Two birds with one editorial

An editorial in today's Kingston Whig-Standard touches upon two critical interrelated strategic weaknesses for the Canadian Forces.

The first is a lack of personal connection between the CF and the ordinary Canadian civilian:

Jack Pike couldn't have put it any more aptly. "It's a dreadful business," the curator of the Royal Military College museum said Wednesday night after hearing news that Matthew Dawe was among the six Canadian soldiers killed earlier that day in Afghanistan. "When you have a [personal] link, it puts such a different context on it."

Today, many parts of the city are feeling that different context. In addition to those at the college who knew Dawe as a cadet with a tremendous sense of humour, those in the volleyball community are grieving, as they remember Capt. Dawe from his days on the RMC varsity team. His former classmates at La Salle Secondary School have had the tragedy of Afghanistan brought too close to home. So, too, has anyone who served with Dawe in the Princess of Wales' Own Regiment.

To speak to anyone who knew him - family man, but a loyal career soldier from a devoted military family - leaves those who didn't know him with a wish that they had.

There was a time in Canada's not so distant past when you would be hard pressed to find anyone in the country who didn't know someone who had served in our armed forces at some point. Today's it's the norm; so much so that a newspaper from a military town like Kingston feels compelled to comment when some of their own are touched by a local soldier's death in the line of duty.

The second weakness is a general lack of military and historical knowledge in Canadians:

Canada has a proud military history and perhaps it is because we are so uninformed about it that many of us cannot place our role in Afghanistan in anything but a superficial context.

Critics of the mission question our need to be there, as if a Taliban-led country was somehow better for the Afghan people than a rebuilt country could be. We had no stake in a conflict between Germany and Poland in 1939, either. We went as loyal members of the British Empire, but few would argue today that we shouldn't have become involved in the Second World War.

Critics decry the loss of life. We should all regret it deeply, but good things do not come without cost. We recently celebrated the 90th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge. Today, we see it as a watershed moment in our history, our greatest victory and a defining moment. In doing so, do we forget that 3,598 Canadians died there? Do we forget that 900 Canadians had to die at Dieppe to learn lessons that made D-Day a success?

We're told that the Soviet Union was unable to tame Afghanistan and that the U.S. is in a quagmire in Iraq, as if to ask what hope of success we can have when such powerful nations fail. Better knowledge of our history would remind us that by the end of the First World War, the Canadian army was renowned as the premier fighting force on the Western Front. Because the British still treated us as colonials in the Second World War, Canada often got the dirty work, but in Sicily and in Holland, we prevailed. Canadians attained more of their D-Day objectives, faster, than anyone else. Why shouldn't we expect to do better where others have failed?

People see our soldiers die in Kandahar - one by one, or in handfuls like on July 4th - and they assume we're losing. They see military commanders admit that NATO can't win this conflict with the Taliban with military force alone, and they assume that means our military efforts are destined to be futile.

Canadians don't know enough of their own history to have any context for sixty-seven killed - in five years.

Heck, forget historical context, and look at contemporary context: in 2004 alone (pdf), sixty-seven Canadians died trespassing on train tracks. In 2000, sixty-seven Canadians were killed by their spouse or former spouse.

The average Canadian also has no idea what constitutes an acceptable rate of casualties, and would probably be horrified to learn that often times commanders go into battle expecting casualties, as part of the cost of the mission. I doubt you could ever get the CF to tell you, but I'd hazard a guess that sixty-seven dead in five years falls short of the well-staffed casualty projections for the mission.

Yes, it's part of a commander's job to determine how many casualties would be too many in prosecuting a mission.

Losing soldiers, while devastatingly tragic for the friends and family of the individuals lost, is part of soldiering. It is one of the few jobs on earth where deadly safety considerations are legitimately overridden by organizational goals: the mission comes first. Deaths in the pursuit of that mission are certainly a factor in determining progress, but at levels such as this, they shouldn't be the determining factor.

Canadian civilians also fail to realize that while we can't win this conflict with military might alone, neither can the Taliban. They've picked IED's as their weapon of choice precisely because they have no other option - our soldiers have thrashed them every other way they've tried to fight. And they've picked a method that cannot defeat Canada militarily.

All it can do - all it is designed to do - is defeat our will to persevere and win.

These two weaknesses - lack of personal connections between the CF and the public at large, and lack of public knowledge about military and historical matters - have been highlighted by our Afghan mission, but they have consequences that reach far beyond that specific deployment. They are truly strategic in nature.

Those in leadership positions within the CF need to understand that their first battle, their most important battle, is actually taking place here at home. The Taliban can't beat our soldiers, no matter how much explosive they can pack into an IED. Only the Canadian public can.

The Taliban are hitting at your 4GW centre of gravity, ladies and gentlemen of NDHQ. Are you hitting at theirs?