Vanguard Magazine

i iDeas www.vanguardcanada.com DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016 19 ChaLLenges A Patriot missile launches from a mobile platform Canadian soldier in a medical mission. armed services become a more robust, technologically savvy, and defensively ori- ented entity. Our motivation for presenting such a piece is two-fold. First, our hope is to en- courage more public discussion and shed some light on what Canada's military should be doing to maintain its readiness, usefulness, and integrity. In the presenta- tion that follows, we will attempt to con- struct a brief, though not unimportant, framework from which to understand and present a more coherent national defence policy. Second, as a collection of policy options we believe that the new Liberal government in Ottawa might be able to draw some insight from these suggestions and modifications to ensure that Canada remains safe, and to restore the country's reputation as an international "team play- er" committed to human security issues, peace-keeping, and regional defence. To begin, we think that Ottawa needs to provide a more honest appraisal of exist- ing global security conditions. The CFDS is largely inadequate in this regards and seems to place a great deal of emphasis on responding to 'a world characterized by volatility and unpredictability.' The reality, of course, is that while several non-military oriented challenges exist, we are not liv- ing in an era engulfed in a perpetual state of chaos, uncertainty, or violence. Hence, the assertion that Canada is now somehow more vulnerable than it is has been in the past is disputable. What, then, should we be worried about? The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the US Defense Department, and several security oriented think tanks have identified five principal areas of con- cern. First, arms proliferation, and specifi- cally black-market access to nuclear, bio- logical, and chemical weapons (and other "mass-casualty" devices) has/have been singled out as one of the more critical se- curity challenges confronting high-income and liberal democratic states in the North- ern hemisphere. Remarkably, it has been suggested that Western governments currently lack the financial, technical, and enforcement tools needed to detect low-yield dirty bombs consisting of a few grams of radioactive material. Furthermore, preventing the spread of a deadly virus in an unconven- tional biological attack has been noted as difficult, given the inability to impair or disrupt trade in these types of danger- ous goods. The belief here is that at some point, some group, known or unknown, will acquire a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) and use it against a sovereign state. While this is a legitimate scenario, we would add that it is also a highly un- likely one—see Dan Gardner's 2008 book titled, Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear, for more detail on this issue—and in any event, it remains uncertain what the

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