CF: Not enough money--and too many commands?

Senator Colin Kenny repeats his well-justified views on under-funding, and notes the drain on personnel resources caused by the four distinct commands that General Hillier created while CDS (I've heard that latter point made by a senior Army officer); the excerpts are out of sequence to suit this post:

The Harper government has announced it will increase military spending by 1.5 per cent per year until 2011, at which point increases will rise to 2 per cent annually. Even if military costs rose at the same level as the consumer price index, military spending would probably shrink every year under this plan, in terms of spending real dollars adjusted for inflation.

But military costs increase more quickly than the CPI, primarily because of ever-advancing technology, so spending after adjustments are made for inflation will shrink even more. We need to hold defence spending at a reasonable percentage of GDP, as other countries do.

There aren't a lot of votes in defence spending, and this government, which likes to parade around in fatigues, is the latest in a string of governments to starve Canada's military. Consider this: Pierre Elliott Trudeau was considered an enemy of the military, but some of his military budgets hit 2 per cent of GDP. Our current spending is 1.2 per cent of GDP - well below most middle-sized countries with similar interests, and second-lowest in NATO.

I estimate this government's stated budget plan for defence will drop that percentage to 0.87 per cent in 10 years. The Conference of Defence Associations estimates the percentage could fall as low as 0.77 per cent in 15 years...

This government will point to all kinds of expenditures it has made on expensive equipment. It will tell you that 1.5 per cent and 2 per cent annual expenditure increases are reasonable. But they are not reasonable when they won't even keep up with inflation, let alone get us out of the defensive hole Canada is quickly falling into.

The government, instead, should be committing to spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence, which would create a military budget of $35-billion in 2012. Its current blueprint won't get us to that figure until 2028. That means 16 years of serious underfunding...

Gen. Hillier's transformation plan superimposed a U.S.-style blueprint onto the Canadian military. Until a few years ago, the Canadian Forces had a Chief of the Defence Staff; a Deputy Chief of the Defence staff in charge of all operations, domestic and foreign; and a Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff who took care of internal issues and long-term planning. They pretty well did their jobs and stayed out of each other's way.

The new system featured a Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Hillier, and four commands reporting to him - in layman's terms, Canada Command, Overseas Command, Supply Command and Special Operations Command. Each built up its own sizable bureaucracy, draining the Forces of senior personnel needed for training and commanding troops. On top of that, Gen. Hillier's staff grew to more than 100 and too often micromanaged what should have been the work of the four commands [I have no idea how true that is - MC].

Unfortunately, Canada's military is too small to carry an American-style command structure. Turf wars and duplication have abounded. A report brought down by three former senior officers recommended the new setup be blown up - but not until after the Olympics and Afghanistan were out of the way...

That "American-style" is a bit unfair. The US military have no services-wide unified commands equivalent to Canadian Expeditionary Force Command or Canadian Operational Support Command.