Michael Higgins: Former top military commanders say threats to Canada highest since Cold War - National Post

The proposal recommends that the government allocates $18.75 million over 24 months to support the program. Photo by LUKE HENDRY/POSTMEDIAArticle contentListening to three former top commanders in the Canadian military at a parliamentary national defence committee hearing can be a scary business.

Stuart Beare, a retired lieutenant general who was in charge of all deployed Canadian Forces, spoke of real threats to Canada and the world being at the highest since the Cold War and pointed the finger at Vladimir Putin, his aiders and abettors and China, in front of the committee discussing military modernization on Monday.

“The need to deter major adversarial military powers is back,” he told the committee, which is looking at how to modernize the military. “And if deterrence fails, so too is the need to be able to prevail in what doctrine calls major combat operations or what we would typically simply call war.”

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Michel Maisonneuve, another retired lieutenant general who was assistant deputy chief of the defence staff of Canada, said the nation’s armed forces needed more investment to meet the “challenges and the potential violence our adversaries will throw at us.”

Mike Rouleau, a lieutenant general who retired as vice chief of the defence staff, put it directly, “There is no surrogate for land troops holding ground on your worst day.”

There are a lot of questions about modernizing the military: does it have enough people; are they the right recruits; does it have the right weapons and the necessary technology; how can it overcome the rigid bureaucracy (both in the military and the political sphere) and is the federal government fully behind those in uniform?

Amidst all this talk of war and how to cure the ails of the military, Maisonneuve floated the idea of a national service program encouraging young men and women to see the value of “the honour of service.”

“It’s not national military service, it’s national service,” Maisonneuve said later in an interview with the National Post.