Should Canada Continue To Maintain Combat-Capable Air Forces?

1
Should Canada Continue To Maintain
Combat-Capable Air Forces?

• Colonel
• Bill Cleland
• Wing Commander
• 4 Wing Cold Lake
• 18 March 2002

2
Presentation Outline

• Introduction
• Common Security and Pacifistic Ideals
• Are Some Wars Just?
• Defending Canadian Sovereignty
• Collective Security
• Canadas Contribution to International Peace and
  Security
• Conclusions
• Questions/Discussion

3
Common Security

• From his 1990 book, Howard Peter Langille states
  that
• The essence of common security is that security
  for one nation can only be enhanced by increasing
  the confidence and security of allThe key
  elements of the common security approach are to
• Develop international confidence
• Exercise national self-restraint in military
  affairs
• Emphasize cooperative over competitive security
  planning
• Promote the common good rather that the pursuit
  of short-term national interests

4
Just War Principles

• War can be decided upon only by legitimate
  authorities
• War may be resorted to only after a specific
  fault or to restore what has been wrongfully
  seized
• The intention must be the advancement of good or
  the avoidance of evil
• In a war, other than one strictly in
  self-defence, there must be a reasonable prospect
  of victory
• Every effort must be made to resolve differences
  by peaceful means before resorting to the use of
  force
• The innocent shall be immune from direct attack
• The amount of force used shall not be
  disproportionate

5
Pacifisms Ethical Dilemma

• As Hare and Joynt stated in 1982
• If absolute pacifism rules out all violence and
  killing, this must be because people have a right
  not to be made the victims of violence or
  killing but if someone has this right, then we
  must have the correlative obligation to use
  whatever means are necessary to secure that he is
  not made a victim of violence or killing since
  sometimes the only means available will be
  violence or killing, it would seem that absolute
  pacifism sometimes requires the use of the very
  means it rules out.

6
1994 White Paper on Defence

• The current White Paper on Defence states that
  there is no immediate direct military threat to
  Canada however it claims that modern
  combat-capable armed forces are necessary for
  three reasons
• Prudent levels of military force must be
  maintained to ensure Canadian sovereignty in
  peacetime
• Deterrence, if it is to be credible, relies on
  minimum combat capabilities capable of generating
  larger forces if significant conventional threats
  re-emerge
• Canada relies on collective security in time of
  war

7
Definition of Sovereignty

• As defined in the Canadian Encyclopedia
• A states sovereignty is projected in its legal
  control of territory, territorial waters and
  national airspace, and its legal power to exclude
  other states from these domains.

8
UN Charter Chapter 7 (Collective Security)

• Article 39
• The UN Security Council has the authority to
  determine the existence of any threat to the
  peaceor act of aggression
• Article 42
• Should the Security Council consider that
  measures provided for in Article 41 would be
  inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it
  may take such action by air, sea, or land forces
  as may be necessary to maintain or restore
  international peace and security
• Article 51
• Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the
  inherent right of individual or collective
  self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a
  Member of the UN until the Security Council has
  taken measures necessary to maintain
  international peace

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UN and the Use of Military Force

• In 1996 the Under-Secretary of the UN (Marrack
  Goulding) listed the following six purposes for
  which the UN has recently authorized the use of
  military force
• Restore or maintain international peace or
  security
• Enforce sanctions imposed by the Security Council
  
• Defend the personnel of peacekeeping operations
• Provide physical protection to civilians in war
  situations
• Protect activities intended to relieve the
  suffering of civilians
• Restore or maintain peace and security in an
  internal conflict.

10
When Should the UN Authorize Military Force?

• According to Marrack Goulding (writing in 1996),
  the following four conditions should be met
• There should be a clear political commitment on
  the part of the Security Council and the
  troop-contributing countries that they are
  determined to prevail against any opposition
• The force should have an evident military
  superiority over the forces of any protagonist
  which might challenge it
• Military forces should be absolutely impartial
  and should be ready to use force against any
  party which obstructs humanitarian deliveries or
  violates an agreed cease-fire
• The force should have no other mandate at all in
  relation to the conflict in question

11
Canadas Commitment to UN Missions

• In 1994, in an address to the General Assembly of
  the United Nations, the Canadian Foreign Minister
  (The Hon Andre Ouellet) confirmed Canadas
  commitment to the Secretary-Generals new
  missions stating that
• The international community cannot remain
  indifferent to the conflicts that threaten the
  lives of millions of innocent people and expose
  them to the worst violations of their most
  fundamental rightsSome people are tempted to
  give up and wonder if the United Nations is wrong
  in trying to resolve essentially domestic
  conflicts that have numerous complex causes.
  Canada does not share this opinion

12
Operation Deliberate Force

• In 1997, in an article in Survival, Gregory
  Schulte concluded that
• Operation Deliberate Force achieved its objective
  when, after three weeks of air attacks, the
  Bosnia Serb leadership agreed to cease offensive
  operations and remove all heavy weapons in the
  Sarajevo exclusion zone to allow unimpeded
  access to the city by road and by air, and to
  formalize a cessation of hostilities. The
  operations also helped to re-launch the peace
  processby showing that the international
  community was prepared to back diplomacy with the
  effective use of military force.

13
NATO Operation Allied Force

• In 1999, in the face of horrific ethnic cleansing
  of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs in Kosovo,
  there was no realistic expectation that NATO or
  any other international grouping could move
  sufficient land forces into the area in a timely
  manner
• NATO launched a major air campaign in an attempt
  to stop the ethnic cleansing
• The Canadian contribution was significant

14
Canadian Contribution to Operation Allied Force

• From an article in the Canadian Military Journal
  in 2000 entitled Mission Ready Canadas Role in
  the Kosovo Air Campaign
• For every mission flown and every bomb dropped, a
  Canadian Forces legal officer examined the
  assigned target very carefully with regard to its
  legitimacy and relevance to Canadian and
  international legal standards.In addition, the
  pre-mission planning process for each bombing
  attack took into account the stringent
  requirement to avoid collateral damage.If at any
  time during the actual bombing attack the pilot
  was either uncertain about the target itself, or
  if he was concerned about the potential for
  collateral damage, he was under very clear
  instructions to abort his mission and bring his
  bombs home. This happened on many missions.

15
Has Air Power Come of Age?

• The air campaigns in the Gulf and in Yugoslavia
  showed that modern technology has finally made it
  possible to be militarily effective while
  complying with international law regarding
  non-combatant immunity and proportionality
• International peace movements should be
  encouraged by the fact these conflicts were
  conducted with diligent reference to, and
  determined application of, just war principles in
  spite of clearly illegal actions by the enemy,
  such as placing command centres in schools, and
  parking military equipment near private homes,
  religious shrines and hospitals

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Why Should Canada Contribute to UN Missions?

• As Marc Milner reminded us, in 1994, in an
  article entitled Defence Policy for a New
  Century
• Only a relative few countries Canada among them
  possess armed forces with the high standards of
  training and professionalism, and the skills
  required to operate advanced technology weapons
  effectively.

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Beliefs of Western Peace Movements

• I believe Michael Howard correctly summed up the
  beliefs of Western peace movements in the
  following quotation in 1987
• I think that what has gone wrong with peace
  movements and could go wrong with peace studies,
  if they are not very careful, is that they are
  still to a large extend based on the eighteenth
  century rationalist assumption that there is an
  underlying harmony of the world, if only one
  could reach it that conflict is something
  unnecessary, arising from extraordinary
  pathological conditions that conflict is a
  disease on which we must focus our attention
  that peace is the normal state of societies, and
  as we develop appropriate techniques, as in
  medicine, for curing the war disease, then all
  will be well.

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Conclusions

• The waging of defensive continues to be just.
• Canada must maintain combat-capable armed forces
  for the foreseeable future to
• Act as the ultimate guarantor of Canadian
  sovereignty in peacetime
• Make a meaningful contribution toward the defence
  of North America in co-operation with the United
  States in time of war
• Honour Canadas collective security
  responsibilities as a founding member of both
  NATO and the UN

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Questions / Discussion