Canada’s military must rapidly retool to defend against hostile nations that already “consider themselves to be at war with the West,” a new internal military report suggests.
The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) also needs to better incorporate “information operations” into their efforts to counter misinformation, and must co-ordinate with “other instruments of national power” during a time of so-called hybrid warfare.
The document — which is not an official strategy or policy, but instead offers “guidance” — was released over the military’s internal communications network on Wednesday, and Global News obtained a copy through a source.
It calls for a drastic reimagining of how the CAF views warfare ahead of the Liberal government’s long-awaited defence policy update, and while the CAF’s top brass are warning they are not prepared to properly address modern threats.
The guidance document suggests that two adversaries — Russia and China — already believe themselves to be “at war” with Canada and its allies, and that those allies need to respond appropriately.
“We must remember that Russia and China do not differentiate between peace and war,” Gen. Wayne Eyre, Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff, wrote in the foreward to the document.
“Their aim is not just regime survival, but regime expansion and a rewriting of the rules-based international order to their ends. Seeking to achieve these objectives, they will use all elements of national power, often acting just below the threshold of armed conflict.”
“We must therefore counter the daily actions of our adversaries to deny them incremental gains and to preserve the rules-based international order.”
The document raised several stark warnings about the necessity of looking at new “domains” — meaning spheres of potential conflict like space and cybersecurity, but also countering misinformation — as part of the CAF’s responsibility.
“Our adversaries are challenging us in the cyber and space domains as well as in the land, maritime, and air domains,” the document read.
“They use information to sow confusion, mask their intentions, oppose our actions, and gain advantage over us. We must meet these challenges across domains and the information environment.”
Canada’s adversaries — China and Russia are the only two named — are also not constrained by the same legal and ethical rules as the militaries of democratic nations, the document notes.
But it also notes that other countries have been better at leveraging other aspects of the state — such as diplomacy, intelligence, economic and industrial policy — to work alongside traditional military operations.
“Military power alone is insufficient to deter or defeat the aggressive actions and behaviours of our adversaries. We must coordinate the military instrument with other instruments of national power,” the document read.
The push for a more integrated approach to national defence comes at a time when the Canadian Armed Forces is depleted — both by the war in Ukraine and Canada’s ongoing pledge of military equipment to Kyiv, and by anticipated budget cuts from the Liberal government, which Eyre has raised to a parliamentary committee.
As part of a wider cost-cutting exercise across the federal government, the Liberals have asked the CAF to find nearly $1 billion in savings in the defence budget, he said.
“There’s no way that you can take almost a billion dollars out of the defence budget and not have an impact. This is something that we’re wrestling with now,” Eyre told the committee in September.
“I had a very difficult session this afternoon with the commanders of the various services as we attempt to explain this to our people. Our people see the degrading, declining security situation around the world, and so trying to explain this to them is very difficult.”
It also comes ahead of a long-awaited review of Canada’s defence policy being led by the Liberals.
The timing of the report’s release ahead of that review — and its release to CAF members over a general messaging system, with seemingly no attempts to contextualize the “guidance” document — is also raising eyebrows among defence watchers.
“This should have waited until the release of the defence policy update, then integrated the key elements from that (update) into the (report) with other changes as needed, so at least it had some formal policy cover for the foreseeable future,” said Brett Boudreau, a retired colonel and now a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, in comments to Global News.
“To claim, essentially, that we should govern ourselves as if at war now with our adversaries — explicitly Russia and China and unnamed others — and that the CAF are the only ones that ‘gets that’ ahead of the defence policy review is striking, and profoundly wrong.”
— with a file from Aaron d’Andrea.
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