There’s an interesting story by Christie Blatchford out today on the long and fairly unsuccessful political effort to increase the size of the Canadian Forces reserves.

Blatchford’s article is centered on a newly released report prepared for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute by Jack English, a former military officer turned historian.

The article is a fascinating synopsis of the much longer report (now available here) and tells the detailed story of how and why the reserve forces have remained on Canada’s military’s periphery.

Here’s a key section, but be sure to read the entire story:

Canada’s bloated military bureaucracy has consistently defied explicit orders from government ministers to increase the size of the army militia as directed.

The accusation is made in a scorching but carefully documented report by pre-eminent military scholar Jack English for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and obtained in advance of its release Wednesday by only a few media outlets, including Postmedia.

It is a “wretched saga” that English describes as marked by “sandbagging, obstruction, futile wheel-spinning, and endlessly wasted staff effort.” Using statements made by a series of defence ministers and recommendations either from special commissions or in government White Papers — all of them pledging or urging growth in the part-time militia or reserves, whose members most proudly call themselves citizen-soldiers — English shows how bureaucrats and leaders within the regular army, who saw any move to increase the militia as a threat, stubbornly stymied the wishes of their political masters.

As the result, the size of the militia remains virtually where it was more than a decade ago, when then-Liberal defence minister David Collenette first called for the number of part-time reservists to be increased to at least 18,500. That number was adopted by his successors, Doug Young and Art Eggleton — the latter even imposed a deadline of March, 2006 for that promised increase.