Rethinking the Total Force

PART TWO - HOW DOES THE CF MEASURE UP?

…the US Defence Establishment has devoted enormous intellectual capital to determining how best to utilise its reserves. By comparison, the work undertaken in Britain, Canada and Australia is generally less well resourced and often short-sighted.

The early post-Cold War period was characterized by loud and public calls for defence expenditures to be reoriented towards social programs and tax relief - the so-called 'peace dividend'. When this failed to materialize, calls for increased efficiencies in the public sector led to the examination of public institutions across the country, and defence was no exception. External criticism of defence business practices prompted numerous calls for reform, and led to an internal process of review that, in many ways, is still going on today. The general conclusion of observers, both internal and external, over the past decade has been that while the Defence Establishment has generally provided the Canadian taxpayer with good value for money, there remains considerable room for improvement. Criticism prompted review, reviews spawned recommendations, and recommendations began to elicit change - and this time, the Reserve component, due to its new importance in sustaining CF operations abroad, was included from the outset. The aim of this section is to review the various calls for reform that have resulted in the implementation of change initiatives, and summarize their impact on and implications for the Defence Establishment.

The Call for Reserve Restructure

The first such call was sparked by the 1992 Report of the Auditor General. In a wide-ranging array of criticisms, the Report noted a lack of inter-component coordination, and stated that the planning framework for the Reserve component as a whole required strengthening. Human resource management systems were deemed entirely unsatisfactory (an observation that came as no surprise to Reserve Force personnel), and the report specifically suggested leveraging modern personnel management technology to match part-time volunteers to operational requirements. The management of infrastructure was deemed both uneconomical and inefficient, and it was recommended that the capability level of many individual components of the Reserve be reviewed. In essence, the Report laid the onus of Reserve management not with the Reserve component, but with the Department as a whole, and stated that Defence should "ensure that Reserve establishments, rank structures and occupational structures and specifications are based on operational requirements, and are realistic and achievable".

At the heart of the Auditor General's 1992 Report lay the assessment that the Defence Establishment had failed to ensure that one of its principal components was structured, resourced and managed in such a fashion so as to contribute to the core business of the Department. This criticism was generally levied against the Department's management of the Army Reserve (the Militia) which, at the time of the Report, comprised 133 units distributed across 125 Canadian communities, and boasting a strength of approximately 18,000 (see Table 1).

The 1994 Defence White Paper echoed the Auditor General's 1992 Report, and acknowledged that there was an urgent need to revisit and "rejuvenate" the Reserve, in particular the Militia, with the aim of "enhancing their ability to respond to new requirements and the new mobilization approach," and, overall, to enable the Reserves to make a more effective contribution to the Total Force concept. Recognizing that the evolving strategic environment was making demands upon the Defence Establishment that the Department could not possibly sustain even with augmentation of the Regular Force structure, the White Paper further established a policy foundation designed to eliminate these discrepancies, thereby laying the groundwork for aligning the Regular and Reserve components towards a Total Force. The Reserves were assigned the operational role of providing "augmentation, sustainment and support of deployed forces", and a review of the function of the Militia, with a view to assigning more service support roles (such as medical, logistic, communications and transport functions), was mandated, a recommendation later echoed by the RMA Working Group.

The review of the Reserve component mandated in the White Paper came into being the following year, in the form of the Special Commission on Restructuring the Reserve (SCRR), struck on 5 April 1995 by the Minister of National Defence. The SCRR Report, published on 30 October 1995, included 41 recommendations aimed at improving the ability of the Reserves to contribute to the core business of the Defence Establishment. These recommendations ran the gamut from pay and personnel management to organizational and rank structures, roles and missions and planning for national mobilization.

The mandate of the Special Commission, as noted in their Report, was framed by the requirement to recommend means of "increasing the reserves' effectiveness, both from an operational and an economic point of view," while at the same time recognizing the importance of maintaining the traditions of the reserves that enable them to serve as the grass-roots link between the Canadian Forces and the public they serve.

The Commissioners, in essence, were trying to come to an accommodation between the present and pressing need to structure the Reserves to meet the day-to-day operational needs of the Canadian Forces, and strengthening their role as the basis for national mobilization in the event of an emergency. In addition to making recommendations aimed at improving personnel management, pay, recruiting and training, quality of life and the employment of Reserve Force personnel on current operations, the Commissioners dedicated considerable energies towards determining the role the Reserves were to play in current and future operations. In essence, the Report confirmed the two fundamental roles of the Reserves in meeting the demands of current and future operations, noting that "the peacetime Militia must be organized and trained to provide augmentation for the regulars and to be capable of expansion to meet mobilization needs."

Confirmation of the fundamental operational roles of the Reserves supported the Total Force policy articulated in the White Paper, and served as a vital pillar for two mutually interdependent studies: development of the Mobilization Planning Framework (MPF), and the Military Occupational Structure (MOS) Review. The goal of the former is to create and refine doctrine enabling the Defence Establishment to transition between the various stages of mobilization in response to Government direction and the demands of the global strategic environment. The latter was intended to determine the optimum number of Regular Force military personnel, by occupation and rank, required to enable the Canadian Forces to meet the operational commitments, at Stages One and Two of mobilization, set forth in the White Paper. In other words, the Mobilization Planning Framework aims to define how the Canadian Forces will meet its operational commitments, and the MOS Review to determine how many people are necessary to do so.

In confirming 'sustainment of current operations' and 'serving as a basis for mobilization' as the fundamental operational roles of the Reserves, the SCRR Report enabled the mobilization doctrine developers to include the Reserves as a planning factor not only as a hedge against a catastrophic scenario (at Stage Four, or National Mobilization), but as a critical part of the Defence Team at all stages of mobilization. Once it became clear that the Reserves were to be employed in all stages, the MOS Review was able to designate positions in the Stage Two force structure (the Main Contingency Force) for Reserve Force personnel. The end result of these two processes envisions using the Reserves to augment and sustain the Vanguard through Stage One, and to furnish up to 20% of the 12,000 personnel required by the Main Contingency Force in Stage Two. The requirement to employ the Reserves in all stages of mobilization, and the numbers provided by the MOS Review, serve as the start point for the finalization of the force development process for the Reserve component.

In the four years since the Commission issued its report, a great many of the underlying strategic considerations have changed. The Regular Force structure has shrunk by one quarter, and the defence budget by more than that. The Mobilization Planning Framework has assigned a specific role in current operations to the Reserves, with specific numbers and occupation requirements defined by the MOS Review. The operational tempo has skyrocketed, and in the last autumn of the 20th century the Canadian Forces have been busier than at any time in the previous forty years. Although some of these changes were either underway when the SCRR Report was written, or were foreseen in part by its authors, the full extent of their collective impact was never fully anticipated. Finally, the publication of Strategy 2020 confirmed and cemented the work begun by the 1987 White Paper, which first made mention of the Total Force concept, validating the conceptual evolution of the Reserves from insular to integral status within the Defence Team. These changes notwithstanding, a large majority of the Report's recommendations remain valid, and many of those that have not already been implemented will be carried through to completion in the near future.

Of fundamental importance, however, was the Commission's recognition of the role of the Reserves in augmenting the operational capability of the Regular Force. As currently structured, resourced and trained, however, the Reserves fall short of enhancing the Defence Establishment in meeting current and future operational commitments to the standard set forth in the White Paper, required by the MPF, and confirmed by the MOS Review. The Reserves represent a significant commitment of defence resources, and it is incumbent upon the Department that the Reserve component be structured and organized so as to be capable of making the best possible use of these resources in accordance with the aims of Departmental policy and strategy.

At present, the Militia structure, as noted in the SCRR Report, is for all intents and purposes the remnant of the Army that fought the Second World War (see Table 1). As such, the structure is heavy in combat units: infantry, armour and artillery account for 88 out of 133 units, or two-thirds of the total strength of the Militia, while engineer, service support and medical units comprise the remaining one-third. While no doubt appropriate to a Second World War-era infantry-heavy mechanized conflict, this structure does not reflect current operational requirements.

Table 1: Structure of the Militia

	Land Force Area
Branch	LFAA	LFQA	LFCA	LFWA	Total
Armour	2	4	6	6	18
Artillery	3	3	6	7	19
Infantry	8	12	20	11	51
Engineer	2	3	2	5	12
Service	5	2	6	7	20
Medical	1	3	3	6	13

It is important to recall, when weighing the utility of the Reserves - particularly the Militia - on operational deployments, that more Reserve Force personnel have served on international peace support operations in the past several years than were called out during all of the domestic support operations of the recent past - the Manitoba and Saguenay Floods, the crash of Swissair Flight 111, and the 1998 Ice Storm combined. There is therefore a continuing and undeniable requirement for Reserve augmentation of Regular Force combat arms units. That said, however, operational demands are today weighted far more heavily in favour of combat support and combat service support organizations - logistics functions, communications, medical services and engineer support - than at any time in the past. The nature of current operations places a premium on support services and, as a result, the Regular Force has found itself to be deficient in these areas, a deficiency which was confirmed by the MOS Review. Due to the twin requirements of policy and operational capability, however, the Regular Force must continue to maintain high-readiness combat units in order to meet the need for stand-by forces, and simply does not have the resources to provide the additional service support forces as well.

As a result, all authorities - including Canada's allies (see Annex B) - have come to the same conclusion: that the only cost-effective solution to the problem of service support shortfalls is the use of reserve personnel. On this point, the White Paper, the MOS Review, and the report of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) Working Group all agree. Moreover, a strong service support and combat support base in the Reserves is highly desirable for Stage 3 and 4 scenarios where these capabilities are required to sustain combat operations.

Consideration will also be given to assigning more service support roles - such as medical, logistics, communications and transport functions - to the Reserves… Reserves offer flexibility to the military and could be especially attractive to support organizations. For support functions, which require a great deal of technical expertise, training costs can be reduced and the available pool of personnel expanded through the employment of reservists…

At the same time, however, it is important that, in drawing comparisons between Canada and her allies, Canada's unique socio-political circumstances be acknowledged and taken into consideration. Unlike Great Britain, the United States, or Australia, Canada is defined in large part by official bilingualism, an increasingly multicultural society, and strong regionalist tendencies. Furthermore, Canada lacks the type of Reserve call-up legislation available to support Reserve activities in other countries, and neither this nor any form of job protection legislation for Reservists is likely to be forthcoming. Any alignment solutions proposed for Canada's Reserve Force must perforce be crafted with these important factors in mind.