Huntington in Canada: The Triumph of Subjective Control

Huntington’s Theory of Subjective and Objective Control

Huntington argued that there were two ways for the civilian state to control its military—“subjective control” and “objective control.” Subjective control “achieves its end by civilianizing the military, making it the mirror of the state.” Huntington viewed the civil state as inevitably fractured into groups by a government institution (legislative vs. the executive) or by “constitutional form” (democracy, fascism, and communism). According to him, one element would seek dominance over the others and in an effort to do so would make the military conform to its interests and image, demanding structural changes unrelated to security requirements. The alternative was “objective control.” In his model, objective control militarized the military, making it the tool of the state. It achieved this by civilians allowing the professional officer corps a considerable degree of autonomy. A professional officer corps qua professional was not driven by social forces, ideologies, or institutions in society but by the “functional imperative” created by threats to security. By relying on objective control, the civil state allows the military an independent sphere in which to respond to the functional imperative. The military, for its part, stays out of politics and takes unquestioned policy direction from the civilian authority (Huntington, 1957; Nix, 2012).

A central problem with Huntington’s model is that the boundaries of the military’s independent sphere and “functional imperative” are poorly defined. He claimed that there was a “military mind” which was shaped by exigencies of the military’s role as managers of violence and professional duties which were intense, exclusive, and isolated from civil activity. This led in turn to a professional ethic which conformed to functional, rather than societal, imperatives. The professional military ethic was pessimistic and essentially Hobbesian. It valued the group over the individual and the subordination of the individual to the group. Tradition, esprit, unity, and community rated high, while personal self-interest was suppressed. Not surprisingly, liberalism was regarded as the enemy of professional military ethic in that it was economic in its focus; had pacifistic tendencies; was hostile to armaments and standing armies; and viewed the military as backward, incompetent, and neglectful of economics, morale, and ideology (Huntington, 1957). While none of this completely defined the military’s required independent sphere, it did provide both a strong image of the functional imperative and what traits of civil society were to be excluded. Missing from Huntington’s analysis was any proof—or even a discussion—as to why these particular attributes were “functional.”

A second element of objective control was the role of the civil state in providing the military with security policy. While the civil authority was to allow the military an independent sphere of operation to maintain and perfect its combat effectiveness, it also had the right—and indeed the duty—to provide the military with political guidance. “The statesmen set the goal and allocate [to the military official] the resources to be used in attaining that goal. It is then up to him to do the best he can.” For its part, a professional military was obligated to obey without question. The military professional “does not argue, he does not hesitate, does not substitute his own views; he obeys instantly” (Huntington, 1957, p. 73).

In summary, Huntington’s objective control requires the civil state to allow the military independent governance internally, allowing it its own conservative culture and refraining from imposing liberal values on it. The civil state is also required to provide political guidance and resources to the military. In return, the state receives optimum combat power and absolute obedience. The primary dangers of subjective control were that the military could be captured by a political faction or social group and used to serve its purposes through social control or patronage and, in the case of a liberal democracy, that the military would be debilitated by liberal values.

Douglas Bland has taken up where Huntington left off in the definition of the exclusive domain of the military profession. In his article “A Unified Theory of Civil Military Relations,” Bland proposed what he called the “theory of shared responsibility” between the military and the civil state. Basing his model on regime theory, he was less categorical than Huntington is drawing a line between civil and military functions, saying that each actor was “responsible and accountable” for some aspects of control, but that although these elements could merge, they were not fused (Bland, 1999). In a later paper, Bland went on to define the division of powers in a liberal democracy. One “norm,” he said, was that the military was “usually” allowed a degree of “rightful authority” over doctrine, tactical operations, training, discipline, military personnel policy, and the internal organization of units and entities in the armed forces.

Bland argued that shared responsibility went beyond delegation or consensus to claim that “rightful authority” derived from tradition and custom. He also noted that the military would sometimes also have “vested authority” conferred directly on it by constitution or statute which could be exercised without consultation or approval of the civilian government (Bland, 1999). In elaborating on “decision-making procedures,” Bland spelled out criteria for civil policy direction to the military. He said,

the military expects from government a clear policy set out in terms understandable to military culture and supported by reasonable means. The government must develop its own competence to produce such a policy or at least a capability to critically assess policy recommendations provided by the defense establishment. (p. 532)

There is no doubt that the Canadian officer corps believed, as did Huntington, that the military should be a society separate from its civilian parent. The dominant theme discovered in service journals (Online Appendix A) was the unique military culture marked by unlimited liability, honor, and obedience. This was often accompanied by open disparagement of civilian society as hedonistic and soft. Military writers stated three major elements of concern: a lack of policy guidance from the political level and a failure to fulfill commitments; the civilianization of the military; and the imposition of diversity, especially the inclusion of women, on the military. Each of these concerns will be discussed below.

Policy

In Huntington’s model of objective control, policy was to be fully articulated by civilians and resources allocated by them. After that, it was up to the military to develop a strategy to implement the policy within the resources assigned. Strategy was, as Huntington (1957, p. 72) quoting Moltke put it, “the practical adaptation of the means placed at a general’s disposal to the attainment of the object in view.” The current CAF concept expressed in Duty With Honour does not stray far from Huntington. In a graphic illustration, policy, political objectives, and the allocation of resources are shown as purely civilian responsibilities while the military are responsible for “professional effectiveness,” doctrine, and training. National security strategy and strategic military objectives are shared, although neither term is defined. While there is recognition that at the top of the pyramid, strategy and policy merge, Duty With Honour concludes “in the final analysis…the civil authority decides how the military will be used by setting political objectives and allocating the appropriate resources, while military professionals develop the force to achieve these objectives” (Canada, Canadian Forces Leadership Institute, 2003).

While the CAF has a Huntingtonian view requiring civilians to set clear policy and assign “appropriate” resources, the same cannot be said about the civilian side of the defense establishment. In fact, such expectations appear to run counter to Canadian civilian strategic culture. Leuprecht and Sokolsky (2015) have recently argued that rather than having “no policy” or failing to honor commitments, Canada has a “not so grand strategy” of defense policy “Walmart style.” This means that Canada has consistently used armed forces not just to meet common threats but to get a seat at the table, prestige, and status. This has been done with a careful eye on costs. The Canadian question is not “how much is enough?” but “how much is just enough?” Other observers have suggested that the Canadian response to “how much is enough?” is “as little as possible” and governments have succeeded brilliantly in gaging that quantity (Morton, 1997). The two most important Canadian military commitments since the Second World War—North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Afghanistan—were both marked by failures of the civil–military policy linkage: NATO because of military misunderstanding and rejection of Canada’s “not so grand” strategy and Afghanistan because of a failure of both parties to discharge responsibilities (Roi & Smolynec, 2010).

The most significant dispute over “not so grand” policy came during the long tenure of Pierre Trudeau who served as prime minister from April 1968 to June 1984 with only a 10-month Conservative interregnum in 1979–1980. Trudeau wanted to reorient Canadian foreign and defense policy to be more independent, put greater emphasis on sovereignty and less on NATO. The crux of the matter became a cabinet decision to change the land contribution to NATO from heavy mechanized infantry on NATO’s Central Front to light infantry with a flank role. At the same time, cabinet directed that the CF-104 nuclear strike role be terminated and replaced by an air interception role. The nuclear role had from inception been slated for eventual termination and the Trudeau government had a strongly held conviction that Canada’s land contribution to NATO was expensive and too small to add anything significant to deterring the Warsaw Pact (Granatstein & Bothwell, 1990). The forces managed to delay implementation while the NATOist Léo Cadieux was minister, but when Donald Macdonald, a profound NATO skeptic, took over delay turned out outright insubordination. A special meeting of the Chief of Defence Staff Advisory Committee in February 1971 to discuss a defense white paper to follow and implement the prime minister’s 1969 Foreign Policy Statement recommended that tanks be retained until at least 1975. The committee also disagreed with the allocation of more resources to the sovereignty role and the use of CF-104’s as interceptors. Macdonald was outraged (Macdonald, n.d./1971; Smith, 1971). This, along with disregard of Cabinet direction on the scope of naval reequipment and the subsequent escalation of the cost of the DDH 280 project from CA$142 million to CA$252 million resulted in Macdonald initiating a review of the management of the defense establishment. The Management Review Group (MRG), discussed in the Civilianization section below, would have a major and lasting impact on civil–military relations (Gauthier, n.d.; Kasurak, 2013).

Bland (1986), while still a serving lieutenant colonel, would criticize Macdonald and Trudeau for not living up to treaty commitments. He said,

The real dilemma of the government was that they had established defence objectives from which they could not escape but which they did not wish to honour. They attributed their difficulty to many things but mainly to a recalcitrant system of administration in DND and the CF that kept placing the dilemma before their eyes. The main thrust of the [1971] White Paper, therefore, was administrative. In particular, Macdonald intended to discipline the management system in order to gain control of the policy options offered to the Minister (p. 10).

Disagreement over NATO was followed by vague and shifting policy objectives and mismatched military resources in Canadian peacekeeping and stability deployments throughout the 1990s. The 2005–2011 Afghanistan deployment to Kandahar provides a good example of the lack of Huntingtonian behavior on both sides. Prime Minister Martin had an unusually good relationship with his chief of defense staff, General Rick Hillier. The critical event in their management of the Afghanistan War was a conversation in February 2007 to discuss Canada’s international priorities. Martin wished to be able to use the Canadian Forces for a stability and relief mission in Darfur and sought assurances from Hillier that any changes to the Canadian mission to Afghanistan would not preclude a deployment to Africa. Canada subsequently accepted a move in Afghanistan from Kabul to Kandahar, just prior to the intensification of the war which changed quickly from stabilization to full-scale combat. These “unexpected” demands meant that Canada had no capacity for other missions. While Hillier’s and Martin’s accounts of their meeting differ, it is clear that neither one raised the subject of Canada’s actual military capability to undertake either mission (Hillier, 2009; Stein & Lang, 2007; Willis, 2012). Roi and Smolynec (2010) call this failure an example of the “core weakness” of the policy relationship in Canada in that civil decision makers do not understand the limitations of military means available. In their opinion, neither side met the demands of Huntington’s model: The civilians provided a list of countries in which Canada might wish to intervene at some unspecified date with unspecified force levels, while the military gave assurances that some undefined capacity would be available. They conclude this “cannot be construed as a comprehensive strategic approach.”

While there is a strong case to be made that the deployment to Kandahar was not a seat of the pants decision, but had been extensively worked out by the defense and foreign policy bureaucracies (Saideman, 2016; Willis, 2012), the lack of genuine political–military engagement was evident. Clear civilian direction once the Kandahar deployment turned into a significant combat commitment did not follow quickly. The minority Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which followed the Martin Liberals, was faced with an increasing unpopular and costly war. Harper appointed a blue-ribbon panel under John Manley, a former Liberal deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, to make recommendations as to the goals to be pursued by the government. The Manley panel did not attempt to state what Canadian goals had been up to that point but pointed out that “…Governments from the start of Canada’s Afghan involvement have failed to communicate with Canadians with balance and candour about the reasons for Canadian involvement, or about the risks, difficulties and expected results of involvement” (Canada, Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan, 2008). Harper used the recommendations of the panel to obtain enough parliamentary support to maintain the mission, but the Liberals were able to extract a firm end date for the combat mission. Harper would subsequently talk as little as possible about the Afghanistan mission, avoid responsibility for it, and leave it adrift (Saideman, 2016).

The Huntington objective control model of policy management was therefore inoperative in Canada’s most significant postwar commitments—NATO and Afghanistan. Huntington appears to be the norm for the military, who have consistently been critical of politicians for not providing policy or, more often, not matching resources their definition of the requirements of policy. Civilians fall far short of Bland’s elaboration of Huntington—“a clear policy set out in terms understandable to military culture and supported by reasonable means.” However, as Leuprecht and Sokolsky point out, such expectations are entirely misplaced. If defense policy is intended to leverage diplomatic advantage, it may well be unclear, and if it is “Walmart style,” resources will be minimal.

If the civilians have simply not accepted they have any responsibility to provide “understandable” policy to the military, the military have likewise failed to unquestioningly accept policy direction they found uncongenial and to implement it. Instead they have, as Feaver puts it, shirked. As will be shown in the following section, shirking over NATO forces resulted in dramatic civilian interventions that affected civil–military relations for decades.

The Functional Imperative—Part 1, Civilianization

A policy of objective control would mean that the military would be allowed to be culturally distinct from its civilian parent. Beginning in the 1970s, the CAF came to believe that they were being “civilianized” and the “civilianization” crisis consumed the CAF for more than two decades. It was founded on the increasing social divergence of the armed services from Canadian society but was precipitated by the Liberal government’s organizational interventions—first unification which abolished the navy, army, and air force and merged them into a single CAF, then—and most importantly—by Donald Macdonald’s MRG and subsequent dissolution of the Canadian Forces Headquarters and its absorption into a National Defence Headquarters combined with the civilian department (Critchley, 1989).

As noted above, Macdonald appointed a panel of civilian experts as a MRG to examine the department in 1972. Their recommendations were extreme. The separate Canadian Forces Headquarters was to be abolished and the military headquarters merged with the civilian department to form a National Defence Headquarters. If the recommendations of the MRG had been fully implemented, the merged organization would have been headed by an “Office of the Minister” in which the minister and the civilian deputy minister would have become the “single operating head” of the defense establishment. The military would have been largely stripped of any role other than military training and field operations, with strategic planning, personnel policy, financial services, engineering, and procurement assigned to civilian assistant deputy ministers. The chief of the defence staff would be retitled as “chief of the defence forces” to reflect his reduced role. The military would have been left with the “minimum” administrative apparatus necessary to support its operational responsibilities (Gauthier, n.d.).

In the event, the actual reforms implemented were less draconian but still severe. As Feaver would predict, shirking resulted in increased shirking civilian surveillance, “police patrols,” and institutional checks. In the new National Defence Headquarters, the chief of defense staff and the deputy minister ruled as a “diarchy” with unclear boundaries to their responsibilities. There was a military vice chief of defense staff who became a general defense program manager and a deputy chief of defense staff who had headquarters responsibility for doctrine and operations and military three-star for military personnel, but policy, materiel, and finance were all headed by civilian three-star equivalents with military two-star associates.

Civilian and military staffs were thereby mixed throughout the organization. A result was a long-lasting complaint that civilian control had been reduced to control by the civil service (Okros, 2015). This complaint was not groundless. Parliament votes funds to the department, not the CAF, and the deputy minister is responsible for ensuring spending and resources align with government policy and direction. On occasion, deputy ministers have not hesitated to flex their muscles as C. R. “Buzz” Nixon did in his 1981 lecture to the Canadian Forces Staff College in which he told his audience of senior military officials he had predominance over policy and planning and influence over training, operational plans, field operations, and the internal direction of the CAF. For good measure, he complained that the combined headquarters was placing military officials into “positions for which they are not trained, they have not the experience; they are unaware of the precedent and cannot possibly fully understand the magnitude of their jobs” (Nixon, 1981, p. 21).

The effect of this civilian coup was intensified by the social stress the military was already under. The navy and army had both retained a British colonial culture following the Second World War. The navy and the army viewed officership as based on character rather than knowledge, with officers being analogs of the British upper class and other ranks obedient and dutiful followers. The navy expected divisional officers to be accepted as the “father” of their division and bemoaned postwar sailors who had “a precocious stubbornness” because of too much education. Even naval staff training was not regarded as a requirement for officers, the only qualification necessary being an Upper Deck Watchkeeping Certificate (Lund, 1999). The army was not far from this line of thought. It had rejected the idea, floated in the early postwar period by Lieutenant General Charles Foulkes, the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, that the baseline education for officers be a baccalaureate. In 1951, the army actually lowered its educational requirement for officers to Grade 10. The army shared the navy’s nostalgia for the British class system and a culture where other ranks were “accustomed to have their decisions taken by the kind of person they saw their officers to be” (Sprung, 1960). Service culture became increasingly out of step with Canadian society which expected education to be a major factor in career success, expected challenging work, and a more egalitarian work environment. According to one Canadian Forces study by 1975, “the military was failing to attract the more desirable applicants and failing to retain enough of the ones it managed to attract. It was becoming a last-resort employment option and earning a reputation as a social daycare for misfits and reprobates” (Cowen, 2008, p. 151).

The combined effect of civilian-forced organizational change and increasing social and educational distance from society resulted in the “civilianization” crisis beginning in the mid-1970s. Viewed through Schiff’s (1995) concordance theory, agreement on “military style” broke down completely. Military authors complained of being strangled in red tape by National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ), the replacement of military with civil service values and military decisions being made by civilians in headquarters (Neelin & Pederson, 1974). Others reasserted Huntingtonian values and resisted pressures to become more integrated with society, especially personnel policies which linked pay to comparable civil employment and eliminated perks such as messes (Loomis & Lightburn, 1980). The senior staff officer individual training for Mobile Command (i.e., the army) wrote that after meeting one young pilot,

Here, at last I had met the model for that marvelous recruiting advertisement which depicted an immaculate young officer descending, attaché case in hand, from a jet transport, to a stirring call to arms to the effect that commissioning in the Canadian Armed Forces transforms any young man into an EXECUTIVE.

Many of the concerns of the military were crystalized in a study carried out at the Canadian Forces Personnel Applied Research Unit by Major C. A. Cotton who used Moskos’s institutional/occupational model to examine army attitudes toward the Canadian Forces. He concluded that the majority of other ranks were decidedly occupational in orientation wanting regular work hours and limited personal liability. He found “the majority [of other ranks] are reluctant soldiers who, if given the chance would opt for the greener pastures of static settings where they ‘work’ at their ‘trade’ in predictable daily routine” (p. 10). A significant minority said they would avoid combat (Cotton, 1979).

Cotton’s study, and less rigorous American works coming to similar conclusions (Gabriel & Savage, 1978), produced a climate of “moral panic” in the Canadian Forces. Senior ranks became convinced that the contemporary Canadian Forces no longer met standards for properly motivated personnel, that there was a loss of military power and imminent moral collapse. Concerns were no doubt exaggerated as they depended in large part on an untested assumption that values had actually conformed to the Institutional ideal at some point in the past. Moreover, reanalysis of Cotton’s survey indicates that his own data did not fully support his conclusions. Nevertheless, the study and the Gabriel and Savage book on the U.S. Army in Viet Nam were widely cited and believed (Flemming, 1989).

The civilianization crisis came to a head when the Trudeau government was briefly replaced by the Conservatives under Joe Clark from June 1979 to March 1980. The Clark government set up a task force to reexamine unification of the armed services. Although the services, especially the army, pressed for a return to a preunification organization and culture, the Clark government fell before anything could be implemented. The return of the Liberals to power meant the incoming government had no enthusiasm to undo its own policies. The only lasting impact of the task force was for the Canadian Forces to publish a bureaucratically entitled “Personnel Concept” which contained an ethos statement and personnel management principles (Kasurak, 1982, 2013).

The institutional interventions and the response to the civilianization crisis demonstrate that at least a significant minority of senior military officials believed that they had “rightful authority” over their own organizations and personnel management. Civilians, however, did not recognize any such independent sphere and intervened with impunity.

The Functional Imperative—Part 2, The Somalia Inquiry

The Canadian Forces’—and particularly the army’s—ability to manage itself as a profession came under question by a series of scandals during the early and mid-1990s. The most important of these was the investigation of the death of a prisoner in custody of the Canadian Airborne Regiment while deployed to Somalia in 1993 as part of the United States-led United Nations Task Force in Somalia (UNITAF). Initial attempts by the Department of National Defence to limit scrutiny to an internal board of inquiry failed when its own senior officials came to the conclusion that facts which would become public in the ensuing courts martial would contradict the findings of the board. The minister, David Collenette, felt obliged to launch a public inquiry which lasted for 2 years. The Somalia Commission of Inquiry revealed a history of indiscipline in the Airborne Regiment, lack of professional standards, undue influence of regimental mafias in the appointment of commanding officers, a failure to provide the government with truthful military advice, and if not a cover-up, then at very least a disinclination to investigate and hold military officials accountable. The Airborne Regiment was called further into disrepute by the publication of videos showing members bearing swastika tattoos, making racist comments and hazing rites involving vomit, urine, and feces (Kasurak, 2013).

The inquiry came to an abrupt halt when Collenette’s successor, Douglas Young, ordered it to submit a final report. After consulting with prominent academics and with CAF officials, Young preempted the commission’s report with a public “Report to the Prime Minister” in which he made recommendations bearing on military discipline, values and ethics, leadership, command and rank structure, operational missions, terms and conditions of service, the organization of the national headquarters, and relations with the public. Young’s (1997) report left no aspect of the functional imperative untouched.

The minister insisted that the Forces should not be isolated from society and must respect women’s rights and reject discrimination based on race or sexual orientation. He noted that during the Cold War, the Forces had been able to shape its identity and purpose around a clear enemy, but that this period was now over. The post–Cold War world would involve the Canadian Forces in operations that were hazardous, ambiguous, and under a media spotlight. He therefore instructed the acting chief of the defense staff to produce a statement of values and beliefs within 90 days to be incorporated in all recruiting, training, professional development programs, and performance appraisals.

Young ordered the Canadian Forces to immediately make the bachelor’s degree a prerequisite for commissioning, except for commissioning from the ranks. He further mandated reviews of the entire professional development system to ensure focus on the new strategic environment and of the regimental system to place loyalty to the Forces as whole before loyalty to the regiment. He dismissed the allegation that the unified national headquarters had prevented unfiltered military advice from reaching the government and simply stated that the chief of the defense staff had unfettered access to him and to the prime minister where it was warranted. However, he said in the future that military advice to the minister and to cabinet would be separated from departmental advice in documents and that the practice of having the chief of the defense staff and the deputy minister signing documents would be ended in order to clarify responsibilities.

Young was not reelected in the 1997 election and was replaced by Art Eggleton who lacked Young’s faith in the armed forces’ ability to reform themselves. Eggleton accordingly put in a place a Minister’s Monitoring Committee headed by former Supreme Court Justice Willard Estey and composed of other prominent figures. The committee’s mandate was to monitor the Forces’ progress, not only on Young’s reforms but also on the implementation of the recommendations of the Somalia Commission and the Advisory Group on Military Justice and Police Investigation Services. Under Estey, the committee did not take an aggressive approach and allowed its requests for information and responses to be channeled through the office of the vice chief of defense staff. After an initial anodyne report from the committee, Eggleton replaced Estey with John Fraser, a former Conservative cabinet minister and speaker of the House. Fraser set up a research office and instituted information collected directly from National Defence desk officers. Overall, the committee’s reports reflected an impression that senior military officials were unwilling to change Forces culture and their response to Young’s reforms and the Somalia Commission were stovepiped and tactical in nature. Monitoring continued until 2000 when it appeared that the department had its own comprehensive plan in place (Horn & Bentley, 2015).

In response to Young’s direction, the army renewed its efforts to define military professionalism. The army published a new manual in 1998 titled Canada’s Army: We Stand on Guard for Thee, but more familiarly known as CFP 300 (Canada, Department of National Defence, 1998). CFP 300 addressed the post-Somalia issues such as the changing strategic environment and the need to keep regimentalism in its place, it remained solidly Huntingtonian in its views of the profession. Described as a “unique social institution,” the army maintained its “corporateness” with “its self-regulating discipline, standards, and procedures” which included the functional imperative components of military law, doctrine, training, and internal organization. The document spent a great deal of time talking about the “military ethos” but did a poor job of defining it beyond saying its fundamental values were integrity, courage, loyalty, selflessness, and self-discipline. The military ethos required “honoring Canadian values” leaving them undefined, something which was becoming increasingly problematic as the military diverged from society as a whole (see the next section on Diversity). The military ethos was a “warrior’s code” and embodied in the regimental system. CFP 300 was unambiguous that the military was subordinate and obedient to civil authority but described military outcomes as a “shared responsibility” without defining the parties’ roles.

The armed forces as a whole did not publish a statement of military professionalism until 2003 when Duty With Honour: The Profession of Arms in Canada appeared (Canada, Canadian Forces Leadership Institute, 2003). Duty With Honour leans toward Janowitz in its acceptance of a constabulary force-like mission and future for the CAF, but it employs a specifically Huntington framework by putting civil–military relations in the context of tension between the functional and societal imperatives. Quoting Bland without citing him, Duty With Honour says,

The functional imperative requires that the military be granted a high degree of what is referred to as rightful and actual authority over technical military matters, including those dealing with doctrine, the professional development of its members, discipline, military personnel policy, and the internal organization of units and other entities of the armed forces. Self-regulation in these areas contributes significantly to professional effectiveness. In operations, the military similarly has a high degree of autonomy at the tactical and operational levels. The strategic level, however, requires further collaboration and integration at the civil-military interface, and this dynamic relationship defies strict differentiation between the civil and military components of the national security structure (p. 40).

Duty With Honour did not follow the path of CFP 300 in appealing to traditional regimentalism and by discretely declining to define the civilian values it claimed to honor. Instead, it explicitly stated that core Canadian values were contained in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and list other key legislation including the Human Rights Act, the Official Languages Act, and the Employment Equity Act as imposing responsibilities on the military. Moreover, the inclusion of these values was seen as part of military ethos itself.

The Somalia affair had resulted in a civilian intrusion into the functional imperative as deep as the unification of the services and dissolution of the military headquarters. Viewed from the perspective of agency theory military shirking resulted in massive monitoring and punishment. From the point of view of concordance theory, it might be regarded as an attempt to bring military and civilian preferences for the composition of the officer corps and military style into alignment. Although the military continued to claim that it was a unique society with “rightful authority” to govern itself, civilians had paid little or no attention to these claims, although they were never openly contradicted. References to a “warrior’s code” in CFP 300 and assertions of “operational primacy” in Duty With Honour were accepted into official documents although they would become increasingly problematic to civilian attempts to remake Canadian Forces culture to more closely resemble that of its parent society.

The Functional Imperative—Part 3, Diversity

The most persistent civilian intrusion into the functional imperative has concerned diversity. From the point of view of recent theorists, the diversity issue fits well into what Feaver calls the “middle range of policy issues” including the use of the military to advance nonsecurity goals such as industrial development and social justice (Feaver, 2003). But while Schiff rightly elevates the citizenry to the status of a separate accord, one has to strain to find how social justice norms fit into her key areas on which “concordance” among the state, the military, and the citizenry must be developed (Schiff, 1995, 2009).

Civilian intervention began with the Official Languages Act in 1969, which required federal institutions to provide services in both English and French, to use both English and French as languages of work, and ensure equal employment opportunities for members of both language groups (Revised Statutes of Canada, 1985, c.31). With a francophone minister (Léo Cadieux), chief of the defense staff (Jean Allard) and deputy chief of personnel (Major General Jacques Dextraze), it is perhaps not surprising that the armed services did not seek an exemption to the act (Defence Council, 1966). This is not to say that all greeted the resulting changes. One infantry officer wrote that the increase in French language units “endangers what linguistic homogeneity the Forces had” and pointed out that “elements of Francophone unrest” might further undermine the armed services (Bury, 1971).

The major battleground became the inclusion of women. Unlike the push for linguistic equity, expanding the role of women was a direct challenge to an all-male heterosexual warrior identity. The Canadian Forces did not resist the 1970 recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, but limited employment equity to jobs and trades other than the primary combat arms, remote locations, and at sea. The real conflict began with the proclamation of the Canadian Human Rights Act in 1977 which forbade discrimination based on race, ethnic or national origin, color, religion, age, sex, marital status, pardoned conviction, or disability. The act required that restrictions on the employment of women be removed unless bona fide reasons could be identified. This meant that exclusion from the combat arms required justification. A set of trials were conducted (Servicewomen in Non-Traditional Environments and Roles or SWINTER) which not only addressed performance as required by the Human Rights Act but also “sociological” effects on male service members and service families. According to Karen Davis, the trial design assumed the only viable model of operational effectiveness was the all-male heterosexual unit and monitored women closely, treating anything less than perfect as a failure. The evaluators were nevertheless unable to define operational effectiveness in a way that was measurable or to provide evidence justifying continued limitations on the employment of women. The final report of June 1986 recommended that women be allowed to serve in noncombat ships, be restricted from serving inland element second-line combat service support units, but be allowed to serve in medium fixed-wing transport, search and rescue, and some aviation training units (Davis, 2013).

Additional pressure was put on the military to allow women into the combat arms by the coming into effect of the provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1985. The charter, part of the patriation of the constitution in 1982, forbades discrimination of all kinds. National Defence established a Charter Task Force whose studies again failed to find evidence that employment of women affected the performance of combat units. The Task Force subsequently turned to emphasizing intangible and unmeasurable factors such as esprit de corps and warrior culture. The 1989 defeat of National Defence in cases before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal brought by women who were denied jobs in the Forces due to service restrictions preempted another set of trials. The department’s defense had been based on the argument that combat success was based on homogenous, socially cohesive units, that is, male heterosexual units. The Tribunal rejected this contention and ordered the trials to become the beginning of implementation of the inclusion of women in combat units with the full integration of women into all occupations and trades within 10 years. The ruling made it clear that the armed services were subject to Canadian law (Davis, 2013).

Following the Tribunal decision, the Forces’ senior leadership outwardly accepted the inclusion of women and gays in combat units but adopted a position of benign neglect. As women’s issues had been “resolved” support to women was “normalized” and studies to determine how to better integrate women abandoned. The position of Director of Women Personnel was eliminated and junior leaders were left on their own to figure things out. This only delayed the day of reckoning. In 1997, as the deadline for full integration of women established by the Human Rights Tribunal loomed, the Chief of Land Staff, Bill Leach, initiated studies to determine why so little progress had been made in the army. He discovered that while policy had changed, army culture had not. Men in the combat arms continued to believe that women lacked the strength and stamina required; that they were given cushy jobs, were favored by leadership; and that battle school standards had been lowered to accommodate them. Junior leaders said they were afraid to exercise leadership as it could be viewed as harassment. Soldiers believed that women were less interested, less motivated, and less capable, and men had to do extra work and deal with the fraternization issues. Finally, they believed that women could not lead because they lacked “command presence.” In February 1999, the Canadian Human Rights Commission found that insufficient progress had been made but was satisfied that senior management was committed to change and did not order additional monitoring (Davis, 2013).

Even before the Commission had reported, the media were filled with news of sexual harassment, assault, and rape in the armed services. Remedial programs were instituted, but cultural change was slow, at best. A 2001–2003 survey of officers ranking from major to full colonel attending advanced military training found that although they had overwhelmingly accepted women in combat and had no concerns about women disrupting unit cohesion or female combat leadership, they also regarded the diversity question as “mission accomplished” requiring little or no additional institutional effort (Okros et al., 2008). In spite of senior officer complacency, continued reports of sexual harassment eventually led to an external review in 2015 under Marie Deschamps, a former Supreme Court justice. She found little had changed since the army’s 1997 study. She concluded that the Forces had a sexualized culture that was hostile to women and that men interviewed argued that incidents were inevitable, that aggression in the military was normal, and “girls who come to the Army know what to expect.” She found the failure of leadership to maintain a respectful and inclusive workplace “troubling.” Her recommendations were headed by demands that the problem be acknowledged and that the armed services establish a strategy to effect cultural change (Deschamps, 2015).

The CAF response, a program called Operation Honor intended to eliminate harmful and inappropriate sexual behavior, was quickly dubbed “Operation Hop On Her” by the undergraduate wits at the Royal Military College (Wyld, 2015). In 2018, the level of sexual assault in the armed services remained unchanged from 2016 (Statistics Canada, 2019) leaving an official spokesperson to comment “we have a lot of work to do” (Carignan, 2019).

What distinguished diversity issues from battles between institutional elites or ones confined to the defense establishment is that diversity demands originated from society itself at the grass roots. As Canadian society changed to become more equitable and place a higher value on diversity, there were consequent changes to law. Human rights legislation and the enforcement institutions it created forced change on the CAF. Change was enforced sometimes with, and sometimes without, the support of ministers and other political leadership. The armed services have continued to resist and maintain an ambivalent position. While publicly supporting diversity, the Forces have also preserved the concepts of operational primacy and the warrior. At one level, these were acceptable reassertions of the functional imperative. At another, they were dog whistles to legitimize hostility to “social experimentation” that challenged an exclusionary male, heterosexual combat model.

Conclusion

Huntington’s theory of subjective and objective control remains a useful tool with which to examine civil–military relations in Canada. The CAF and a good part of academia have accepted its premises as norms for how the armed forces should relate to the state and society. Elements of the Huntington model, notably the functional and societal imperatives, have found their way into official publications. Members of the CAF vigorously complain when they believe Huntington’s norms have been violated. On the other hand, when civilian policy was uncongenial, they did not hesitate to shirk.

Civilians, on the other hand, do not cite Huntington and probably have never read him, the study of national security being an unlikely route to the federal cabinet. Whatever they may or may not know of Huntington, they have ignored the functional imperative in their actions. The history of Canadian civil–military relations since 1963 has been a steady erosion of the military’s “rightful authority.” Subjective control has not been the exception, it has been the rule.

Subjective control has not resulted in the negative effects predicted by Huntington. The military has not been captured by a political party or a social class. And while the armed services have been forced to adopt more of the values of their parent liberal society than they wished, it is difficult to discern that military efficiency has suffered. There has been no visible failure of morale and expeditionary operations have continued as before. If anything, it has become evident that resistance to diversity has imposed a personnel cost on the armed services by excluding valuable groups of people while simultaneously making service less desirable to them. It has been the insistence on their Huntingtonian zone of exclusivity that has imposed a cost, not subjective control. As embedded as Huntington is in official Canadian ideology, it is past time to let it go.

Feaver and Schiff have made valuable contributions in understanding how Canadian civil–military relations actually work. Schiff’s recognition that separate spheres for the military and civil society are unnecessary and the society as a whole needs to be taken into account are both surely relevant to Canada. However, her factors necessary for concordance (composition of the officer corps, the political decision-making process, recruitment method, and the vaguely defined “military style”) do not offer much insight in the Canadian case. Feaver’s focus on the middle range issues, rather than the coup/noncoup issue, is more useful to understanding relationships in a country where the military is relatively uninfluential. Agency theory and the civilian tools of fire alarms, institutional checks, police patrols, and punishment provide a clear image of what occurs when the military forgets that its civilian principal has the right to be wrong.

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