‘Woke’ vs. ‘Warrior’? Poilievre Aims, Shoots and Misses

Pierre Poilievre recently said he wants to “replace a woke culture with a warrior culture” in the Canadian Forces as a way to improve recruitment.

It’s clear what he meant by “woke” — a military culture that respects all its members. According to the Canadian Armed Forces, “Every member of the CAF and the Department of National Defence team is entitled to work in an environment of mutual respect, dignity and inclusion, where they have the opportunity to contribute and achieve their full potential.”

But we won’t fill the ranks by appealing to wannabe warriors who think they’re entitled to bully and harass their comrades in arms about their gender or their ethnicity.

That’s a bogus solution to the non-problem of “wokeness,” and it completely ignores the real problems we face in sustaining an effective military in the midst of a global climate disaster.

My own military experience is 60 years in the past, but my army-issue bullshit detector still works just fine. “Warrior culture” is bullshit, and especially in Canada.

During the First World War, Canadian newspapers and even novels used that kind of rhetoric as propaganda, but the reality of combat soon exposed the hollowness of such language.

As Canadians have learned in the past century, modern wars are fought and won by clerks and techies and logistics experts, not by Viking berserkers or knights in shining armour. People who enlist in the peacetime military are looking for a career, not a fight. (Wartime enlistees soon lose their patriotic fervour and focus on survival.)

Modern soldiers are also very aware of occupational hazards to their mental health. They know that few survive modern combat without some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Canada’s novelists of the First World War described long before the condition was medically recognized.

Canadian soldiers in more recent wars, like Afghanistan, have come back with similar problems.

It takes a certain kind of courage to serve in the military while knowing its psychological hazards. But it’s not the courage of Saxons fighting Vikings or crusaders fighting Saracens.

A military freeloader?

Still, when wars are being fought from Myanmar to Sudan to Gaza to Ukraine, Canada has come in for a lot of criticism as a military freeloader, letting our NATO allies spend far more than we do for our common defence.

NATO says its members should spend a minimum of two per cent of their GDP on their militaries. In 2023 we spent 1.29 per cent of our GDP on defence. Finland, one of NATO’s newest members, spent 2.42 per cent of its GDP.

Admittedly, Finland makes us look like wimps. With the population of B.C., Finland has an army, navy and air force with just over 30,000 active personnel.

All men are conscripted at age 18 (women can volunteer for service). After active duty they remain in the reserves until age 50 or 60, meaning Finland could put 280,000 trained soldiers in the field on short notice. Finnish forces include a formidable field artillery capacity, anti-aircraft missiles and drones.

Finland’s conflicts with Russia are still fresh in the national memory: two wars against the Soviet Union during the Second World War, the second of which was a defeat. Finland was lucky to escape becoming a Soviet satellite.

Especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Finnish government has been keenly aware that a third war with Russia is a real possibility. So conscription and military spending have strong public support.

By contrast, Canada’s all-volunteer military is chronically underfunded and understaffed. We did wonders in two world wars, but our geography makes us helpers in other countries’ wars.

Our days of peacekeeping glory are long past. Fighting alongside the United States in the 1991 Gulf War and against the Taliban in Afghanistan was not glorious at all. We wisely excused ourselves from the American war in Iraq.

The eight missions of the Canadian Armed Forces

The Canadian Forces have eight missions:

• detect, deter and defend against threats to or attacks on Canada;
• detect, deter and defend against threats to or the attack on North America in partnership with the United States, including through Norad;
• lead and/or contribute forces to NATO and coalition efforts to deter and defeat adversaries, including terrorists, to support global stability;
• lead and/or contribute to international peace operations and stabilization missions with the United Nations, NATO and other multilateral partners;
• engage in capacity building to support the security of other nations and their ability to contribute to security abroad;
• provide assistance to civil authorities and law enforcement, including counterterrorism, in support of national security and the security of Canadians abroad;
• provide assistance to civil authorities and non-governmental partners in responding to international and domestic disasters or major emergencies; and
• conduct search and rescue operations.

These are all necessary tasks, especially disaster response in a time of worsening climate change. Politically, it would be easier to expand the CAF’s capacity for civil emergencies like wildfires and floods than it would be to buy fighters and submarines that might never be used.

But what about detection, deterrence and defence — the basic task of every military? If detection and deterrence fail, how should we defend ourselves? And would two per cent of GDP be enough to fight and win such a war?

Especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we’ve seen a redefinition of warfare. Now it involves cyber-sabotage, drones and missile attacks on civilian infrastructure.

Armed robots may soon find a role on the battlefield. No doubt other advanced weapons already exist, waiting for the right opportunity to go into action.

Dangerous understaffing

It’s unlikely that we could take advantage of most modern weapons systems. Gen. Wayne Eyre, who retired this summer as Canada’s chief of the defence staff, has said we need to recruit and retain about 30,000 new people just to meet current needs.

We may not have enough pilots to fly our expensive new F-35 fighters, or crew members for new submarines. It’s hard to find staff with the expertise to use drones and ground-based missiles.

It might be possible to solve some of these problems the way the U.S. army did in the 1960s: recruit permanent residents with a promise of fast-track citizenship — perhaps after six months of service. But not many people immigrate to Canada with experience in submarines or drone piloting.

We might also consider an offer for young Canadian citizens: sign up and the CAF will pay for your post-secondary education. You commit to one year in the Forces for each year of your education, with a bonus if you re-enlist at the end of your commitment. But military technical training would likely pay better in civilian life than in the CAF, so retention would be a problem.

We could even offer a variation: sign up for a few years in something like the American Climate Corps, which plans to enrol 20,000 Americans this year, and 50,000 by 2031.

Spend those years installing solar panels, preventing fire hazards and acquiring useful trade and technical skills. Leave as a “climate reservist” with free post-secondary and a commitment to return to service — civilian or military — in an emergency.

Such measures could help give many young people in Canada an experience of public service without conscription, as well as enabling them to work with many other Canadians they would otherwise never meet.

Those in the military would likely specialize in high-tech forms of warfare, trying to catch up with and surpass their counterparts in other countries. They would be few in number but far more effective than any number of old-fashioned warriors slogging through the mud with fixed bayonets.

And we might also do some serious recruiting not only for fighter pilots and submariners, but for military intelligence and the foreign service. Diplomats should be working all out to prevent wars from happening at all, and to end the ones that do break out.

We don’t need warmongers half as much as we need peacemongers. And if we can sustain peace while preparing for climate disasters, we will serve not only Canada but the whole world.