Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Canadian surrender monkeys, neoliberalization, hobby wars

CBC is reporting the Canadian Forces planning staff under the recently retired and "biologically wired" General Tom Lawson discussed integration with the US military, up to and including "full" integration. The article states that it wasn't about defence agreements like NORAD, but targeting "expeditionary" aka offensive overseas operations: war-making.
Over the past few years, Norad has also assumed increasing command and control over naval forces that protect the maritime approaches to North America. But those efforts are focused on defence; the integrated forces planning was for expeditionary forces to be deployed on operations overseas.
The Conservatives are denying any knowledge of this. I'm tempted to believe them.

There are just so many things wrong with this picture that I hardly know where to start.

If the Tories actually aren't lying(!), then senior staff officers attempted to negotiate the complete surrender of Canadian sovereign control over our defence to a foreign power without the knowledge, let alone the sanction of the government and especially parliament. How else do you put it?

I believe there are very serious laws against this sort of thing.

An earlier piece this week hints at why.
Military planners advised the chief of the defence staff the proposed integrated force would help Canada "demonstrate a continuing commitment to the U.S." 
and,
military planners were searching for operations and exercises on which to deploy Canadian troops in order to contribute to "international peace and security," but also to support objectives such as retaining "readiness" and to assert the military's "relevance and credibility" to Canadians.
So it's a sort of corporate merger? Perhaps hatched in the mind of a general (or several) seconded to a career-development MBA program, who came back gushing about new "markets" for CF capabilities so the organisation stays competitive. Betcha it's in a dissertation somewhere.  That, or coming out of Afghanistan (and Iraq) the international senior officers who worked so closely together came away thinking "oh, it was really great working together, we should do this more often," while their troops are left to carry the mental and physical baggage from all that wonderfully slick "interoperability" and the rest of us get to trot out with our poppies on 11 November and listen to sombre speeches about sacrifice and valour.

Never mind whether the war was won or lost. Not really the point anymore, is it? Deploying, interoperability, relevancy, etc are the discursive terms of traction. Everything is about amping up all that stuff. Where does it lead? One giant US-led superNATO+ where the only one actually able to set a defence (war?) policy is President Trump?

None mention words like "victory" anymore. The modern Western army is an army of adventure for adventure's sake. Maybe the risks of war are too low (for our side), especially so for the air marshals, generals or admirals pretty much guaranteed executive spots in the transnational defence industry jobs on retirement. I'm digressing.

The point is that treaty-making, defence policy, and national sovereignty are and can only be the purview of elected parliament and the government of Canada. The winner on the 19th might want to issue a stark reminder...to the officer corps.

3 comments:

lungta said...

i read years ago
where american soldiers had gained full military equal status on Canadian soil in a general to general deal outside of political and public domain
the horse is out of the barn a long time really

UU4077 said...

Seems to fit with the Conservatives buying the F-35.

ThinkingManNeil said...

I do believe, MR. Lawson, that there is a term for proposing the surrender of your nation's sovereignty and military to a foreign power - even one that one is so closely allied and friendly wit as the United States - through "Fully Integrated Forces" and that term is treason, sir.

N.