Sheep in Sheep's Clothing

March, 1995

Battle and disease during the Crimean War took a tremendous toll of British Infantry, and by 1855 recruiting parties were sent to drum up replacements. Some went up into the Highlands in search of the teeming numbers of hardy Scots who had filled so many battalions in the Napoleonic Wars forty years earlier. This time, however, the glens were empty. In the interval between Balaclava and Waterloo, Scottish landowners had found that mutton and wool were more profitable than tenant farmers and the Highland Clearances had sent the clansmen on their own Diaspora. Unaware of these developments, one mystified recruiter asked and elderly Scot where all the young men had gone. He was told "You could hae had men, but you wanted sheep, let sheep fight for you."

Sheep are malleable and easily controlled. The uncut rams aside, they are gentle, stupid and fond of conformity. Sheep do not fight well.

Men, if they are to fight well, need an entirely different set of characteristics. The military ethos stresses reciprocal trust and loyalty between peers and subordinates and mutual respect among peers. These ties must be backed by discipline. Men are trained to the use of violence as a tool, but violent instincts must also become controlled -- often through sublimation. The ethos recognizes that the difference between a soldier and a murder is the assumption of risk. The soldier, then, must be ready to hazard his own life. Modern combat also demands men who are self reliant and confident, not regimented automatons.

Canada has produced such soldiers, in vast numbers. The Canadian Corps in World War one was one of the most feared formations of that conflict. In the Second World War, the Germans used to put their elite SS, Panzers and Fallshirmjager troops opposite the Canadians -- who were regarded as being as tough, stubborn, aggressive and innovative as Hitler's best troops were. The fighting qualities of Canadians have also been remarked on in the Boer War, Korea, and in the fighting that attended some Peacekeeping missions in the 1960s and '70s.

The military structures that foster and sustain these complex attitudes and behaviors among soldiers have evolved over centuries and were certainly present in Canada. While they must necessarily be a part of the larger society they defend, military units must be able to withstand the strains of pushing controlled violence to the extremes of human tolerance. Military organizations can only be adequately tested by warfare, and if they fail, the consequences can be severe.

The value of military sub-cultures should be self-evident to those who participate in it. Alas, this is not always so. Norman Dixon's brilliant study On the Psychology of Military Incompetence shows how a long peacetime allows incompetent leadership to rise to positions of responsibility. Dixon could be writing of any bureaucracy. Indeed, virtually all hierarchical organizations that reward conformity over capability allow the slow rise of petty authoritarians into positions of control. War can dramatically show how dangerous such leaders are. Civil service and corporate bureaucracies are rarely tested to this extent (which is a great pity).

This is not to say that men of genius and innovation cannot emerge in a long peacetime. Many do, but once the dry rot sets into a service branch, they had best keep their abilities carefully concealed. Men of outstanding ability can advance (and the Canadian military is not short of these) but one hint of trouble can permanently handicap their careers.

This trend has been manifested in the Canadian Forces for some time. However, it is compounded by several factors including the relatively small size of the Canadian military. Since 1951, perhaps only 7% of Canadian adult males have served in the Armed Forces or in a police force. In that year, 14 per 1,000 were in the military or the police, a figure that now amounts to 6 per 1,000. Men who have been exposed to the military ethos are even more rare in politics, the media and among the "chattering classes" who have continually experiments upon Canadian society. The very last of the great body of men who served in the Second World War reached retirement age in 1990-91.

The military ethos is not understood in Parliament or by the media. Our intelligentsia refuses to recognize its existence. This also seems to be increasingly true among senior officers. The ethos has been warped and perverted at times (not least in the Airborne Regiment in 1992-93), but this is indicative of failing leadership even at junior levels. The military should be turning out men accustomed to hardihood, ready to inflict and receive harm, accustomed to awarding trust and respect while being trusted and respected in turn. This is not happening now.

Instead, the military is now expected to be more conformist -- in line with the notional ideals widely held among the chattering classes, if not among the greater mass of Canadians from whom are service members are drawn. Recruitment and training standards have been dropped to bring the Armed Forces in line with Human Rights legislation -- lest the military be accused of ageism and sexism by admitting that the average middle-aged male or young woman is not as effective as a young man in a combat arms role. Junior officers are saddled with environmental reports when completing an exercise, and all ranks are subjected to "sensitivity training" (a lousy substitute for simple common decency) and are otherwise expected to be politically correct.

In other cases, even the accusation of sexual harassment (such as ogling female soldiers who are wearing spandex outfits on PT in the middle of the Canadian compound in Bosnia) can bring much grief -- this in a time when more traditional forms of misconduct are endemic, unrecognized and unpunished. Indeed, the modern practice of being more concerned about the appearance than substance is very much in evidence in our contemporary military. Not only have senior officers been dodging responsibility for the conduct of their subordinates, but many general officers have been disavowing responsibility for reveling in the perks of higher office. Fortunately, this sort of behavior is by no means universal, but it is common and does go un-reversed.

There is another major cause underlying the Military malaise which must be addressed. Armed forces reflect the society they are drawn from in many ways. If fundamental flaws in the Canadian Forces' standards of leadership and behavior are becoming manifest, what is the ultimate cause?

If officers shun personal responsibility for the actions of those under their command, is this also not frequently seen in so many other institutions? Indeed, for thirty years, Canadians have stressed individual rights, entitlements and privileges while disavowing the concepts of duty, obligation and personal responsibility. The evidence is everywhere from our Parliament to our prison.

For years, perception has been more important than reality and substance yields first place to appearance. These tenets have dominated public discourse for so long, is it any wonder that many officers who rise to general and flag rank abide by them?

The shirking of individual responsibility and the importance of appearance are leading traits among the incompetent as outlined by Dixon.

Worse still, too much of the military's current leadership is increasingly inclined towards micromanaging every aspect of military life, making the domination of the Armed Forces by the incompetent that much closer. More than ever, Canadian soldiers are expected to be in conformity with this country's increasingly twisted values. Already under-equipped and under-trained, the hapless Canadian soldier will sometime soon probably be confronted by real violence... and our government and senior military leaders might expect them to fight and die like sheep. But then, a country led and administered by sheep should expect no less.