.

FOCUS OF EFFORT: The Importance Of A Force's Centre Of Gravity When Formulating A Campaign Plan

Prior to his loss at the Battle of Waterloo in July 1815, Napoleon had been successful in shattering his enemies’ moral cohesion. (william sadler ii)

(Volume 24-03)

By Colonel (re'd) Pat Stogran

In my last article I talked about Manoeuvre Warfare (MW) as espoused by the former professor of the Marine Corps University, William Lind. I contrasted strategies based on manoeuvre to that of attrition, a “grinding” approach to battle aimed at wearing down the enemy’s combat power, a graphic example of which resides in the suicidal charges over the parapets that characterized World War One. To gain a better understanding of the art of manoeuvre, in this article I will pull apart one of the three “filters” Lind suggests defines MW, the theory of the “focus of efforts.”

The focus-of-effort filter, as Lind calls it, has been manifest in German military doctrine as schwerepunkt, which literally translates as centre of gravity (CofG). In his magnum opus On War, the famed military theorist and Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz referred to the CofG on the battlefield many times with varying degrees of detail and nuance. He stated that a CofG is the point where enemy forces are concentrated most densely and where a deft attack would lead to the defeat of the enemy. Clausewitz advocated striking the enemy’s CofG with one’s own CofG, so it is understandable if some readers see that as the antithesis of the other MW filter Lind postulates of “surfaces and gaps.”

Many academics have made a career interpreting what Clausewitz really meant by the term and many a staff college paper picked up on the rhetoric. The debate was wide ranging. On one side it was argued that the CofG should be considered the aspect of a force, organization, group or state’s capability from which it draws its strength, freedom of action, cohesion or will to fight. Manoeuvrists, eager to conform to their core beliefs and the surfaces-and-gaps filter, stretched the interpretation of Clausewitz’s meaning as a critical vulnerability that, if attacked effectively, would lead to the defeat of the enemy.

Clausewitz also described the CofG in terms of cohesion, and asserted that in war moral elements are among the most important. Napoleon too is often quoted as having said that “the moral is to the physical as three to one.” Therefore, we must be careful not to restrict our understanding of Clausewitz’s definition of the CofG to the physical domain.

In Clausewitz’s time, commanders-in-chief such as Napoleon achieved concentration of force by the concentration of men due to the exceedingly short range of the weapons of the day. Consequently, there would have been less of an operational level of war separating the strategic and tactical, and the bonds of physical and moral cohesion were much, much shorter and interdependent in those days than they are today. This would have limited the options to break them in battle, and would naturally lead even the most gifted intellectual to the erroneous conclusion that Napoleon’s success was founded more on attrition than manoeuvre.

I believe that there is a very good reason for the manoeuvre warrior to remain faithful to Clausewitz’s expression of the CofG as strength rather than construe it as vulnerability. If I use the metaphor of a sport like hockey, before a game it is a useful exercise to consider the strengths that both teams bring to the ice, not only the opponent’s. By considering relative strengths in terms of capabilities and absences thereof, a team can make a game plan to focus on opportunities that might arise from an overmatch in one’s favour or to exploit weaknesses identified in the opponents. Conversely, a team can create a strategy to mitigate the threat posed by mismatches of capabilities that favour the opponent.

The exact definition of CofG that consumed manoeuvre pundits therefore is not as important as how the relative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are considered in the formulation of a campaign plan. This, of course, is a highly subjective process, but I submit it is the essence of what is known in the military profession as command genius and should be fundamental consideration in military estimates for campaign design as I described in earlier articles.

Napoleon was inordinately successful at shattering the moral cohesion of his enemies and imposing his will upon them by orchestrating a clash of CofGs; however, when you enjoy an overmatch in combat capability relative to the enemy, a strategy based on pitting strength against strength can be an approach that even the most devout Manoeuvre Warrior would be inclined to adopt.

A clash of CofGs worked a century and a half later in Gulf War One when coalition forces slammed headlong into the Iraqi Republican Guard. The vastly superior combat power of the former based on the presence and capabilities of American forces virtually annihilated Iraqi cohesion at every level. Coalition Commanding General “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf was acclaimed as somewhat of a manoeuvre god for the way the ground forces under his command ultimately joined battle with Iraqi forces. A strategy based on brute force and ignorance is often easier to effect than one of manoeuvre which is why, I believe, it is often the default setting in a commander in chief’s battle scheme. In the absence of a distinct overmatch, however, a strategy based on attrition can be doomed to be defeated.

CofGs can and should be derived at every level of war: tactical, operational, and strategic. In an engagement at the tactical level it is often pretty simple to determine the enemy’s CofG. It manifests itself physically such as a machine gun pit or a mobile reserve that the friendly force commander must deal with, not only in order to accomplish the mission but to survive. CofGs at higher tactical, operational and strategic levels of war can be more esoteric or obtuse. In the majority of the staff college exercises I participated on the CofG at the national level invariably was narrowed down to the will of the people. As a clash of wills, our notional campaigns would often boil down to breaking the will of the enemy while preserving that of Canadians.

I believe that in Kandahar, Afghanistan, senior management in the Canadian Armed forces relegated the concept of CofG to the realms of rhetoric and proved themselves incapable of realizing its relevance in the defeat of the enemy. In 2006, journalist Adam Day of Legion Magazine interviewed the deputy commander of the Canadian task force who, in describing Canada’s plan for the campaign, said, “The will of the Canadian people is our centre of gravity. So, define centre of gravity as our strength. If our strength fails, we lose.”

Day says he found this amazing, so he asked the Colonel Fred Lewis, “How does a military force bolster or maintain the will of the Canadian people?”

Lewis’s reply was equally amazingly. “Yeah, you know, that’s the 64-million-dollar question. It is a hard thing to do.”

It goes without saying that Canadians were hugely behind our intervention in Afghanistan and there was no need to bolster their will — in the beginning. It was painfully obvious to me, however, that the spillage of Canadian blood was going to weaken Canada’s CofG in the war against the insurgents, and that the logical deduction in the military estimate should have been that force protection was of paramount concern. The main reason I chose to leave the military and become the Veterans Ombudsman was that we had defaulted to a flawed scheme of manoeuvre, and that, sooner rather than later, Canadians were going to get sick and tired of the number of casualties we were enduring. Needless to say, our resolve disintegrated and our government abandoned the people of Afghanistan.

If Canada ever hopes to accomplish anything of any significance by our intervention in the Middle East other than bragging rights for having been there, then I submit that manoeuvre theory is relevant. As such, a thorough CofG analysis is warranted and worth re-evaluating on a regular basis as a campaign unfolds.

So the question of the month for my readers is: What do you think the CofG might be for the Canadian Armed Forces in Iraq today, the physical and moral sources of our cohesion in our war against ISIL that afford us our freedom of action and fuel our will to fight? What are the possible CofGs of ISIL?

Next month I intend to delve a little deeper into the analysis of CofGs with a view to discussing how it lends itself to the application of manoeuvre warfare theory in campaign design. As usual, the reader who offers me the most insightful thoughts or ideas will receive a free copy of my book Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans. Until next time.

MANOEUVRE WARFARE: Applying the basics to Canada's current role in Iraq

 (Volume 24-01)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

Regular readers of “The Armchair Colonel” will recall I offered a definition of military operational strategy (“the art of advantage”) and last month I introduced the concept of manoeuvre warfare (MW), which I intend to expand on to use as a construct to consider coalition operations in the Middle East.

Manoeuvre in the context of strategy means the adroit and clever management of affairs in order to shatter the moral cohesion (in the psychological not the ethical sense of the word) of an enemy rather than the detailed destruction of their physical capabilities.

Before I can delve into some of the tenets and techniques in the application of MW as it might pertain to Canada’s involvement in Iraq today, I will have a look at the fundamental mechanisms of the concept.

For a very brief period of time, back in 2006 when I was uniform, I was seconded to the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre (PPC). It was my first occasion to work for a senior public servant, as the president was an ex-director general from RCMP headquarters. It was the second most frustrating job in my life, next to being the Veterans Ombudsman. One of the responsibilities assigned to me, a “gruntasaurus-rex” incognito as a civilian executive, was the formulation of a business development plan. I really seized on the task as an opportunity to learn a little something about management at senior levels in the business world. I interviewed all the employees and met with clients, management consultants and professors at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University, and reoriented my private study from warfare to business systems.

After extensive research and consideration, I identified niche markets and capabilities, systems and an organizational structure that, I thought, would wean the Centre off the teat of government handouts, which we had been warned were going to be terminated. The president didn’t like the outcome of my study, discarding my draft report out of hand, and took grave exception to my assessment that the projects the Centre were pursuing was “busy work” and would do little to make the PPC financially independent of government. Professionally, I ended up following in the footsteps of the other dinosaurs, as that was also the first of two times in my life that I was fired, the other one being the ombudsman job.

I guess the PPC never did find a niche that would sustain it without government funding, as it ended up closing down operations. That’s what busy work does. It keeps the troops busy but contributes little to winning the war. In the private sector, war is a metaphor for the bottom line; but it isn’t in the military where busy work costs lives. That is not to suggest that lives are not lost and ruined by military operations that are based on carefully calculated effects-focused effort, but the latter approach to business stands a much better chance of achieving a substantive and enduring operational end-state. MW is what I consider to be the antithesis of busy work, fighting for fighting sake alone, which is why I very quickly became a disciple.

In the Maneuver Warfare Handbook, William Lind suggests there are three “filters” that are fundamental to the manoeuvre approach: mission-type orders, the focus of effort, and surfaces-and-gaps. Let me approach these in reverse order. Surfaces-and-gaps (SG) is a label for exploiting enemy vulnerabilities rather than engaging where they are strong. Back in my mechanized operations days, SG was achieved simply by pinning down pockets of opposition and bypassing them to attack the enemy in depth. Such shock action was a key ingredient for the early and spectacular successes of the German blitzkrieg in the Second World War. The application of surface-and-gaps on the mechanized battlefield is the very manifestation of Sun Tzu’s warning not to besiege walled cities. If Sun Tzu’s principle of avoiding what is strong and striking what is weak could stand the test of time and be relevant in Industrial Age warfare, how can it not be now in the global insurgency we are facing in fourth generation warfare?

Another MW filter is the focus of efforts: an interpretation of the Schwerpunkt of German Army doctrine of focusing combat power on key enemy vulnerabilities in order to be decisive, and the practical application of the principles of war of concentration of force and economy of effort. In MW terms, the concept is represented as the point of main effort (ME) and supporting efforts (SE). The aim is to concentrate combat power against high value targets (HVT) and high payoff targets (HPT). In manoeuvre warfare, HVTs are objectives that can be expected to seriously degrade the enemy’s capability to interfere with our operations; HPTs are objectives that will contribute significantly to the success of our operations.

Operations are often broken down into phases in order to concentrate sufficient combat power sequentially against HPTs identified in the planning. Such efforts are nested hierarchically, in that the ME of a subordinate unit should be a SE to the higher formation’s ME. In my instructor days at the Land Warfare Centre in Australia, I used to assert that combat power not apportioned to a main or supporting effort is often wasted effort.

Lind’s third filter, mission-type orders (MTO), is a protocol for tasking subordinates that seeks to optimize the quality of decision-making in terms of timeliness and impact. It compels superior commanders to articulate what the goal of their mission is in terms of what they want to have happen to the enemy and how that contributes to the higher formations plan, as well as to identify what I call the “defeat mechanism” (Volume 23 Issue 9). A fundamental rule of MTOs is that higher commanders must inform their subordinate commanders what they are expected to achieve and why, but not how they should do it. This is a very important feature of MW.

Another renowned manoeuvre theorist, Richard Simpkin, in his epic Race to the Swift: Thoughts on 21st Century Warfare, coined the term “directive control” to describe this filter of Lind’s. The idea is that operations should be launched with a minimum of instruction, in what he considers more characteristic of military “directives” than the level of detail that is normally included in operations orders. In doing so there will undoubtedly be gaps in the master plan, so subordinate commanders are expected to use their intellect and initiative in order to fill those in “on the march.” This requires well-trained, confident and empowered subordinate commanders. In my opinion, controlling operations by timely directives rather than time-consuming, detailed orders is the essence of a leadership-biased organization.

Thus far I have been considering MW at the tactical level, by interpreting MEs, SEs, HVTs and HPTs in terms of combat power. Strategically, one must consider the instruments of national power; namely diplomacy, information, economics, and defence. Clearly, analyzing the battlefield in terms of the MW filters is a complex process, and more of an art than science. At the strategic level it is even more difficult because the environment is often much more ambiguous and vague. For that reason the commander-in-chief must remain flexible, another principle of war, and reassign main and supporting efforts as the operational situation develops. MW doctrine fosters agility, the capability of an organization to act and react very quickly in order to, once again, keep focused on the defeat of the enemy.

At this point in my columns you have been introduced to many of the tools that would help us to assess the intervention in the Middle East critically and objectively. No doubt everyone is well aware of Canada’s military involvement in Iraq. Would you consider military operations to be our main or supporting effort in the defeat of Daesh and ISIL? What would you consider the coalition’s main and supporting efforts? What is the defeat mechanism sought to eradicate the threat of radical Islamic criminals? How well do you think we are doing?

I look forward to hearing your opinions on this issue and each month I offer a copy of my book, Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans, to the contribution that I find most thought-provoking.

MANOEUVRE WARFARE: Using clever and unexpected tactics to defeat an enemy by attacking their weaknesses

These are the actual check lists Colonel Pat Stogran used as a platoon and company commander to launch attacks. He offers them as an example of the templated tactics the Canadian Army used to exercise ad nauseam, which he submits is of limited utility against a thinking, manoeuvring enemy. (pat stogran)

(Volume 23-12)

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

When I approached Scott Taylor with a proposal to produce “The Armchair Colonel” as a monthly column, my intention was to introduce readers to military doctrine with a view to considering, critically and objectively, the efficacy of Canada’s intervention today in the Middle East. To date we have discussed numerous concepts, from the military planning process to the powers that perceptions have in conflict. The discussion in these articles is cumulative, so for those readers who would like to get caught up on my previous submissions can have a look at them at www.espritdecorps.ca/the-armchair-colonel/

I first read William Lind’s Maneuver Warfare Handbook when I joined 1 PPCLI as a rifle company commander in 1990. It was a revelation to me as a warrior. Up to that point in my career, strategy and tactics as taught and practiced in the Canadian Army were very prescribed and predictable, so much so that we would train day in and day out, night and day, conducting operations using checklists! Consequently, our tactics, as an Army, were constipated (see my reflections of a German Colonel who faced Canadians in Italy in WWII in Volume 23, Issue 10). Sure, we considered the lay of the land in our plans, but from my very first experiences as a platoon commander using first generation laser engagement simulators on our small arms, I knew something was missing. Years before, the first time one of my platoon attacks was assessed not by an instructor or senior officer for my adherence to fundamentals and principles but from the directed fire of a living, thinking enemy force inflicting simulated casualties on my assault force and firebase, I realized there was something more to combat than skills, drills, and procedures. There was an element of the cunning or guile of the commander in the creative application of tactics that had long since been squeezed out of our doctrine and training.

As I understand it, the United States Marine Corps was first to embrace the concept of “manoeuvre warfare.” As such, it was not meant to be synonymous with movement, although the skilful movement of mechanized forces was fundamental in the application of the doctrine back in the day. The word manoeuvre was used more in the sense of the other definition offered in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, that being the “adroit and clever management of a airs often using trickery and deception.” The intent of manoeuvre warfare is to effect defeat by repeatedly attacking weaknesses rather than strengths in order to shatter the enemy’s moral cohesion (in the psychological not the ethical sense of the word), not the detailed destruction of their physical capabilities. The antithesis of manoeuvre warfare is referred to as “attritional warfare.” According the USMC FMFM 1 Warfighting, the attritionist “seeks battle under any and all conditions, pitting strength against strength to exact the greatest toll from his enemy.” This brings to mind Field Marshall Haig’s “brilliant strategy” of pouring troops frontally over the parapets in the First World War in order to exhaust Germany’s ability to generate soldiers and materiel to fight. I use a bit of artistic licence in that historical metaphor in order to reinforce the fundamental difference between manoeuvre and attrition as strategies.

The martial art of judo is often used to illustrate the theory of manoeuvre. In a judo match, the skilful competitor exploits opportunities presented by the opponent’s shifts in balance or commitment to a particular technique in order to use the opponent’s own weight and strength against them. I don’t like that analogy because, as “the gentle art,” judo lends the impression that successful manoeuvre is a bloodless endeavour. Physical destruction remains an important ingredient of manoeuvre warfare, calling for close combat with the enemy but at a time, place and level of intensity of our choosing. For that reason, when I was attached to the Australian Army’s Land Warfare Centre I preferred to hold up Muhammed Ali’s “Thrilla’ in Manila” to illustrate true manoeuvre. Muhammed Ali won that fight on the moral plane, so to speak, through the use of his self-described “rope-a-dope” strategy.

An attritionist strategy à la WWI would have seen Ali standing toe to toe in the centre of the ring, trading punch for punch with the brutally powerful George Foreman. I also submit that had Ali “floated like a butterfly” as he was apt to do, it would also have been a battle of attrition. That was exactly the strategy George Foreman was anticipating, so he undoubtedly had prepared to deal with it. He didn’t expect Ali to lay up against the ropes; indeed, nobody did! Angelo Dundee and Bundini Brown in Ali’s corner were pleading with him to get off the ropes. However Ali, the superior manoeuvre pugilist, won that fight inside the head of his opponent. Yes, he took a beating — that is unavoidable in the ring just as it is in battle — but compare the outcome of that fight to the war of attrition that was waged in the three superfights between Ali and the powerful Joe Frazier. Ali came out ahead in their third and final match, but he was hospitalized with serious trauma injuries and, I seem to recall, was of a mind to give up boxing due to the beating he had endured at the hands of Smokin’ Joe. It had been a gamble to lure Foreman into “punching himself out,” but Ali’s Fingerspitzengefühl — a German term literally meaning finger tips feeling in the sense of intuitive flair or instinct that is highly relevant in manoeuvre warfare — made the day.

So-called “manoeuvre warfare” as a concept compared to “attrition warfare” was clever packaging that operationalized B.H. Liddell Hart’s strategy of the indirect approach and Sun Tzu’s acme of generalship. It was born of an era of Industrial Age mechanized warfare fever, though, and so it seems to have been abandoned as we transitioned against the new foe posed by a global insurgency. Granted, the physical manifestation of the tenets of manoeuvre back in the day was in terms of adroit and clever manipulation of armoured and mechanized assets to defeat a similar threat, but I would submit that the tenets and intent of manoeuvre, the clash of wills in both the psychological and physical domains in order to shatter the enemy’s moral cohesion, still apply today against an “asymmetric threat.”

Another marketing label, asymmetry describes the transnational criminals and international terrorists who have been empowered by the modern technologies we are facing today. As the Information Age threat has morphed into a form that could, to some degree, negate the distinct advantage that industrialized nations have in large scale, synchronized WWII-style warfare, it means that the tenets of manoeuvre must be applied in a different way. But, as USMC Colonel (ret’d) John C. Studt quotes B.H. Liddell Hart in the forward to the Maneuver Handbook, “The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.”

In future articles I intend to delve into the tenets of manoeuvre with a view to contextualizing them in terms of the 21st century threat that we are facing in the Middle East and around the world today. Until then, I invite readers to share your thoughts with me. Unlike the military, where the best course of action is always the one proposed by the senior rank present, in “The Armchair Colonel” I am open to all sorts of ideas and any kind to comments.

Based on the description that I have offered herein, do you think our nation is engaged in a campaign of manoeuvre or one of attrition? The person who offers the most thought provoking commentary will receive a complimentary copy of my book Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans

RESIDENT PERCEPTIONS: Why being cognizant of resident perceptions in a conflict is key for third parties

By Pat Stogran

Last month I introduced some of my ideas about strategy in the context of combat and war versus how the term might apply in the business world. I embrace the definition of strategy as the art of advantage. In the business world, a strategy, I submit, engages the skills of an organization and is dependent on good fortune in accomplishing simultaneous and/or successive objectives that are often mutually dependent. While such applies to military organizations also, strategy in the context of conflict hinges on interdependent antagonistic decision-making. In other words, in combat a commander’s strategy seeks to optimize the quality of one’s decisions in terms of timeliness and impact while denying or degrading the same capability of the enemy.

A very important axiom in the theory of strategy in war is that what you don’t know can and probably will hurt you. Sun Tzu introduces a useful concept to characterize that axiom in what has been translated as “orthodox” and “extraordinary” forces. I use the term “force” in the a philosophical sense as in the “power of persuasion,” although there often must be a physical component to that philosophical force in order to achieve the desired effect.

Sun Tzu tells us that the general should seek to “engage” the enemy with the “orthodox force,” which is what the enemy would expect to be engaged by, and inflict defeat upon the enemy via the unexpected extraordinary force. In the example I gave last month of the strategy I employed in training at the tactical level, the fire support base for my platoon attack became the orthodox force, while my assault force infiltrating onto the enemy’s position was the extraordinary force. My enemies were effectively “defeated” the moment they were convinced that my fire support base was my main effort and focused their combat power against it. That opened the door, so to speak, for my assault force to gain lodgment on the objective virtually unopposed.

In war, like so many other aspects of life, perceptions are reality, and the masterful general will seek to shape the enemy’s perceptions, which can only be accomplished when the general truly understands the enemy. I was recently contacted by an irate reader who objected to me referencing a State of Palestine in my discussion a couple of months ago on the Balfour Agreement and the expressed intention of the British to establish the State of Israel. Indeed, the United Nations did not exist back in the day to offer any formal recognition of the sovereignty of the region, and the imperialist powers were busy hacking up and apportioning statehood to the various areas despite the ethnic, tribal and religious divisions that already existed in the region with self-serving glee. So I was in fact incorrect to refer to the Palestinian homeland as a state.

Truth be told, as I write this I am hesitant to refer to the region as the Palestinian homeland for fear of causing further angst amongst readers because I am not familiar with the migrations that have taken place over the preceding millennia. And please don’t interpret that as trivializing the issue. When I was a United Nations military observer during the war in Bosnia I heard the territorial disputes between the warring parties going back hundreds of years when they were contextualizing some of the aggression that they committed against one another. I think that my personal feelings reflect those of many if not most Canadians. My relatives emigrated from Ukraine to create a better life for their family. Although I am proud of my Ukrainian heritage and concerned about the crisis today in that country, I share my grandparents’ commitment to the future of my children. Notwithstanding, I learned to treat the opinions and perceptions of the warring parties with sincere deference.

With the irritated reader I acknowledged how I had erred regarding Palestinian statehood at the turn of the last century, but blew it off as inconsequential to the point I had tried to make. The reader would have none of it and demanded that I make a disclaimer to that effect in my column. I was not surprised by the reaction and saw it as an opportunity to learn, so I sent the reader a list of questions regarding the situation in the Middle East. I learned a lot in the email exchange that ensued. Part of that learning process was to pose the same questions to a Palestinian gentleman I had met following a presentation I once made at the University of Ottawa. Needless to say, the opinions this gentleman offered in response to my questions were different from those I received from my disgruntled reader.

I did not seek to confirm this juxtaposition of interpretation in order to draw my own conclusion, but rather to highlight another gravely important consideration that must be made before attempting to intervene in a regional conflict: Warring parties are very clearly entrenched in their own interpretation of the roots of their conflict; indeed, they are prepared to die for it! Hence, any foreign third party to a regional conflict had better be fully cognizant and respectful of the resident perceptions in order to avoid becoming part of the problem.

There are so many competing ambitions and intentions in the region that I am loath to open that Pandora’s Box. I am not sure the average Canadian has ever taken stock of the complexity of the situation we have thrown our troops in to combat ISIL so I will open that box but a sliver, but I am quick to remind readers that I am not passing judgement in any way, shape or form. Clearly Israel’s right to exist is a point of contention in the region — enough said about that. Then there are the other sovereign states in the immediate conflict area and the deadly grudges they hold against one another or the detentes and alliances they embrace. Of course, we are all well aware of the religious rivalries between the Shia and Sunni, Muslims and indigenous Christians, and between the various sects of their respective militias.

On top of that there are the ambitions and interests of the superpowers — U.S., Russia, China. Clearly Russia has a key concern that their superpower rivals do not, in that this conflict is virtually on its front porch. Sandwiched between Russia and the conflict area is the Caucasus, where ISIL is allegedly fueling an insurgency, particularly in the north. And then, of course, Armenians hold a particular grudge against Turkey, not to mention Azerbaijan, who in turn is in a conflict with the Kurds with whom Canadian troops are fighting ISIL. Saudi Arabia and Iran are avowed enemies, and their client militias — considered by some as terrorist organizations — further complicate the crisis, not to mention the various rebel groups, some of which have been labelled as “moderates.”

Sound complicated? It is, even though my description is grossly over-simplified. In trying to better understand the situation I have constructed a 20 x 20 matrix trying to capture the various rivalries endemic to the region that could impact on our intervention, the accuracy of which I cannot vouch for so I do not offer it here. Given that alliances and detentes can be fleeting as a matter of convenience and that, as Sun Tzu also told us, deception is fundamental to all warfare, the general must always be suspect of what is “understood” about any conflict. That is why I am dumbfounded when Canadians, be they mainstream citizens or elected officials, suggest that joining the fight against ISIL is really going to make Canadians safer at home and abroad, especially when some of the sovereign nations that we are allied with, at least on the surface, are not only not antagonistic towards ISIL but may secretly be empathetic with them.

Now for the “So what?” Is what we are doing in the region going to achieve the aim? More importantly, are there any measures or factors we can or should be considering that have not as yet entered our consciousness? What are the orthodox forces at play in the conflict, and what extraordinary forces might there be available to us? I am not holding an ace up my sleeve that I intend to spring upon you as the ordained solution to our problem. To the contrary, in fact, given the interdependent antagonistic decision-making nature of strategy in conflict, a course of action that might work today can become completely irrelevant tomorrow so it behoves us to keep an open mind and adapt to new or unforeseen realities.

In this column I am trying to spur a structured discussion without leaping to any spurious conclusions, so I am really interested to hear the opinions of Esprit de Corps readers. The offer stands of a copy of my book Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans going out to anybody who offers thought-provoking commentary even if I can’t use it verbatim in an article. Until next month, I look forward to hearing from you!

STRATEGY: SHOULD CANADA NOT BE MORE CONCERNED WITH "TACTICAL OUTCOMES" THAN "POLITICAL ADVANTAGES"?

By (ret'd) Pat Stogran - The Armchair Colonel

Last month in “The Armchair Colonel” I closed off with the suggestion that we have embarked on a campaign against ISIL to:

(a) make Canadians safe at home and abroad,

(b) uphold what many perceive to be our humanitarian obligations, and

(c) support our coalition partners.

At the same time I introduced the concept of a “defeat mechanism,” defining that as the conditions that we would seek to exploit in order to allow us to impose our will on ISIL, and invited readers to suggest what this might be. We will leave the discussion of defeat mechanisms for the time being in order to introduce the concept of “strategy.”

Thomas C. Schelling’s seminal work The Strategy of Conflict offers a useful albeit highly theoretical discussion of the concept. What struck me by Schelling’s work was his examination of strategy as it pertains to game theory. Unlike games of skill and chance, games of strategy recognize the interdependence of decision-making between adversaries. The best concise definition of strategy that I found to suit my purposes as a war-fighter-wannabe came from a book about the Asian way of war, the name of which I have not been able to come up with, that defined military strategy as “art of advantage.” As such, I believe that a strategy aims at causing an adversary to make decisions or act in ways that will be advantageous to us, which makes strategies intrinsically linked to what I call defeat mechanisms.

In my experience in the CF, strategies were, in reality, little more than long-term plans. The difference, I believe, is that plans, even so-called strategic-level plans, are executed tactically. Strategies, on the other hand, set the conditions for the tactics to be successful in achieving the desired end state. Let me use one of my personal war-fighting training experiences to illustrate.

As a young platoon commander on winter exercise in the Chilcotin region of B.C., I was tasked with a night attack against a position that had only one avenue of approach. While I led my platoon on our bellies through the waist-deep snow around to a flank, one of my section commanders, Sergeant Eric Green, commanded my supporting firebase situated on that obvious approach. At H-hour, he was to open up on the objective — as per standard operating procedures (SOPs) — but I had also told him to orchestrate his activities in a way that would cause our enemy to consider his element to be the main attack force. So Ranger Green (he was a Canadian graduate of the United States Army Ranger Course), set up what appeared to be a firebase and separate assault force, but collectively their fire was aimed at supporting my assault onto the objective. Sure enough, my assault force, the real one, could hear the enemy reacting to Green’s ruse, and as we leopard-crawled forward we could see exactly where the enemy trenches were by their weapons’ signatures. (This was long before the days of portable night-viewing equipment.) By the time I called for my firebase to swing fire, our battle was already won.

In this case, “defeat” simply meant destroying the enemy position and the tactic was simply a right flanking, which we had exercised together probably a hundred times or more. The strategy was one of interdependent decision-making, where I wanted to cause my adversary to decide that my firebase was my main effort in order to make it easier for my assault force and me to gain lodgment on the enemy position. The strategy manifested itself on the cerebral plane, while the tactics played out on the physical plane.

Strategic plans, on the other hand, normally take a long time to execute and sometimes never become a reality in the physical plane, which I believe is why they can be construed as strategies. In the private sector at the strategic level, where skill and luck in the marketplace are more the determinants of success than interdependent decision-making, plans might be analogous to strategies, but strategic plans alone are not adequate in the ultimate game of strategy: war.

In Canada, in my opinion as an admittedly unqualified historian, general officers and flag officers (GOFOs) have seldom, if ever, been notable strategists. The likes of Sir Arthur Currie, Canadian corps commander at Vimy Ridge, and Guy Simmonds were masterful managers at pouring hoards of men and mounds of materiel into the jaws of battle, but they were hardly visionary strategists.

When I was a ‘thrusting captain’ I had the opportunity to test that hypothesis during a monumentally memorable battlefield tour in Italy. At a private moment with a German officer who had fought, desperately outnumbered, against the Canadian formations, I asked: “Sir, as you can expect our history tells us that Canadians virtually won the war single-handedly. No bullshit, and confidentially, what did you think of the Canadians you were fighting?” He replied that it was a mark of honour for a German soldier to have survived close combat with Canadians, because Canadian troops were renowned for their fighting prowess and incredible tenacity. Our generals, however, were “pedestrian.” He went on to describe how they were entirely predictable, plodding, and missed many opportunities when, he believed, he and his tiny force would have been defeated handily.

Today, when we send GOFOs on operational duties overseas, they are seldom if ever called upon to effect decisive operations, so manipulating interdependent decision-making to gain an advantage has never been deemed as an important professional attribute.

In a paper entitled “Tactics Without Strategy or Why the Canadian Forces Do Not Campaign,” Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance, a colonel at the time, argued that the strategic goals assigned to the Canadian Armed Forces are “less concerned with tactical outcomes, and more concerned with the political advantages of being seen to participate.” Vance coined the term “contribution warfare” for the Canadian way of war, one that is absent of strategy to pursue Canadian interests and void of “operational-esque decision making.” Our intervention in Afghanistan, specifically Kandahar Province, was a significant departure from the fire-and-forget missions we traditionally sent Canadian troops on to that point in our history, but Canada failed miserably in accomplishing the desired end state.

The command and staff training we subject our GOFOs to is overly set piece to inculcate an operational strategy mindset. Training scenarios are overly clinical, and performance and enabling objectives too focused on what to do in order to get a good mark than how to think if one is to outsmart a determined foe. While the training syllabuses are replete with reflections on the likes of Clausewitz, Sun-Tzu and B.H. Liddell Hart, too much emphasis is placed on the constructs of their theory and not enough on applying them with creativity and audacity to CAF operational deployments.

Consider the boldness and decisiveness of Nazi General Heinz Guderian, who virtually disobeyed the orders given him by breaking through French defences at Sedan, in the Ardennes, in order to accomplish his higher commander’s intent and force France into early capitulation.

These kinds of legends abound in the grooming of GOFOs in the CAF; however, Canadian GOFOs in charge of contemporary military operations have characteristically executed their duties in a passive, managerial fashion. Their subservience may never have run afoul of the politicians and bureaucrats whom the respective GOFOs were serving but, unlike Guderian’s bold initiative that virtually won the war for the time being, on several notable occasions their passivity had catastrophic ethical and humanitarian consequences.

In my next articles I intend to build on our understanding of strategy from the ground up, examining some theories of operational art and tactical manoeuvre that, I think, demonstrate “strategy” with a view to discussing a campaign design that might truly “defeat ISIL.”

As usual, I very much look forward to hearing from Esprit de Corps readers. At this point I don’t want to “situate my estimate,” in other words going through this process to confirm my personal biases, so I am eager for any constructive criticisms or creative ideas readers have to offer. This process is very much more an art than a science, so there are no right or wrong answers and out-of-the-box thinking is especially welcome.

Again, a copy of my book Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans will be sent to anybody who offers an opinion, observation, or idea that I think adds a new and interesting dimension to our consideration

DEFEATING THE ENEMY PArt 2: what will the defeat of ISIL bring to the people of canada?

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

I concluded my last instalment of The Armchair Colonel posing the question: “What will the ‘defeat’ of ISIL bring to the people of Canada?” Therein I also offered a definition of the term “defeat,” that being setting the conditions to impose one’s will on an adversary, which did not raise any contention. The feedback I received from readers on what we hope to achieve pretty well hit on similar themes suggesting that we are in Iraq to make Canadians safe at home and abroad, uphold what many perceive to be our humanitarian obligations, and to be seen by the nations that comprise the Global Coalition Against Daesh (also known as ISIL/ISIS) to be “doing some of the heavy lifting.”

Contrary to what the war hawks would have us think, it would be near impossible to kill every last one of the bad guys. History has demonstrated that genocides have rarely if ever been successful in eliminating a culture or an ideology, and there is little chance that Canadians would have the stomach to go to the length that would be necessary to eradicate this threat.

Some warriors who have done the hard yards in the “sandbox” are proponents of such a strategy, which I find surprising because they would know better than anyone how resolute the bad guys are and how easy it is for them to run away knowing that they will get a chance to fight another day. One veteran of several tours in Afghanistan characterized the Canadian Armed Forces search-and-destroy strategy in Afghanistan as Whack-a-Taliban: you stomp on fighters in one area only to have them poke their heads up somewhere else later.

In the early days of the so-called Campaign Against Terrorism, the Hydra — a mythological multi-headed monster that grew two heads back every time one was cut off — was thrown around as a metaphor for the threat. Just as the jihadi movement persisted and perhaps even intensified with the assassination of Osama bin Laden, yesterday the bad guys were al-Qaeda, then it was ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, tomorrow it will morph into something else. What we must not forget is that many of those fighters were the “rebels” that NATO was providing close air support to in the overthrow and subsequent torture and execution of Moammar Gadhafi.

And yes, there is a place for killing bad guys, but that has to be done judiciously and with caution. We have seen how collateral damage fuels the recruitment of people to undertake suicide missions around the world or join the fight in Syria and Iraq.

Clearly any suggestion that we should ‘just nuke them all’ is a non-starter. The apparent dependency upon military forces to solve all the world’s problems has often been compared to the situation when the only tool in the box is a hammer, in that problems take on the appearance of a nail. A nuclear weapon, however, is more of a sledgehammer. Notwithstanding all sorts of implications associated with nuclear strikes, such a tactic would not eliminate the existing threat in its entirety. Erroneously, it would alienate millions of people, turning moderates in the Muslim world into extremists and undermining the moral cohesion, a decisive ingredient in war, within the coalition. If we are going to make Canadians safe at home and abroad, uphold our humanitarian obligations, and demonstrate solidarity with our coalitions partners, which in some cases might be mutually exclusive, we must have a greater feel for the complexities of the conflict that we are involved in.

My first awareness of the depth of the problem came from my study of the First World War and the exploits of T. E. Lawrence. Of course, at the time I was a military officer reflecting on the lessons from that war that might be useful in the impending war against the former Soviet Union, so events in this particular theatre of the war didn’t register with me back then. Lawrence of Arabia felt that the Allies had let the people in the region down after WWI with the Sykes-Picot and other secret self-serving agreements that parceled out to the colonial powers the war booty that is today the Middle East. People in those regions had been butchering each other for a millennium or longer, punctuated with the murderous incursions of the Crusades by the infidels from the West, and Lawrence prognosticated that the secret deals would lead to emergence of unrest in the ensuing years, which indeed occurred.

Ignoring history or extant wishes of the people in the region at the time, France was awarded ownership of Syria and Britain took possession if Iraq. Another source of conflict at the time was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, a pledge by the British government to support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in the State of Palestine. And of course, there were the oil fields that had been the exploratory interests before the war of the likes of Standard Oil in the United States and British Petroleum, a factor that cannot be ignored today.

Obviously, I am not able to do justice to the history of the region in a magazine article, but the foregoing should be an adequate start-state to consider what Canada could or should be doing if we are going to be successful in Iraq. So, if we accept that we have embarked on a campaign against ISIL to (a) make Canadians safe at home and abroad, (b) uphold what many perceive to be our humanitarian obligations, and (c) support our coalition partners, what might the conditions be that would allow us to defeat ISIL? In other words, what do you suggest the “defeat mechanism” is that we should be seeking to exploit?

If someone can make a compelling case how it would be feasible to kill every single antagonist in order to achieve our aim, I would eagerly share the argument with the Esprit de Corps readership.

As usual, I very much look forward to hearing from Esprit de Corps readers, and a copy of my book Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans will be sent to anybody who offers an opinion, observation, or idea that I think adds a new and interesting dimension to our consideration.

Defeating the enemy: what will the defeat of isil bring to the people of canada?

By Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

I remember as a junior staff learner at First Canadian Mechanized Brigade Headquarters, our brigade major, one then-Major John Joly, used to taunt me out of the blue with provocations such as “What are the principles of the defence?” or “Why are things seen?” — a spur-of-the-moment challenge for me to come up with the principles of camouflage. Now, the reader must understand how extremely elementary those concepts are and, even more so, how out of place they were as a topic of conversation in a formation headquarters. It was a compelling lesson for me very early in my career, though, that professional military officers at every level must remain brilliant at the basics of our craft as we work our way up the ranks.

Many years later, when I was a tactics instructor at the Australian Army’s Land Warfare Centre, I perpetuated Joly’s legacy, challenging my young charges to recite doctrine that they would have been taught much earlier in their careers. Much like a much-younger Pat Stogran, my students would hem and haw and eventually come up with a reasonable answer, or a facsimile thereof, and pat themselves on the back. I would counter them by asking how much confidence they would have in the medical officer (MO) if they were presented with such a tentative diagnosis for an itch in a private area. Could be heat rash, or “just” an insect bite. Poison Ivy? An STD? AIDS?!

Never having been someone who is a slave to convention, another challenge I would pose when the instructional moment offered itself — particularly on higher level pre-command seminars — was to explain what the verb “to defeat” means as a military task. That always made for very stimulating discussion, especially when we would drill down from broad academic definitions to some pragmatic operational analyses. When senior officers presented to me, the seminar facilitator, a briefing for the plan of a military operation that was doctrinally faultless, I would sometimes deviate from the instructor notes and pose the question, “What exactly do you envision as the ‘defeat mechanism’ for your plan?” More often than not, I would meet with some waffling and bafflegab that might have made sense, but most certainly would not inspire any more confidence in a discerning inquirer than my metaphoric MO would for a person suffering from jock itch.

At its most fundamental level, “defeating” an antagonist militarily means imposing your will upon them. I submit that, on the surface, our victory in the Second World War could reinforce what I consider to be a popular misconception that “defeating an enemy in war” means destroying them physically and morally into capitulation. The notion that the Allies won that industrial war and defeated the Nazis by mass destruction alone ignores how the Marshall Plan following the Second World War had a different lasting effect than the annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine industrial region of Germany did after the First World War.

I don’t mean to suggest that the officers in the Australian Defence Force are in any way inferior to ours in the Canadian Armed Forces. I am tired of hearing senior management in the Canadian Armed Forces insisting that we will not be able to defeat ISIL unless we commit more “boots on the ground.” It is nonsensical to infer the obverse, that more troops in the fight in Iraq will enable us to destroy the enemy.

That fallacy ignores the recent history in Afghanistan, in which we had plenty of boots on the ground and over 150 pairs in caskets. It is also disconnected from the reality of the threat that ISIL poses to Canada and Canadians and how the physical face of that threat morphs. Yesterday it was Taliban and al-Qaeda, today it is ISIL. Who will it be tomorrow?

When I was a young officer learning how to fight the Soviet hoards, it was all about destruction. Our doctrine and training were not constrained by media awareness, human rights, nation-building, and the like. The military was all about the application of violence, full stop. Hell, so-called peacekeeping was viewed as a tedious distraction from our mandate of high intensity conflict, and even the laws of armed conflict didn’t enter into my professional consciousness until much later in my career. I hasten to add that it was via my private study that I learned of the moral component of war-fighting. It was not introduced as doctrine or a learning objective on any military course of the day. We merely assumed that what we were doing was lawful and moral.

That may have been the way we fought a Cold War battle, but in retrospect we must not ignore, as I explained in an earlier article, the fact that NATO emerged victorious from that war without so much as a clash of arms between the primary belligerents. In battle, tactical-level objectives can sometimes, perhaps always, be interpreted as nothing other than to destroy, but at the strategic and operational levels the concept of defeat is much more complex, uncertain, and ambiguous. Regular readers of Esprit
de
Corps will know that one of my central themes in these columns is that warfare has changed, war is raging today, and Canada is in the middle of it whether we care to admit it or not.

Canada is one of 67 members of the “Global Coalition against Daesh,” formed in September 2014, and is unique in its membership, scope and commitment. Together, the Global Coalition is committed to degrading and ultimately defeating Daesh. But in order to impose our will on ISIL we first have to determine what it is that we want for Canada and Canadians. So my question for readers is the following: What will the defeat of ISIL bring to the people of Canada? In other words, what is it, exactly, that we “will upon ISIL,” which will impact on the lives of Canadian citizens? This is a seemingly esoteric — obscure, even — question, but such is the nature of the strategic environment.

Once again, the person who offers the most compelling commentary will receive a copy of my latest book (my first and only book thus far, actually): Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans.

MODERN WAR

WHEN IS A COUNTRY TRULY "AT WAR"?

BY Colonel (ret'd) Pat Stogran

With our Understanding of the strategic-operational-tactical framework of war and the acknowledgement that, at the tactical level, the high intensity combat operations in Iraq to which our troops are contributing training, advice and assistance looks a hell of a lot like war, the question begs: Are we at war? Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance said, “Canada is not at a declared state of war,” although he qualified that assertion by saying we are “a lawful party to an armed conflict against a non-state actor.” Technically and legally, in a spurious sort of way, he is correct: We are not “at war.”I say spuriousway because it is obvious that a nation does not have to declare war in order to go overseas to kill people. However, is a nation at war in this day and age even though we have not so declared but, for the most part, are having the killing done by an agent on our behalf?

Under the Westminster style of government, the power to formally declare war evolved from the prerogative of the Crown to do so on the recommendation of the duly elected Cabinet. The Royal Prerogative was vested to the Government of Canada in the Statute of Westminster in 1931, which effectively made Canada and other countries in the Dominion sovereign, independent nations. Canada subsequently exercised its authority to declare war as we entered the Second World War, although it was arguably more of a symbolic gesture that masked our tradition of subservience to the monarchy. If we set aside the lingering redundancy of the monarchy as it pertains to Canada for the moment, to “declare war” in our bastardized-Westminster-come-ad-hoc-presidentialized system of government, the prime minister needs only to decree it so. In other words, the only legal requirement for Canada to be “at war” in Iraq or anywhere else is for Cabinet to cut an Order-in-Council to that effect and post it in TheGazette.

Notwithstanding our reticence to declare war formally, the international community has adopted protocols and conditions that justify the use of armed force by one nation against another. Philosophers have batted around the concept of the “Just War” for a millennia, the arguments of which are reflected in the United Nations Charter and form the basis of what I used to understand as the laws of armed conflict (LOAC). The LOAC, commonly known as International Humanitarian Law, have been an attempt over the last century to constrain the use of violence during international armed conflict. The conventions that have been adopted call for the protection of non-combatants and otherwise incapacitated combatants, compel military forces to restrict their attacks to legitimate military targets and to employ a level of force that is sufficient to achieve the desired military effect with minimal collateral damage. Chapter Seven of the UN Charter acknowledges the right of nations to use lethal military force against another in self-defence, although it encourages the use of lesser means of coercion. To the best of my knowledge, none of those conventions compel a nation to formally declare war before launching military operations against another sovereign nation.

The Government of Canada has not exercised the prerogative to declare war since WWII but, then again, neither has anybody else despite some fairly major conflicts: not the Americans in the so-called Vietnam War, the United Kingdom in the so-called Falklands War, nor any of the coalition partners that participated in the so-called Korean War, the Gulf War (neither the first or second one), nor the war in Afghanistan. The United States and like-minded nations have further blurred the lines by unconventional declarations of war on objects and a relatively vague, ill-defined concept, having declared war on drugs and later against terrorism. In Canada, although we were the first nation to join the United States when they invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, we conveniently avoided the dreaded term war by choosing instead to reference our use of force as a campaign against terrorism.

Prior to our non-war in Afghanistan that cost the lives of well over 200 people KIA and consequential suicides, the so-called Cold War raged around the world for decades even though there was nary a clash of force between the main warring parties: the superpowers of the United States of America and the Soviet Union under the guises of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact respectively. Another apparent aberration of the concept of war, the main antagonists of the Cold War did, however, taunt each other pseudo-anonymously on the fringes by instigating proxy bush wars and insurrections. And while the member nations of NATO and the Warsaw Pact were preoccupied by equipping and training for massive scale combat operations under the threat of weapons of mass destruction, the conventional forces of the lesser powers were heavily engaged in trying to manage some of those conflicts on the periphery and mitigate their fallout. These became known as peacekeeping, peace support operations or operations other than war, but not “war.”

In the shadows of NATO’s apparent victory in that ostensible war, the Cold one, noted scholars were anticipating that the face of war was changing. As the Cold War unravelled and peace appeared to be breaking out all over the place, Samuel P. Huntington warned of an impending “clash of civilizations,” the rise of conflict based on culture, ethnicity and religion. A similar theory was offered by Israeli historian and military theorist Martin Van Crevald in his book The Transformation of War, which was pivotal in my own military metamorphosis as a warrior-scholar. As the title implies, Van Crevald prognosticated the emergence of Huntingtonian-like threats and so-called low-intensity conflicts that differed hugely from the conventional interpretation of war and that would pose a huge challenge for conventional forces to deal with. The details of these and other such hypotheses have been the subject of heated debate amongst military philosophers and pundits, but as a fan of Bruce Lee I tend to follow his martial art canon and “absorb what is useful” from all those analyses of contemporary conflict.

As simple soldier I liked the operationally relevant picture the theory of USMC University professor William Lind painted, that of fourth generation warfare. It put an edge on these theories that really resonated with me as a war-fighter. In short, Lind talks about post-Westphalian warfare that has evolved through four generations. In the first generation, warfare manifested itself in the form of masses of soldiers armed with musket, ball and bayonet. To generate maximum combat power at decisive points, armies marched around en mass in rank and file. As the Industrial Age matured and weaponry became much more lethal and far reaching, troops had to seek protection in the terrain to survive. This led to the trench warfare that emerged during the American Civil War and characterized World War One, which Lind coined as the second generation. The advent of the tank broke the stalemate of WWI and later became the theme of the Second World War, which has dominated military thinking ever since and defined Lind’s third generation of warfare. In the fourth generation of warfare, the Internet, commercially available broadband communications, worldwide high-speed travel, satellite imagery, and the liberalization of technologies that could lead to the development of weapons of mass destruction, all of which used to be the soul domain of the militaries of only the most sophisticated nations, have greatly empowered international terrorists and transnational criminals to become serious threats to sovereign states. These combine to constitute fourth generation warfare (4GW).

As such, the world finds itself in a global 4GW war, albeit an undeclared one, against non-state actors. ISIL, like the Taliban and al-Qaeda before them, is an example of a 4GW threat of mammoth proportions. ISIL has struck terror in the hearts of millions through its use of the Internet and social media to recruit suicidal madmen to kill masses of people in Europe, North America and elsewhere. And while our military keeps insisting that “boots on the ground” in Iraq will be required to defeat ISIL, a fifth generation of warfare has been lurking behind the scenes as a full-on cyber war rages around the world. It is well known, for example, that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons suffered a severe setback due to a cyber attack — the infiltration of a computer worm or virus that apparently destroyed over a thousand of that country’s nuclear centrifuges. Since then, Iran has allegedly risen to become one of the world’s cyber superpowers alongside the United States, Russia and China. Cyber warfare is not restricted to attacks against government institutions and military installations, as power grids and the private sector also pose lucrative targets for cyber attacks. And as we have seen with the appearance of “Anonymous” on the scene, non-state actors again are challenging the technological dominance the United States and other states and aspiring superpowers.

With all of this percolating in the background, our prime minister has advocated a return to sunny ways and the good old days of peacekeeping, with his CDS insisting that we aren’t at war in the Middle East. So what? Does our understanding of the apparent transformation of war at the strategic level challenge that assertion and call into question how our government is dealing with contemporary conflicts? If other people have declared war and committed acts of contemporary war against us, for whatever reasons (which we will get to in later articles), are we not at war? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, are we pre-occupied with regional Industrial Age solutions to global Information Age problems?

I would like to hear your views. If your contribution is included in my next installment of The Full Send, I will send you a copy of my book Rude Awakening: The Government’s Secret War Against Canada’s Veterans.