With Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan ending this week and the nation awash in an attendant flurry of publicity, the usual questions are being asked: Was it worth the loss of “blood and treasure” (the common phrase, cloying in my view, for those who were killed or injured)? Did Canada achieve anything lasting? How will Afghanistan fare?
Good questions all, but a combat engineer and army major, Afghanistan veteran Mark Gasparotto, asks another: Whither the Canadian Forces?
In a thesis written for his master’s in defence studies, Gasparotto examines four CF policies and concludes they collectively have served to weaken the army’s operational effectiveness and undermine the martial spirit which ought to form the backbone of any fighting army.
All stem from efforts to make up for the shabby pay and treatment Canadian soldiers received in the 1990s (famously called the “decade of darkness” by former Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier) and are rooted in high-minded intentions. All are meant to see that soldiers are well-taken care of by a grateful nation. All reflect the army’s struggle to reconcile its traditional ideals (that soldiering is a calling, not just another job; that the unit and mission are more important than the individual, etc.) with those of a contemporary and increasingly individualistic society.
Thus the title of Gasparotto’s brave paper — No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
The policies are (1) tour length (including a policy that provides a paid trip home from the theatre of war); (2) support to deployed troops (everything from the quality of food, gyms, barber services to availability of web access); (3) bonus “environmental duty allowances” (which pay deployed soldiers, depending on their length of service, anywhere from an extra $300 to $750 a month); and (4) so-called universality of service, which means that soldiers must meet a minimum fitness level, a requirement which is now being waived or bent for injured troops.
Gasparotto uses the results of his survey of senior officers and non-commissioned members — 127 leaders anonymously completed the survey — to bolster his concerns. Fully 40% agreed or strongly agreed that the CF focus on troops’ well-being threatens the primacy of mission success ....