Chief of Defence Staff General Tom Lawson addresses the audience.

PHOTO: ADAM DAY

Late winter in Ottawa can mean only one thing—the annual gathering of global defence and security movers and shakers at the Conference of Defence Associations. Held Feb. 20-21 at the Chateau Laurier Hotel, the conference focused on the emerging defence issues of austerity, cyber-security and, in general, the question: what comes next?

For more than a decade now the military establishment has been fairly preoccupied by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the general threat presented by Islamic militancy. Times have changed however, the air has cleared and it seems the Global War on Terror has come to an end, or at least dissipated a little, and this year’s conference reflected the new reality.

In the days leading up to the conference, the CDA Institute released a report entitled Strategic Outlook For Canada: A Search For Leadership. It is an excellent read, highly recommended for any readers interested in the current defence situation (see www.cdainstitute.ca). To some degree, this year’s conference was conducted in the shadow of this report, which was widely cited by media and analysts in the days following its publication.

Some of the report’s key findings were of “a general disengagement by leaders in the West from the difficult international issues of our time, demonstrating a reluctance to go beyond rhetoric towards discernable action.” The paper also argued that “military power has limitations in trying to impose solutions: Libya post-Gadhafi has become an ungoverned space, al-Qaida has been prevented from taking over Mali but they are still there, Iraq is the greatest hotbed of terrorism on earth and Syria is a war zone with no end in sight.

The final main point, and a key one, is “domestically, fiscal pressures are leading to cuts to defence, based more on the balance sheet than on what a nation wishes to do in the world. For Canada, cuts to capability, delay or elimination of procurements, or reduction in readiness are imposed without the benefit of a foreign policy and defence review to articulate our national interests.”

The conference opened on these themes, with CDA Institute vice-president and report co-author Ferry de Kerckhove arguing that the dominant feature of the past two or three years in the west is a pulling back, a kind of generalized retreat from Middle East conflict which itself is a result of “war weariness.”

Unless there’s some very vital concept at stake, de Kerckhove predicted, there won’t be any more humanitarian interventions or, one could gather, attempts at nation building like what was recently attempted in Afghanistan. It will be, he said, a period of “quasi-isolationism.”

The problems in the Middle East are now being regarded as intractable, practically impossible to solve. Instead, the effort will be on avoiding the problems, on short-term fixes rather than long-term remedies.

Instead, national effort will be directed toward solidifying the economic position while simultaneously keeping an eye on the rising powers in Asia. “China is testing the resolve of the West,” said de Kerckhove, “and there is some great uncertainty as to its long-term ambitions.”

In Canada, meanwhile, problems with budget are compounded by lack of political direction. “How do you do more teeth and less tail if you have no clear definition of what you might need to do with the teeth?”

The net result is stark, according to de Kerckhove, “Canada is going to matter much less in world affairs and may possibly undermine its fundamental interests.”

In the afternoon of the first day, there was a fascinating panel on Cyber-Security in the Post-Snowden Era. Retired major-general John Adams was the moderator. He is the former director of the Communications Security Establishment Canada, which is roughly our equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, responsible for, more or less, electronic spying. The question put before the panellists was to determine what the impact is of the massive leak, by NSA contract-employee Edward Snowden, which showed the U.S. government has been conducting extensive espionage activities against its own citizens.

Adams led the panel off by noting that, in his appraisal, it used to be that Canadians had a fairly high level of respect for intelligence agencies. While even then there were those who thought intelligence agencies needed stringent oversight, that their institutional tendency would be to compromise privacy and other values in order to gain a piece of intelligence, on the whole people thought the agencies were on the side of good. Now though, in the period after Snowden’s leaks disclosed the massive scope of NSA surveillance, the issue of how to do intelligence oversight and where to draw the lines is a very hot topic. Trust is low.

The three panellists—U.S. Cyber Task Force former director Melissa Hathaway, the SecDev Group’s Rafal Rohozinski and Dr. David Mussington, former senior adviser for cyber policy at the U.S. Department of Defense–all expressed the opinion that Snowden’s leaks had strongly negative effects on our security. Not only were large and expensive surveillance operations compromised, but the increased scrutiny and oversight placed on the various agencies involved would hamper future efforts as well. The general sense is that despite the apparent illegality of many of the surveillance programs Snowden disclosed, we would all have been better off if he hadn’t done it. Naturally, there is room here for disagreement.

On Friday morning Defence Minister Rob Nicholson gave a brief speech defending the recent budget reductions, arguing they were “not cost-cutting” but rather new challenges requiring adaptation.

Directly after Nicholson’s speech, the man required to deal with those challenges, Chief of Defence Staff General Tom Lawson, took to the stage to lay out the issues.

In the last decade in Afghanistan, he said, the Canadian Armed Forces have been “highly employed,” and the conflict there in many ways defines the Forces today. However, with that mission ending, it’s time to re-adjust to peacetime. The risks facing Canada now, he said, aren’t existential like they were in the past, but we nonetheless have to pay attention to them.

The main issue facing the Department of National Defence (DND) is how to deal with the budget cuts while keeping units and equipment operationally ready. Training is expensive. Lawson notes that DND has had to re-examine what we do in order to remain ready and affordable. “But we need to ask ourselves upfront: ready and affordable for what?” he asked.

Minister of National Defence Rob Nicholson.

PHOTO: ADAM DAY

It is a key question, no doubt, and one addressed in depth in the CDA’s report. Lawson complicated the question by noting that the familiar refrain of “more tooth and less tail,” which argues the priority should be on front line troops instead of headquarters staff, is not quite so simple. “It’s very tough to define what’s tooth and what’s tail?” he notes, before laying out how crucial support staff are for the functioning of troops in the field. “How far back does the root of these teeth go?”

While there’s no clear answer to that difficult question, by the end of the two days of speeches and panels it became apparent that the current period could well be defined by difficult questions with no answers.

While many at the conference were hopeful that a revised Canada First Defence Strategy—due out in the near future—would help provide some leadership to the military, others were far less hopeful.