Juno News - Former Canadian Army Colonel lays out a path to rebuilding the CAF

00:00:00.000 Joining us now on The Faulkner Show is retired Lieutenant Colonel David Redman, a distinguished

00:00:08.240 veteran and the former Alberta emergency management leader who oversaw critical disaster responses

00:00:14.640 and international military operations. In the C2C Journal, David Redman has recently published

00:00:22.440 an article titled, Unfit for Duty, It is Time to Rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces.

00:00:28.800 So thank you so much for joining us and let's just get right into it, right into this. How do we go

00:00:34.240 about rebuilding the military? What's it going to take? All right, that's why I wrote the article and

00:00:40.300 C2C graciously published it. In the article, what I did in the first half is I defined the problem

00:00:47.660 and in the military, you're told never to come with a problem unless you have a solution.

00:00:52.160 So the first half, I defined how we got there and its terrible results. In the second half,

00:00:59.520 I defined very clearly what is the statement of requirement, all of the pieces that are needed to

00:01:06.320 rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces, and then a very detailed process to lay out how we can restore

00:01:14.160 the Canadian Armed Forces starting within the first year, but overall in three years.

00:01:19.120 So we know that right now we are well short of that two percent of GDP spending on our national

00:01:26.320 defense, that NATO requirement. The argument that we've heard from the current defense minister,

00:01:32.240 Bill Blair, is that it's one thing to find the money, but it's an entirely different thing to

00:01:38.800 figure out where to put that money. Where exactly should the money go? Where should we spend that money

00:01:46.560 first when it becomes available to spend on national defense?

00:01:50.880 So that's why I take the time in the article to define the five pieces, the statement of requirement.

00:01:56.960 And number one is purpose. The government of Canada and the people of Canada need to define what

00:02:03.520 they want for our country. So I want to take you back. I published an article last March in Frontier

00:02:08.640 Center for Public Policy on the status of our country, Canada. Canada and all democracies are

00:02:16.240 built on six national interests. Now, when I was a young officer cadet in the Royal Military College

00:02:23.360 of Canada back in the very early 1970s, we were taught the national interests of our country and were

00:02:28.960 required to pass examinations on them because as an officer in the army, we were going to be deployed all

00:02:34.400 over the world and we would need to describe to people who Canada was. So in that first article back in March,

00:02:41.840 I laid out those six national interests, unity, national security, good governance, rights and freedoms,

00:02:49.760 economic prosperity and growth, and personal well-being and growth. And each of those must be defined.

00:02:57.120 And in that one on national security, the Canadian Armed Forces is but one element of national security.

00:03:03.760 Canada as a nation needs to define where it wants to be in the world. And I think most Canadians want a

00:03:10.160 vision of Canada that existed before 2015. One where Canada was strong and independent internally with a

00:03:19.200 prosperous economy, but that had a standing in the world where our voice was at least relevant. And in

00:03:26.480 that first article, I said loss of relevance. And so the first step in rebuilding the Canadian Armed

00:03:33.040 Forces is to find its purpose. Is it solely to be a backup to police forces in our country? Or is it to

00:03:41.360 actually do what an Armed Forces is for, which is to fight? So the first statement is we must define our

00:03:48.160 purpose. And when I was an officer in the army, our purpose was number one, national sovereignty. Number two,

00:03:56.080 defense of NORAD, the North American continent. Number three, support of our allies, where it was in

00:04:03.520 Canada's national interest, NATO being one of them, but things like ABCA, the American British

00:04:09.120 Canadian Australian partnership that we're now excluded from. Those were the types of things that

00:04:14.720 were the number one, two, and three roles of the Canadian Armed Forces. But at the base of it all

00:04:20.640 was that we needed an army, navy, and an air force that could fight.

00:04:25.600 All right. So define the purpose. You're asking me where to spend the money. Once you define the purpose,

00:04:32.480 the money becomes much more clear because the number one item next, as you'll see in my paper,

00:04:38.400 is personnel. And people are the most important element in an Armed Forces. The ability to fight

00:04:46.240 depends on having people trained and constantly exercised to be ready to fight.

00:04:53.200 And anything that takes away from that number one mission is a waste of taxpayers' money. There's

00:04:58.880 lots of people that can come in fires and floods to help people in all our provinces and territories in

00:05:03.680 Canada that don't carry rifles, that don't fly jets, and that don't sail ships. We need an Armed Forces to

00:05:11.280 fight. So once you've defined the people and you have a fighting force that's combat capable, the third

00:05:19.440 step then is their equipment and supplies. And the equipment and supplies goes with the purpose.

00:05:24.960 So if it's Arctic sovereignty, defense of North America, and support of our allies in NATO,

00:05:30.000 we need to be combat equipped to match those mission statements. That's why in the paper I lay out

00:05:38.000 in the last part the exact step-by-step process to assign a task force to define each of those primary

00:05:45.920 elements and then to walk that process in three months to a plan, which then is implemented over

00:05:53.520 the next three years. You can't just pull things out of the sky like we saw our previous Prime Minister

00:06:01.600 do when he announced 12 diesel submarines. He picked 12 simply to get a magic number that equaled 2%

00:06:09.200 with absolutely no definition of what their purpose would be, how they would deploy, whether they were

00:06:15.760 good under Arctic ice. He simply picked a number to try and get all the tigers that were at the doors

00:06:22.240 beating him up for the 2% away from his doors. There was absolutely no concept.

00:06:30.480 I think it's pretty obvious to everyone, unless you happen to be perhaps a member of the

00:06:35.920 Justin Trudeau cabinet, that a functioning country requires a functioning military,

00:06:40.480 a military that is capable to do its job. One thing we've heard from the federal government

00:06:45.360 is that they believe climate change spending is part of national defense spending. When they're

00:06:51.920 asked about why they don't spend much on national defense, they say, well, look at how much we're

00:06:55.760 spending on climate change, which we believe to be a national security issue. Where does that ideology

00:07:02.720 come from? And is it your belief that the federal government genuinely doesn't care about funding

00:07:10.000 the military? All right, so number one, the first part of your question was every country that's

00:07:15.920 credible has an army. The very first line in my paper is a quote from ancient Greece,

00:07:22.560 every country has an army, theirs or somebody else's. So if you don't have an army, you don't have

00:07:30.320 national security, you don't have a country anymore. We've heard those exact words coming out of

00:07:35.840 President-elect Trump's mouth in the last two days. So number one, you have to have a standing army,

00:07:42.320 navy and air force that is defined to match the purpose of your country. I put it to you that back

00:07:48.960 in 1965 and take you back for a little bit of history here. 1965, we had an armed forces of 105,000

00:07:59.440 army, navy and air force combined. We now hear people like Bill Blair talk about the fact that he'd

00:08:05.680 really like one day maybe to be able to get to 71,000 even though we're currently sitting at under 35,000

00:08:13.040 operational, capably deployable troops. This isn't the first time we've been here. So I want to go back

00:08:19.840 to the point about fighting. I was asked to testify in front of the National Standing Committee on

00:08:24.400 Defense in October of 2022 because at that time this whole climate change discussion really started

00:08:33.440 in earnest. It started long before but in earnest directed straight at the CAF it was then and I was asked

00:08:40.400 to testify because I wear two hats in my past life. I was an officer in the army deployed around the

00:08:46.560 world, 19 houses and 27 years all over the globe and in my second career I ran emergency management

00:08:53.200 in Alberta but first of all immediately following September 11th on September the 12th I was asked by

00:08:59.360 the Premier of Alberta to lead the task force on security which wrote the counter-terrorism plan

00:09:04.960 for Alberta wherein we proved to the United States that Alberta took security seriously. You might

00:09:11.760 remember a guy named Paul Cellucci. He was the ambassador to Canada at the time and I personally

00:09:17.200 briefed him one-on-one for two hours and he started the briefing with security trumps trade. Remember

00:09:24.240 those words? Heard them recently? I proved to him in two hours that we took security seriously at that time

00:09:32.720 in the province of Alberta. I briefed congressmen in their offices in the U.S. Capitol. I briefed

00:09:38.800 senators in their offices in the U.S. Capitol and I briefed the first three directors in the new

00:09:44.560 Department of Homeland Security and they walked away content that our trade was secure. So the armed

00:09:51.760 forces of Canada is but one piece of that. What we've seen is an erosion of all of national security,

00:09:58.400 our intelligence services and trust in them, our border services and trust in them, our coast guard

00:10:04.720 and trust in them, our national police forces, our provincial police forces and trust in them. We have

00:10:11.200 a huge job not just the Canadian Armed Forces but we have to re-establish that we are a credible trading

00:10:17.520 partner not just for our largest partner to the south but all of our partners in the free world. And so

00:10:24.400 first we need to define the purpose and then we need to be serious and do it. And this whole two percent,

00:10:31.680 NATO's now talking three percent. So when I started off with we were 105,000, Trudeau senior, Pierre

00:10:38.240 Trudeau reduced the Armed Forces of Canada to 70,000 and thought he was going to remove all our forces

00:10:44.080 from NATO until NATO told him no troops, no trade. That was in 1972 when I joined the army. We're now in

00:10:52.080 exactly the same boat. If we don't step up our armed forces, the first two of the national interests of

00:10:59.600 our country are unity, national security. Without the first two, you can forget the other four.

00:11:06.000 And we have destroyed our unity in the past nine years and we've watched the government intentionally

00:11:11.760 try and fragment the Canadian people. And then number two, national security. We've watched them 0.98

00:11:17.680 destroy every element of national. We still have a list of known MPs who have done foreign interference

00:11:26.640 in our government and we don't know their names. So the Canadian Armed Forces is the canary in the

00:11:32.160 coal mine. They are dead, but they are showing that our whole national security is in the same boat.

00:11:39.520 And when a minister of national defense thinks maybe one day he might get to 71,000 soldiers back in the

00:11:46.240 armed forces. I put it to you that if we had 105 in uniform members in the CAF in 1965 with a population

00:11:55.200 of Canada of 20 million, with a population of 40 million, we should at least have 200,000 in uniform

00:12:04.880 to meet our obligations to our alliances, but far more importantly, to meet the national security

00:12:12.400 sovereignty tasks of our own country, our three coastlines and our landmass.

00:12:18.000 So let's get into that because we are a long way off of that target and we are well behind

00:12:24.560 in developing our national defense. But what are those threats right now, domestic threats that are

00:12:30.320 facing this country that require the national attention, whether it be through the military or

00:12:35.840 through other avenues? What are those threats? All right. That's the first step in any estimate

00:12:41.360 of the situation or in the operational planning process is you do the threat analysis. The largest

00:12:47.360 threat to the free world and Canada in particular is China. We need to stop thinking of China as a 0.94

00:12:54.800 trading partner. They ceased being that about 10 years ago, maybe 15. The point I make with China is 0.96

00:13:02.880 the Silk Road Initiative is how China has infiltrated over 140 countries of the world and taken over the 1.00

00:13:09.280 United Nations and now funds directly into Canada foreign interference in our election, in our economy,

00:13:17.280 in every daily walk of our life. The fact that we've got a foreign interference inquiry that has been

00:13:23.600 silenced is unacceptable and is part of this government's decisions. They've decided to

00:13:32.320 intentionally do this. Again, we have members of parliament who are known by our intelligence

00:13:39.040 agencies to have been involved in foreign interference in our country. So China is our number one threat 0.99

00:13:44.560 and through them they dominate the United Nations. Number two in my book to Canada is Iran and the IRGC

00:13:53.520 who is funding activists all over our country which is directly targeting our citizens and which is 0.98

00:13:59.680 marching in the streets calling death to all Jews, death to all Christians and death to Canada. If that's 0.99

00:14:06.640 not a blatant national security threat brought about by the world knowing Canada is basically an open and

00:14:16.000 porous border system and an immigration system which has allowed them to pour into our countries. So number 1.00

00:14:23.200 one China, number two Iran and then I get to Russia and Russia is way down the list. It's an order of

00:14:30.560 magnitude lower in my opinion. Russia has its own problems and what's happening in Europe shows that

00:14:36.800 Russia has already been contained to a large degree and can be managed. If we don't deal with China and Iran 1.00

00:14:45.120 as our number one and number two threats and the daily activities they're doing in our country then our national

00:14:51.200 national sovereignty is a joke. The question that I ask veterans and experts on the military who have

00:15:00.480 been in uniform is what you think it will take to try to encourage more Canadians to join the military to

00:15:09.600 serve the country because we know there's an attrition crisis. There's not only a failure at being able to

00:15:15.040 recruit new members but the good ones are leaving, the officers are leaving, the NCOs are leaving.

00:15:21.440 What do you think it will take to get Canadians to want to sign up and wear the uniform and defend the

00:15:27.600 country? Okay the paper defines that very clearly but let me do it in two parts. First of all let me give

00:15:35.920 you the history again. I joined the army in 1972. Think about the world in 1972. The Vietnam War was still

00:15:43.440 raging and was winding down. The United States was trying to find a way to get out of there without

00:15:47.760 losing too much face. In Canada we had draft dodgers living all through our country that had escaped the 1.00

00:15:53.840 Vietnam War and I chose to join the army. Do you think that was a popular thing to do in 1972 in Canada?

00:16:01.520 It wasn't. My first platoon had 85 all ranks in it. I had five warrant officers, one sergeant, one master

00:16:10.320 corporal and one corporal and the remainder just under 80 were all privates because Pierre Trudeau had

00:16:17.280 stopped all recruiting into the Canadian forces and yet young soldiers men and women still joined.

00:16:24.560 They joined for a number of reasons as I define in the paper but number one they joined to be part of

00:16:31.840 a capable fighting force. When you join an armed forces, army, navy or air force, you know you are

00:16:39.920 joining with unlimited liability to fight for your country. When you join and you find out that that's

00:16:46.720 a joke, that you don't have equipment, that you're not training for that, that DEI is more important

00:16:53.200 than combat capability, you leave. We have a hollowed out armed forces. We have some senior veterans who

00:17:00.880 have stayed on hoping that there will be a new government and they can be part of the training

00:17:06.320 cadre to rebuild. So how do you keep people in an armed forces? You let them do what they join for.

00:17:14.000 You give them the tools and equipment to do it. I left the army in absolute rage in 1999. I was promoted

00:17:23.360 to full colonel and I was posted to my dream job. I have the proof of all of this. I wrote a four-page

00:17:30.560 letter to the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Prime Minister of Canada, who is Jean-Claire Chen,

00:17:35.040 explaining why I was leaving, that they had betrayed the young men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces

00:17:41.680 who had joined to defend their country. We are in exactly the same position again. So I lived through

00:17:47.680 the rebuilding from Pierre Trudeau. I left with no job and no future from a job that I had, the only job

00:17:54.800 I'd ever wanted was to be an army officer. I left because I could no longer lie to the young men and

00:18:00.960 women who were joining. We are back in that same situation again after nine years of Justin Trudeau.

00:18:08.960 We can rebuild again. And in the paper, as I say, I define the step-by-step process. But first, we need

00:18:16.080 a government who will champion the Armed Forces of Canada and who will assign a leader of a task force

00:18:22.640 whose sole focus for the next three years is the rebuilding of the Armed Forces. But I put it to

00:18:30.320 you, there needs to be an equal champion for all of national security.

00:18:34.400 I couldn't agree more with you. And I'm sure the audience agrees with you as well, Colonel.

00:18:40.480 The article in the C2C Journal is unfit for duty. It is time to rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces. A link

00:18:47.760 to that you can find in the description of this video. That is all the time we have for today.

00:18:52.160 Colonel Redmond, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Juno News - January 17, 2025

Former Canadian Army Colonel lays out a path to rebuilding the CAF

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