Vanguard Magazine

i iDeas 18 DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016 www.vanguardcanada.com 21st CentuRy seCuRity addRessing Canada's What are Canada's major security challenges? What equipment and training is needed to help the armed services become more robust and defensively oriented? Dr. Jason Lacharite is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Northern British Columbia. His co-author, Lieutenant-colonel (ret'd) richard Lacharite served for 38 years in the Canadian Armed Forces, including as a staff officer at NATo headquarters in Brussels and SACLANT in Norfolk, Virginia. Is a Coherent and Affordable National Defence Strategy Possible? f or too long Canadian defence policy and operational priorities have lacked a degree of precision and purpose. Indeed, since 2006 the Harper administration has been pledg- ing Canadian forces to an indiscriminate series of overseas and domestic military adventures without sufficiently clarifying how they will ultimately protect Canadian sovereignty, freedom of action, and/or values. Our armed forces, need direction and the grossly inadequate Canada First De- fence Strategy (CFDS) with its deliberate hawkishness, equivocal declarations, and unrealistic budgetary promises have done little to improve the country's long-term commitment to defending North Ameri- ca, contribute to international peace and security, and/or project leadership abroad. Nor has it helped to fashion (or rebuild) Canada's military into a well-integrated and effective fighting force. We suspect that Prime Minister Trudeau and his staff are mindful of some of the serious limitations outlined in the CFDS. Yet, beyond the convenient optics of promising to cancel the Conservative Party's F-35 fighter jet program, Canada's military and defence spending have again been relegated to the position of a second- ary or low bearing policy priority. This needs to stop and the newly anoint- ed Trudeau government has a genuine op- portunity to put Canadian defence policy and strategy on a more solid footing. Towards a more coherent defence policy In this piece we examine the following questions: 1) What are Canada's major se- curity challenges? 2) Is Canada's military the best option for addressing these chal- lenges; and 3) What kind of equipment and training, in a normative sense, should be purchased and/or adopted to help the

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