In 1995, Rick Hillier went to the former Yugoslavia as director of plans and policies in the United Nations headquarters there as the world struggled to bring an end to fighting and genocide. The Canadian Forces had 4,000 troops deployed in the region, but all were hampered by post-Somalia rules and regulations laid down from a faraway National Defence Headquarters, Hillier writes, "more concerned with what was happening in Ottawa than getting anything done" in Croatia and Bosnia. So bad was it that the two Canadian battalions there, nicknamed Canbat 1 and Canbat 2, picked up the names "Can'tbat 1" and "Can'tbat 2" from Allied commanders.
This mattered, the general goes on, because a few years later, in 2001-02, Canada wanted to join the International Security Assistance Force mission then forming in Afghanistan, "but we were shunned. Part of the reason was that the Europeans, the British in particular, remembered our risk-averse approach ... and had no faith that Canada would pull its weight. ... They did not want us as part of their alliance." Instead, Canada had to place a battalion in a U.S. division.
A tough, competent and proud soldier, Rick Hillier makes it clear in his memoirs that his aim as chief of the defence staff from 2005 to 2008 was to change the way Canada played the game. To him, the Canadian Forces had to be transformed organizationally, re-equipped and reconnected to the people. The popular idea that Canadians were peacekeepers first, last and always had to be smacked between the eyes.
And Hillier did that as soon as he took the job. Canada was in Afghanistan fighting "detestable murderers and scumbags," he said, and the Canadian Forces weren't the public service. Our job is to kill people, he proclaimed. There was some tut-tutting from a few delicate souls, but Hillier's unscripted remarks began the process of changing the mindset of the forces to a war-fighting culture and to make his soldiers - and soon the public - proud once more.
This, more than anything else Hillier did, stands as his great achievement. None would complain about Canadians being unwilling to fight after 2005. The Can'tbats were gone.
Hillier, however, had less impact in changing the peacekeeping mindset of the public. Huge numbers still think Canada is doing peacekeeping in Afghanistan. And if we aren't, we should be. Not for Hillier, however. In Bosnia and Croatia, he writes, the concept was "meaningless in practice" and "far too many of our young men lost their lives there for no discernible effect." Why? Because "the United Nations itself couldn't run a one-man rush to the outhouse. Pragmatically, it was almost criminal to put Canadian troops under UN command … because the UN was fundamentally incapable of running effective military operations." Those Canadians who remain true believers in the UN's efficacy need to read Hillier.
He is as scathing in his comments on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Western alliance did well in winning the Cold War and in former Yugoslavia, but not in Afghanistan, where its members continue to hamper their troops with caveats designed to guarantee that no one will shoot at or be shot at by them. NATO, he writes scornfully, is based on consensus, with every member needing to agree "on every single little issue. That kind of consensus is simply not possible when you're trying to win an up-close-and-personal battle like the one in Afghanistan."
The result: no coherent strategy to win the war. "Afghanistan has revealed that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse, decomposing," Hillier says flatly, "and somebody's going to have to perform a Frankenstein-like life-giving act by breathing some lifesaving air through those rotten lips into those putrescent lungs, or the alliance will be done." Tell us what you really think, Rick.
A Soldier First gives us the story of Hillier's life, his birth in small-town Newfoundland, his joining the army as a student, and his rise through the ranks during the successive decades of darkness that neutered the Canadian Forces during the Trudeau, Mulroney and Chrétien governments.
Why he stayed in, why other good soldiers and sailors remained, was because they believed in the military's duty to defend the nation, even one that thought defence unnecessary. He writes about the "two-way contract" he made with defence minister Bill Graham and prime minister Paul Martin at the end of 2004, when he agreed to become chief of the defence staff. He wanted the government's commitment to give the military more funding "for the enormous changes that the Canadian Forces required."
Graham and Martin agreed, and the process of transforming the Canadian Forces began. When Stephen Harper's Conservatives came to power at the beginning of 2006, the political players changed, but the support remained. The condition of the Canadian Forces was so desperate that bipartisan agreement on the need for renewal was there. This all might have happened without Rick Hillier as CDS. Maybe. But his role, ably recounted in what reads very much the way he speaks, was crucial.
The general is now on the road selling his book, and some controversy has focused on who said what to whom and when. What is more important, however, is what Hillier writes about the world context in which Canada lives. Soft power - peacekeeping and values - is well and good. But without the capacity to deploy effective, well-trained, well-led hard power when needed, no one will pay attention to Canada. Can'tbat l and Can'tbat 2 are the proof of that, and Hillier superbly makes the case that we cannot allow the Canadian Forces to go down that road again.
J.L. Granatstein is author of Canada's Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace. He was director and chief executive officer of the Canadian War Museum from 1998 to 2000.