Back in December, the Conference of Defence Associations Institute argued, in BruceR's words, that
at current levels of spending ($12 billion a year) the air force will have to effectively disband by 2013, and either the army or navy by 2018, due to the massive equipment and personnel shortfalls brought about by three decades of bad planning.
The Post this week quoted an internal military report that was more or less as apocalyptic, predicting that the military's financial crisis would lead to four or five air force base closures. The list includes Bagotville, the fighter base from which (as BruceR pointed out) planes would be sent to intercept a hijacked airliner over the eastern half of the country.
(My own impression was that the idea was for the public to register the words base closures in the headline Defence minister denies base closures planned - the military is finally catching up to the game that every school board and municipal parks department perfected years ago.)
What part of the defence budget to cut next? We could give the army a sabbatical. Or we could tie up billion-dollar warships at dockside to save on having to pay the crews sea allowance. Or we could let the handful of people who pass pilot selection rot in boredom beside prairie runways. Sucks to be them, but as expensive as it is to recruit them, they're even more expensive to train. Let alone employ. Hey: a penny saved is a penny earned.
Damn - we've already done all those things.
Or we could ask another question: why, in this day and age, is Canada eking out money from a tiny defence budget to run an all-singing, all-dancing university, something that isn't even a federal responsibility, let alone a military one? Apart from the influence of its notorious alumni mafia, that is?
A decade or so ago, I spent a number of years as an officer in what we then called the militia, and now seems to always be referred to as the army reserve. I was trained under a program, now sadly diminished, which put reserve officer candidates through the regular army's training program.
On the way, I ended up with a pretty broad exposure to various kinds of very junior officers, regular and reserve.
Consistently, the RMC cadets stood out as the most rigid, unimaginative and insecure I had to deal with, as well as the most personally immature. The problem seemed to be that they had gone directly from the parental home to what amounts to an extremely rigid boarding school, at just about the time when the rest of us were embarking on the complicated and anarchic trial-and-error process of trying to figure out how to be adults.
Their culture had its cult-like aspects. I knew a couple who'd met on the parade square at Royal Roads: he was administering Saturday morning punishment drills, and she was marched out for some misdemeanor. He roared, she squished her nose into the immaculate asphalt; love blossomed. They were cute, in a scrubbed, abrupt sort of way.
In the Western world, there are two approaches to running military colleges:
RMC moved from the Sandhurst system to the West Point system in the 1950s: while the institution has a rich history, its current identity as a university is not integral to it.
It's a caricature, but the totalistic system tends to take the grind-'em-down-and-build-'em-up approach, molding the personality as far as possible. West Point and Annapolis, for example, won't accept applicants over 23: they don't want to have to deal with fully formed adults. (The U.S. Army’s cutoff age for officer applicants off the street is 29; the navy’s, 35.)
The humanistic approach tends more toward overlaying a military ethic, and specific training, on an existing personality. Some personalities lend themselves to this better than others, but there will never be a way around that problem.
I argue that the humanistic approach better serves the needs of a modern army, which needs a group of officers with diverse adult experiences, balancing imagination and personality with discipline and professional skill. This is particularly true if one looks at the wide range of things Western armies are actually sent to do in our own era: a punitive expedition here, an armed civil-affairs mission there, a traditional campaign somewhere else. More and more officers will end up as the modern equivalent of Victorian colonial administrators. They will have to think their way through situations that are impossible to fully prepare them for through training, in a way that was not generally true of officers in Cold War-era armies.
Given that this is true, officers are better off having had a wide range of broadening adult experiences - the broader the better. Institutionalizing them for four years at the beginning of adulthood is not the best way of making this more likely.
The profession of arms is monastic enough by nature without adding more monasticism. It's not a situation where more is better and even more is even better than that.
Here's what I'd do:
End undergraduate instruction at RMC. Establish the Canadian Forces National Scholarships, a financially generous and very demanding university scholarship program for Regular Force officer entrants (something in the nature of $15,000 a year, so it would be competitive and attractive, and dropping out or getting kicked out would have real consequences). The existing service requirement after graduation would be retained, obviously. Design the program in such a way as to stress self-discipline over externally imposed discipline, treating entrants as adults from Day 1. (If a student failed or dropped out, the scholarship payments already made would become a student loan obligation.) Create demanding but achievable PT and second-language requirements, tested at the end of each term. Help and advice would be available if asked for, but the onus would be basically on the student to figure out how to meet the requirements. Which builds character better: being roared out of bed to go on a five-mile run with fellow-sufferers, or going on a five-mile run on your own initiative? Require a minimum GPA, weighted to reflect the academic rigor of the university. For students who enter the program fluently bilingual, there would be a third-language requirement, in some useful modern language. There would be a requirement to live more than a certain distance (100 km?) from the parental home, with allowance for humanitarian exceptions. Make service in the reserves compulsory, with reports due to the program from units on candidates' character, performance, attendance and so forth. This means that they couldn't conveniently attend universities in towns with no reserve unit, but there aren't all that many: in the whole country, I think it's just StFX, Acadia and the University of Brandon.
Reserve units would get a new source of recruits, by necessity disciplined and motivated. Students' reserve pay would be in addition to their scholarship money.
It is an interesting question whether they would be better off in the ranks or entering as junior officers; my preference would be to keep them in the ranks, in a combat-arms occupation. Perhaps a separate and more intense training stream would be appropriate. Candidates would be strongly encouraged to try to get some kind of operational experience, on an overseas tour or perhaps on a warship.
To be a reservist, particularly on a university campus, is to have a more or less constant series of conversations about soldiering with people whose assumptions are often very different from your own. These are seldom along the lines of how-can-you-be-a-baby-killer, though those are educational too. They are all more or less forced to think through their own ideas about the ethics of warfare and the place of the military in society well enough to be able to articulate them. This is also healthy.
The new-model RMC would:
Administer the CF National Scholarships. Administer the existing War Studies MA program, if necessary with help from Queen's. Be the site of introductory officer training for all branches of the CF, regular and reserve, with an emphasis on the history and tradition of Canada's officer corps.