With Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan ending this week and the nation awash in an attendant flurry of publicity, the usual questions are being asked: Was it worth the loss of “blood and treasure” (the common phrase, cloying in my view, for those who were killed or injured)? Did Canada achieve anything lasting? How will Afghanistan fare?
Good questions all, but a combat engineer and army major, Afghanistan veteran Mark Gasparotto, asks another: Whither the Canadian Forces?
In a thesis written for his master’s in defence studies, Gasparotto examines four CF policies and concludes they collectively have served to weaken the army’s operational effectiveness and undermine the martial spirit which ought to form the backbone of any fighting army.
All stem from efforts to make up for the shabby pay and treatment Canadian soldiers received in the 1990s (famously called the “decade of darkness” by former Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier) and are rooted in high-minded intentions. All are meant to see that soldiers are well-taken care of by a grateful nation. All reflect the army’s struggle to reconcile its traditional ideals (that soldiering is a calling, not just another job; that the unit and mission are more important than the individual, etc.) with those of a contemporary and increasingly individualistic society.
Thus the title of Gasparotto’s brave paper — No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
The policies are (1) tour length (including a policy that provides a paid trip home from the theatre of war); (2) support to deployed troops (everything from the quality of food, gyms, barber services to availability of web access); (3) bonus “environmental duty allowances” (which pay deployed soldiers, depending on their length of service, anywhere from an extra $300 to $750 a month); and (4) so-called universality of service, which means that soldiers must meet a minimum fitness level, a requirement which is now being waived or bent for injured troops.
Gasparotto uses the results of his survey of senior officers and non-commissioned members — 127 leaders anonymously completed the survey — to bolster his concerns. Fully 40% agreed or strongly agreed that the CF focus on troops’ well-being threatens the primacy of mission success.
In Afghanistan, the standard Canadian tour for most of the duration of the mission was six months, though that has recently been lengthened to eight. Because every soldier had to get home for leave, some were heading back to Canada for their break within a month of arriving, with the result that much of the time, units were at 80% combat effectiveness.
At Kandahar Air Field, where Canadians were based with troops from a dozen other countries, the creature comforts were significant. So accustomed have troops become to such amenities that after Canada’s 2010 relief mission to Haiti, for instance, the commander lamented in a post-op brief that the “CF has lost the ability to go in austere.”
Some survey respondents commented in particular on what Gasparotto calls “the insatiable appetite” of troops for web access to “remain connected to friends and family no matter where they are in the world or what they are doing on operations.”
As one respondent said, “Any suggestion to go without air conditioners, video games and unlimited access to communicate back to Canada is met with anger.”
In fact, using the army’s own figures, Gasparotto shows that since 2006, “the CF spent an average 3.7 times more on its own infrastructure [in Afghanistan] than what it spent on reconstruction” for locals.
The environmental duty allowances, some respondents argued, have a similar deleterious effect.
Soldiers (and sailors and air crews, too, who receive different but equivalent bonuses; there are more than a dozen different kinds) become accustomed to the extra pay, and when posted to jobs, such as those at the army’s own schools, which don’t offer the allowances, will try to avoid taking them.
This is also telling of the vocation-versus-profession dilemma: If in order to recruit from a decreasing pool of potential candidates who have their generation’s high expectations for personal satisfaction, the CF markets itself as simply another good employer, what is lost?
“The CF must redirect its energy by strengthening the intangible benefits of military service — the very ones that attracted most of its members at the outset to choose a career in the military,” Gasparotto says. “It is by focusing on the intangible benefits that the CF can fortify the vocational model of duty among a new generation of Canadians who want to serve their country.”
The emotional universality-of-service issue may pose the single trickiest challenge.
At its simplest, it means that everyone in the army needs to be able to fight as an infantryman and pass a mandatory fitness test. A soldier who can’t may stay in uniform on a temporary basis not to exceed three years.
But as troops began returning from Kandahar with grave injuries, both physical and stress-related, and in the face of a widely reported promise from then-boss Hillier that “no soldier wounded in Afghanistan will be released” without his okay, the policy wasn’t universally applied, leaving the CF vulnerable to legal challenges from recruits who can’t pass the minimum test.
More important, the survey suggests, is that while the vast majority of respondents believe the Canadian government is responsible for providing indefinite care to injured soldiers, and that wounded warriors must get all the help they need, the CF itself must not be allowed to become what one respondent called “an alternate form of welfare.”
The survey asked respondents if these policies, adopted since Afghanistan, are sustainable — emotionally, operationally and materially.
Two distinct points of view emerged, Gasparotto writes. But a marked number of respondents — and among Afghan vets it was half — say they aren’t sustainable.
As an officer commanding in Kandahar, where he was in charge of 23 Field Squadron, Gasparotto struggled with this himself, and concludes now, as he did on the ground back then, that if a leader, unit or the entire CF is preoccupied with providing care to veterans “the CF will have mortgaged its future as a combat-capable force.”
These are useful, timely and thorny questions for a battle-weary army to ask itself.
cblatchford@postmedia.com.
CKA Uber 
