Old Sweat said:
In my 20s and 30s I experienced the worst of the budget cuts, reductions, disbandments and all the rest of the integration and unification which was not well planned at all and in fact was implemented in a pretty haphazard manner. Then add on the general contempt in which the government of the day held the forces in the seventies, and it was not easy being a soldier. This also was the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era, and the dislike of the war and of the military in general migrated north of the border and we were widely viewed as baby killers and all the rest. In spite of all that, or maybe because of it, we took pride in doing our best with what little we did get, and trained as hard and as often as we could.
Two generations of Canadian service people lived through all this with no real prospect of being on the two way range. Despite that we maintained extremely high standards. Our legacy and our payback came watching you guys and gals perform so magnificently in Afghanistan and Haiti and Libya and patrolling in far distant waters and . . . Less I get too preachy, I'll just close by urging you to build on what you learned and don't ever take the easy way out. Soldiering in times of peace when the budgets shrink is not easy, but it can be done. No, it has to be done, lest ye break faith.
Many years ago I was asked to speak to a somewhat broad question about what kind of Army (CF) we wanted. All the good words/ideas like flexible and affordable and, and, and ... had been covered so I decided to take a soldier specific focus.
Now, this was in the midst of the
decades if darkness (the plural matters because, as
Old Sweat says, there were several of them. The ideas being presented had to be something we could
manage under the highly constrained circumstances in which we found ourselves.
My thinking, such as it was, led to me to believe that, like the lord high executioner, I needed a
little list. Mine ended up with six items, all related to the notion that the modern Canadian soldier must be: _________
Here is my little list (the first four, I insisted,
must be in this exact order):
1. Tough;
2. Superbly disciplined;
3. Well trained;
4. Adequately equipped;
(the next two, I suggested, were not “order” sensitive, but they were equally important)
5. Properly organized; and
6. Well led.
It was a somewhat lengthy presentation and I cannot remember most if but here is a encapsulated
sketch of the items, from memory:
Tough refers to
both physical and mental “robustness” - what Field Marshal Lord Wavell described as the ability to withstand the shocks of war. What is was
not was what my old friend MGen (ret'd) Clive Addy called “macho thuggery” (this was just after the Somalia Inquiry so that sort of thing was on many minds). (I explained that
toughness is not the same as brute strength and that nothing in my comments could or should be considered as, in any way, restricting the employment of women.) But, I reminded my audience, war was a rough, dirty business, not for the faint of heart, mind of body. Toughness, I opined, could be taught, in fact it had to be taught – developed and nurtured in every phase of training and employment for all officers, NCOs and men. We were never too old or too senior to need “toughening up,” I said, and I suggested that the time would come when some officers in the audience, wearing more rank than they had at the moment would have to make hard, life and death decisions and we had all better hope that they were tough enough to do it.
Discipline, I told my audience, is the
sine qua non of soldiering: the toughest guys and gals in the world are useless if they are not able to submerge their (natural) fears and sense of self preservation and “soldier on” just because they ARE soldiers and their duty requires it. Discipline, I said, is what sets really good armies apart from just good or average or just acceptable ones. Well disciplined – and I kept repeating the phrase “superbly disciplined” - soldiers, I said, would always find a way to “make a silk purse from a sow's ear,” and I reminded my audience that given our current budgetary situation, “sow's ear” pretty much described our equipment situation. I also said that we didn't need a “school of discipline” or a CF disciplinarian or anything new: all we needed was to reinforce what was already written in our (recent) military ethos documents and what was written, in blood, in our military history. Like toughness, superb discipline needed to be an everyday thing – I recall digressing, just a bit, into remarks on senior officers' dress, deportment, passing of faults (like saluting) in NDHQ, conduct at all ranks social functions and physical fitness, there was an uncomfortable silence in the room – and it needed to be instilled by example, from the top down. Quiet, almost invisible, self discipline, I said, was the goal. Square bashing and screaming NCOs was just a step on a long – permanent – quest for superb discipline in all ranks in all circumstances.
Training did (and still does) cost money and we were (and you still are) right to look closely at training to make sure it is what is needed, that it is delivered when it is needed and that it is done in an efficient and effective manner.
But, I said, a separate training function, separate from the general staff in HQ and separate from combat formation and unit commanders in the field, was neither efficient nor effective. Service schools, I suggested,
must be where we always find our best officers and NCOs – getting in to a school staff position should be hard, getting out of one should be easy. School postings, like HQ staff jobs, should be temporary things, between regimental duty tours, and they should be damned hard work, too – but since only the best should be posted in to a school those who are there should often be promoted when they leave – and all the hard work will be worth it. But the important training is not done in schools, it is done in units and in the field, on exercises. That's where we teach soldiers, NCOs and officers, including colonels and generals, how to apply the skills and knowledge, including “leadership” knowledge, learned in the schools.
Equipment did cost money and I suggested that we had to be sure we understood the old adage that the very best is the enemy of the good enough and we needed to question the last 5% of performance when it consumed 20% of the budget for an item. It was out duty, as staff officers, I said, to “fight,” in all our committees, for the Army's fair share of the capital budget and then to “fight” to ensure that we, the Army staff, spent it wisely.
Organization is a very subjective issue but I suggested to my colleagues and superiors that we, the CF, were not especially well organized and, more important, that poor organization cost real, measurable money. There is no “perfect” or even "right” organization but there are very imperfect and, indeed, wrong ones and it is the duty of the staff to recommend better organizations.
Leadership is “easy,” I suggested – it is, essentially, a combination of
toughness,
discipline and
training piled on top of what an honest young man or woman learned from his family, friends and teachers. But I did mention that leadership training was (still is)
vital and nowhere more than at the junior levels – corporal and 2nd lieutenant. Leadership training, I suggested, is an
essential component of TQ5, 6 and 7 training.
Why is this long story relevant to budgets? Because, 20+/- years ago, we were also (still) in a budget crisis and we were looking for ways to, as
Old Sweat suggests to maintain the “extremely high standards” which had been passed on to us and we had to do that with too little money and too many tasks.
I suggest that keeping
our your “great little army” great isn't overly expensive and it can be done if officers and NCOs, on regimental duty and in HQs, want to make it work.
Clearly, not all my ideas found favour with those to whom they were presented but I still think they are valid.
Attitudes matter more than "stuff," and the very human business of developing tough, superbly disciplined, well trained and adequately equipped soldiers need not stop or even slow when budgets are tight. In fact, as an old friend used to say: "when the weather's bad let's step up the training;" we should say, "when budgets are tight let's use our imaginations."
