Transcript Should Canada Continue To Maintain Combat-Capable Air Forces? Colonel

Should Canada Continue
To Maintain
Combat-Capable Air Forces?
Colonel
Bill Cleland
Wing Commander
4 Wing Cold Lake
18 March 2002
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Presentation Outline
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Introduction
Common Security and Pacifistic Ideals
Are Some Wars Just?
Defending Canadian Sovereignty
Collective Security
Canada’s Contribution to International Peace and
Security
• Conclusions
• Questions/Discussion
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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 all…The 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
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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
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Pacifism’s 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.
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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
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Definition of Sovereignty
• As defined in the Canadian Encyclopedia:
• A state’s 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.
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UN Charter Chapter 7 (Collective Security)
• Article 39
• The UN Security Council has the authority to determine the
existence of any threat to the peace…or 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.
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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
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Canada’s 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 Canada’s commitment to the
Secretary-General’s 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 rights…Some
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
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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
process…by showing that the international community
was prepared to back diplomacy with the effective use
of military force.
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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
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Canadian Contribution to Operation Allied Force
• From an article in the Canadian Military Journal in 2000 entitled
Mission Ready: Canada’s 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.
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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 Canada’s collective security
responsibilities as a founding member of both
NATO and the UN
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Questions / Discussion
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