Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (50 page)

And the consequence of all these cuts and neglect was … nothing. They had no more effect on how the rest of the world unfolded during
these years than cuts to the summer camp training budget for the Canadian militia would have had on the world in the 1880s. They wouldn’t have made any difference if we had all tumbled into World War Three, either. A few more fisheries surveillance vessels would have come in handy, but Canada’s maritime sovereignty was never at risk despite the alleged shortage of ships to enforce it. It was a perfect illustration of the extreme “elasticity” of Canada’s military requirements in the circumstances that prevailed then (and are even more pronounced in the current era).

The size and composition of the Canadian armed forces, to a far greater extent than those of most other countries, are not determined by the “threats” that face the country, and that might be deterred or defeated by military means. Broad oceans and Arctic ice protect us from the rest of the planet, and our one vulnerable border, to the south, is guaranteed not by force but by our commercial and treaty relations with the United States. So our options in national security are very wide. We could have very small armed forces and a minimal capacity for territorial and maritime surveillance—say, twenty thousand service personnel—and we’d still be all right. Since 1939 we have always been far above that level, but those choices are driven by the ideological fashions of the moment, by the expectations of our neighbours, allies and commercial partners (and how much we choose to give in to them) and by the needs and wishes of our own military-industrial complex. For almost half a century now, with the single exception of the Mulroney years, that level has never risen far above eighty thousand or fallen far below sixty thousand. That is, you might say, what the market will bear—and the fluctuations in the numbers occur almost independently of any external reality. As in the case of the great defence mini-buildup of the late 1980s.

There is an American political myth, cherished by the right, that President Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War by forcing the Soviet Union to spend itself into bankruptcy. He did this, it is alleged, by raising American defence spending to an unprecedented level and devoting it to various projects, like the “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile programme, that forced Moscow to spend comparable amounts to keep up. Since the Soviet economy was much smaller than that of America, the Russians eventually went broke, Communism collapsed and the Cold War ended.

It is an agreeable story, especially if you happen to be in charge of the U.S. defence budget, but it is simply false. It’s true that excessive defence spending forced the Soviet Union to try to make fundamental reforms in the economy, and that the political repercussions of that effort destroyed the entire system, but the dates are wrong. Ronald Reagan inherited a defence budget of $440 billion in current (2013) dollars when he took office at the beginning of 1981. His own first defence budget, for 1982/83, was $488 billion. It then continued to rise until 1985/86, peaking at $580 billion—but the Soviet attempt at reform actually began in 1982, after the death of the long-ruling Leonid Brezhnev.

The first reformer in Moscow, Yuri Andropov, unexpectedly died in 1984, and was briefly succeeded by a conservative, Konstantin Chernenko, before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and resumed the reform effort. Even in 1985, given the ponderous nature of the Soviet planning and budgetary processes, there had scarcely been time for Soviet defence spending to rise in response to Reagan’s higher budgets. Excessive defence spending did play a large part in bringing down the Soviet system, but Reagan was too late on the scene to have any appreciable impact. It was the relatively modest defence budgets of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon and Carter that brought the Soviet Union down.

Does this mean that the Soviet Union might have survived for at least another decade or two if it had not tried so hard to match American defence spending? Impossible to say, of course. But it is clear that by the time Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government took power in Canada
in 1984, after a generation of Liberal rule, Soviet power—and in particular Soviet military power—was in irreversible decline. Gorbachev’s assigned (but hopeless) task was to save the Communist system politically by re-basing it on consent rather than compulsion, and to rescue it economically by breaking the stranglehold of the “metal-eaters’ alliance” (the Soviet version of the military-industrial complex), which was consuming an estimated one-third of the country’s gross domestic product. And it was precisely at this point that the Mulroney government decided it needed to build up the Canadian armed forces to counter the “growing Soviet threat.”

First, however, there was the peculiar episode of Defence Minister Erik Nielsen’s attempt to pull all the Canadian troops out of Germany. Nielsen was actually deputy prime minister, but he was parachuted into the Defence job as well when Mulroney’s first appointment, Robert Coates, was forced to resign after an ill-advised visit to a West German strip club while visiting the Canadian troops in Europe. By chance Nielsen, who had been a bomber pilot in the Second World War and had a healthy disdain for the defence orthodoxy of the time, inherited a chief of defence staff, General Gérard Thériault, who was also something of an iconoclast—and together they came up with the most radical proposal for a new Canadian defence policy of the entire Cold War era. (It may have had something to do with the fact that they both had air force backgrounds, for the proposal would have eliminated the Canadian army’s main justification for staying in the “big leagues,” while leaving the air force’s roles more or less intact.)

Nielsen and Thériault began with the belief, never adequately documented but widely accepted, that Canada’s Mechanized Brigade Group and the Canadian Air Group in Germany, which accounted for only about 8 percent of Canadian Forces’ personnel, were consuming about half of the defence budget in one way or another. Yet in fact (as Thériault later said in public), “Our forces in Central Europe mean next to nothing in military terms.” They were purely symbolic, a token
of Canada’s intent to stand by its
NATO
allies in the event of war. So Nielsen and Thériault began concocting a plan to maintain a token Canadian commitment somewhere else in Europe, while bringing the great majority of Canada’s troops home. The device they hit upon was the Canadian Air Sea Transportable
(CAST)
Brigade, a commitment dating from 1968 to send Canadian troops in an emergency to reinforce Norway’s northern frontier with Russia.

It was a paper commitment only: the notion that a Canadian brigade and its equipment could be rapidly moved from Canada to Norway in the midst of a NATO-wide panic about an imminent war in Europe was risible. But it gave Nielsen and Thériault something to work with, and in consultation with a selected group of National Defence officials (who were ordered not to report their work to their superiors) they came up with a plan. The Mechanized Brigade Group would come home from Germany, but all its heavy equipment would be moved to northern Norway. The Canadian Air Group would return home too, but in an emergency three squadrons of CF-18s would fly over to Norway, as would the Canadian soldiers who would man the pre-positioned equipment. In normal times, however, there would be no significant number of Canadian troops left in Europe.

It was a bold but quite rational plan, although there was bound to be hell to pay when the Canadian army and the External Affairs Department found out about it. Nielsen even got initial approval from U.S. secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, although he must later have realized that he was simply being sent out to draw fire. When Nielsen travelled on to London and Bonn, however, he ran into a wall of panic and outrage: British defence secretary Michael Heseltine refused even to discuss the proposal, and West German defence minister Manfred Woerner “just went crazy.” They didn’t care about the Canadian forces as such, but they saw the plan as setting a precedent for an American withdrawal from Europe.

Nielsen came home with his tail between his legs, to meet a
comparable barrage of condemnation from the defenders of
NATO
orthodoxy at home. Weinberger, of course, disavowed Nielsen, who was subsequently forced to resign all his government offices and soon afterward left politics entirely. During House of Commons hearings Thériault’s successor as chief of defence staff, General Paul Manson, denied ever having heard of or seen a paper on the “Thériault plan”; it had been consigned to the memory hole. And it was perhaps a minor by-product of the incident that the second broadcast of the television series that the original draft of this book was based on was cancelled by the CBC.

By 1986 a new defence minister, Perrin Beatty, was laying plans for a major expansion of the Canadian Forces, including an upgrade of its
NATO
contribution in Central Europe: he argued that Ottawa should station a full mechanized division in Germany, with another fully equipped mechanized division to be held in Canada as a backup. The reserves would be expanded to forty thousand and integrated more closely with the regulars, and extra maritime reconnaissance aircraft, more CF-18s and patrol frigates, and new EH-101 anti-submarine helicopters were ordered. He even promised the navy a dozen nuclear-powered submarines. The price tag was forecast to be $8 billion ($14 billion in today’s money), but cost overruns would inevitably have pushed that even higher. Assuming that Beatty was not a Soviet agent tasked with turning the “Reagan strategy” against Canada and spending the country into bankruptcy, how could he have got it so wrong?

The answer probably goes like this. During two decades of almost continuous Liberal rule, one of the Conservatives’ main criticisms against the government, regardless of the state of the international environment, was its neglect of the armed forces, so it was hard for the Conservatives to walk away from all their promises to build up the forces even if the Soviet Union was in steep decline by the time they actually got back in power. Moreover, they really didn’t understand just how rapid and terminal the decline was. It should have been obvious to them—I went back to the Soviet Union for a week in 1987 after five
years’ absence, and immediately went home and made a deal with the CBC to visit the place every three months and interview all the major players, in order to deliver them a radio series as soon as the crash actually happened—but the Canadian government’s main source of information was, as usual, American intelligence assessments. In those intelligence reports, the Soviet “threat” was always “growing”: in all four decades of the Cold War, the American intelligence services never once issued a report that said the Soviet threat was shrinking. So the apparently sudden collapse of Soviet power in 1989 actually took both the U.S. and the Canadian governments by surprise.

That put paid to Beatty’s grand plans, of course. The personnel strength of the forces continued to grow for a time, peaking at ninety thousand in 1990 before falling back to seventy-one thousand in 1995, but the nuclear submarines vanished at once and the new aircraft were also cancelled. The first of the promised new helicopters (now Sikorsky H-92s, to be known as CH-124s in Canadian service) may be delivered as soon as 2015.

In 1993, after forty years in Europe, the Canadian forces in Germany all came home, and some wondered whether the Canadian armed forces could avoid serious shrinkage now that the only plausible enemy had retired from the confrontation. The
NATO
alliance that had been created to “contain” the Soviet Union had worked itself out of a job, and many thought it would just fade away. But they all underestimated the resourcefulness and staying power of a very large and experienced bureaucratic organization with powerful allies in the military forces of every member country.

NATO
did not fade away; it expanded right up to the borders of the former Soviet Union, taking in former Warsaw Pact members (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria) and even territories that had been part of the Soviet Union itself (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). By the early twenty-first century its easternmost border was only 120 kilometres from Russia’s second city, St Petersburg.
This was all in direct contradiction to the promise made by U.S. president George H.W. Bush to the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, that if Moscow were to withdraw its garrisons peacefully from Eastern Europe and accept the reunification of Germany,
NATO
would not recruit these former Warsaw Pact members to its ranks. But Russia under the leadership of the drunken Boris Yeltsin did not object very loudly in the 1990s, and even when Vladimir Putin took over at the beginning of the twenty-first century he grudgingly accepted the situation. One of the reasons he did so, no doubt, was that
NATO
had at least been tactful enough not to station foreign troops (i.e., Americans or Germans) on the soil of any of the new members of the alliance who directly bordered on Russian territory.