Your duty doesn't end when you take off the uniform

I started this blog a few years back with three goals in mind:

1. Better inform the Canadian public on Canadian military matters.


2. Catalyze a Canadian milblogging community in Canada in order to improve public discourse by engaging those who know military matters.


3. Give myself an outlet to vent, so I'd spend less time yelling at the television news anchors and muttering profanities over the newspaper.

I believe I've succeeded on precisely one count: I rant at the media far less these days than I did before the inception of The Torch.

Surprisingly - to me, at least - our audience consists far more of politicians and their staffers, civil servants, CF personnel, and paid journalists than I ever would have expected. It is not a particularly broad readership, but I take pride in the fact that it's a reasonably influential one. I'm proud of what we've achieved here, but my point is that it's not what I expected.

More disconcerting to me has been the lack of development of a military blogosphere in Canada, akin to the thriving one in the U.S. It's true that the UCMJ and U.S. Constitution provide a profoundly different legal climate for free expression by uniformed personnel than the QR&Os and Canadian law. But that only covers those currently in uniform. What's been more disappointing to me is the lack of involvement of retired CF personnel in the public debate on matters martial.

I just received a number of back issues of Veritas, the magazine of the Royal Military Colleges Club of Canada, and was encouraged to find none other than the dean of Canadian military historians, Jack Granatstein, echoing those concerns in his convocation address to the Class of 2007:

Those who pass through RMC are - or should be - educated about the military and its role in Canada. I believe this is done better now than it used to be, but I am not wholly convinced that the lessons stick. Distressingly few Ex-Cadets out of the Canadian Forces worry about Canada's military weaknesses and even fewer seem to be willing to try to do anything to remedy them.

...

Still, we have a long way to go before Canadians understand those who defend them or even why national interests must be defended. That educational mission is, I believe, one of the tasks of those who graduate from RMC. In a nation with so few national institutions, a duty falls to those who have had the privilege of being educated and trained here. A duty to serve, yes, but also the duty to participate in the public debates after they have left the Canadian Forces. The need for informed opinion is very great in Canada. Who better to provide it than those who have served their country; than those who have studied its interests and its needs?

If I have a message to you in the military who graduate today, it is this: serve your nation in the Canadian Forces and then, after you take your leave, continue to serve your country by taking an active part in the ongoing debate on defence. That is your duty. Do it with truth and, as you will surely discover, it will take some valour to persist in the face of public disinterest. But persist we must. The stakes are very high for Canada, the task very important. If we RMC graduates don't speak out for the Canadian Forces and for our national interests, who will? [Babbler's emphasis]

Hear, hear!