A National Force: The Evolution of Canada’s Army, 1950–2000 by Peter Kasurak (review)

Students of post-Second World War Canadian military history are wellacquainted with the accepted account: a highly professional Navy, Army, and Air Force emerged from the crucible of global violence as world-class fighting organizations, only to be gradually (and sometimes not so slowly) dismembered in the decades that followed. In retrospect, the final coup de grace resulted from the 1964 White Paper on Defence, which, by 1968, integrated the separate services into the “unified” Canadian Armed Forces. The succeeding years were characterized by a struggle, in the face of national indifference and political neglect, to prevent both the loss of identity and the ability to function within the profession of arms. The situation was exacerbated by the 1989 defence cutbacks. These cuts resulted in what former Chief of the Defence Staff General Rick Hillier would later describe as a “decade of darkness,” which, when combined with what had gone on before, contributed greatly to a number of military catastrophes in the 1990s. The most visible result of these failures was the disbandment of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. Consequently, by the end of the decade, public outcry and government action had prompted a reinvigoration of the Canadian services in order to address years of neglect and mismanagement.

In A National Force, Peter Kasurak provides an alternative and thought-provoking interpretation. Kasurak challenges the mainstream narrative and argues that the Canadian Army produced by the Second World War was a disorganized entity beholden to British military culture and without a clear national identity or vision. Out of this arose a force that lacked introspection and an integrated professional philosophy that would allow it to interact with its political leadership and which, coincidentally, created the conditions for its own failure. According to Kasurak, the manifestation of these core issues can be discerned in a number of themes.

First, orientation to a British system created a Canadian Army officer corps that was selected for character rather than education and proficiency. Much is made of the deleterious impact of official and unofficial aspects of the regimental system within the Regular Army and the Militia, an argument that could be tempered. Second, the postwar inability of the Canadian Army to contribute to the construction of national security policy is examined. In this area, Kasurak brings great insight to an issue studied only by a few. Third, Kasurak’s examination of the inability of the Canadian Army to produce appropriate doctrine and force structure is quite interesting, and it ties together the relationships between a number of organizations through decades of evolution. One aspect of this theme that could have been further developed concerns the role of the Canadian Army Staff College (later the Canadian Land Force Command and Staff College) as a test bed for concepts and an intellectual centre of the Canadian Army. Many of Canada’s most prominent leaders passed through this institution as commandants or instructors; the innovative and influential Major-General Roger Rowley was one of the former. Fourth, the relationship between the full-time Army and the Militia is explored in a fulsome manner and with much rich detail. Finally, there is discussion of the civil-military relationship; in intellectual terms, Kasurak is critical of Huntingtonian thinking, and leans instead in the direction of the more recent ideas of Peter Feaver. These latter concepts seem to provide a prism through which to interpret the Canadian situation, particularly in the latter years of the Cold War and beyond. Absent is an explicit discussion of the gradually increasing United States military influence over the 1980s and 1990s, although it is palpable within the evidence presented.

Kasurak notes that A National Force deviates from the “standard narrative” (8), and that it might be criticized on a number of fronts. However, he does achieve his objective of setting forth a perspective on the Canadian Army in the latter half of the twentieth century by...