Hello Fellow Dragoons,
The following articles of interest to the members of the RCD Association
have been extracted from the RCAC MilNews Digest of 10 Feb, with the
courtesy of Dave Wright [ <mailto:dwwright@rcaca.org> dwwright(a)rcaca.org]
the Corps Association Secretary
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Defence minister's background seen as troubling by some
By John Ward | The Canadian Press News Agency
OTTAWA (CP) - The new defence minister is a retired general who once
lobbied government on behalf of some big military contractors, a background
which some find troubling.
Gordon O'Connor says he's beholden to no one, but others say it looks odd
to have a one-time lobbyist sitting in the minister's office. "It's a bad
message to be sending," says Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch. O'Connor, 66,
is the first defence minister in 20 years to have actually served in the
Forces. But it's his post-service lobbying that has raised eyebrows.
O'Connor left the army after a 30-year military career. He was a
brigadier-general and director of military requirements when he retired. He
went into business and in the 1990s became a senior associate at Hill and
Knowlton, one of the world's largest public affairs firms.
Up until February 2004-when he left the firm to run in the June election-he
was a registered lobbyist. He represented defence contractors such as Airbus
Military, United Defense, General Dynamics Canada and BAE Systems as well as
a variety of other, non-military clients. His work mainly consisted of
setting up meetings and contacts between clients and government officials.
Conacher said O'Connor can't help but make ministerial decisions that
affect former clients. "Policy decisions overall help those companies or
hurt them" Conacher said.
O'Connor says he has no remaining ties to a job he left two years ago. "I
have no shares in any company, I get no remuneration from any company, I
don't have any loyalty to any company, so no there was no concern at all,"
he says.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he won't discourage people from private
industry coming to government. "Having worked in an industry in the past
does not constitute a conflict of interest in the present."
Still, Steven Staples of the Polaris Institute says O'Connor's lobbying
activities look bad. "I think there could be a problem of optics," Staples
said. "If you look at the list of companies he's represented, it's as long
as your arm. It does play to the optics of him being very closely aligned
with some very big players in the international arms industry. With billions
of dollars coming through the pike for new acquisition of equipment, is
there a conflict of interest perception here?"
Doug Bland, chairman of defence management studies at Queen's University,
said it makes no sense to set the bar impossibly high. "If every person of
experience is precluded from cabinet, the pickings would be slim," he said.
David Rudd of the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies says he sees
nothing amiss with O'Connor's appointment.
"If you've severed all ties two years ago, I think that should be fine."
However, Rudd says politics could produce an artificial tempest over the
minister's lobbying background if it arose during a particularly touchy
acquisition program.
"I can't think why it would be an issue, but that doesn't prevent the
Opposition from raising the issue and the media love nothing more than a
good fight." That could make the military's procurement process-already long
and Byzantine-even more difficult. "It could become so politicized that
nothing is done."
Bland said military procurement has long been a political tangle. "I would
not be surprised if (O'Connor) made getting the politics out of defence
procurement a major issue."
Brian MacDonald, a retired colonel now a defence analyst, said there was a
time when it was an advantage to have a minister come out of industry
because he or she was then familiar with the issues. "The fact that we've
had O'Connor spending some time as a paid lobbyist; it's out in the open,
everybody knows about it, so what's the problem?"
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Defence Minister O'Connor has his work cut out for him
By Bob Bergen | Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute
For the first time since the early 1960s, Canada has a new Minister of
National Defence, Gordon O'Connor, who knows first-hand the magnitude of the
Canadian military mess that he has to clean up.
And, many of those who know the former Canadian Forces brigadier-general
say O'Connor is the single most qualified politician to do it, despite the
political slings and arrows that may come his way stemming from his
private-sector past before he was elected to Parliament in 2004.
Former armoured corps commander, Maj.-Gen. (ret'd) Clive Addy, said perhaps
O'Connor's greatest strength is the knowledge and experience he acquired
working at National Defence Headquarters in the 1980s where, among other
responsibilities, he was the director-general of land force development.
Addy explained the job required O'Connor to consider the need for
artillery, for example, against the need for small arms, tanks and
airplanes. He then had to put together procurement programs and address
those topics at the defence management committee level and at Public Works.
"He's more knowledgeable than most I know in that field by a long shot,"
says Addy who, as a young lieutenant-colonel, took over from
then-Lieutenant-Colonel O'Connor as commander of the Royal Canadian Dragoons
in Germany in 1980.
"It's quite an exciting time," says retired Lt.-Gen. Ray Crabbe, a former
Deputy Chief of Defence Staff in 1997-1998, responsible for Canadian Forces
operations and intelligence worldwide. "But, I've always been somewhat leery
about former senior officers becoming ministers of national defence because,
I would think, there would be a tendency for him to get involved in the
details of running the department simply because of the nature of the
individual's background. On the other hand, on the positive side is his
knowledge and his experience in the Department of National Defence," Crabbe
said.
One thing is certain, both O'Connor and his Chief of Defence Staff, Gen.
Rick Hillier, share a bond few ministers and their chiefs of defence staff
ever do: they both have armoured corps blood in their veins.
Then-Lieutenant-Colonel O'Connor even commanded then-Captain Hillier in
Germany in the 1970s.
In a tribal culture like the Forces, that will have the air force and the
navy thinking the armoured corps has virtually taken over Ottawa. But, here
is where O'Connor's former life as a private-sector lobbyist after he left
the military could come back to haunt him politically as minister.
Prior to the election campaign, O'Connor was a fierce critic of the Paul
Martin government's plan to fast track the purchase of 16 sorely needed
Lockheed Martin C-130J Hercules transport aircraft to replace Canada's aging
fleet of Hercules. Among the Conservatives' many election campaign platform
planks was a plan to re-open the aircraft bidding to other companies,
including Boeing and Airbus Military.
O'Connor claims he wants a legitimate competition and, to that end, he will
have far more influence as minister overseeing the government's military
procurement programs than he ever had as the Tory defence critic. But, one
of O'Connor's former private-sector clients was Airbus, which was trying to
sell the government its A400M transport plane as a Hercules alternative.
That could create a perception-real or imagined-imagined of potential
ministerial conflict of interest.
Where some might see O'Connor's lobbyist past as a potential conflict,
military scholar Dr. Douglas Bland-chair in Defence Management Studies in
the Queen's University School of Policy Studies-thinks the new minister's
private-sector experience is an asset. "I think it's actually of great value
to be able to have someone who understands both sides of the street, as it
were," Bland said. "I think that people should expect the new Conservative
government and Gordon O'Connor to do exactly what they said they were going
to do."
Bland also said that the new Conservative government will now have access
to classified military information and briefings from officials and officers
they didn't have in opposition. "I expect the government will review every
aspect of defence policy including the Liberals' recent statement on
national defence and they'll look at Afghanistan, for sure, and decide how
that's going and how they might modify it," he said.
During the election, the Conservatives' key platforms included boosting
military spending to $25 billion by 2010-2011 and spending 25 per cent of
the military budget re-establishing military operations in Western Canada
and Quebec, creating urban army bases of up to 500 regular and reserve
personnel in Vancouver, Calgary, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Quebec City and
Montreal where reserve units are already established.
They said they would create a 650-member rapid-reaction battalion to
replace the disbanded Canadian Airborne Regiment, double the size of the
Disaster Assistance Response Team, buy new replenishment and transport
ships, build new ice breakers for the Arctic and buy strategic and tactical
airlift.
O'Connor, the defence critic, was the author of much of the Conservative
defence election platform and he raised the bar high.
The question is now whether National Defence Minister O'Connor can deliver
on all those ambitious, expensive and mostly badly-needed and promised
programs. He certainly now has the power to try.
Bob Bergen is a Ph.D. and a Research Fellow with the Canadian Defence &
Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI) in Calgary. The opinions expressed in
this document are those of the author and not necessarily those of CDFAI,
its Board of Directors, Advisory Council, Fellows or donors.
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Military short on bilingual senior staff: audit
<
http://www.cbc.ca/news/credit.html> CBC News
Senior Canadian military officials at the Department of National Defence's
headquarters are not meeting bilingual requirements, creating an
English-dominated work environment, an audit has found.
"The number of bilingual military personnel at headquarters who meet the
language requirements of their positions is insufficient," wrote Dyane Adam,
commissioner of official languages, in a department audit released on
Tuesday.
The audit found "major weaknesses" in the bilingual skills of senior
managers, as well as deficiencies in the language of meetings, performance
appraisals, computer software and training.
Adam's staff surveyed 1,883 bilingual employees. About 55 per cent responded
to the questionnaires.
The survey suggests francophones often switch to English in the workplace.
"English dominates even among French-speaking employees, who tend to use
their second language in their daily work, particularly when their
supervisor is not comfortable using French," said the survey.
Nine per cent of francophones said they could speak with senior management
in the language of their choice. That number was 87 per cent for
anglophones.
"The low level of second-language proficiency of a number of anglophone
supervisors who hold bilingual positions is a major impediment to the
possibility of francophone employees working in their language," says Adam.
The audit says the Canadian Forces has been slow to address the issue, with
a "significant gap between the formal message, action plans and objectives
and the actions taken by employees."
The main reason given for this slowness is that operational needs "take
priority over the language rights and obligations of employees."
Adam recommends increasing the percentage of francophones, improving the
language skills of senior management and formalizing language objectives for
managers.
Spread in buildings through the Ottawa area, DND headquarters employs more
than 11,000 civilian and military personnel. More than 83,000 people work
for the department, and the navy, army and air force.
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New C.O. in Afghanistan well prepared
Brig.-Gen. David Fraser will lead multi-national force of 6,000 in Kandahar
Duncan Thorne | The Edmonton Journal
EDMONTON - The soldier who leaves today for Afghanistan to command a
multinational force has prepared for the job throughout his career, says his
former boss.
Brig.-Gen. David Fraser has extensive experience working with multinational
forces and is a skilled consensus-builder, said Bob Meating, a retired
major-general.
"Most people are thrown into those jobs because they have been in the
service for 30 years or 35 years," Meating said Tuesday. "In his case, every
step along the way has been one of grooming him for this job."
Meating commanded the Edmonton-based 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group in
the 1990s, when Fraser was a lieutenant-colonel. Fraser, 48, assumed command
in of the group in July.
He served in Cyprus and Bosnia and played and helped plan Canadian
participation in Kosovo.
He speaks French, which allowed him to work as the military assistant to
the French major-general commanding multinational forces in Sarajevo in
1994-95.
He helped to develop a new role for the army reserve and serves as
co-director of the Bi-National Planning Group, which oversees Canadian and
American efforts to improve security in the two countries.
In his previous roles, Fraser has not faced the prospect of suicide
bombings, which are becoming commonplace in Afghanistan's Kandahar region.
But much of his experience has been in crisis-management, said Meating, now
with the Calgary-based Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute.
"He knows his business," Meating said. "He's ruthless in doing his
business
correctly but he is very much a communicator.
"He seeks to build consensus with people around him. When he can't build
consensus then he will take the difficult decision."
Fraser is normally a colonel, the rank for brigade commanders.
He has temporarily moved up to brigadier-general while he commands 6,000
soldiers in Kandahar, mainly from Canada, Britain and the Netherlands.
It's quite possible the promotion will become permanent, Meating said.
Fraser is married and has two teenage sons. He looks on duty in Afghanistan
as an evolution for Canadian soldiers.
He said the role has gradually shifted from peacekeeping in Cyprus, through
hostilities in the Balkans to supporting U.S. counter-insurgency in
Afghanistan.
The commander, who said he plays golf "really poorly" and is "even
worse"
at taekwondo, acknowledged that taking the lead in the dangerous Kandahar
area of southern Afghanistan will be different.
His main concern is suicide bombers, he said, citing the deaths of 12
people in Tuesday's bomb attack on a Kandahar police station.
"My second concern will be explosive devices on roads and things like
that," Fraser said. "And finally, people running around with AK(-47)s
shooting at us.
"But we've got the training and we've got the people to deal with it."
An added complication is the violence that has spread among Muslims
outraged about cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
"It does illustrate some of the cultural sensitivities," he said. "I just
spent a lot of time training with my soldiers, making sure that we are
culturally sensitive to the Afghan way of life and respect for their
religion, because this is not Canada.
"We are a different culture and we've got to make sure that we are
sensitive to their way of doing business.
"This is not just a military mission. This is a Canadian mission. This is
Canadians helping Afghans."