Vanguard Magazine

www.vanguardcanada.com DECEMBER 2015/JANUARY 2016 45 t tHe laSt WORD Jeffrey F. Collins is a sessional lecturer in political science at the University of Prince Edward Island. A former policy advisor to Canada's Minister of Veterans Affairs (2013-14), he is completing his doctoral research in Canadian defence policy at Carleton University. His first book, Reassessing the Revolution in Military Affairs, was published in 2015. To say the Canada First Defence Strategy is outdated is an un- derstatement. Published in 2008, the document still lists the 2010 Winter Olympics as a defence priority. Moreover, a series of fiscal cutbacks and deferrals in 2010-2014 have left many of its major capital projects, like the Canadian Surface Combatant, underfunded due to inflationary pressures and a weakened dol- lar. Yet, despite these changes the CFDS remains the Ottawa's official defence policy and a planned revised version was never issued during the Conser- vative's final years in power. Fiscal woes and outdated objectives aside, the CFDS also suffers from a lack of strate- gic analysis. There was little space given to analyzing the time period's global security context, depriving the CFDS of a frame- work in which to prioritize and explain the choices Ottawa wanted to make for the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and the Department of National Defence (DND). Instead, the brunt of the document reads like a shopping list of multi-billion dollar projects without much rationale provided as to how Canada's national interests will be furthered by their acquisition. The current Liberal government has sought to address this conceptual shortfall by conducting a de- fence policy review sometime in their first term. However, as demonstrated in the recent Speech from the Throne, details re- main scarce: "To keep Canadians safe and be ready to respond when need- ed, the Government will launch an open and transparent process to review existing defence capabilities, and will invest in building a leaner, more agile, better-equipped military." Nevertheless, in approaching the defence review Ottawa may want to look at the United Kingdom's recently released Na- tional Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Re- view ('Security Review'), published in November 2015. There is much to admire about the Security Review. Firstly, unlike the CFDS, it has a solid strategic analytical grounding: the docu- ment takes a 'whole-of-government' approach in articulating the case that multiple departments and agencies are needed in order to achieve a "secure and prosperous UK, with global reach and influence." The Security Review frames its policy recommendations in the context of three 'National Security Objectives': protecting the domestic population, projecting international influence, and promoting prosperity. Hence, economic security is seen as being intrinsically tied to national secu- rity. Likewise, soft power is key to fulfilling the Review's objectives. Boosting the dip- lomatic corps; pegging foreign aid at 0.7% Gross National Income; doubling United Nations peacekeeping contributions; sup- porting permanent member status for India, Germany, Japan, and Brazil on the U.N. Se- curity Council; funding international schol- arships for foreign students to study in the UK; and giving more funding to the BBC World Service are singled out as important non-military areas in which to invest re- sources and advance the national interest. This is not to say there are not challenges. Terrorism, cyber attacks, conventional con- flict, and the "erosion of rules-based inter- national order", in the form of Crimea's an- nexation and Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons use, are cited as the primary security concerns for the next five years. As such, in addition to the soft power plans outlined earlier, the Security Review emphasizes the need to strengthen the UK's intelligence agencies – in the form of 1,900 more personnel – while allocat- ing £1.9 billion for cyber security over five years. In terms of its Armed Forces, defence spending will be kept at the NATO standard of 2% GDP per annum until 2020, making the UK just the second nation outside of the United States to meet this goal (the other being Estonia). By this token, British defence spending will amount to £39.6 billion per year by 2020, up from £34.3 billion in 2015. This move represents a significant departure from the austerity-oriented 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review when the military shrank by a sixth and defence spending was cut by 8% in real terms as the government grappled Want a good Defence White paper? Look to the uk the Royal navy and the Royal air Force seem to be the primary beneficiaries of the planned spending increases and acquisitions.

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