The Thursday Question 2:21: Life During Wartime
The sound of gunfire, Off in the distance, I’m getting used to it now. - Talking Heads
Even Ottawa feels it now. The world is changing.
A year and a half ago, at a CGAI event in Ottawa, a panel of defence procurement officials were asked how they had been coping with the challenges of the prior year. They responded by talking about the challenges of working from home. The irritated questioner followed up by clarifying that he was asking about the war in Ukraine and the pressure to find ammunition and other supplies. Official Ottawa has its own priorities and sometimes even defence officials lose sight of the ground war being fought on NATO's eastern flank.
But official Ottawa's focus has shifted. Two weeks ago, I sat down with a senior public servant and started by asking how things were going. He said it was the most unsettled (the civil service code word for “dangerous”) the world had been since 1945. Earlier this week, a recently departed official told me he was, for the first time, worried about Canadian troops fighting a large-scale war within a decade. And Canada's CEOs are now worried in public that our defence effort will leave us diplomatically isolated.
Our allies are well aware that we could soon face more wars - in Europe, the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula, and the South China Sea, to name only four - than the US can fight at one time. American strategy once envisaged fighting and winning two major wars simultaneously. Twenty years ago, when the US was fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, their reliance on NATO in the former country recognized that their capabilities had declined. They have declined further since then. We are not the only country that long assumed US strength would deter attacks on our borders. We should not assume that into the future.
The optimistic scenarios for the future of American strategy involve decades of expensive, multipolar struggle to deter war by building alliances. The pessimistic ones involve major wars, each one larger than the one in Ukraine.
In Canada, this spring's defence policy update made allowances for a more dangerous world. The government is slowly ramping up ammunition production. It promises to build out Canada’s domestic capabilities, particularly in the North. There is no commitment, yet, to anything that might be useful in overseas combat. No rush on the order for new combat ships. No plan to reverse the “death spiral” of recruitment and training. But Mr. Trudeau suggests new submarines are coming. Defence policy is slowly coming around to match official Ottawa's assessment of the threats.
In the event of a major war, Canada’s prime minister will not be asked to be a Churchill, a Roosevelt, or even a Robert Menzies. We aren’t usually on the front lines or under direct threat.