On the outgoing Minister of Defence
The esteemed Dr. Jack Granatstein has written what I see as a balancing piece on the tenure of Gordon O'Connor in today's Globe & Mail. It details the positive elements of O'Connor's time as MND, which have been largely ignored in the media feeding frenzy accompanying his recent shuffling to Revenue.
While I believe Dr. Granatstein is writing with the noblest of intentions - to publicly recognize the contributions of a long-standing public servant, and to argue that while he had his faults "he handled the important matters well" - I believe some of the points our eminent historian uses to support his argument are quite a stretch. In fact, Gordon O'Connor wasn't nearly as successful as Granatstein paints him to be.
It's important to agree on what a MND should do, before we assess what he did do. I'd argue that a Minister of National Defence has three prime areas of responsibility: vision or policy, internal politics, and external politics. Vision is the big-picture direction of the CF - what our military should be, and how it should be utilized. Internal politics are the behind-closed-doors management of your department's bureaucracy, and the equally quiet caucus and cabinet negotiations on behalf of your department. External politics are dealings with your opposition, the media, and the Canadian public.
I believe that Minister O'Connor shone at none of these aspects of his job description, although he performed some better than others. I'm in agreement with Dr. Granatstein that Gordon O'Connor's time at the helm of DND wasn't the unmitigated disaster that the press is telling us it was.
But it wasn't great.
When it comes to vision and policy, O'Connor's record is mixed. While Granatstein rightly points to the improved emphasis on Arctic sovereignty as an O'Connor accomplishment, he fails to note the less useful policy ideas that have been quietly shelved or amended to mesh with realities on the ground: heavy naval icebreakers, a reconstituted Airborne Regiment, territorial defence battalions. He also fails to mention that while the Defence Policy Statement written under Bill Graham by Rick Hillier's staff and at his hands-on direction was a much-needed navigational aid for those charting the CF's future, a revised Defence Capabilities Plan has been indefinitely stalled by the politicians and bureaucrats at DND and PCO, according to information I've received.
O'Connor's ability to engage in internal politics is also mixed, although it's here that his performance was strongest. It's fair to credit him with securing a great deal of the capital budget that has enabled the equipment acquisition announcements we've seen over the past year and a half. But I wonder if the Conservative government really needed that much persuading, or if it would have boosted funding regardless of which rump happened to warm the MND's chair.
I'm more prepared to credit O'Connor with the way he managed his equipment budget and the Byzantine defence acquisition process. The Leopard purchase was brilliant: withdraw money already allocated for a new and controversial piece of kit (the MGS), funnel it into a fire-sale purchase of barely used but more proven kit, and get more bang for your buck more quickly than you could have any other way. I'd also challenge anyone to name another MND who has been able to shepherd a multi-billion dollar aircraft procurement from the idea stage to first tail delivery in eighteen months. O'Connor did it with the Globemaster.
On one factual point, I must correct Dr. Granatstein: the CF's new M777 155mm howitzers were purchased under the Martin government, when Bill Graham was MND, not on O'Connor's watch. Same with the RG-31 Nyala mine-protected patrol vehicles, and the Sperwer TUAV's. Check your dates, sir. If we're going to give O'Connor credit where it's due him, we should also extend the same courtesy to his predecessor.
Within his own department, as Peter Worthington points out in a Sun column today, O'Connor got his own bureaucrats moving on a number of outstanding issues surrounding veterans who were getting the shaft from DND, for which he deserves a great deal of praise. But he also publicly blamed subordinates for not following his direction on reimbursement of military funeral expenses, and appeared to be poorly informed on a number of issues - from detainees, to the number of magazines a soldier needed to take into the field, to how many ANA soldiers we could reasonably expect to have trained up in Afghanistan by next spring - suggesting he didn't understand his department's operations as well as one would expect.
Of course, when one considers external politics, O'Connor was a disaster. Although the criticism of him as defence industry shill was horribly unfair (ask his former client Airbus just how much they like him, with so many Boeing and Lockheed purchases), and the supposed contradictions between him and Hillier on ANA training were completely fabricated by a bloodthirsty press, many of O'Connor's other public wounds were self-inflicted. Those failings are well-documented, and I won't bother to revisit them here.
So, of the three aspects of O'Connor's job description, he gets a mediocre grade on two of them, and a failing grade on the third. And here's where I disagree most of all with Granatstein's assessment:
As I've said too many times to count at The Torch, the military battle in Afghanistan isn't the big worry: we should be kicking Taliban ass any time we engage them, and our troops do just that. No, the single biggest threat to the Canadian mission isn't the military fight that Granatstein wants to credit as a success to O'Connor, it's the battle for domestic public opinion in Canada. If we don't have that, the slow and painstaking progress our soldiers are making in Afghanistan will be washed away in an unwise and premature withdrawal.
Gordon O'Connor didn't handle the "important matters" well, because the most important matter for him to handle was public opinion, and he bungled it. The military was quite capable of dealing with the soldiering, if only he had been able to maintain the support of the average Canadian.
And I regret to say that that failure, beyond all the good things this dedicated servant of the Canadian public accomplished, will be the final word on Gordon O'Connor's public life.
While I believe Dr. Granatstein is writing with the noblest of intentions - to publicly recognize the contributions of a long-standing public servant, and to argue that while he had his faults "he handled the important matters well" - I believe some of the points our eminent historian uses to support his argument are quite a stretch. In fact, Gordon O'Connor wasn't nearly as successful as Granatstein paints him to be.
It's important to agree on what a MND should do, before we assess what he did do. I'd argue that a Minister of National Defence has three prime areas of responsibility: vision or policy, internal politics, and external politics. Vision is the big-picture direction of the CF - what our military should be, and how it should be utilized. Internal politics are the behind-closed-doors management of your department's bureaucracy, and the equally quiet caucus and cabinet negotiations on behalf of your department. External politics are dealings with your opposition, the media, and the Canadian public.
I believe that Minister O'Connor shone at none of these aspects of his job description, although he performed some better than others. I'm in agreement with Dr. Granatstein that Gordon O'Connor's time at the helm of DND wasn't the unmitigated disaster that the press is telling us it was.
But it wasn't great.
When it comes to vision and policy, O'Connor's record is mixed. While Granatstein rightly points to the improved emphasis on Arctic sovereignty as an O'Connor accomplishment, he fails to note the less useful policy ideas that have been quietly shelved or amended to mesh with realities on the ground: heavy naval icebreakers, a reconstituted Airborne Regiment, territorial defence battalions. He also fails to mention that while the Defence Policy Statement written under Bill Graham by Rick Hillier's staff and at his hands-on direction was a much-needed navigational aid for those charting the CF's future, a revised Defence Capabilities Plan has been indefinitely stalled by the politicians and bureaucrats at DND and PCO, according to information I've received.
O'Connor's ability to engage in internal politics is also mixed, although it's here that his performance was strongest. It's fair to credit him with securing a great deal of the capital budget that has enabled the equipment acquisition announcements we've seen over the past year and a half. But I wonder if the Conservative government really needed that much persuading, or if it would have boosted funding regardless of which rump happened to warm the MND's chair.
I'm more prepared to credit O'Connor with the way he managed his equipment budget and the Byzantine defence acquisition process. The Leopard purchase was brilliant: withdraw money already allocated for a new and controversial piece of kit (the MGS), funnel it into a fire-sale purchase of barely used but more proven kit, and get more bang for your buck more quickly than you could have any other way. I'd also challenge anyone to name another MND who has been able to shepherd a multi-billion dollar aircraft procurement from the idea stage to first tail delivery in eighteen months. O'Connor did it with the Globemaster.
On one factual point, I must correct Dr. Granatstein: the CF's new M777 155mm howitzers were purchased under the Martin government, when Bill Graham was MND, not on O'Connor's watch. Same with the RG-31 Nyala mine-protected patrol vehicles, and the Sperwer TUAV's. Check your dates, sir. If we're going to give O'Connor credit where it's due him, we should also extend the same courtesy to his predecessor.
Within his own department, as Peter Worthington points out in a Sun column today, O'Connor got his own bureaucrats moving on a number of outstanding issues surrounding veterans who were getting the shaft from DND, for which he deserves a great deal of praise. But he also publicly blamed subordinates for not following his direction on reimbursement of military funeral expenses, and appeared to be poorly informed on a number of issues - from detainees, to the number of magazines a soldier needed to take into the field, to how many ANA soldiers we could reasonably expect to have trained up in Afghanistan by next spring - suggesting he didn't understand his department's operations as well as one would expect.
Of course, when one considers external politics, O'Connor was a disaster. Although the criticism of him as defence industry shill was horribly unfair (ask his former client Airbus just how much they like him, with so many Boeing and Lockheed purchases), and the supposed contradictions between him and Hillier on ANA training were completely fabricated by a bloodthirsty press, many of O'Connor's other public wounds were self-inflicted. Those failings are well-documented, and I won't bother to revisit them here.
So, of the three aspects of O'Connor's job description, he gets a mediocre grade on two of them, and a failing grade on the third. And here's where I disagree most of all with Granatstein's assessment:
But on the issue of fighting the war in Kandahar, the truly important matter, Gordon O'Connor was sound as a bell....he handled the important matters well.
As I've said too many times to count at The Torch, the military battle in Afghanistan isn't the big worry: we should be kicking Taliban ass any time we engage them, and our troops do just that. No, the single biggest threat to the Canadian mission isn't the military fight that Granatstein wants to credit as a success to O'Connor, it's the battle for domestic public opinion in Canada. If we don't have that, the slow and painstaking progress our soldiers are making in Afghanistan will be washed away in an unwise and premature withdrawal.
Gordon O'Connor didn't handle the "important matters" well, because the most important matter for him to handle was public opinion, and he bungled it. The military was quite capable of dealing with the soldiering, if only he had been able to maintain the support of the average Canadian.
And I regret to say that that failure, beyond all the good things this dedicated servant of the Canadian public accomplished, will be the final word on Gordon O'Connor's public life.
posted by Babbling Brooks at 10:22 a.m.
3 Comments:
Babbling: Brilliant.
Mark
Ottawa
Yes, a very solid rebuttal. Still, I'm going to give the old gruff his due, if for no other reason than how much I hate the media pile on.
His due, Beaverbrook, I agree. But not Granatstein's soft-pedal, and not the G&M's knife between the ribs either.
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