Integration (now largely complete) and unification of Canada’s armed forces had moved a long way toward fulfillment within the limits National Defense Minister Paul T. Hellyer was permitted to go before Parliament finally approved the unification bill last spring.
The result of the unification campaign has been a political crisis in Canada and a major institutional crisis in the armed forces, especially in the Royal Canadian Navy, which will disappear as an entity. These crises, though domestic in content, suggest that the same kind of repercussions might take place in any other nation with a substantial military establishment and a distinguished military record, if armed forces unification were also to be attempted.
Both the supporters and opponents of Mr. Hellyer make sense in their arguments. And there are plenty of arguments on both sides. Support for him is based, in part, on pure pragmatism. The Canadian Defence Department has been burdened since 1945 with a top-heavy manning establishment where civilians often outnumbered uniformed personnel in non-operational jobs, and where the functions of supply, personnel, and other services were duplicated in all three forces. The economy of Canada could no longer support this kind of infrastructure, which on occasions since Korea devoured as much as 20 per cent of the Canadian budget.
Another reason heard in support of unifica- tion is purely nationalistic. Many Canadians are rankled because their country, so intimately involved with the United States in economic as well as military affairs, has been hard-pressed to find its own distinctive formula in this era of technological and managerial innovation.
A third reason—the one most publicized by Hellyer abroad—is the future use of a compact, highly mobile, unified Canadian force in world peacekeeping operations of the kind that have won international respect for Canada in the Gaza Strip, the Congo, Kashmir, and more recently, in Cyprus.
Hellyer’s opponents, spearheaded by the Royal Canadian Navy, which has the most to lose from land-oriented concepts of military unification, are convinced the Minister is wrong. The most realistic of them, including nearly all his bitter naval critics among Canada’s admirals, agree with his scheme, short of unification,—perhaps integration only—but hotly reject unification in the cause of preserving Canada’s historic military and naval entities.
Indeed, retired Rear Admiral William Landymore, Mr. Hellyer’s former chief of the new Maritime Command, and cause celebre in the fight to defeat unification, was one of the early proponents and implementers of integration in the Royal Canadian Navy.
The origins of Bill C-243, the legislation to unify, and innocuously called, “An Act to amend the National Defence Act,” are set deep in Canada’s expensive experience in maintaining substantial armed forces for its size, since World War II. That expense had become too heavy even for a major middle power as affluent as Canada. The concentration had been on duplicated and inefficient military management, rather than on sharper operational involvement and planning.
At the same time, the unseemly haste of Defence Minister Hellyer to get the integration-unification in the works and rush his bill through Canada’s Parliament is based in part on his zeal to make unification a success and to forestall any more service revolts such as that stirred up last year within the R.C.N.
The R.C.N.’s resentment and opposition to Hellyer broke open last July when Hellyer fired Rear Admiral William Landymore, his chief of Maritime Command. Over the ensuing months, five more rear admirals resigned before their full period of service had expired. Hellyer and the pro-unification brass in Canada’s Defence Department, including a commodore he had promoted to vice admiral —an event unprecedented in Canadian naval history—were aware that the retiring admirals were not old guard officers, but recent appointments to flag rank and keen exponents of managerial systems and a revitalized fleet. They had gone a long way with the Minister, but not to the point of seeing the Navy merged into a unified force where its traditional antisubmarine warfare role remained undefined and insecure.
All last summer, Canada’s press and radio rang with stories of “the admirals’ revolt” and “the Navy’s mutiny.” Mr. Hellyer, a wartime air force corporal, with a distinct hostility to what he sees as the Navy’s rigid class structure, nevertheless tried to smooth troubled waters. In September 1966, he visited the oldest naval base in Canada, a site hallowed by history and the ancient Royal Navy affiliation of the days of sail. This is HMCS Stadacona, the shore base in Halifax, a city founded to meet the needs of the Royal Navy in 1749, prior to the Seven Years’ War. But on the day of his arrival, a freshly-painted, new sign suddenly appeared outside the main gate of the base marked, “Canadian Forces Base, Halifax.”
Inside, Mr. Hellyer was booed and heckled by some officers and men, and he shouted back, “your uniform was not ordained by God.” The reference was to the planned replacement of the Canadian naval uniform with the single-breasted, dark green uniform which unification is supposed to initiate for all ranks. The naval personnel knew about this and also knew that admirals, commanders, chief petty officers, and leading seamen, indeed the whole panoply of naval rank, would be no more in the new unified force. They would become, according to the new Act, generals, brigadiers, sergeants major, and corporals, respectively. In frustration and derision, naval personnel dubbed the new unified force as either “the Jolly Green Giant” (for its as yet unseen uniform) or “Disneyland.”
TRIO (Tri-Services Identities Organization) was established last fall in Toronto by almost all Canada’s senior naval, army and air force officers in retirement to compel Hellyer to stop short at integration, and preserve the identity of ancient military units, such as historic regiments with battle honors in Britain’s as well as Canada’s wars back to the War of 1812. TRIO has money, high hopes, and much political pressure behind it, emanating from commanding generals and admirals of World War II and Korea. It did much to impede, although it could not prevent, the passage of Hellyer’s bill.
In Ottawa, Canada’s capital and headquarters of the Defence Department, at least ten nations, large and small, Free World and Communist bloc, have enlarged otherwise small military attachés’ offices which have orders to report closely on the course of Canadian military unification. If Hellyer makes unification work—and in the long-term perspective he probably will—the new Canadian Armed Forces will be the model to all other nations intent on simplifying their military apparatus in the same way.
The future unified structure and the new role of the Canadian armed forces were first made public in March 1964 in the Canadian Government’s “White Paper on Defence.” At that time, because of anticipated service and political opposition, Hellyer hesitated to emphasize in public the third stage—unification—of his program, even though it is clearly defined and promised in the “White Paper.”
The three stages are: (1) a single chain of command reporting to the Minister through a. Chief of Defence Staff to replace the cumbersome Chiefs of Staff Committee, which was composed of the heads of the three armed services. This has been accomplished and is operational, (2) integration of all services, supply, communications, personnel, accounting operations, now almost entirely completed, and (3) unification of the three existing services into a single force identified by a single name, Canadian Armed Forces, and attired in a single uniform.
At a time when Canada’s post-Korea commitments in NATO and even NORAD are cloudy, Hellyer is moving toward a tight, mobile, and flexible force, easily able to move anywhere in the world on call from the United Nations. Politically, he wants a defense budget which will never again exceed $1.5 billion, or never more than about 20 per cent of a Canadian federal budget. He wants to use a greater amount of the defense budget for the immediate training and equipment costs of building up a peacekeeping force, rather than feeding the kind of overhead that was prevalent when he became Defence Minister.
Hellyer knew better than anyone else how rampant Parkinson’s law had become among Canada’s men and women in uniform. By the end of 1963, out of a total of 120,000 in the services, 15,000 men and women were in Ottawa’s military headquarters. Hellyer’s first job was to integrate “the desk battalions,” reduce the forces initially by 10,000, and have more funds to spare for the new military hardware to see Canada into the 1970s.
The Defence Minister also realized he was on a one-man path as far as some of his cabinet colleagues are concerned. Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson’s minority Liberal administrations, elected in 1963 and again in 1965 on slim majorities, were basically pledged to heavy welfare spending. As a result, Canada during the 1960s has moved deeper into the welfare state, a phase which obviously has to be paid for in harsh fiscal policy. By taking some cream off the top of her booming economy through taxes and occasional bouts of tight money, the Liberals have made most of their election promises come true in the form of expensive welfare and social services legislation. Waiting not too far behind the unification bill is a federal Medicare act that had to be delayed until early 1968.
At the same time, he has had the support of the Prime Minister, who is not a military expert, but the creator of such schemes for peacekeeping as UNEF (United Nations Emergency Force), which kept the peace between Israel and the United Arab Republic after the Suez campaign in late 1956 until May 1967. Mr. Pearson was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts at that time.
These are distinctively Canadian circumstances, affecting both the external and internal position of that country. Bearing in mind that any nation attempting such a revolutionary military concept would face parallel developments, Mr. Hellyer’s “White Paper” and Bill C-243 outline precisely and in business-like fashion, what could be the framework for all future attempts at military unification.
Finally, whatever purely domestic motives inspired the Defence Minister, the philosophical concepts and many of the working parts of integration were borrowed from the highly- developed phases of “man management” techniques perfected in the U. S. armed forces since Korea. Such texts as the late Admiral Harry Eccles’ classic study Military Concepts and Philosophy find avid military readers these days in Canada, although, it should be noted, the admiral found substantial fault with the need to unify completely the professional military corps.
At the same time, Mr. Hellyer took equally strong reference from Canadian advice on changing the armed forces, implicit in the Canadian Royal Commission on Government Organization of 1962. This was in charge of J. Grant Glassco, president of Brazilian Traction Light and Power, the largest surviving private power corporation in Latin America —and Canadian-owned. Glassco was severely critical of the “administrative tail” which Canada’s relatively small military establishment had accumulated. He wrote, “ ... to maintain three separate organizations for such functions as supply, construction and general administration, is uneconomic.”
Hellyer, therefore, operates within the best of Canadian managerial practice, borrowing techniques from the United States and applying the method applicable to the Canadian experience.
This becomes evident in a review of the new Canadian Forces organization structure.
Chief of Defence Staff. The appointment of a single Chief of Defence Staff to replace the previous three-man Chiefs of Staff Committee was concluded by 1 August 1964. So far, two officers have served: an air vice marshal and, at present, an army general.
Responsible to the Chief of the Defence Staff (who, in turn, is responsible for the entire Canadian Armed Forces to the Minister), are four “branch heads,” the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, the two Chiefs of Personnel and Technical Services and the Comptroller- General (at present Vice Admiral Ralph Hennessy).
The Vice Chief of the Defence Staff is mainly concerned with military operations. He has, in turn, three deputies for defense programming, intelligence, and military operations. The Chief of Personnel has five subordinate director generals. These are responsible for senior appointments, administration, postings and careers, training and recruiting, and personnel plans.
The Chief of Technical Services has three deputies, engineering, logistics, and construction engineering, as well as an attached “scientific deputy.” The Comptroller General and his deputies are key persons in the new Canadian scheme. On them and on his three directors of finance, manpower control, management engineering, and automation, hang much of the chances for early success with the organizational structure of the future unified force.
The real work of integration begins with his Director General, Management Engineering and Automation under whom are three subordinate officers. (See Figure 1.) These are styled “ME 2,” for handling nationwide evaluations of total programs, “ME 3,” which is concerned with standards of measurement on projects assigned, for example logistics work study methods, and “ME 4,” the study section doing management engineering studies for headquarters.
Beneath them are nine MSUs or Management Study Units also spread across Canada and established in former air force, naval and army bases. The former “R.C.A.F. Station Toronto” for example, is now “Number 5 Management Study Unit, Toronto.” Launched on 1 August 1966, they represent much of the pre-integration thinking in defense management which each Canadian service had developed and often duplicated, independent of the others.
Officers in charge of these courses have usually been exposed to long defense management courses with the American Management Engineering Training Agency or the joint Canadian armed forces management school at Longueuil, near Montreal in Quebec.
The MSU is basically a consultative body, available on request or on assignment to all three services. Such problems as cost saving on ship design, air force cafeteria layouts, weapons operational studies, application of PERT to defense contracts with private enterprise, are typical MSU tasks. Each unit has a staff of about 30 officers and non-commissioned officers. The basic function of the MSU, therefore, is to save, as well as economically allocate funds and resources, both human and physical, toward the goal of a more efficient military establishment.
Finally, the Canadian scheme calls for a Defence Research Board and the Defence Council. The former is a specialized military research and investigatory agency, already held in high regard by its U. S. counterpart with whom it has a close liaison. It is a preintegration agency that will not change in either its function or structure, but will from now on, report directly to the new Chief of Technical Services.
Mr. Hellyer reconstituted the Defence Council, an existing but almost defunct internal committee of his Department. In the 29 months preceding the new integrated role of the armed forces, it had held only four meetings. In the 29 months since reorganization began, it has held 90 separate meetings involving not only the Minister and his Deputy, but the three senior deputies responsible to the Chief of the Defence Staff.
The most important duty of the Defence Council is the development of Canada’s so- called “field formations.” Overseas with NATO these have included one mechanized infantry brigade and one air division of six CF-104 Lockheed Starfighter strike and reconnaissance squadrons (soon to be replaced with the Canadian-built version of the Northrop F-5 jet tactical fighter), all stationed in Western Europe.
The Command Structure. Having announced and formed Phase One, Hellyer moved to Phase Two. This is the organization of the command structure for both integration and ultimate unification. The new commands were reduced from an awkward 11 to a more compact six elements. (See Figure 2.) These are Mobile (handling peacekeeping and limited war operations as they arise), Air Defence (the still-standing NORAD commitment at Colorado Springs and in Canada), Maritime, Air Transport, Training, and Materiel. These commands were established at key urban centers around Canada: Mobile at Montreal, Training at Winnipeg, Manitoba, in central Canada, and Maritime at Halifax.
Maritime Command was first made public on 17 January 1966 with Rear Admiral William Landymore in command. His firing a brief six months later brought the first major service split within the Hellyer scheme. This new command absorbed various naval commands and one R.C.A.F. unit from pre- White Paper days. These were the historic Atlantic and Pacific Commands of the R.C.N., the former Maritime Air Command of the R.C.A.F. and the Maritime Warfare School, jointly run by the R.C.N.-R.C.A.F., also at Halifax. At the same time, other vital fleet operations and procedures were ingested into other Commands. Navy manning and training now came under Training Command in far-off, land-locked Winnipeg. Supply and ships’ equipment now came under the new Materiel Command in Ottawa.
Within the new Maritime Command, one of the major sources of great contention between Hellyer and the R.C.N.’s admirals was the new “prime role” of the Navy. Was this to be a continuation of the same, high priority ASW capability; or a downgrading of this in favor of the new Navy requirement as a troop transport and supply operation in what a Defence Department internal study called, “a limited sealift capacity”? To this day, neither Hellyer nor his surviving naval commanders have adequately defined what it is they want the R.C.N. to do in the way of integration and unification.
Hellyer’s naval opponents, even those who enthusiastically went along with integration, saw disaster for the Navy in splitting its traditional ASW role into both antisubmarine and transport roles. Morale, they claimed, would quickly decrease if the Navy had a divided purpose. Officers would retire in droves. Manning would lag permanently.
Although the Minister began to emphasize in successive public statements during the height of the unification debate that the Navy’s basic function in unification would continue to be the ASW role, by late summer 1966, Hellyer, who had originally denied all these suppositions, was compelled to admit that the R.C.N. east coast destroyer escort strength was already in trouble. Nine ships, half of Canada’s modern fleet of DDEs were laid up for lack of crews. When all ships are activated, the R.C.N. at present consists of one small fleet aircraft carrier, nine destroyer helicopter carriers DDHs of the St. Laurent and Nipigon classes, 11 DDHs of the Restigouche and Mackenzie classes (all named after Canada’s great rivers), one “replenishment” ship, and two “mobile repair ships” (one in reserve).
The remaining ships include two British- built, non-nuclear submarines, ten World War II frigates of which four are in reserve, three World War II destroyers also in reserve and three patrol craft for reserve officers and cadet summer training.
New construction for Maritime Command accounts for the biggest and most expensive capital projects for the new armed forces. It calls for two more operational “support” ships, four advanced helicopter-carrying destroyer escorts (DDHs), incorporating all the substantial lessons learned from the early St. Laurents during the Fifties and Sixties, and with secondary gunfire capabilities (the St. Laurents have no defensive armament), and the Canadian Sea Sparrow surface-to-air missile.
The first of the new DDHs is due for delivery around 1971. Finally, there are six naval air squadrons in Maritime Command, augmented by the big Argus used by the former R.C.A.F. Maritime Air Command in submarine-watching operations. At present the carrier is undergoing a nine-million-dollar refit and, along with the naval air arm, may in the long run, be doomed. In both cases, this is a result of specialized personnel shortages which recruiting is not replacing.
Although Hellyer hopes to save one billion or so dollars from housekeeping to put into weapons, the Navy may eat up about 460 million dollars or nearly half the amount for the projected operational force deployments in the early 1970s.
Unification. This final phase called for in the new Act, the “Canadian Forces Reorganization Act,” has now begun with the Canadian Parliament’s passage of the Act. The Act is quite explicit in its intent. Section Two reads, “The Canadian Forces are the armed forces . . . and consist of one service called the Canadian Armed Forces.”
Few have yet seen the new, common, officers-and-men uniform, which is now undergoing trial wearings among small interservice groups and which will be in general use in the forces probably by late 1972. Present service dress, such as navy blue, will be worn only on formal occasions as a dress uniform. Naval officers may be called by their naval ranks in the unified force if they like. But officially, their ranks will revert to the equivalent army tides, as will those of the present R.C.A.F. Hellyer claims unification will be complete in five years.
The Royal Canadian Navy, one of several repositories of Canada’s best tradition of men under arms, simmered ominously from the start of the new program. A large number of officers of the rank of commander and above did not like the “White Paper” commitment and did not like Hellyer.
His enthusiasm about formula management antagonized a fleet still relying largely on traditional, trial-and-error processes of command and decision-making. This antagonism grew when the integration technique destroyed the Navy’s first real internal program for training and structural change. This animosity was increased by the publication of the White Paper in early 1964 and has increased with the resultant retirements, not only at admiral’s rank, but heavily throughout the ranks of commodores, captains, and commanders.
To match Hellyer’s singleness of purpose— what one rear admiral has called his “Harvard Business School mentality”—the R.C.N. had its own singlemindedness of purpose as well. This was the continuity of its ASW function since the far-off summer of 1940 when the ocean-going German U-boats poured out of the captured French Atlantic ports to start the Battle of the Atlantic.
The R.C.N. held a major part of the North Atlantic against the U-boat and had assumed this role two years before the U. S. Navy entered the Atlantic arena after Pearl Harbor. The Canadian Navy dame out of the war heavy with honors and fame, with a fleet largely manned by former civilians, many of the best of them coming from the western prairies, hundreds of miles from Canada’s two coasts, plus a small, prewar, professional officer class, whose survivors were honed to perfection by the U-boat battles.
For a decade, 1945-1955, the R.C.N. and its early postwar admirals, men promoted from the prewar officer group, were historically-oriented. While the Canadian Army and especially the Air Force moved into the new and strange world of military management, the R.C.N. largely stood pat, with the addition of new battle honors won by its small but competent patrol and coastal attack units during the Korean War.
With very rare exceptions, the Navy’s early postwar admirals—those wartime ships’ captains and heroes of the U-boat war—rarely stood on principle for their service, either during public attack against the military or during crucial inter-departmental conflicts of the kind unification hopes to eliminate.
This was a result, in part, of the general anti-intellectualism which flourished in the Fleet during the first decade after the war.
But the R.C.N. began to change with the arrival of the first of many superb “River” class DDEs, and the promotion, to admiral’s rank, of officers who believed in genuine structural change, but also desired the preservation of their service identity. The R.C.N. could no longer turn its back on the “management” phase, not with the sophisticated warships it was now building. The R.C.N. still had the same role as in the black summer of 1940, to sink enemy submarines when war came again. This is its continuing role under CANLANT, the Canadian Atlantic Area of SACLANT, located at Norfolk, Virginia.
In the mid-Sixties, the Navy proceeded on its so-called Cyclical Plan, an effort to allocate naval manpower more easily between new entry training, and specialized instruction, especially for adequate operational manning of ships at sea. Naval technology, research, and seagoing training continued on the assumption that Canada, like the United States, might have to fight an all-up sea war in the Atlantic again.
The “new wave” of young admirals, promoted around 1960, were in charge of and committed to these training and strategic programs. After the change of government in 1963 and the arrival of Paul Hellyer as Defence Minister, thinking in the Department, where the R.C.N. was concerned, solidified around the Canadian well-wishing frame-of- mind that there would never be a major Russian submarine confrontation in the Atlantic.
Not even the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, before Hellyer arrived on the scene, had shaken this type of thinking, even though Russian submarines were already at battle stations. Every available Canadian ship was placed on a war footing and deployed into the northwest Atlantic even though the Conservative government of the day procrastinated over a Canadian position. By placing his ship on a war alert, every Canadian naval commander afloat took his career in his hands.
These differences of opinion between the senior naval officer and the Minister were bound to come into the open within the Canadian system of government. The venue would be the Parliamentary Committee on Defence, which had been hearing naval witnesses for months after the unification bill announcement. In time, Admiral Landymore was called to appear. The crisis broke over the contents of his report.
The naval crisis around Admiral Landymore erupted over the allegedly severe preediting of his presentation before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence on 23 June 1966. Admiral Landymore has since made public what was once a confidential document, namely the original presentation he had planned to make on the state of the Royal Canadian Navy and the final document he was instructed to table.
On arrival in Ottawa from his Maritime Command in Halifax, the admiral was requested by Mr. Hellyer’s office to submit his brief overnight to the Defence Department. Next morning, it was returned heavily edited and with substantial omissions indicated in key portions relating to ships laid up, manpower deficiencies, and his concern about the long-term future role of the R.C.N. within unification.
A portion of the alleged alterations related to Admiral Landymore’s assessment that the net loss of 45 men per month from the R.C.N. would make necessary a reduction of, “six to seven additional destroyers to maintenance crews by May 1967,” leaving only “13 or 14 out of 23 destroyers in full commission.”
This was replaced in the final brief by the following: “In my Maritime Command, we will continue to do whatever we can at our level to improve service conditions which will attract men to, and retain them in the Services. . . .”
Even though Mr. Hellyer admitted last fall to the unusual number of DDEs laid up, he consistently refused to produce any evidence that he had tampered with the admiral’s presentation, denying at the same time that the admiral’s brief had been radically altered.
Knowing his release was inevitable, and also because he had called a press conference on his return to his command without departmental orders, Admiral Landymore took the unprecedented step, and for a senior officer an insubordinate step, of requesting an interview with the Canadian Prime Minister. This request was granted; but, of course, the Canadian chief of state supported his Minister of National Defence as could be expected.
Admiral Landymore was fired from his command under conditions of high emotion. He was, perhaps, the most popular admiral in the R.C.N. at the time and his abrupt departure from Halifax was accompanied by a full turnout of his 5,000 officers, men, and their families, emphasizing the Canadian Navy’s feelings that it was being asked to do, as Time commented, “more than its share of unifying.”
Between July 1966 and January 1967, Landymore has been joined by five more admirals seeking early retirement plus several Army and Air Force general officers.
Commander F. B. Watt, M.B.E., C.D., Royal Canadian Navy (Retired), a former Deputy Director of Naval Information, a Canadian poet and the Navy’s senior wartime boarding officer, writes of the feelings of many men of his age and experience who might have been won over to unification of the Navy in Canada.
“ . . . The point at which they lost me was the ham-handed attempt to convince the country that morale in the Navy was excellent, when any knowledgeable person knew it was plummeting. The humorless, materialistic, inflexible line that has been followed left no room for a flowing together of the best of the past with that which the future will require.”
The real uncertainty for the first Navy in modern times to be entirely unified, is its undefined future role in the new process. Both the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force have been better prepared psychologically and administratively for unification. The R.C.A.F. had become largely ground- borne and formula-seeking since 1959 when the big, Canadian-designed and built Avro CF-105 fighter-bomber was junked as too costly. Though the U. S. Lockheed CF-104 replaced it, the elan of the Royal Canadian Air Force was shattered.
The Canadian Army’s role after Korea, its last major clash of arms, changed less dramatically. Hellyer’s underlying idea of the Mobile Command, in which the R.C.N. would appear to act as a transport service, is based on the role of the Canadian Army since Korea as a fine peacekeeping force.
But the R.C.N., with its antisubmarine warfare commitment unchanged in a quarter century, with largely Canadian-designed capital equipment geared to sea war, still remains out on a limb, uncertain which way to move, as unification begins.
Mr. Hellyer begins unification with problems. The first was entirely unexpected and has been a great disappointment to Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson. This was the sudden termination of the United Nations Emergency Force last May by U. N. Secretary General U Thant under pressure from Egypt’s President Nasser.
UNEF was largely the creation of Prime Minister Pearson. Its 11 years of successful operations between 1956 and 1967 in helping hold off the United Arab Republic and Israel had become a cornerstone in Canada’s middle-of-the-road, “quiet” diplomacy. UNEF was also the model peacekeeping operation, the kind which might rise again, as indeed it has in Cyprus, and which justified the need for a Canadian unified force in the first place.
Second, the leakage of senior and experienced naval officers of commander and captain rank continues. Canada’s spurt of new universities and widening industries which desperately need administrators with decision-making abilities, have claimed many of these, often at salaries in excess of service pay. This is a serious loss because of the obvious seniority of these men. For officers seeking retirement, Hellyer requires an interim six- months’ waiting period following such requests for release.
At the same time, recruiting of young men and women with no previous service experience nor personal involvement in military issues, has jumped considerably and there is no appreciable leakage among junior naval officers of lieutenant’s rank and below.
Third, the key Mobile Command is far from complete and may need more funds to be rounded out than the Minister contemplated. The new C-5s, for example, will need in-flight tankers to meet the new air commitment. Replenishment and supply ships in the navy and on order have draughts too deep for shallow water operations, say in various African coastal waters where crises in emerging nations might require U. N. use of the new Canadian intervention force. To meet these would mean a larger budget approved by Parliament, a self-defeating possibility when the whole idea of unification was to cut Canada’s defense outlay.
Fourth, Hellyer’s critics, defeated by the passage of the unification bill, still point to an escalating Vietnamese war, in which Canada is not a belligerent, as yet another in the long line of post-1945 conventional wars where armies, navies, and air forces operate as identifiable and largely separate services. If the era of big naval ships is over—as they now say—why does an Asian war in the late Sixties require reactivation of a World War II battleship, placed in unexpected naval service again at a cost of about $20 millions to the U. S. taxpayer?
The basic lessons learned so far from the Canadian experience in military unification, are the same ones being learned the hard way in other places in North American technological change. Systems are moving quicker than people. The human element still cannot be ignored nor run over roughshod. Mr. Hellyer’s plan, seen in the very long-term needs of Canada, has great merit, and unification may be the wave of the future for middle power armed forces at least. But he has been less than honest with the problems of morale and personnel attitudes, from his commanders and down, which integration and unification processes have raised.
Finally, the younger officers and the rank- and-file of the Canadian Navy, who have no memories of World War II’s great battles, are still to be heard from, as well as the junior naval officer, heavily involved with the MSUs of integration and new theories of naval management ashore and afloat. Will they really abandon a computerized navy, even though until 1965, it still flew the British White Ensign and has origins and roots deep in the Royal Navy experience?
Or will these young men, like the progressive officers and planners of the transitional steam-and-sail fleets of 60 years ago, which gave way to the “all-big-gun” Dreadnought battleship, say goodbye to a familiar and historic past and remold the Royal Canadian Navy into a new likeness?