On February 1, 2006, the Canadian Forces (CF) stood up four new commands, the first visible public signs of a major transformation in the way they would defend Canadian interests, conduct operations and train and educate personnel. Two years on, General Rick Hillier, chief of the defence staff (CDS), spoke with Robert Parkins and Chris Thatcher about the progress and challenges of this massive process.
Vietnam had a profound effect on the thinking of many American commanders with respect to force reorganization. What role did your experience in the Balkans play in shaping your thinking about CF transformation?
There wasn’t one specific “transformative” experience. It was a combination of experiences. In Bosnia, we saw massive investment from Canada in a variety of United Nations missions – at points in time we deployed more than 4,500 men and women in a variety of places – but the way we did our business gave us almost zero credibility or profile for the country. We were deployed tactically under various organizations – this battle group under here, the navy under something separate, and the air force under something else. We did not have a Canadian contingent, a Canadian flag visible in the ground. We did not get the effect as a country from the folks we had deployed, the casualties we suffered.
That was an eye opener for me. Many of us said, we can do better than this. We are a G8 nation. As one of my commanders said recently, we’re not trying to be one of the big boys, we are one of the big boys. Now we just need to start acting like it.
There’s a way to do business that gets you that profile, that footprint on the ground, and the credibility when we go to shape a region like the former Yugoslavia or Somalia or East Timor or Afghanistan. It gets you a seat at the table where you can shape it in accordance with what Canadians deem is right and appropriate – with our interests and values.
We needed to fundamentally shift our thinking, our culture, and our structure. We have powerful units, often tactically deployed, and we were not letting them do anything. In the Balkans everything was abbreviated: The French battalion was French-Bat, the British were Bri-Bat and we had Can-Bat 1 in Bosnia and Can-Bat 2 in Croatia. Because of the restrictions placed on those units, they became known as Can’t Bat. We’ve got this enormous, powerful battle group and because of the restraints and risk aversion back here, that’s the reputation they ended up with.
That is not going to get you a seat at the table. As commander of ISAF in Afghanistan, Canada was not my go-to nation because of the time requirements to get permission back here in Ottawa to do anything. I went to other nations by and large. We needed to fundamentally change that.
Another significant experience was coming to National Defence Headquarters and seeing that we had become a heavy-staffed matrix of bureaucracy. Everything we were doing was based on process, on risk aversion. Nothing was based, in my view, on producing an effect that ensured that every decision we were making at the strategic level had to do with operations primacy.
When I was a brigade commander in Petawawa, we assisted in the Red River flood in Winnipeg and the ice storm in Ottawa. In Winnipeg, how we worked was pretty constrained; everything was back at NDHQ. When we rolled into Ottawa, I had my strategic guidance, but it was strategic guidance. We knew the situation on the ground, and what we could do to help people and the authorities. There was a two-way conversation between me and my commanders up through the CDS, but because we had that guidance, we knew what our mission was. I think we started to realize the powerful effect of enabling people and having operations outputs as your priority, and then what that would mean to connect with Canadians and how powerful that circle was.
All of those experiences helped shape my thoughts. We need an absolute laser-like focus on operations as operations primacy – that is why we exist. Every decision we make, whether it’s buying equipment, recruiting young men and women or establishing what standards we use, all of that’s got to be designed to give an operations output over the longer term. And how we train those people, together, how we control them and how we support them – all that has got to be designed in a way that we’ve never done before.
Part of the implication there is that you put more of a premium on strategic planning.
Very much so. We had a very small organization here, the DCDS group, that was focused on planning responses to domestic events in Canada, and a slightly larger one engaged internationally, but they were trying to do things inside the building related to the department, related to the missions overseas, and related to Ottawa, and the focus was on none of those three things.
Part of our reorganization, at the strategic level, was to take one commander and a small staff and focus them on international operations: keep him out of the building so he’s not involved in all those meetings, and have him focused solely on setting conditions for success.
The other part was to take one commander and, for the first time in our history, again with a small but appropriate staff, focus on Canada: treat Canada as an operational theatre and develop the capabilities we might need to become world class responders in support of other agencies for massive ice storms, earthquakes, floods, or an event requiring support to police. Or the 2010 Winter Olympics. And then exercise and exercise those responses.
Those two commanders employ all the resources, and everybody else generates forces for them.
The management cadre on the uniform side is becoming different than it historically was?
Absolutely. One piece that we let lapse due to cutbacks in people in the ‘90s was force development – conceiving the forces of the future, how to get the best effect for Canada from them. What we had was an army, a navy and an air force filling that void, but the CF wasn’t shaping that to meet our strategic business. We’ve changed that so that we now have an army, navy and air force who are the force generators for the two commanders who employ them: one internationally and domestically. There is also a smaller cell that helps articulate the CDS’s and the government’s vision into force structures of the future, and allows the CDS to give instruction to the army, navy and air force commanders as to what they will produce in what form over what timeframes.
How has that gone over?
It’s a huge amount of work. But the mindset and culture and the thought processes of people in uniform have changed. We had almost produced a public service. Now our raison d’etre is operations – that’s how we’ve set up the entire structure. Not everybody agrees on the methodology, but it’s in place as long as I’m the CDS. If someone disagrees they can work to shape it after. I think it’s been proven that we would not have been as successful with military operations in Afghanistan if we had not had this set up. We would not be as comfortably prepared to work with all the other agencies to be ready for the 2010 Olympics, let alone anything that might occur between now and then. And I think the rest of government has seen the value of those structures.
It sounds ironic, but have the demands of operations in Afghanistan slowed your ability to become operationally focused? And has the Afghanistan experience caused a re-think to aspects of transformation?
Yes and no. Sometimes I find I am more focused on Afghanistan than I would like, but then I remind myself that we’ve got young men and women whose lives are on the line and I should have a focus there. More importantly, we have been able to use Afghanistan as a lever to change fundamentally in a microcosm of time things that would have taken us a decade to get at, including the command structure, some parts of our acquisition process, the force development process, particularly the lessons learned process: how we learn things in a theatre of operations, take the implications from those lessons, transmit them around the theatre and back to Canada, and change the training of the army within days of learning those lessons in Afghanistan. Before, that just did not exist.
Afghanistan has also helped us re-set and re-learn some lessons that were badly learned during the late ‘90s in the “revolution of military affairs” (RMA): as an ally in an organization like NATO, if you don’t bring something, somebody else will. That just isn’t the case. Or if others do bring it, they don’t bring enough so you can’t get it, or they get first dibs and you can’t get it when you need it. That’s why we took decisions back in the mid ‘90s like getting rid of the Chinook helicopters; now we’re paying the price. That’s why we were lethargic about going after long endurance persistent coverage UAVs.
The RMA thinking was: small footprint on the ground, small units and big reach-back capability. That might work in a high intensity fight like the Kuwait to Baghdad rush. But in the four years since then we’ve learned you need big units, lots of boots on the ground, and the high technology that goes with it. Afghanistan has also helped us re-learn how to put together fighting units and do that joined up command and control: take an intelligence tip and use that to cue our command and control brigade at battle group level, our special forces, a company of troops on the ground, tanks, artillery fire, a UAV overhead, and a precision weapon dropped from an airplane to take out somebody who is trying to dig anti-tank mines in the road. That kind of synchronization is PhD level work.
Transformation is obviously a never-ending process, but what type of a CF will we have as a result of these changes 10-20 years out?
I guess the simple answer would be exactly the type of force Canada would need. There is no end state. It’s one long tunnel. We’ve done about 80 percent of the things we planned. As we reassessed, used our experiences in Afghanistan, airspace control in Canada, and search and rescue, and dollars – because dollars are always a factor – we didn’t do that other 20 percent. We’ve been reshaping those.
The changes will give you a CF that can operate together, with one focal point internationally or domestically, with operations primacy, where the flexibility of command will come from commanders armed with appropriate staffs who have earned the confidence of their country that they will do the appropriate things once they’ve been given the guidance. You don’t need to control it nauseatingly moment by moment from Ottawa.
One of the criticisms raised in the U.S. as a result of the war in Iraq is that, in making itself more operationally focused after Vietnam, the U.S. Army got very good at executing operations but lost sight of the bigger strategic challenge of winning wars. Is that a risk here and how are you addressing that?
What was happening before was, with the DCDS in this building, any time anybody sneezed in Bosnia or Afghanistan, that ricocheted from there to here, so everybody was involved in the tactical.
As commander of CEFCOM, Gen. Michel Gauthier runs Afghanistan. Yes, I expect to have situational awareness on a daily basis or, if it’s a big event, as soon as possible after, but it’s his business to do. My business is to set up the CF for domestic and international responses, over the long term, with the appropriate amounts of air, land and sea that can work together. That’s allowed me to step back a little and focus on the strategic. I will say that I haven’t been perfect at that and the reason is because we’re still relatively early in establishing CEFCOM and Canada Command.
It’s hard to untangle tactics and strategy.
It is. But if you don’t have the right commander in place, empowered in the right way, it’s impossible. What we’re after is what I call the ”Vimy Effect.” Vimy was a tactical fight. Two weeks after the fight up the hill, we owned Vimy Ridge, the Germans were back two miles and nothing had changed. But the implications of that fight, the way we had done it, the ingenuity, the empowering of lower level troops – 91 years later it continues to shape us as a country. That’s our strategic vision: that’s the effect we’re after.
I draw our transformation as a four-stage rocket. The first part we concentrated on was force employment: Canada Command and CEFCOM. That’s where I felt we needed the most change. Guiding this are the CDS’s principles: a Canadian Forces focus, operations primacy, command centric – commanders with the appropriate staff who then have responsibility, authority and accountability to accomplish their missions – and mission command: I want you to achieve this effect in Afghanistan, as opposed to here’s what I want you to do and how to do it. Lastly, we are an organization based upon civilians, regular force and reservists, and all three components play a part in what we do.
The second part was force generation primary: how the army, navy, air force and special operating forces generate forces both for domestic and international deployment. And to put some rigour to that process as opposed to what they’ve been doing all along. These are my joint forces generators. For each major mission, one becomes the ‘validator’ of the rest. For example, in Afghanistan the army is the lead force generator. That means that the air force, which produces the UAV capability there, validates that capability to the commander of the army. For another mission elsewhere, it might be the army commander validating to the air force commander. And the commander of CEFCOM determines what is needed in Afghanistan; I give it the thumbs up and the various pieces go to the commanders.
The next part, which we’ve only just started, is what I call force generation secondary: combat service support pieces such as logistics, military police, intelligence, signals, for example. We have not done this well as a unified CF. What we tried to do was make each logistics person, for example, the all-singing, all-dancing sailor, soldier, airman or airwoman. And we got to a lowest common denominator by trying to cram all of that in. It actually gave us a product that in many cases was inappropriately developed to suit any of the three environments. So we’re now walking through how we best do this without losing the benefits of being one Canadian Forces.
Then there is force generation tertiary – people. Over the last 10 years we put in place about 175 personnel initiatives. Not one of those initiatives, in my view, was put in place with a view to enhancing operational primacy. Each one by itself was very good, but the combination of those has made it extremely difficult, sometimes almost impossible, to produce units that are ready to conduct operations. We’re coming at that more coherently than before.
Last is force development: lessons learned and then how we attract, recruit, train and organize. We have an analysis team, and a lessons learned process back to the army, the air force and the navy, and a context in which we do this.
The U.S. Army recently rewrote its counterinsurgency field manual to shift emphasis from combat to protection of the local populace. How do changes in counterinsurgency fit into transformation?
When you have ops primacy as one of your guiding principles and major outcomes, it produces an intelligent effect. In Afghanistan, every soldier understands this; we’re there to help the Afghans. If you get that part right, there will be more than enough credit to go around for all the other things.
The change in places likes Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Feyzabad or Kabul from when I first went through there in 2003 is unbelievable. When I was last in Kanadahar, I drove down to the bazaar – it is bustling in a way that they haven’t seen for years. In large part, that is possible because of what we are doing in the south to keep the Taliban on the back foot. And a major component of that is helping build the Afghan National Army – we’re helping to equip them in some significant ways. We’re working hard to help build the police capacity – in a counterinsurgency that is a fundamental thing.
And, at the same time, we’re facilitating development and governance. The one that concerns me the most is governance. We deliver security and we know which organizations deliver development, but there’s really no responsible organization that has building governance as its number one lead, and I believe that is the key.
Transformation is primarily a military objective, but given the recent emphasis on integrating whole-of-government into operations, how does transformation incorporate this broader requirement? Is it affected by it?
I think it’s a wonderful combination. How quickly can we do whole-of-government integration and transformation so that the government works as one institution, whether internationally or domestically? What we’re doing lends itself completely to the government’s intent, and in some cases has already started actions, particularly on the international scene.
You provided the Strategic Advisory Team as a way to assist the Afghan government. Does it offer a model, like the provincial reconstruction teams, to combine government resources into one team that can be provided to a fragile or failing government? A plug-and-play of Canadian federal and even provincial or municipal assets to be inserted as other governments require?
What you describe is ideal. LCol Ian Hope, who worked as my strategic planner when I was commander of ISAF, used to call it government in a box. We all agreed that was too simplistic an approach, that it is far more complex than that. But it is government in a box. We did it because no one else did, but our intention was to shift it to a civilian focused capability. I’d love to hand it over to a civilian organization. I think it’s a great part of the whole-of-government approach, it’s just that we’ve never done it before.
It comes back to my issue of who delivers governance? To be able to advocate an ability like that, you need to have that capability in the government. But we have to do this right so that we don’t end up destroying something in Kabul that the Afghans love. They see it as not having ulterior motives: it’s there to help a minister and his team in a department sort out their process for delivering something to the Afghans as quickly as possible.
To get the leaders you need to deliver these effects in such complex environments, does it change the type of person you recruit?
I’ve said we need men and women of action. Actually we need thinking men and women of action. And we get those. But we also then get many of them very young. So with the transformed way we educate, train and empower people, we teach them how to think – how to think their way through complex challenges. We’ve gotten pretty successful at that but we have to fine-tune some of things we do and perhaps change others more radically.
Our young men and women have had to think through some complex things, and they’ve done it pretty well based on their training and experience. We’re now getting incredible mid-level leaders. They are at ease in very complex environments with a lot of ambiguity. They know to focus on an effect that they want. We’ve got to make sure we harness that, that our education and training systems enable that.
In the past, you’ve mentioned revolutionizing procurement: for the force you need and the complexity of missions, is it possible to create the kind of flexibility that can provide what you want when you want?
I think it is, but I don’t think we’re there yet. It is crucial to the success of the CF to move to something that is flexible and adaptable. We can help that with a strategic-level statement of requirements. No more 1600 pages of specifics; rather we need an aircraft that can deliver the following effect: range, weight, capacity, conditions. Second, we’ve got to take an appetite suppressant on “Canadianization.” That’s hundreds of millions and it also extends the time line. Lastly, we’ve got to buy off-the-shelf whenever we can. Where we run into problems, and are still running into problems, is when we try to take an aircraft and match it up with, say, a developmental system of sensors. That causes delays and cost overruns.
We’ve also got to demand from the political side that, when those things are done, we don’t then take months and months to sort out industrial regional benefits or contract awarding. Otherwise we’re into the same dynamic we’re in now.
To wrap up, let’s go back to the first question: If the Balkans played a role in shaping your thinking about transformation, how will the experience of Afghanistan shape the thinking of your new generation of leaders?
It has shaped their thinking in a dramatic way. They have re-learned all those lessons that had either been forgotten or were learned incorrectly. They have operations primacy as their bread and butter, and they have no tolerance or no patience for anything but that. They have a frankness and a ruthlessness, if you will, on how they do business and what they demand from their leaders that we have not seen in 30 or 40 years. They are not going to be patient with things that are not perceived to be directly giving Canada a better effect through its armed forces.
That part is already obvious to us and is exactly what we should be producing every time we go through intense operations like Afghanistan or Korea. When I talk with them, they say: “we’re with you, now how are you going to make sure this continues past you?” There are a number of things, obviously, but I’ve told them: “at the end of the day it’s you who is going to determine that.” And these young leaders will do that – they are as good as any we’ve ever produced.
Interviewed by Robert Parkins and Chris Thatcher