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Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence

Issue 5 - Evidence - Meeting of March 26, 2012

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OTTAWA, Monday, March 26, 2012

The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 4 p.m. to examine and report on the status of, and lessons learned, during Canadian Forces operations in Afghanistan; and on the state of Canada's defence and security relationships with the United States.

Senator Pamela Wallin (Chair) in the chair.

The Chair: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. We have a busy agenda today. For the information of the members here, we have three witnesses. We will begin with Mr. Granatstein in just a moment, and then we will be meeting in camera to discuss orders of reference, budgets, et cetera.

We will begin with the substance of our meeting now. As we know, Canadian Forces first went into Afghanistan in December of 2001, and for much of the past 10-plus years, they were there in a combat role. Many of our men and women volunteered for multiple tours. We lost 158 of our soldiers, and many more were wounded. Canadians today remain very proud of what our men and women have achieved and what they continue to achieve there. Our troops are leaving Afghanistan in 2014, about two years from now, when the current training mission that has replaced the combat mission ends. Some of you will have seen this on your television screens, but just last Friday Edmonton-based troops returned from that first rotation of the training mission, and there were some very happy faces there.

Today our committee continues its study of the status of and the lessons learned during CF operations in Afghanistan. You will remember that we issued an interim report in 2010 on the Afghan mission, and we have been hearing witnesses since we returned on the lessons-learned aspect.

Our first witness is Mr. Jack Granatstein, a well-known academic and thinker in this country. He is senior research fellow with the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute and co-author with Mr. David Bercuson of a recent paper entitled Lessons Learned? What Canada Should Learn From Afghanistan, with a nice cover that I have written all over.

Mr. Granatstein, do you have some opening remarks? Please go ahead.

Jack Granatstein, Historian, Senior Research Fellow, Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, as an individual: Thank you. I do not propose to read the statement I submitted, but to talk to some of the lessons that Mr. Bercuson and I point to. Let me say first that we are historians and we usually write on the documentation that is available. Most of the documents for the Afghanistan war, of course, are still closed and will not be opened for some long time. However, we got documents from individuals. We read people's emails. We poured through WikiLeaks; criminal though it was, it had some good material.

The Chair: Shame on you.

Mr. Granatstein: Yes. We did a lot of interviews and we went through the public materials. However, we know that we do not have the full story, and no one will for another 20 years at least.

Nonetheless, we felt confident enough to draw some lessons. Let me talk to the key lessons that we thought were there. First, we did very well in Kabul from 2003 to 2005. We had very good troops in sufficient numbers, good commanders and relatively good equipment. We had 16 light armoured vehicles; not enough for the number of troops we had, but more than anyone else had.

We also had strong, capable diplomats in the Canadian embassy. A whole-of-government program requires those things including and especially, perhaps, early placement of well-trained troops with clear goals. In general, in our view, the military did well; some of the civilian representatives, less well.

A key is that we had good intelligence. We took with us what is called an all source intelligence centre from the Canadian Forces, a unit that worked with human sources, with electronic sources, with written sources. It used everything that was available. Essentially we had the best intelligence in Kabul in this period other than the United States, which had massive resources.

To operate in a place like Afghanistan, we needed this kind of good intelligence — political, military, cultural — and we needed the skills to process and disseminate it.

In Kandahar, after 2006, our all source intelligence centre again established a very good reputation for getting and processing intelligence on the Kandahar region. Where we missed, however, was in Ottawa, in failing to truly appreciate the impact on operations in Regional Command South — where we operated and where we often commanded — of the open Afghan-Pakistan border and the safe haven provided in Pakistan to the Taliban.

Some intelligence officers in Ottawa — we talked to some — completely discounted the idea that there was Pakistani support for the Taliban. There was enough dissonance in the intelligence community in Ottawa that we think this resulted in our troops being left in a badly exposed position for far too long. Essentially, we need to get our intelligence act together in Ottawa. We operate well in the field — we did at least — not necessarily in Ottawa.

Secondly, there is a necessity to define clearly our political and military objectives. They were not defined clearly. We wobbled from beating al Qaeda to defeating the Taliban to trying to build a democracy in Afghanistan to wanting to emancipate Afghan women and children and to training the Afghan National Security Forces. At the same time, the military aim changed from combat to counter-insurgency. It was not only the Canadians that were wobbling all over the place in their aims. The Americans, ISAF, similarly did not know what they wanted. However, we could hardly wonder that Canadian public opinion began to turn against the war and politicians had a field day in attacking the government when our aims seemed to change once a year.

Third, there must be clear lines of command and control in the government, the bureaucracy and the military. In fact, what we had was squabbling between Foreign Affairs, National Defence, Privy Council Office. This was simply debilitating. In particular, the Department of Foreign Affairs, with only a relative handful of people on the ground in Afghanistan, claimed the right to control operations where the Canadian Forces had up to 3,000 people.

It was this type of feuding that led to the strategic advisory team that the military had set up in Afghanistan being killed. This was one of the only creative efforts to help Afghan government departments develop that was put forward by any of the allies.

It was killed not in Afghanistan, not by the Afghans, but in Ottawa by bureaucratic infighting. Very simply, we cannot afford to do this again.

In the future, the Prime Minister simply must crack heads and establish the line of command so that bureaucratic and military infighting does not jeopardize mission objectives.

Fourth, NATO in Afghanistan did not show well. Overall, the NATO command structure was not impressive. It was divided between Afghanistan and the supreme allied commander in Europe.

ISAF nations, as Canadians know all too well, operated with caveats that were dangerous to us. There were some countries that would not fight at night. There were some countries that would not fight at all. There were countries that would not go out in the snow. There were pilots flying Apache helicopters who would not go below a thousand feet. The Canadian Forces had operated with caveats in Kabul until the end of 2005, but we dropped them in Kandahar. We took casualties. The chair mentioned that there were 158 dead Canadians. Some of them came about because of our friends' caveats.

If we do this again, if we go into a combat mission again, we need to understand the caveats before we get in, and we need to factor them into our deployments. However, in my view, we should not take part in a coalition operation again unless we can guarantee that we will fight with American troops and with American support. Very simply, the Canadian army learned in Afghanistan that the sole ally we could rely on to fight well and to support us with troops, air power, intelligence and medical evacuation were the Americans. This is a major lesson for us. It is not one that the Canadian army wanted to learn, but it is one that calls into question — and I should say that here I am somewhat more strong on this position than my co-author — our future in NATO, or, at the very least, the scale of our commitment to NATO.

That is all I have, Madam Chair.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Granatstein. I just want to say in response that I agree with much of what you have said. Our dependence on the Americans was very clear, but we have also heard throughout the last decade some very powerful statements from Americans like General McChrystal and others saying that Canadians grasped counter- insurgency better than Americans did; they may have written the book, but we know how to implement it. Did you get that sense, that there was the flip side of that?

Mr. Granatstein: Yes, I think we did very well in the field. I think we developed the right tactics in Kandahar. We never had enough people to hold the ground that we cleared, and that was the difficulty. Once the Americans came into Kandahar in force, then we, the allies, began to have some better results, but it is still an uphill struggle.

The Chair: They were late coming in.

Mr. Granatstein: They did not come in until after 2008.

The Chair: Right; election year politics, which we find ourselves in again at this time.

Senator Lang: You talked in your presentation about going into Afghanistan. The way I understand it, we were not as prepared, perhaps, as we should have been. We move another 10 years later to today, where we are going to exit that theatre in a few short months.

Perhaps you can expand a little bit further. It is one way to look back 20/20 and be critical, but look ahead as well at where we are going with our Armed Forces and the state that our Armed Forces are in, to be able to go into other theatres — we have already gone into and out of Libya. Perhaps you can expand on that. From my sense, having being on the committee over the last couple of years, it seems to me that our Armed Forces are fairly well prepared now compared to what they were. Perhaps you can expand on that.

Mr. Granatstein: I have no doubt that that is true. The forces today are in much better shape than they have been for 25 or 30 years. The government has put substantial amounts of money and effort into rebuilding the Canadian Forces. We are about to see the budget cut at the end of this week, I am afraid, but it will still be better off than it was for a long time before.

The troops are better. They are better prepared. They have better equipment — not everything they need, but they have better equipment. We do not have enough people yet, but the lesson that we came away with from our research on writing this paper on lessons learned was that the problem was not the troops. The problem was political bureaucratic thinking about what we were doing. We think it is essentially an intelligence failure that did not have us prepared, not for going into Kabul so much but for going into Kandahar, which was where it turned into real combat. We went there in 2006. Our people arrived totally unprepared for the strength of the Taliban forces in the area, totally unprepared for the way they fought. They fought like Russians. They fought out of Russian defensive positions. They used tactics. They were centrally directed. They were well led in the field. They were formed units. We had been expecting a few ragtag, $10-a-day fighters who were trying to make a living. It was not like that at all.

How had this happened? The border allowed Pakistan-based Taliban to come in as they wished. Although this seems to have been common knowledge in all of the literature that Bercuson and I read before the 2006 period, somehow in Ottawa this had not been taken into account. I really cannot explain how this happened, but I know for a fact that the soldiers who went in, and we talked to both the first commander in Regional Command South and the first commander of a battle group in Kandahar, had no idea of what they were to face.

This struck us as simply extraordinary. How could we — not the soldiers, it is not their fault — have been so unprepared that we send our people in without that vital information?

Senator Lang: Just pursuing that a little bit further then, looking ahead and going into another theatre, how do we change the thinking in Ottawa? If you are correct, how do we change it so that that does not happen again? Do you send the CEOs here in Ottawa out to the front line so they can fully understand it?

Mr. Granatstein: That would be a good idea.

Senator Lang: It is easy to sit here and be critical, but how do you change that so we are better prepared and do not put our men and women in harm's way?

Mr. Granatstein: Clearly, we need more resources in our intelligence side. We have substantially increased and improved our resources. I have met CSIS officers who have served in Afghanistan. They struck me as being very competent and capable. None of them had the languages they needed and they had to rely on interpreters. That strikes me as being a drawback. Clearly, we need to have substantial effort on learning the languages of the areas in which we are likely to have operations in the future.

It is money, resources, training and thinking that are required. I have always thought, for example, that our intelligence services do not take advantage of the resources in the universities. There is substantial expertise in some of the most esoteric areas of the world in universities all across the country. It seems to me to be very useful to have people on a kind of retainer so that when a crisis blows up in country A we can go to universities across the country and find four specialists who actually know something about it, who can come in and work with our intelligence people and our military and do the briefings that can raise the game a bit for our side.

The Chair: You seem to be suggesting not just briefings for the military side but the political side?

Mr. Granatstein: Yes, and bureaucratic.

The Chair: Senator Eggleton has an intervention.

Senator Eggleton: I have a different experience with the Afghanistan mission, the first one anyway.

I want to ask you about the question Senator Lang asked, the failure you said to understand the intricacies of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. You said it was good to be involved with the Americans.

Mr. Granatstein: That is to fight with.

Senator Eggleton: I agree with that. What was their intelligence? What failed there? If Ottawa failed on that, then surely Washington did as well. Washington had a lot more at stake here.

Mr. Granatstein: Yes, you are undoubtedly right. The Americans had been fighting in the mountains on the border since late 2001 when they went in. Somehow that message does not seem to have reached the Canadian Forces when it deployed to Kandahar.

I find this inexplicable. I think the Americans understood full well.

When our first two commanders went to Kandahar in 2005 to be briefed, they were warned by Special Forces people that it would be a hot summer. They were told by the U.S. Army that there was no problem coming. Unfortunately, they seemed to believe the army rather than the Special Forces, and that contributed to our lack of preparation.

However, it is clear that the detailed word never made it to NDHQ, to Foreign Affairs, or to the Prime Minister's Office here.

Senator Eggleton: Or the same in Washington, or so it seems.

Mr. Granatstein: I guess they went through the same mess that we did, but some people clearly knew what was happening.

The Chair: All right. We will return to our list.

Senator Nolin: Good afternoon, sir. Thank you very much for accepting our invitation. I want to go to your fourth lesson when you talk about NATO. Having an alliance where caveats are allowed — do you think it is the beginning of the end for a great alliance like NATO?

Mr. Granatstein: If the members of an alliance will not fight with their friends, it does call into question the alliance.

Now, to be fair, this is not defending Europe.

Senator Nolin: No, no.

Mr. Granatstein: This is an out-of-area operation. This is a Special Operation. There is no doubt that the Americans twisted arms massively to get people to go in, and they desperately wanted to have, you know, one Romanian. It did not matter if he could do anything, but he had to be there to say that the coalition had X number of representatives there.

Naturally enough, as in Canada, there was a lot of public opposition to the war in Afghanistan. Once the shock of 9/ 11 went by, people began to draw back and ask if we should really be there. There were all sorts of other factors.

However, the reality is that, on the ground, when we were in difficulty in Kandahar, our commanders would call the Germans and say, "Look, you are not in any difficulty where you are. Can you send some people to help us?" "Terribly sorry, but Berlin will not permit it." You go to the French and the French commanders would say, "Yes, we would like to. Unfortunately, Paris will not let us." Therefore, you went down the line, through the various national representatives, and effectively got nothing.

It was the same thing at the NATO council meeting in Europe. The Canadian representatives would make the case every time: We need some help. Again, they would be stonewalled.

In the end, only the Americans came through after the Manley report in late 2008. After that came down, the Americans finally anteed up, and did so in a very substantial way. That meant that the Americans took control in Regional Command South instead of us, but at least we were not being put in a position where we did not have enough troops to do the job.

Senator Nolin: You mentioned two countries. When you look at the list of the 28, where are those of the last 10 that have caused problems? However, the problematic members are more of the first group of countries.

I will lead into my next question. We will have a summit meeting in Chicago in May.

Mr. Granatstein: Right.

Senator Nolin: Some of us on both sides of this table are afraid of the results of that meeting because of financial problems and lack of political commitment. I just want to take your experience and try to look a little bit beyond that meeting and see if there is a future for that alliance.

Mr. Granatstein: I do not think the alliance will disappear; I think it will exist in an attenuated form until such time as the Russians again become a threat, which unfortunately begins to look more likely. That will bring the alliance back to life.

However, they are all facing economic problems; they are all in serious trouble. They are all cutting their defence forces. The Americans have indicated that they are turning their face to the Pacific, and I suspect that we will be doing that as well in the very near future. In other words, I suspect that North America will say, "We were staying in NATO, but you guys are rich even if you are in trouble right now, so you can take care of yourself. We will turn our attention in the other direction — across the Pacific rather than across the Atlantic." I think that is the future.

Senator Nolin: Yet that raises a question of financing or coming up to the plate with the financial support for all the endeavours of the alliance. If we are still around the table, we will be asked to pay for it.

Mr. Granatstein: We will be asked to pay for it and we will probably say what we usually say when NATO asks us.

Senator Nolin: "Yes."

Mr. Granatstein: "No." We have almost always said no. You will have noticed that we pulled out of a couple of very important things in the last month.

Senator Nolin: Recent no's, I thought, because historically — we are talking to a historian.

Mr. Granatstein: No, we have not been the most faithful of allies. A lot of our protestations about how bad NATO has been ring a bit hollow. After all, we almost pulled out entirely in 1969 under the Trudeau government; it took a cabinet revolt to make us only cut by 50 per cent. The Mulroney government pulled out without giving any notice.

We never really were totally faithful in our support for the alliance. We were not totally bad, but we never really lived up to all of our talk after about 1958. Therefore, it has been a slow diminution. I would suggest that the rate of our pullout will increase.

The Chair: Thank you. We will focus on the shift to the Pacific, as you talked about, with some of our next witnesses.

I just wanted to note that, as a member of the Manley panel, we also talked about the problem of the border with Pakistan pretty directly.

Mr. Granatstein: May I say that it was after the Manley panel that things began to be properly assessed.

The Chair: Yes, in terms of that issue.

Senator Day: Thank you, Madam Chair. Normally the first speaker on this side would be Senator Dallaire as deputy chair, but unfortunately he is away, so I will try to fill his shoes and ask a couple of questions of my good friend Dr. Granatstein.

The first point you made, Dr. Granatstein, was the issue of defining the mission at the front end, and you are absolutely right in the abstract. However, this is something that went on for 10 years and evolved over that time. I recall having been in Kabul and the military said, "We need the civilian side here. We need a head or chief of the civilian side. Where is the UN? We need the chief of the civilian side from Europe." They were looking for civilian participation, but not getting it. However, it was a decision by the executive that created the commitment for NATO to send in the military.

Was it not the Americans who were thinking at the front end — and therefore all of us that joined ISAF — thinking that this was another military mission at the very front end; that we will just go in. We have been sent in by the executive. This is like Korea. This is like a number of the small skirmishes. We will go in with military force. The only reason the Russians were not successful was because they did not put enough military might in there and because maybe Charlie Wilson gave too many armaments to the other side. However, it was still just a military operation.

Then, as time went on, we started hearing about "well, we will create these provincial reconstruction teams" and "this is a three-block war." We started hearing all those things. The mission definition is changing as we go along and we are not being successful one way.

Is it not unfair to say that we should define the mission at the front end in a situation like this?

Mr. Granatstein: Yes. It is unfair. It requires skillful, political management to ensure that you can bring your population with you when the goals change. It should not be beyond the realm of possibility to do that, but it was not done because there was always political criticism from whoever was in the opposition at the time. There was criticism from peace groups and others. There was support for the troops, but there was very little support for the mission, and what little there was tended to decline as the war went on.

Therefore, it was not "sold," to use a crude term; it was not sold properly, and that was the difficulty. It was not sold properly in any of the NATO countries that were involved. The drop-off in support has been across the board. We are not unique in any way, shape or form.

Where we are unique, perhaps, is in keeping our combat role for as long as we did, for five years in Kandahar. That was much to our credit, and our troops did very well.

Senator Day: Should we have been able to define at the front end, back in 2001, 2002, 2003, that this is a whole-of- government approach and that the only way to succeed is on a whole-of-government approach?

Mr. Granatstein: We probably should have been able to see that then. I think in a future operation we will recognize that, and we will try to do it better than in Afghanistan.

Senator Day: I think that is a major lesson learned, but I am not sure I agree with you. The mentality was there — I do not want to say intelligence — but at the front end, we should have thought of this as primarily a military operation.

I would like you to talk about the strategic advisory team with respect to General Hillier and the government in Kabul. It was mainly military advisers that were into those government departments at the front end, and I think that was one of the jealousies of Foreign Affairs, but we were thinking military at that time.

Mr. Granatstein: Hillier wanted to have civilians on board and tried to bring some in. He got one in the first iteration of the strategic advisory team. Thereafter, he could not get civilians to go. It was dangerous place, after all, and civilians were not prepared to go.

When Ottawa killed the strategic advisory team, Hillier was told — he said this to me — that Ottawa would find civil servants to take the place of the military and could not. Yes, it was military, and, yes, that caused some of the jealousies that existed in Ottawa, but it was a good idea that was helping the Afghans develop their public service, but it was killed by bureaucratic infighting in Canada, a perfect example of how not to run a public service.

Senator Lang: You made the statement clearly that support for the mission had diminished to point of little support. I think that cannot go by unchallenged because it seems to me that over the period of time that we went into the Afghan theatre until today, there has been a grudging support by the public for the mission, knowing that there are problems over there and that the world has a responsibility.

I do not understand how you can sit in your place and say there is no support for the mission because I believe Canadians do support this type of activity when they know it is in the world's interests.

Mr. Granatstein: I have no doubt there is support for the military's role and support for the military itself, support of a kind that we have not seen in this country for a long time.

There is much less support for the mission, much less support for the idea that anything we can do will help create a stable situation, a good government, a society in which women are not abused in Afghanistan. There is, I think, no longer any support for that as a concept in the West. It is gone. The Afghans have lost the trust of the people who were there helping them. Their government is corrupt; their society is Islamist; it is not going to change. That has weakened support dramatically.

Senator Day: There was a time, about 2005, when this committee visited a provincial reconstruction team. There were civilian bureaucrats in the PRT who could not go outside. They had volunteered to go there but could not go outside the base because the military had not secured it enough to do that. That is an important part of recognizing that this began as a major military operation and slowly evolved.

The other point on which I wanted to comment, Dr. Granatstein, is that you said that we would not go to war without the Americans, and maybe we could add the Australians to that group because they were pretty good at sharing things as well.

Mr. Granatstein: I think the Australians were very good. Unfortunately, there were not enough of them.

The Chair: They were a very small contingent.

Senator Mitchell: There is a difference, perhaps, between caveats and more dependable allies who just do not have enough resources. Certainly, the Australians and maybe even the British, it is not like they would not help us. It was not caveats preventing them; it was just resources. They were busy where they were, and they were not like the Americans with what seemed to be unlimited resources. Is that fair?

Mr. Granatstein: That is true up to a point. We spent a lot of time in 2006 helping the Brits who were in serious difficulty, and who, frankly, were not very good. If you read in the monograph written by Colonel Ian Hope, who was the first commander of Task Force Orion in Kandahar in 2006, he does not say the Brits were bad. He says his experience of dealing with the Americans who would fight began to change a lot of attitudes that the Canadian Army had had. This is a man who had served with the British army before the Canadian Army, and who, in fact, came away from his experience, if I read correctly what he said, convinced that you could not rely any longer on the British or the French or the Germans or anybody except, frankly, the Americans. They had the resources. They had troops that were well trained and that would fight. As far as he was concerned, the Canadians would fight, too, but we needed those resources and that support.

Senator Mitchell: It is a nuance. You have not mentioned the success or your impression of our training mission, the Afghan army and the Afghan police force. Was that outside the scope, or could you comment?

Mr. Granatstein: It was outside the scope, and I really do not have an opinion except there is not much sign of success in the training of police, certainly. There is some success in training the army. They seem now able to conduct battalion-scale operations, which is a sign of substantial progress, but we will see where it goes in the next couple of years because they will have to do better than that.

The Chair: In fairness, we have literally been training since the day we arrived on the soil. This is what the FOBS were about and everything else. This is kind of a separate mission, but it has been job one.

Mr. Granatstein: Yes, I agree.

Senator Mitchell: You said your impression is the U.S. will turn away from NATO or that side of things and look more to the Pacific. Surely, they will be drawn back into the Middle East again; will they not?

Mr. Granatstein: They might. I hope not, but they might.

Senator Mitchell: They will not just turn their back on that; will they?

Mr. Granatstein: It is pretty hard to avoid. There is a lot of public pressure in the United States and in the West to get involved or not.

The Chair: I want to follow up on one thing that Senator Lang raised. This is important in the lessons learned. When we talk about that support for the mission and the support for the troops versus the mission itself, I always found that when you had an opportunity to talk to people about it, they engaged. The issue seemed to be communication, and, again, we talked about it on the independent panel. People did not know what was going on there. Of course, they loved the troops and supported them, but they did not understand the mission. Is that anywhere in your work or research?

Mr. Granatstein: We did not go into it at great length, but I am convinced that 99 out of 100 Canadians thought Afghanistan was peacekeeping that went wrong somehow, and we had casualties. They did not realize, despite the best efforts of the government in 2005, to prepare people by saying, "There will be casualties," and Bill Graham went around the country saying that there would be casualties, but people did not believe it. I am not sure the army believed it in 2005-06, either. We were setting up a PRT in Kandahar. The idea was that the battle group would provide protection for the PRT. Instead, it found itself fighting a war.

The Chair: Could you give us your assessment on the whole-of-government approach? Yes, there were bureaucratic nightmares. We do not train people in CIDA and the Department of Foreign Affairs to go to war. That is the job of our military. There were lots of issues. Do you see this as a one-off in the sense that we were trying to figure out what to do there? As Senator Lang noted, we did not go through this discussion about Libya. Most people say our missions will probably, in the future, be more like Libya than Afghanistan. Could I have your assessment on that and your one- liner on the whole-of-government approach?

Mr. Granatstein: We did not have a template, and we probably have now created a template on how to do it better. The problem is that your template from five years ago may not be the one you will need five years hence. That is the difficulty. We are not good at adapting, that is the problem we face. I do not know what the next kind of mission will be. I suspect it will be something different from Afghanistan and different from Libya. Where it will be, I do not know. Syria, somewhere else, who knows? The problem is that, whatever it is, it will require special knowledge and training, people with languages and intelligence skills, and those are the things in which we always seem to be rather lacking.

The Chair: It may be more an inclusion of the intelligence community than CIDA?

Mr. Granatstein: I certainly hope so.

Senator Eggleton: Of the four points you make regarding lessons learned, I will deal with the fourth one first, the national caveats and the NATO situation.

I agree with you; I think NATO has got to try to come to grips with this thing. In this case it is even worse than I think what you have indicated because even though this mission was outside of Europe, it was also subject to article 5 having been declared, because an attack on the United States is what precipitated this mission. It is all the more unforgivable to have these caveats, it seems to me. I think you are right: NATO better start coming to grips with that soon.

The other three, you talk about well-trained, well-equipped, prepared, experienced civilian and military, you talk about clearly defined objectives by partners, et cetera, about clear, consistent and persistent lines of command and communications. Those are lines that have been around many times before.

Mr. Granatstein: It is not brain surgery.

Senator Eggleton: There is nothing new about any of those lines at all.

Mr. Granatstein: I agree.

Senator Eggleton: You would agree then that we largely go into most of these ill prepared, in this context. There are some things we may have right but a lot we do not.

You talked about the political end of things and not pulling it together enough for people, but democracy is a messy business. There is a lot of toing and froing about what to do, and people have different opinions, and in a fully democratic country they are allowed to express them and the media is allowed to report them. I do not know that we could ever do it differently than that. We will probably see these lessons learned in future missions as well. As you say, maybe there is a template to come out of this.

Mr. Granatstein: A whole-of-government template.

Senator Eggleton: Maybe a whole-of-government template, I am not sure about that, but it strikes me that every conflict we get involved in is different and the lessons learned from the previous one do not necessarily apply.

Mr. Granatstein: One can learn some lessons, I would think. The government can take control of how it functions. The Prime Minister can beat heads in the bureaucracy and make it do what he wants. That did not happened under Martin or Harper. That is the difficulty here. You had departments going in different directions. That does not have to happen.

Senator Eggleton: You are not really referring to the opposition, but to the government itself?

Mr. Granatstein: Yes, you cannot control what the opposition or media do, but you can control how the government functions, or you should be able to.

Senator Eggleton: Let me ask you, as a historian, the question about where this will end up. There is every reason to be very pessimistic about where this will end up. We can be proud of what we have done and look at achievements and say that is good and that is good. However, at the end of day, we know the history of Afghanistan, we know it is very difficult to govern, that it is full of corruption, full of warlords and tribal conditions, et cetera, and the border thing with Pakistan. How could anyone be optimistic that it will not end up going back to the Taliban or some other dictatorial entity?

Mr. Granatstein: I am not at all optimistic, unfortunately. I expect it will go back to civil war between the northern area and the Taliban. It will be as messy as can be, and the rights of women and the education of girls will be gone.

Senator Dawson: On this question of the rights of women and the education of girls, some of the lines of communication that we used at the beginning were that we were there to liberate Afghan women. I agree with the senator that there is still strong support. I come from Quebec City which, even though we have Valcartier, has not been known to be sympathetic to going to war. As a historian you have probably noticed that.

This time around, quite clearly the support for the troops in Quebec City was much stronger than ever before in history. One of the problems we have now is one of reasons we were supporting them is there was a noble goal of liberating women, educating young people and giving them a chance to be up to international standards.

We now know that is not turning out to be true. The support we are giving for the army and the support for the police will not help liberate Afghan women or educate young Afghan girls.

Mr. Granatstein: First, that was not what we went in for initially. That was an afterthought a couple of years down the road.

We wanted to do that, I think, from the beginning. We did not start it until midpoint of the mission and we did not try to sell it as a key factor until the midpoint.

I think we have had great success. The numbers of kids in school, the numbers of women in Parliament in Afghanistan, the role that women are able to play in Kabul, and probably in the cities, is impressive. It is back to where it was before the Taliban took power the first time, but it is very fragile and unlikely to last once the western troops have gone. That is the problem.

Much as I hate to say it, I fear that the gains that were made will turn out to have been illusory.

The Chair: I guess we can only hope that the 2.2 billion girls who are in school today, who were not 10 years ago, might be able to resist and put up a battle.

Thank you, Dr. Granatstein, Senior Research Fellow with the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, the co-author, with David Bercuson, of Lessons Learned? What Canada Should Learn from Afghanistan. We appreciate your contribution to our study and this debate.

Thank you for being with us.

With our next panel we shift focus to talk with two American defence budget policy experts about the U.S. budgetary pressures on the military and what that means for us as an ally and in operations in the future.

We are going to shift our focus a little bit from lessons learned in Afghanistan to the future, and particularly what is going on with our biggest ally south of the border. A former Canadian Prime Minister once observed that living next to the United States is like sleeping with the elephant; one is affected by its every twitch and grunt. Today, we will ask about some of those recent American twitches and how they might affect us pretty directly.

In January, the Pentagon published a new defence strategy with some significant changes in its priorities. We touched on this briefly with our earlier witness. At the same time, the U.S. defence budget is also being drastically cut and may be cut even further in the years ahead. What does this mean for the American military, the U.S. posture in the world; and of course, from our point of view, what does it mean for us?

Joining us now by video conference from Washington is Todd Harrison, Senior Fellow for Defence Budget Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Would you like to go ahead, Mr. Harrison, with some opening comments?

Todd Harrison, Senior Fellow, Defence Budget Studies, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, as an individual: Yes. Thank you for having me here today. It is a pleasure to come talk to you about some of the major challenges facing the U.S. defence budget and what that could mean over the coming decade. I had sent ahead a couple of charts, and I hope you have them before you.

The first chart is the constraints of the Budget Control Act. That is an important factor right now in U.S. defence budget and planning. Last August, the U.S. Congress passed what is known as the Budget Control Act of 2011, and that set caps on different parts of the federal discretionary budget. The DOD budget is about half of our discretionary budget. These caps had the effect of reducing how much we will be able to spend on defence over the coming decade.

As you can see in the graph, U.S. defence spending is cyclic and has been since the end of World War II. We have seen three main cycles: one at the end of the Korean War, one for the Vietnam War, and one for the Cold War buildup. Starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we had a dramatic buildup in U.S. defence spending for the Cold War. That peaked in fiscal year 1985, then declined for a little over a decade, finally reached the bottom around 1988, then began building up after that, and of course U.S. defence spending accelerated following the attacks of 9/11.

We appear to be at this point just past the peak in this cycle of defence spending, the post-9/11 buildup in defence spending. Unlike previous buildups in defence spending, this one did not result in a significant growth in the size of the U.S. military. The total number of personnel in the U.S. military has stayed relatively even, at about 1.4 million to 1.5 million in uniform.

In previous defence budget cycles, we saw a rapid increase in total people in the U.S. military, and then, on the downside, we saw a rapid decrease in the size of the U.S. military. However, that is not an easy option this time around because this buildup did not result in a significantly larger military. In fact, our navy and our air force are smaller than they were a decade ago.

The impacts of the Budget Control Act can be seen on the right-hand side of this graph; the dashed line at the top, in blue, is last year's president's budget request for FY12 and beyond. Last year, the president requested a slight increase in defence spending that would have flattened off near the end of the decade.

The effect of the Budget Control Act is shown in the green line there. It mandates an initial set of caps in the defence budget. That is what this represents, and that is what the president's FY13 budget level was set to be.

For FY13 — the next fiscal year the Congress is considering — the base U.S. defence budget will be capped at about $525 billion. That is slightly down from the current level of funding. Right now, it is at $530 billion. We will see it stay at that lower level basically for the rest of the decade, only growing with inflation.

The big unknown, at this point, is what the effect of sequestration would be. That is the second part of the Budget Control Act that has not yet gone into enforcement. Sequestration would lower the budget caps by about $52 billion per year in the base defence budget. That would come about through a very formulaic process. DOD would have to cut all of its accounts by a uniform percentage. The only account it could exempt would be military personnel for pay and benefits. When you exempt those accounts, all other accounts have to be cut by a greater percentage in order to get to the $52 billion in annual savings. It is very much, as I think Secretary Panetta has called it, a "meat-axe approach." I think it is very untargeted. It is not strategic, and it will be rather messy within our own defence budget.

With that said, to put it in perspective, that is about a 10 per cent cut in defence spending. While it does occur abruptly, it does not go any lower after that. It remains flat in the years that follow compared to previous downturns. At the end of the Cold War, what you can see on the chart here is that total U.S. defence spending declined by about a third over a little more than a decade. Looking ahead, the cuts you see under sequestration would be abrupt, but the depth of the cuts is realistic and is something that could reasonably occur over the course of the decade.

The second slide I have here has three different charts on it, and I want to use that to just highlight that there are other options available if our Congress reached some sort of compromise position on the sequestration. What you see in the middle are the cuts that would happen under sequestration. They would just happen abruptly and be spread out equally over 10 years. An alternative to achieve the same level of deficit reduction would be to phase in the cuts more gradually. Currently, the law, as it is written, does not allow this. You cannot move money between years, but Congress could amend the law. If they did so, an annual reduction of 2.2 per cent per year over the decade would result in the same total dollar amount of savings as sequestration would.

That is one option. Of course, another option is to find other offsetting cuts or revenue increases in other parts of the budget, but that gets beyond defence policy.

Those are all of the prepared remarks I have. I would be happy to answer your questions.

The Chair: Thank you very much. We were following along, but we did not have all the coloured lines. However, I think we have kept up with you there in terms of your point that there are some rules in place now that kick into gear. There is an election between now and January 2013, which is when this would happen by fiat if nothing else intervenes. We will come back to that political question, but can the president do what he says he wants to do with sequestration with the fiat in place? He says he wants to shift gears and change the emphasis, and yet you do not see the budget reflecting his statements.

Mr. Harrison: I think the short answer is that Secretary Panetta and other leaders within the Pentagon have been clear that any further reductions in the budget, whether it is sequestration or something short of sequestration, would mean that we would not be able to follow through on the new strategy that they outlined in January. I believe their words were that they would have to throw it out the window and start over. The reality is that it is not likely they will be able to avoid further cuts. Even if sequestration is avoided, there probably will be some additional cuts to defence. If you take them at their word, that means that we would not be able to support the strategy that they have outlined.

The Chair: That obviously has implications for your allies not just for any unknown operation or mission at this particular point.

Okay, let us delve in a little bit. Senator Lang, would you like to go ahead?

Senator Lang: Thank you, Madam Chair.

Perhaps you could enlighten us as to your opinion in observing the present election that is ongoing in the United States. Is there a marked difference between the Republicans and the Democrats? If, for example, the Republicans were to take the oval office, do you see a substantial difference in how the military would be dealt with? Are they locked in, and either individual elected president will have to deal with the situation that they are confronted with?

Mr. Harrison: I guess I would divide my answer into two parts. The politics between now and when sequestration would occur are a little different than the politics that would occur after a new administration would take office. Sequestration, as the law is currently written, goes into force on January 2. That is after the election but before the new Congress and potentially new administration would be sworn into office.

I think the likely outcome is that after the election the lame duck session of Congress would come back in November and December, and they would try to deal with this issue of sequestration and how to diffuse it.

At the same time, they have several other very big policy questions to tackle. A number of tax cuts are expiring on December 31 as well, so they will have to deal with a lot of issues that will have a significant impact on the federal budget and the deficit over the coming decade. They may or may not be able to work out some compromise during that lame duck session. It remains to be seen.

If they do not, sequestration would take effect. The money would begin to be cut from these accounts. Then a new Congress would be sworn in, and, a few weeks later, a new president could potentially be sworn in.

I think that unless there is a significant swing one way or the other in party control of the House and the Senate, it is not likely that the situation will change that much. To do anything significant, you have to get past the 60-vote hurdle in the U.S. Senate to end debate, break a filibuster. I do not think it is likely either party will have 60 votes in the Senate, so they will have to work out some sort of compromise one way or the other.

For that reason, the election may not matter as much as some might think because we will still likely have divided government in one form or another. As I like to remind people, the party control may change, but the budget math remains the same. We have a tremendous deficit in our budget right now, and it will only grow in the future if we do not do something about it. One way or another, if you are going to try to restore some of the funding for defence, you have to find offsets in some other part of the budget, and that is just really difficult to do.

Senator Lang: Thank you.

The Chair: Let me just come back to that because you touched on this, and it is just a follow-up.

Given that you have laid that out and that the numbers are the numbers, whoever is in office has to deal with this. If they cannot compromise, this system goes into place.

From your look at it — and I do not know whether you even look at it through this lens — do you agree with Panetta's view that a) this is a meat axe approach and that b) it means the new policy sustaining U.S. global leadership as laid out by the president is in jeopardy?

Mr. Harrison: I think if sequestration takes effect as it is currently written in law and you have to make these uniform cuts across every account in the defence budget, it would be accurate to call that a meat-axe approach. I understand secretary Panetta once worked as a butcher as a child. I do not have a similar experience, but I —

The Chair: We will quiz you on the cuts of meat, believe me.

Mr. Harrison: What it would do is it would be messy. It would be untargeted. It would create a tremendous number of inefficiencies within the Department of Defence because you would be talking about cancelling contracts and in some cases laying off civilian workers. A number of contractors would have to be let go. It would have a significant impact across all sectors of defence.

With uniform cuts, it means you are cutting your air force by the same percentage as your navy, by the same percentage as your army, and your special operations forces. Everything gets the same cut. That is really the antithesis of strategy. Strategy is all about making the hard choices and prioritizing. I think if DOD had the flexibility to prioritize in those cuts and basically direct them so that some areas would be cut more and some areas would be protected, this would not be nearly as bad.

The Chair: However, that option does not exist.

Mr. Harrison: It would require the cooperation of Congress to give DOD the option to do that.

The Chair: Right.

Senator Day: Could you go back to your first graph again — the top line — so that I understand? We were at fiscal year 2010, 2012 onward, and you have three options.

As the chair pointed out, our lines were not coloured. You were talking about colour-coded lines and we were trying to follow. I think the top line is the president's budget; is that correct?

Mr. Harrison: The president's budget from last year is the top line; the FY12 budget. The current budget the president just came out with is the FY13 budget, and that is the second line down. That budget is in line with the initial cuts required under the Budget Control Act.

Senator Day: Okay.

Mr. Harrison: That is the middle line.

Senator Day: The initial BCA, what is the BCA? What is that acronym?

Mr. Harrison: That is the Budget Control Act.

Senator Day: The president is following then with his most recent budget?

Mr. Harrison: Yes, sir.

Senator Day: With the Budget Control Act, we read about your difficulty with borrowing, permission to borrow, and that dictates how much you can spend — because you are right up at the top of how much you can borrow — and how much more you can borrow.

Mr. Harrison: Yes, sir. The Budget Control Act was a compromise piece of legislation that came out of the debate over whether or not to raise the debt ceiling, the limit on how much we can borrow. The compromise they came up with was for every dollar, roughly, that they would increase the debt ceiling we would have cuts to spending. Instead of coming up with specific things to cut, they came up with budget caps. As long as you stay within those caps, you will be cutting spending relative to what it would have been otherwise.

Senator Day: Okay, and was that in fact adopted by Congress?

Mr. Harrison: It was adopted in August of 2011.

Senator Day: That could go forward with that projection. Sequestration, which is the third line down and we have talked about, is a term we are not familiar with here. However, I thought that was because the compromise that Congress was looking for when they created a two-party committee could not come forward with a decision; is that correct?

Mr. Harrison: Right, I should probably go back and explain the sequence of events that occurred. That might help a bit.

The Budget Control Act was passed in August, and it was divided into two phases. The first phase is the middle line, the initial Budget Control Act cuts. They said this is how much we were going to cap spending for defence and non- defence. Phase two of the Budget Control Act said we were going to find another $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, but we were not going to specify what it is. We were going to leave it to this super-committee.

Senator Day: A super-committee, okay.

Mr. Harrison: Right, the bipartisan committee that was charged to find the additional savings. They did not find any additional savings. They did not come up with a plan. The law had a trigger mechanism in there as a penalty and because the super-committee failed, there is now a penalty sequestration, if you will, that drops you down to the bottom line. It takes all the budget caps from before and it reduces them. That is where we are right now. That is the current law and is the bottom line.

Senator Day: You indicated that roughly works out to a 10 per cent reduction in the defence spending?

Mr. Harrison: A 10 per cent reduction compared to what the president proposed in his most recent budget requests for FY13 and compared to the initial cuts under the Budget Control Act. It is taking an additional 10 per cent from that.

Senator Day: That clarifies it. Thank you very much. I appreciate that, Mr. Harrison.

Senator Nolin: Good afternoon, sir. Thank you for accepting our invitation.

Mr. Harrison: Thank you.

Senator Nolin: I want to turn the question to NATO's future.

I understand your expertise is more on numbers and budget matters, but recent years and recent experience with NATO suggests that if the U.S. is not financing the endeavours of NATO, NATO may have problems.

What is your take on that affirmation?

Mr. Harrison: I think in a tight budget environment we have to coordinate much more closely with our allies and our partners — NATO and then more broadly as well — so that we are spending our dollars in more complementary manners. For example, the operation in Libya showed that the U.S. has some core capabilities that NATO countries need to carry out any kind of operation like that, like setting up a no-fly zone over Libya. Things like intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, aerial refueling, command and control, and mission planning are some of the areas where the U.S. can contribute.

We have to think more proactively about that in the future and coordinate with our allies so they can focus their defence spending on areas that complement us. We can focus our defence spending on areas that will complement them, so we can work together as one integrated force effectively in the future but at a lower cost; not just to the U.S. but to our allies as well. One of the things we see in this budget environment is it is not just the U.S. that is running into budget difficulty. A lot of our traditional allies are having similar problems with their own budgets.

Senator Nolin: If the U.S. is to be more focused or turn its interests more to the west and less to Europe, do you think the commitment towards NATO is still there or is it really changing? Should we be concerned by that?

Mr. Harrison: In the strategic guidance, I did not see anything to indicate that we would not be as committed to NATO. I do not think anything was stated explicitly on that. I am not an expert in that, so I will defer to my colleague who will come after me and could probably provide a much more in-depth answer on that.

Senator Mitchell: I throw my thanks in as well. It is really good to have you with us.

My question concerns the implications of these cuts for two areas. You call them unmanned. We do not. I call them remote-controlled aircraft. There is certainly an emphasis on that more and more in your military, and I think more and more in ours as well, but will this begin to shift that balance from remote-controlled to person-driven aircraft even more?

Mr. Harrison: I think it is a mixed bag really. We have invested heavily in UAVs, these unmanned aerial vehicles, over the past decade. They have performed wonderfully in Iraq and Afghanistan and even in Libya, more recently; but as we shift to the future, particularly looking at a focus on the Asia-Pacific region and in the Middle East, and looking at a future where we will probably have to operate in a more defended air space where we will not have absolute air superiority from day one as we have been accustomed to in recent years, our spending will have to shift, even within UAVs. Instead of investing in the, if you will, lower-end UAVs that are not stealthy, that can only operate where we have air superiority, we will have to shift to more advanced UAVs that are stealthy and go beyond just being remotely piloted because in a truly denied environment, there could be jamming that could knock out communications links; so there will have to be a degree of autonomy on these weapons system so that they can do whatever you program them to do, which could be as simple as turn around and come home, or continue to carry out their mission if they lose their communications during flight.

I think we will see a shift in the type of spending we have on UAVs. However, the same thing is going on in our manned aircraft as well. We are in the process of finishing the development of the joint strike fighter, which is a stealthy, relatively short-range strike platform. That, of course, is intended to operate in a denied environment. Then we are starting development of a next-generation bomber that would be a follow-on to the B2 stealth bomber. It would have additional stealthy characteristics, but long range is the distinguishing characteristic there. It also would be intended to operate in a denied environment.

We are seeing a real shift in our investments in aircraft in particular to longer-range systems and systems that can operate in a denied environment where there are sophisticated, integrated air defences.

Senator Mitchell: I think you may have answered it, but to take it one step further, what will this then do to your commitment to the joint strike fighter program? Do you think it will cause you to waver somewhat in your commitment to that, just the cost?

Mr. Harrison: The program in the past three years has slipped three times because of development and testing problems. Hopefully, we are near the end of that — knock on wood. We should expect that there probably will be some additional issues that will pop up over the coming years.

In terms of sequestration, if cuts like sequestration go into effect and it is a uniform cut across all accounts, then the joint strike fighter will get cut by the same percentage. That will hamper the development timeline for that program. That is a good example of a reason we should try to do better in the way that we are implementing these cuts so that it is not a meat-axe approach.

Barring sequestration, it looks like DOD is committed to the joint strike fighter program. Once we get out, when we are ramping up production to the full rate production level, I suspect, based on historical trends and air force aircraft procurement and other services' aircraft procurements, that we probably will not end up buying as many as we project right now. That might mean that we do not ramp up to as high of a production rate annually as we are currently planning, or it could mean that we do ramp up to full production but we just end the production line a few years earlier. All of that is really speculative at this point. All DOD is planning for at this time is really a five-year time horizon, looking out from FY13 to FY17, and what is in the budget now continues the Joint Strike Fighter Program. It invests heavily in continuing development and test work and beginning to ramp up production in the later part of that five-year period.

Senator Mitchell: Your missile defence system development is expensive. Might that be reconsidered given these cuts?

Mr. Harrison: We have a number of different missile defence programs in the works. All together, I think they take up about $10 billion in the defence budget, about 2 per cent of the overall defence budget. What we see so far is they have been relatively spared from cuts, at least to this point. Again, under sequestration they would get the same uniform cut as everything else, but barring that, it looks like there is support to continue with the programs that are in progress, THAAD — Theatre High-Altitude Area Defense system — patriot, Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense and specifically SM3 missiles that work with Aegis, those interceptor missiles. There appears to be continued support for those programs in the budget for now and for the foreseeable future.

The Chair: Just a final point as we wrap up here: The President has basically said that he would — if he is back in office — veto these automatic across-the-board cuts. I am assuming a Republican president would do the same. This takes away any of their strategic ability or their ability to pick and choose. Would it be a safe bet on either side that this would be vetoed?

Mr. Harrison: I think what the President has said is he would veto any attempt to undo these cuts unless it was accompanied by some sort of offsetting cuts for deficit reduction.

I think a Republican president may not make the same veto threat. In terms of whether or not the cuts happen, the only way to avoid them is for Congress to pass new legislation that overturns the previous legislation. In order for Congress to pass new legislation, they have to get past the 60-vote hurdle in the Senate.

The Chair: I read you, yes.

Mr. Harrison: That therefore requires bipartisan support.

Senator Day: Mr. Harrison, I am still working on the graph and this chart. I guess it is my finance background that is causing me to ask these questions, but is the Department of Defense in the U.S. right now planning based on the Budget Control Act reductions?

Mr. Harrison: They are planning for the middle line that you see there.

Senator Day: Yes, exactly. They are planning on that.

Mr. Harrison: Right.

Senator Day: I am sorry to interrupt you, but the 10 per cent reduction would be in addition if a deal cannot be worked out, Congress does not act, sequestration happens; there is going to be 10 per cent more across the board — was that the 10 per cent number?

Mr. Harrison: Yes, sir. That is exactly right.

Senator Day: Thank you.

Mr. Harrison: Secretary Panetta and the DOD comptroller, Bob Hale, have both said very explicitly they are not planning for that 10 per cent cut, that there is no planning going on in the building, so I take them at their word, but I think later in the year they may actually have to begin to start planning for that.

Senator Day: What is the reduction now that they are planning on?

Mr. Harrison: The reduction they are planning on now is the middle line you see here. That is a slight reduction of about $5 billion, 1 per cent reduction in nominal terms, from the current level of defence spending.

The Chair: Mr. Harrison, thank you for walking us through this and setting the stage for us. We are watching elections and budgets on your side of the border and certainly budgets on ours as well. You have taken complicated material and helped us digest it. Thank you very much for being with us.

Mr. Harrison: Thank you.

The Chair: We will just pause for a moment while we change witnesses.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are continuing our conversation about the implications of the U.S. defence spending cuts, not only on the U.S. priorities and systems, but what it may mean for allies like Canada. We are pleased to welcome Nora Bensahel, Deputy Director of Studies and Senior Fellow with the Center for a New American Security.

This is our chance to look at the Canada-U.S. defence and security relationship — the long-standing partnership that we have. We want to look at how these cuts that Mr. Harrison has just walked us through — at least the potential cuts coming — might affect the U.S. military, the president's new global defence strategy and whether that can happen, and what that means for all of its allies.

We welcome you to our committee. Do you have some opening comments to make?

Nora Bensahel, Deputy Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, Center for a New American Security, as an individual: Yes. First, thank you very much for inviting me to speak with you today. It is an honour and privilege to do so. Since Mr. Harrison covered the budget debates so well, I will focus on the issues I think are most relevant strategically, and particularly for U.S. allies such as Canada.

I want to talk about the defence strategic guidance and budget principles that the administration released in January 2012. As Mr. Harrison noted earlier, the administration has said that this strategy and the principles in it would be "thrown out the window," in their words, if the levels of budget cuts are higher than what is currently planned for, if that sequestration mechanism comes into play. However, I believe that these will most likely be the enduring strategic principles, no matter what level of defence cuts are finally agreed to. Therefore, I think they merit review.

There are two themes in those documents that I see as most relevant for the future of U.S. alliance relations. The first is the idea of rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific. This is a recognition for the United States that many long-term interests really do lie in that part of the world, not just in terms of military and security interests, but also economic and trade interests.

The main issue there is the growing power of China. Some people believe that China is a growing threat that will have to be contained militarily, and that is therefore the reason why the United States will have to rebalance toward Asia. However, even people who do not believe China necessarily poses a threat do acknowledge that, as two large powers, the United States and China may have conflicting interests and that it is important to defend U.S. interests even if the worst fears about the Chinese military do not come true.

In the short term, however, there will still be a great deal of instability and insecurity emanating from the Middle East. Therefore, this rebalancing idea the Department of Defense has talked about really emphasizes the need to prepare for the shorter- and medium-term threats that come from the Middle East with the longer-term shift of interests toward Asia-Pacific.

As a practical matter, this has two implications. The first is that the U.S. defence budget will likely prioritize naval and air forces over ground forces. You see that even in the cuts that have been made to the defence budget — those already incorporated in the fiscal year 2013 request that Mr. Harrison mentioned earlier.

The second implication, which is particularly important for U.S. allies, is that it will make all other regions of the world lesser priorities. That does not mean they are not priorities, but it means those I mentioned will be to the two priority areas of focus. To the extent that the cuts in the defence budget remain largely as they are — if sequestration is averted or somehow modified by Congress — I do not think there will be a huge trade-off here. The U.S. will still be able to continue the program of cooperation with its partners and allies to the extent that it has in the past.

However, if the defence cuts do grow larger — and I share Mr. Harrison's assessment that the final budget figure is likely to be higher than what we see now, even if it falls short of the sequestration number — I think that will further constrain U.S. resources in that the United States may not be as willing to commit its resources to allied operations — for example, the kinds of capabilities that were critical to NATO operations in Libya — if there are greater constraints on the assets. Due to defence cuts, the U.S. may be more inclined to reserve those for its potential unilateral operations rather than contributing them to coalition operations.

The second issue that cuts across all of these strategic documents is what the Defense Department is calling a "prioritization on reversibility." That term has been poorly understood because many people think it implies the ability to undo bad decisions if they are made. However, that is not really what it is talking about. It is a prudent principle at a time of strategic uncertainty that the way in which the cuts are implemented focus on the cuts that cannot be most easily reversed. It also leads to a prioritization of naval and air forces. The decisions you make about buying ships and aircraft over the next 10 years will really affect your future military inventory for the next 30 to 40 years. That is not only the United States but any country.

By contrast, ground forces can be reversed more quickly — certainly not easily and certainly with great expense in terms of resources, both financial and in terms of lives in the case of conflict — but it is easier to do than to try to build ships and airplanes quickly if you have made the wrong strategic calculations. To the extent that the budget cuts continue, I think the size of the U.S. ground forces will shrink. The cuts that have already happened for the president's fiscal year 2013 request have shrunk the size of the army, in particular, from a planned level of 520,000 troops to 490,000 troops. A similar proportion has been already cut from the Marine Corps. If the final level of defence cuts — whatever it is — go higher, I expect there will be a great number of cuts to that ground force strength.

Having said that, I do not think naval and air forces will be immune from additional cuts. To the extent that the final amount of the defence cuts go higher, I think that you will see additional pressure to cut naval forces and some of the expensive air programs, including the F-35, as a result.

I will stop there and take any questions you might have.

The Chair: Thank you very much. That is a very good overview. You talked about this rebalancing issue, which we are hearing a lot about, toward the Asia-Pacific for obvious reasons, like China and then the other issues — more domestic focus in terms of the build. There is this discussion out there that, with Iraq having been wound down and Afghanistan winding down, those kinds of missions are not something the president is interested in at this point. It is perhaps even reinforced by the fact that you do not see any action on Syria as you did in some other places. I know there are a lot of other reasons for that, as well, though.

Are you starting to see that there is a very different approach to the kind of mission, regardless of where the numbers fall?

Ms. Bensahel: The strategic guidance issued says that operations of the type and particularly the scale of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will not be force-sizing criteria. In other words, they will not build army or marine forces — the ground forces used in those types of operations — or they will not be designed to be able to conduct operations of that scale again.

However, there is an acknowledgement that the U.S. and, frankly, most other countries have a poor history of predicting when their ground forces will go into combat. Therefore, even though it is not used as a force-sizing criteria explicitly, the army in particular, but also DOD, wants to ensure that the nation's ground forces are prepared and capable of responding to whatever future military requirements emerge.

The Chair: Is it your sense that the president sort of has a different view about what America should be doing out in the world?

Ms. Bensahel: I do not think there is anything that has come out of that process yet that fundamentally changes the U.S. role in the world. As you said, the case of Syria is very complicated for a variety of military reasons. It would be very different from Libya, so it is not quite comparable there. The president has talked about a need to get away from the types of big, nation-building operations of the type that have occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the points that he makes frequently on the campaign trail, in his words, is that it is time to do nation building at home. If there were to be some sort of instability in the Middle East that required a U.S. military presence, I do not think the President would hesitate to act if he thought U.S. interests were at stake.

The Chair: Thank you for the opening segment.

Senator Lang: I would like to go to the other area that affects us, and that is the allies of the United States. Obviously, with the cutbacks that will occur or are occurring in your military, yet we live in a very volatile world, what do you see the expectations of the United States being of their allies looking forward and looking at the various other theatres? North Korea comes up now and again, as does Iran, and they are very much threats out there that may have to be dealt with at one time or another. What will be expected of the allies?

Ms. Bensahel: I think that the U.S. hopes that in any future operation the U.S. will work closely with allied and coalition partners and that there could be, as Mr. Harrison discussed before, greater cooperation to make the best collective use of scarce resources to ensure that capabilities across the spectrum are covered.

I fear, particularly when it comes to the NATO allies as a whole, and I am not necessarily talking about any specific countries, that the NATO members have not developed the kinds of capabilities that will enable independent action in places like Libya, for example. That operation, although most of the combat piece of it was conducted by non-U.S. planes, relied extensively on U.S. support capabilities, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and aerial refuelling to operate.

As long as the budget cuts are not terribly extensive, and by that, I mean at the currently envisaged rate, I do not see cuts that would make the U.S. more likely to hoard those in future operations. Again, to the extent the defense cuts increase, I think there is much greater danger that the U.S. will reserve some of those for potential unilateral operations when U.S. national interests are at stake, and the U.S. would then be less likely to contribute those types of enabling capabilities to alliance military operations.

Senator Lang: To follow up on that, could you maybe enlighten us, with your opinion, at least, of what you foresee with NORAD in the foreseeable future as far as Canada and United States are concerned? Do you see any changes there, and if so, what?

Ms. Bensahel: I do not see changes specifically about NORAD. One of the things the Department of Defense will need to do in the coming months and years is to think more about the way it conducts operations itself and how it organizes itself. One of the things that may come under discussion is the Unified Command Plan, which allocates responsibility among the different U.S. commanders for different parts of the world.

The only potential thing I can see even considered that might affect NORAD at all would be pressure to consolidate U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command into one broader command. However, I do not expect that even that — and this is a hypothetical and not on the policy agenda right now — would affect the working relationships of NORAD at all, many of which were already worked out when U.S. Northern Command was established.

Senator Day: Thank you for being with us. As I understand matters, the Department of Defense is doing all of its planning and budgeting for the fiscal year 2013, based on the Budget Control Act figures. If Congress cannot get together and sort out something, then the additional amounts of $1.3 trillion have to be found somewhere. Do you believe that some of that might, through Congress acting, ultimately come from the budget for the Department of Defense?

Ms. Bensahel: Yes, the way that the law is formulated at the moment is that if no legislation is passed to change the current law, on January 1, 2013, a set of requirements will go into effect that will require $1.2 trillion of savings split evenly between defence accounts and non-defence accounts. There is a little bit of a budget hitch in there in that there is a complicated way that they are calculating the saved interest from having to go less into debt. In the final calculation, once you scrub all the numbers, the total that would need to be cut is not actually $1.2 trillion. It is in the high $900 billion range. I do not have the figure in front of me.

The Office of Management and Budget in the United States has estimated that will result in almost $500 billion of additional cuts to the Department of Defense over the next 10 years.

Senator Day: Is that the sequestration situation?

Ms. Bensahel: Correct. There have already been $487 billion of cuts over the next 10 years that are incorporated into the fiscal year 2013 request. If the sequestration mechanism is not changed by Congress, there will be an additional $500 billion from the DOD budget over the next 10 years.

Senator Day: What happens if that comes about? There will be, obviously, some reductions in personnel and reductions in equipment purchases. Can you speculate as to where the majority of that $500 billion will be coming from?

Ms. Bensahel: As Mr. Harrison mentioned before me, if that mechanism is unchanged by Congress, the Department of Defense does not have any flexibility in how to account for that. It must cut 10 per cent from all program accounts equally.

The President can exclude military pay and benefits from the budget cuts, which take up a third of the defense department budget. He does have that flexibility. However, that would mean that all of that $500 billion in additional cuts would then have to come from the remaining two thirds of the defense budget, which is primarily personnel, force structure and equipment costs.

Senator Day: Is there anything in the policy discussion that is ongoing with respect to the National Guard — we call them "reservists" — part-time personnel to fill the gap, who would be ready if needed but are not on as full-time employees of the Department of Defense?

Ms. Bensahel: Yes, the Department of Defense is exploring ways to keep the reserve and guard forces operationally active the way they have been involved in conflicts for the past 10 years here in the United States. They have gained a tremendous amount of combat experience in ways they simply did not before 2001, where they were much more in a ready and alert state rather than participating in operations. One of the things being talked about in the policy debate surrounding this is one of things to do to hedge against uncertainty in the future is ensure that the guard and reserve continue to play an operational role so that they remain much more up to speed with their active component counterparts than if they simply go back to the way they were before 2001.

That is something that will be explored, although the exact details and how that matters still remain to be worked out.

The guard and reserves often point out that they are cheaper than the active component forces. Of course, that is only true when they are not activated. When they are serving in operations, they cost just as much as their active-duty counterparts. The question is how to do the calculations so they end up being more cost effective in terms of how often they are activated versus how often they are or not and still maintain the operational efficiency.

The Chair: I want to come to a final point because it is something we share here, and Mr. Harrison mentioned this, too, namely, the impact on capital acquisitions. You said the President has some flexibility when it comes to military pay and benefits but none on capital acquisitions. You therefore have old fleets, both ships and some of your planes, although you have so much more equipment than we could imagine.

With this mandated cut, what is the impact? Somewhere between one and ten. Would you see every program sort of wounded and none shut down or is there some on the table that would just simply fall off?

Ms. Bensahel: If the administration has the flexibility to decide how to implement the cuts, in other words if the sequestration mechanism is somehow changed but they still have to accept a greater level of cuts overall, then you will see a strategic set of calculations about what capabilities the United States will continue to invest in and which ones —

The Chair: I am asking in the situation where there is no flexibility. Are there some programs sitting there that, with up to a 10 per cent cut, would simply be stopped?

Ms. Bensahel: I am not aware of any that would simply come to an end although, as Mr. Harrison mentioned before, the contracts that would be broken and the fact that it would be 10 per cent, all of a sudden in one year, could potentially do that. I am not aware, off the top of my head, of any that would require immediate cancellation as a result of that.

The Chair: The acquisition programs — we had some discussion about the F-35s, but obviously it would affect others — would go on but probably at a slower rate and perhaps the overall purchase numbers later would be down?

Ms. Bensahel: That is right. The fact that there may be delays in the acquisition process might itself be costly, again in terms of having to renegotiate contracts that would then put further downward pressure on the amount of money you are actually able to spend on the capabilities themselves.

The Chair: How does the Department of Defense stateside prepare for this? You are dealing with budget cuts, an unknown political outcome and you are caught in the middle of an election year. What is going on right now inside the Department of Defense? Are you doing scenarios, or how does the department deal with this, to your knowledge?

Ms. Bensahel: The department has clearly said that it does not need to plan for the implementation of sequestration because it has no flexibility on how to implement it. There is not a whole lot of planning that they need to do if their job is to implement an across-the-board cut.

I do think, based on the public statements from senior administration officials, that they will start thinking about various planning options during the summer if sequestration is officially overturned, but again they have to accept some higher level of defence cuts. I do not think those plans will start until the summer, at the earliest.

The Chair: Thank you for this. These insights have been helpful and perhaps a bit nerve-racking for those on this side of the border too.

Our thanks to Dr. Nora Bensahel, Deputy Director of Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Thank you so much for your time.

We will take a break and go in camera at this point. We will bring this portion of our meeting to an end.

(The committee continued in camera.)

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