Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  Tip Number Eight—Have the Courage to Disagree

  When I mention courage, most people assume that since this advice comes from a soldier, I must be talking about physical courage under fire. Not so: I’m talking about having the courage to disagree and having the confidence to encourage people to disagree with you.

  Soon after taking over a large command late in my career, I asked my assistant to have all the senior officers gather later that morning so that I could address them about a serious issue. Needless to say, there was a lot of speculation in the hours before the gathering as people tried to identify what the problem was. What sort of trouble were they in?

  Standing in front of the assembled group, I cut to the chase: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve now been your boss for a week, and no one—and I mean no one—has disagreed with me yet. Sometimes I’ve been in the middle of a sentence when I see people in the back of the room rushing off to implement what they think I want done. Look, I’m not so smart that everything I say is gospel. There are a whole bunch of you sitting here who are experts in your areas of responsibility. It would be reassuring to occasionally hear you say, ‘You know, General, we tried that idea of yours three years ago and the results were not good.’ Having heard your advice, I might well decide to proceed anyway—but at least I would be doing so with some background or counter-opinion. I won’t get that with the current reluctance to disagree with me on anything. I want you all to feel free to disagree with me—without being disagreeable!”

  It’s the leader’s job to create an atmosphere in which honest disagreements are aired. Most of us have worked for a boss in situations where disagreements were reflected in a less than glowing personal evaluation report and were a potential career stopper. Fortunately, those bosses are in the minority. If you’re not one of them, it’s a good idea to be sure your subordinates know that early on in your leadership role.

  Tip Number Nine—Prepare and Train Your Subordinates

  The most stable kind of business to lead is the one in which the boss has been away for a week and someone asks, “Has anyone seen the boss lately?” Yet everything is ticking along quite nicely. That can happen when the boss has taken the time to ensure that subordinates are well prepared to take over and execute the boss’s responsibilities.

  This requirement is second nature in the military. In fact, they take it one step further and train an individual soldier to take over from his or her boss and boss’s boss. In other words, if the lieutenant platoon commander is killed or wounded and replaced by the platoon second-in-command, a warrant officer, and he or she is also killed or incapacitated, one of the sergeant section commanders is prepared to take over. To reinforce the point, this has in fact happened during Canada’s current Afghanistan mission.

  It takes time and effort to prepare subordinates in the business world. It doesn’t happen by osmosis, so merely ensuring that people observe their boss at work is insufficient. They need to experience actually doing their boss’s job, and not just while he or she is away on holidays. The real boss must be there to mentor and guide subordinates. It takes courage to implement such a program because your subordinate might get you in trouble if he or she screws things up, but it pays big dividends in the long term.

  Tip Number Ten—Be an Actor

  Good leadership demands consistency. If you have to go to the boss’s assistant to ask, “What mood is she in today? Should I pass this to her now, or do you think I should wait until next week?” or “How did he do on the golf course yesterday? Do you think he’s in the mood to see this controversial report?” you have an inconsistent leader. We all have bad days, but it’s essential that on those days we act just as we do on our good days. Inconsistency and unpredictability in a leader destabilize the organization and detract from the very open and collegial atmosphere that many of the above tips strive for.

  In the past decade I made presentations and conducted mini-seminars on leadership to a number of large oil companies at the tar sands projects near Fort McMurray, Alberta. Since each attendee was at the sharp end as far as leadership was concerned, I always finished each session by asking: “If my ten tips on leadership were expanded to eleven, what new one would you add?” I was amazed at the consistency of the responses. The overwhelming majority of respondents wrote “Approachability” on the index card they dropped into the box.

  I was pleased that six of my ten leadership tips—Be Yourself; Lead by Wandering About; Listen; Accept Responsibility; Have the Courage to Disagree; and Be an Actor—contribute to creating that most desirable leadership trait: approachability.

  23: The Enduring Canadian Peacekeeping Myth

  “Pearson’s brilliance is diminished when he is credited with merely inventing peacekeeping.”

  A FAN’S OPINION

  CANADA FOUGHT WELL above its weight in the Second World War, when there was only a modest direct threat to our nation. In the 1950s, following demobilization, the military’s top priorities were the defence of Canada, creating a modestly sized but significant special force to dispatch to the Korean War, some 11,000 kilometres away, and maintaining our land, sea and air commitments to NATO. Then our priorities changed.

  In 1956 the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal. The narrow ribbon of water that connected the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea was built, owned and operated by the Suez Canal Company, which belonged to England and France. The two countries, with the collaboration of Israel, decided to confront Egypt and re-establish their control of the canal to guarantee the uninterrupted passage of Middle Eastern oil to Western markets. On October 31, the Israelis invaded Egypt, reaching the canal by nightfall. France and England conducted an airborne drop in the area of Port Said. The world held its breath as the United States and the Soviet Union squared off over the escalating situation.

  We Canadians should remember that our geometry teachers lied to us in saying that “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” In fact, on our earth’s surface it’s a curve, and that curve between Russia and the United States goes over Canada, and that’s where the missiles would meet—over Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Halifax and points in between. It is therefore always in our national interests to temper any tensions between Russia and the United States.

  When I and my peers got into a schoolyard fight during my high school days in Chilliwack, the five-foot-nothing female teacher would intervene and stop it. We could have beaten her to a pulp, but we didn’t. She represented the authority of the school, and we knew there would be serious consequences if we defied that authority. Not to mention the fact that we were usually pleased to have an excuse to stop fighting.

  Lester Pearson, Canada’s foreign minister at the time of the Suez Crisis, applied that reasoning to the battlefield. Picking up on a British suggestion he’d overheard in an elevator at UN headquarters that some sort of neutral force should intervene in the unfolding crisis in the Sinai, Pearson grabbed the moment.

  Pearson’s brilliance is diminished when he is credited with merely inventing peacekeeping. There were plenty of ideas in the air regarding the use of an outside multinational military force to stop a conflict. Pearson’s unique contribution to resolving a conflict that could have triggered another world war was taking an idea and convincing a fractious UN Security Council to act on it. If you don’t think that was impressive, consider the Security Council’s rigor mortis since 2004 in responding to the genocide in Darfur and the fact that this despicable inactivity is occurring while the veto-holding members of the council are actually getting along with each other. Not so in 1956.

  Pearson was convinced that the presence of an impartial military force that was backed by the authority of the United Nations would convince the belligerents to agree to a ceasefire and break contact on the battlefield. This pause would allow the UN force to interpose itself between their front lines, thereby permitting diplomacy to begin in search of a lasting solution to the conflict.

 
Pearson declared that for a force to qualify as a peacekeeping force, three criteria would have to be met: it would have to be invited in by all sides in the conflict; it would have to be lightly armed, using deadly force for self-defence only; and it would have to be impartial.

  Not auguring well for the future—and sowing the seed for many UN mission failures to come—the Security Council decided to ignore one of Pearson’s three criteria and deploy the first UN peacekeeping force even though Israel refused to recognize its authority or permit it on Israeli soil. Eleven years later, when President Nasser ordered the UN force to leave his country at the beginning of the Six-Day War in 1967, the Security Council had no choice but to give in to his demand as his country was the only signatory to the UN agreement creating the force. Fifteen UN soldiers were killed and twenty-one were wounded during their withdrawal.

  Canada was a major contributor to that first UN force. It provided a large logistics base, communications and an armoured reconnaissance squadron that, with a similar unit from Yugoslavia, shared the responsibility of patrolling the border between Egypt and Israel. This was the beginning of the myth that Canada was the world’s pre-eminent peacekeeping nation and that peacekeeping was our traditional role in a world sorely in need of more “Canadas.” As we participated in virtually every one of the UN’s missions up to the end of the Cold War, the myth became even more ingrained in the Canadian psyche. This, despite the fact that from the beginning, peacekeeping was a very low foreign-policy priority, following our NATO deterrent obligations at sea, on land in Europe and in the skies over North America and Europe. Successive Canadian governments encouraged the myth because it made cutting defence budgets much less controversial. And cut the budgets they did, regularly and predictably. After all, if Canadians could go off and do peacekeeping armed with nothing but a blue beret and a pistol, why was the military clamouring for all those expensive tanks, ships and aircraft?

  All of the rules for peacekeeping went out the window at the end of the Cold War, yet the continuing use of the term in Canada and by the UN confused the public even more. In Yugoslavia, the 14,000 strong UN force sent to monitor a ceasefire in Croatia in 1992 arrived six months after the ceasefire had been signed, and the war continued. The force took up positions throughout the war zone and “observed” the war. It had no mandate to intervene and severely limited military capability when it ignored the direction from the UN in New York and tried to do so anyway. Many soldiers were killed and seriously wounded because peacekeeping policy was slavishly applied to a civil war scenario. Venturing back into Sarajevo in June 1992, a tiny UN force of less than a thousand ran a humanitarian airlift and was vilified by the local population, who understandably thought the UN was there to stop the war.

  In Rwanda, there were no national self-interests and the Security Council refused to authorize the deployment of the troops that were required to thwart the genocide. The mission in Somalia became caught up in the 1992 Bush Sr. vs. Clinton U.S. presidential campaign, and the candidate who said he would pull his troops out if he won did just that.

  By this time, the only common characteristic of post–Cold War peacekeeping missions was the UN apology that followed each mission—an apology for not doing the job properly and for allowing the slaughter of innocents. Nevertheless, in Canada, faith in peacekeeping and the belief that it couldn’t work without us remained. The Canadian Forces continued to be cut in size and funding in search of a “peace dividend.” This in spite of the fact that we had cashed in our dividend two decades earlier, during the slash-and-burn years of the outspoken anti-military prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. In our tiny army, the regular infantry shrank to the point where it employed a thousand fewer personnel than the Toronto Police Force. In the months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, plans were made to eliminate the three light infantry battalions of the Canadian infantry, leaving only six mechanized battalions.

  Clearly, the idea of Canada as the world’s pre-eminent peacekeeper had lost its currency.

  24: A Sea Change: Afghanistan

  “Every impulse of Joy, Love, Jealousy, Hope, Boredom, all the myriad of grand and petty streams of consciousness that forms each of us has just been smashed…”

  WILLIAM RAY, IN “FIGHTING BLIND”

  FOLLOWING ON THE heels of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Canada committed the 3rd Battalion of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (3 PPCLI) battle group, based in Edmonton, to Afghanistan. This move was in support of Article 5 of NATO’s charter, which states that an attack against one member is considered an attack against all. Ironically, 3 PPCLI was one of the light battalions headed for the chopping block as part of the army’s forced downsizing—a result of the Liberal government’s budget cuts—until Osama bin Laden appeared on the scene.

  Canada’s commitment followed rapidly on the heels of the UN Security Council’s authorization of armed intervention, which was based on the self-defence article of the council’s charter. Its deployment, however, was delayed by confusion in Canada about its role in Afghanistan. As a result, there was a lack of strategic lift.

  The United Kingdom’s Royal Marine Commandos, the first to arrive in Afghanistan, in November 2001, immediately came under fire. Apparently no one had informed the Afghans that NATO was coming to “help them.” The plan was that the U.K. troops would leave the theatre in six months and that Canada would take over as lead nation and command NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. At an Ottawa conference around Christmas 2001, Turkey volunteered to provide a battalion to the British-led force, but only if it took over command when the British departed. Canada was snookered, and the frustrated commander of the 3 PPCLI battle group, Lieutenant-Colonel Pat Stogran, and his staff returned to Edmonton.

  Meanwhile, at the U.S. Army Coalition Forces Land Component Command Headquarters in Kuwait, Canadian Major Jim McKillop was serving as a member of the multinational staff. When he advised the U.S. commanding general that the 3 PPCLI battle group was sitting on its hands in Edmonton, a formal request for forces was sent to Ottawa. On or about New Year’s Day, 2002, Colonel Stogran was advised that his battle group would be attached to the 3rd Brigade, “the Rakkasans” of the 101st Airborne Division, based in Kandahar. Seven days later, Colonel Stogran deployed to Kandahar with his key commanders and staff.

  That sequence of events should have been followed by the immediate phased deployment of the Battle Group from Western Canada to Afghanistan. But it wasn’t. Tragically, the Canadian Forces’ strategic capability to deploy troops by sea and air was yet another sacrificial lamb on the altar of reduced budgets for the Defence Department. Since withdrawing its NATO contingent from Germany in 1993, thereby losing its forward operating base, the Canadian Forces had been reduced to begging rides with U.S. carriers or paying exorbitant fees to rent ships and/or large Ukrainian Antonov aircraft to move its troops. In the post-9/11 atmosphere, the increased international military activity resulted in skyrocketing rental prices for ships and planes. At the same time availability plummeted, so it was February 2002—more than three months after the commitment and over a month after getting the order to deploy—before the Canadian Battle Group arrived in Kandahar. At the risk of repeating myself, I must stress that contrary to the information provided in the majority of media reports, the initial Canadian deployment to Kandahar in 2003 was not in a peacekeeping role.

  The 3 PPCLI battle group commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Pat Stogran formed one-third of a U.S. Airborne brigade operating out of Kandahar airfield and was tasked with seeking out and destroying elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.

  It was reasonable for the United States to assume that Canada would continue to participate with the U.S.-led mission until the job was done and the Taliban was defeated. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien thought otherwise and decided to abandon the mission after a mere six months, indicating that the Canadian army could not find the six hundred soldiers r
equired to replace 3 PPCLI. Many Canadians didn’t accept Chrétien’s comment about a lack of personnel and assumed that we withdrew because of the U.S. friendly-fire incident in Afghanistan that killed four members of 3 PPCLI and seriously wounded a number of others. In fact, the prime minister’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was made long before that tragic incident. 3 PPCLI returned home to Edmonton in August 2002, to a well-earned hero’s welcome.

  Shortly after Canada’s departure from Afghanistan, the war clouds gathered over Iraq as the United States turned up the heat on the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. The U.S. floated a series of justifications for a potential invasion. First came “links with terrorism,” but there was precious little evidence to support the allegation. Pictures of Iraqis attacking a gutted Boeing 707 outside of Baghdad could just as well have been video of soldiers practising rescuing hostages rather than terrorists taking them. Next came the “existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)”: obviously Saddam had WMDs, because we in the West have the receipts! We sold many of the components—precursors, chemicals and so on—to Saddam during his war with Iran. But the accusations didn’t stick with the U.S. public, so the Bush administration went on to justification number three, “regime change,” which flamed out with the public as well. In the interests of operating within the confines of international law, the Bush administration returned to the presence of WMDs because that, it could be argued, created “a clear and present danger” and justified intervention, with or without the support of a UN resolution.

  On February 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State General Colin Powell appeared before the UN Security Council. He pleaded the case for military action against Iraq to eliminate the threat of Saddam’s use of WMDs. Undoubtedly he was acutely aware that a resolution would never be forthcoming from the council authorizing such an attack. The UN weapons inspectors could have found a cache of high-yield nuclear weapons at the traffic circle in front of the Palestine Hotel in downtown Baghdad, and still there would not have been even a chance of a resolution authorizing military intervention seeing the light of day. The national self-interests of at least two, and possibly three, of the veto-holding members of the Permanent Five of the Security Council would have seen to that. Russia, France and also China, to a lesser extent, had massive oil interests and investments in Iraq, and it would only take one of them to veto any resolution authorizing the use of force—and one certainly would.