The news is full of images from the wildfires in northern Alberta. Fort McMurray is especially hard-hit, but there are also many other fires throughout the Prairie Provinces and further into the north. According to CBC News this morning, three suburbs have been damaged to at least 60 percent and the fire spread into three others overnight as the result of wind changes. As of this morning, news reports indicate that 80,000 people have fled the city areas, which is far more than the official population of 62,000.
Yesterday afternoon, (Wednesday) Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced that military resources were being put on notice to respond to a request from the provincial government. It was reported then that military units would be ready to move in two days. At the very same time, the mass exodus from Fort McMurray had resulted in virtually all gasoline supplies in the city and on southbound Highway 883 being exhausted. Today, aerial surveillance shows hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of cars abandoned along the highway. Emergency shelters in small communities both north and south of Fort McMurray are struggling to cope with the hordes of people arriving. Supplies of water and food are running out and a boil-water order was issued this morning, along with a province-wide emergency declaration.
Against this backdrop of disaster, and there is no other word for it, the military response is slow, far too slow and limited. There are several reasons for this, one of which has to do with the formal process of a request being issued by the province to the federal government. There are at least three other reasons and these need to be recognized and dealt with as part of the Defence Policy Review.
Readiness. The Canadian military is not currently officially tasked with domestic Disaster Response as a mission. While the United States and many other countries regularly employ their military services in this role, in Canada it is done as the result of a provincial ‘assistance request’ rather than a formal mission. The difference is important. When formally listed as a military mission, plans must be formed, equipment lists generated, training conducted and contingency scenarios researched. A lot of progress on the material side has been made regarding the Disaster Assistance Response Team but it is largely an ad hoc arrangement with very limited capabilities. The ‘feel good’ factor that Canadians get when they see it deployed abroad is fine but, for a major event like this inside Canada, much more is needed.
Responsiveness. A two-day wait period is too long when lives are in jeopardy. Military reaction times should be much lower for circumstances like this one. Analysis will show that logistics is a critical aspect of handling the mass movement of people along constricted transit routes. Portable logistics and flexible supply lines should be military specialties and they need to be alerted and ready for the moment the call for assistance arrived. A two-day wait does not ‘cut it’ when your fellow citizens are stranded and exposed to the elements. Don’t forget, this is still early May in northern Alberta. The heat wave is ending today and it will be cold at night. As an Albertan, I know that the prospect of sleeping in a dead car on the roadside with no equipment or warm clothing is not a good one.
Effectiveness. This morning, the news showed four Griffin helicopters that are being deployed into the disaster area. They are the lead element of the military response. They are being sent because, as Search and Rescue assets, they are the most ready to deploy. The problem is that they are small helicopters and do not have enough capacity to do much of significance. They are designed to rescue one person or very small groups from life threatening situations. This is not that situation. What is needed is large capacity, large volume ground and air transport to move massive amounts of food, water, fuel and people. Vehicles need to be cleared away from the roadside to open the way for the largest possible flow of people, equipment and supplies. Meanwhile, SAR capability in other areas has been significantly reduced to meet this urgent need. The military should be well-suited to all of these tasks but they are not properly organized for the mission.
The Defence Review should look at the Fort McMurray disaster and insist that changes be made. What we are seeing is a slow and ineffective response by an organization that is still primarily designed to fight heavy mechanized warfare in central Europe. One of the statements made by the Liberals during the election was that they intended to restructure the military to make it lighter and more responsive. It is probable that they were thinking of expeditionary deployments abroad. Now they clearly need to think about this from a more domestic perspective.
Readiness and Responsiveness issues do indicate a need for change in military structure, planning and preparation. But, Effectiveness issues mean that volumetric means are still needed to deal with problems of large scale and long duration. The government should not be fooled into thinking that changes to the defence forces will be cheap and easy. Logistics is not an easy or quick ‘fix’ and it has very little profile with the leadership, which is almost single-mindedly focused on combat capabilities. All the services resist the idea that Disaster Response should be added as an official mission because they know that it shifts the priority away from combat to logistical capabilities.
Oddly, logistical capacity is also the Achilles’ heel of the Canadian military for combat operations abroad. The effectiveness of our military is constrained by its very evident logistical limitations. This aspect of defence planning is fundamentally important and should not be overlooked during the Defence Review.
By Ken Hansen, CFPS Resident Research Fellow
One thought on “Military response to Fort McMurray fires far too slow”
The Hansen post argues military assistance to the McMurray fire should have been more responsive and more capable. While he points out the military can only go in after a provincial request for assistance, he quickly sidesteps the fact that there is no evidence the provincial or federal government wanted more military assistance. The Globe and Mail also recently pointed out that numerous international offers of actual firefighting equipment and personnel were refused. This report makes clear acceptance of assistance to the Fort McMurray fire will be:
“based on an assessment by the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC), a non-profit corporation owned and operated by federal, provincial and territorial wildfire management agencies, according to a government official speaking on background. To date, the CIFFC has determined that domestic fire management capabilities are sufficient, the official said.
This suggests the firefighting experts have no urgent need for the Canadian Armed Forces, Ken Hansen’s assertions notwithstanding. In addition, the evacuation, with assistance by the police, Westjet, Air Canada, and nearby oil sands camps, has proceeded successfully, without a major CF effort.
No disaster should unfold, however, without providing some benefit somewhere. In this case Hansen uses Fort McMurray to advance his longstanding concerns over Canadian defence logistics. Without providing any proof whatsoever he concludes that “All the services resist the idea that Disaster Response should be added as an official mission because they know that it shifts the priority away from combat to logistical capabilities.” He also makes clear there are “very evident logistical limitations” within our military without outlining what they are.
It is difficult to accept his assertion that priority has been on the combat when of late all of the large, billion-dollar DND projects that have been delivered (C-17 and C-130 air lifters and Labrador helicopters) are logistics-related. Combat purchases (Leopard tank upgrades, and 6 artillery pieces) were few and of much lower cost.
As the naval reader will be all too well aware, these types of disconnects will not be allowed to interfere with his assertion that the Canadian military, and particularly the Navy, undervalues logistics. His earlier critiques follow:
• The current lack of RCN replenishment ships has a simple explanation according to Ken Hansen in a 2015 CDAI Institute Blog, titled Canada’s Naval Fuel Crisis: “The blame for all this has to lay with the naval leadership. Somehow, generations of Canadian admirals decided that logistics is less important than combat capability.” To this he adds:
I find it sad that the admirals care more about politics than they do about the history of their own service. A much more robust logistical capacity is needed immediately. They should remember this advice from American General Omar Bradley: “Amateurs talk tactics; professionals study logistics.”
Just how admirals “care more about politics” is never explained nor is how they could have accelerated the replenishment ship replacement.
• On our navy’s current lack of supply ships to provide a better disaster response again rests on failed naval thinking according to Ken Hansen in his Broadsides post titled The Danger of Tactical Thinking in Times of Strategic Change:
By some estimates, globally we have the capacity to assist 150 million people who
have been affected by a humanitarian/natural disaster(s). But by 2025, the potential number of people affected by such events will be 450 million people.[5] There will be a monumental shortfall, but the Royal Canadian Navy seems unimpressed and remains resistant to change.
Again, exactly what specific change the Navy is resisting is not made clear in the post.
• The size, and thus the range and the carrying capacity of the Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships, was reduced to provide, instead, increased ship’s numbers. Ken Hansen reduces the complex issue of ship design tradeoffs to the following: “The navy is ‘cheeping [sic?] out’ on this design because they have a different set of priorities than the government.” The extent to which government had to have participated in the decision as to AOPS numbers is not raised. See his Broadsides post, Not Just for the Arctic.
• In a 2012 Broadsides post titled Opportunity Lost Ken Hansen critiques the head of the Navy for not advancing the case for more ships before a Parliamentary Committee. This is based on a media report that Admiral Maddison said “he is happy with the number of ships the service operates and he doesn’t need any more.” According to Ken Hansen: “This is a staggeringly uninspired statement by the institutional leader of the navy before a political body (Senate committee on defence) that is designed to ask exactly these kinds of questions about the security needs of the country.” He adds “It seems the navy is both content and ambitionless.” Given that the 2008 Canada First defence policy had laid out the future fleet numbers with some precision, Hansen does not consider that it would have been risky indeed to contradict that policy publicly. Neither the concept of ministerial responsibility nor the PCO direction to government employees appearing before Parliamentary Committees is considered in this post.
In each of the above cases I have provided links to Hansen’s work so you can gauge the context and the extent to which he considers factors other than naval leadership for our lack of replenishment ships or a broader logistics capability. I found none. Yet there were many others who had written on the topic. In 2015 Martin Shadwick argues the RCN fleet has not been renewed on time because “The navy was largely frozen out of the procurement spending” as a result of the Afghanistan War and the priority spending being assigned to the just noted airlift aircraft. David Perry considers an inadequate budget allocation, acerbated by inflation and extensive requirements (for more logistic capability) were factors in our failure to replace our AORs on time. These two authors do not even hint at naval leadership being a factor, nor does anyone else. This is largely because Ken Hansen’s monocausal explanations for the failure to renew a multi-billion dollar capability are quite simply untenable. Far too many players and factors are in play in approving and moving a major crown project.
Elsewhere Ken Hansen has accurately made the case that the Canadian Navy leadership did not provide sufficient priority to logistics during World War II, although I would like to see a fuller treatment of the factors in play in setting the Navy’s wartime priorities. That a small navy that struggled to exist in the 1930s might well have had difficulty also growing a logistic capability may not be that surprising. Yet, the evidence he mounts is compelling for the World War II period. However, his attempt to extend that argument to today falters mostly because the deep research effort he had mounted earlier trails off during his discussion of the Cold War, and is absent thereafter.
This is particularly so as his views on current naval logistic priorities rest on a debatable set of interlinked claims:
• “In the absence of a direct military threat the constabulary or diplomatic roles [for the Navy] should take precedence.”
• “The first step should be to dispense with the bias toward combat capabilities in the design of warships for the fleet.”
• “The experiences of the Canadian navy during Operation Hestia have cast a new light on the need for logistical capacity as a central design criterion for all future Canadian naval vessels.”
When one expects such fundamental changes in fleet structure extensive supporting analysis is required. Regrettably, the paper did not devote the same energies to this part as it did in analyzing World War II. In particular, these claims rest a very positive world view. Events in Crimea, the Ukraine, off the Baltic coast and in the South China Sea suggest the time to downgrade combat function lower than the diplomatic or constabulary role has not yet arrived.
This, of course, returns us to Ken Hansen’s various Broadsides posts. When the Canadian Forces’ or the RCN’s priorities do not align with Ken Hansen’s priorities and world view, he suggests they do not understand logistics and are “amateurs.” When he combines this with monocausal explanations for delayed replenishment ships the lack of balance becomes so extreme as to be mean-spirited. Broadsides should be ready to accept all views including his, but can we not raise our standards?