4 Wing Cold Lake 1

Should Canada Continue To Maintain

Combat-Capable Air Forces?

Colonel Bill Cleland

Wing Commander4 Wing Cold Lake

18 March 2002

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 2

Presentation Outline

• 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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 3

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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 4

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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 5

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.

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 6

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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 7

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.

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 8

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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 9

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.

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 10

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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 11

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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 12

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.

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 13

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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 14

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.

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 15

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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 16

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.

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 17

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.

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 18

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

Wing Commander 4 Wing Cold Lake 19

Questions / Discussion