A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats, and the Politics of War

A reivew of the autobiography of General Rick Hillier.

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

2009

ISBN978-1-55468-491-5

509 Pages

Hardcover

$31.49

Vincent J. Curtis


5 November 2009

            This account of the life of recently retired General Rick Hillier is the most significant biography of a Canadian officer yet published.  As a biography, A Soldier First is more important even than Jack Granatstein’s The Generals because Hillier’s book concerns the present, and bears on the future of the Canadian Forces and Canada’s future role in Afghanistan.  The biography is intended to be the first volume of a two volume set, the sequel being a book on leadership.  Hillier clearly intends this volume to be an element of his “recruit the nation” campaign.  Hillier himself was the most important leader in the office of CDS since J.A. Dextraze.

            Brisk and readable, the biography covers the mandatory period of early Hillier’s early life in Campbellton, Newfoundland, briefly and efficiently.  It establishes that Hillier, from an early age, wanted to be a soldier, and moves on.  It makes no attempt at showing that from his early childhood he was destined for greatness; the reader is advanced into the important part of the book, his career.  One can hear Hillier’s voice in the words.  In these respects A Soldier First follows the model of Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs. 

            Like anyone who rose from Officer Cadet to Chief of Defense Staff, Hillier lived a charmed life.  His career hit no snags and a few greased skids.  He didn’t suffer the fate of Lewis MacKenzie, or was a victim of the numbers game.  Part of it is due to his intelligence, part to his character, and part to luck.  Much also must go to his personality, which is a different thing from character.

His intelligence enabled him to be an effective staff officer throughout his career, so much so that senior commanders wanted him to work for them.  His character made him an above average commander in Canada, Germany, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and in the United States.  He would not have been asked to go to the United States as an exchange officer on two occasions but for the recognition by his superiors that he could do the job and be an effective diplomat for the CF at the same time.  His big and amiable personality Canadians came to know after he became CDS.  That personality enabled him to rise to the top because, with few exceptions, he did not raise fear and jealousy in the breasts of his superiors.  I suspect that personality, as well as aptitude, is what enabled Hillier to survive Phase 4, at the very beginning of his career.

            He was lucky by being in the right place at the right time: to be available to go to Fort Knox on exchange, and later in his career to Fort Hood to be Deputy Commander of III Corps.  He was in command of a brigade in Petawawa during the time of the Winnipeg flood and the ice storm in eastern Ontario and Quebec, and his brigade played a visible role in helping those places recover from natural disaster.  Finally, he was untouched by the Somalia scandal.  Another highly capable officer, not so lucky, was in the middle of Somalia: Serge Labbe, and at the end of the book Hillier explains why he enabled Labbe to salvage some dignity at the end of both their careers.

Hillier’s career began in 1976: in the middle period of the long decline of the CF, which reached a nadir in the 1990’s with the Somalia scandal and did not reverse until Bill Graham became the Minister of National Defense.  Hillier conveys some of the lessons in leadership he learned on the way up, many of the negative variety.  The disinterest of the political leadership and the public generally in the Canadian Forces, combined with financial neglect led, to bad leadership within the military itself.  DND and the CF became (and still is) ludicrously risk-averse and process, as opposed to results, oriented.  The specific failures of leadership documented in the books of that period written by Scott Taylor, James R. Davis, and others; and that appeared in the pages of EdC are validated and explained, indirectly, by Hillier.  As the ship he was aboard was sinking and he was rising to the top, Hillier learned what not to do and what should and can be done.  His luck enabled him to develop his leadership skills in situations that were testing, but not overwhelming.

I hoped Hillier would reveal how it came to be that Canada became involved in its current mission in Kandahar, Afghanistan.  Canadians have never been told why our military forces are there, and what we hope to accomplish.  Given the thirty years’ history of risk-aversion in military matters and the then parlous state of the CF, the change to a lead combat role in Kandahar from an occupant of Camp Julian near Kabul was striking.  Who made the decision, and why?  Hillier does not say, but reading between the lines it is possible to conjecture how it came about.

The man who redirected the trajectory of the CF upward is Minister of National Defense Bill Graham.  Graham’s boss, Prime Minister Paul Martin, knew nothing about military matters but did want to distinguish himself from his predecessor and political rival, Jean Chretien.  NATO was pressuring Canada to send combat forces to Kandahar, and Graham understood perhaps in a way that Martin did not how combat (and combat losses) can reinvigorate the neglected military of a financially healthy country.  Graham convinced Martin to accede to NATO and redeploy the CF to Kandahar, and Martin agreed because placing Canada in a combat role was completely different from the risk-aversion policy of the last thirty years, and upgrading the CF generally seemed like a distinguishing and defensible thing to do.

Graham needed a new CDS who had a personality the complete opposite of the obsequiousness and risk-aversion that characterized the men in the job previously.  In Hillier, Graham found a man who would provide the vigor on the military side that would help drive forward the large new spending and other changes the CF would require to support the Kandahar mission and improve the condition of the CF generally.  In his preliminary interview with Graham, Hillier said that he planned to retire and would not accept the job of CDS unless lots of new money was made available.  Graham liked what he heard, and recommended him to Martin.  Martin liked it too, and Graham and Martin could smile when Hillier made it appear that the new CDS was pressuring them to spend more money on defense.     

The Liberal cabinet gagged on the new spending proposals just as the Martin government fell, and when the Conservatives under Stephen Harper took power they had all these beautiful spending plans ready for action, and a mission in Kandahar that nobody but Bill Graham and Deputy MND Ward Elcock fully appreciated.

When the new MND Gordon O’Connor, himself a retired General, just went out and bought four new C-17 Globemaster aircraft before the surprised bureaucracy could mount a defense, the bureaucrats really dug in; and Hillier discusses the obstruction that large new acquisitions for defense faced, and still faces in Ottawa out of sheer jealousy.  Hillier admits that O’Connor acquired an important new capability for the CF that he hadn’t allowed himself to dream about.  Maintaining this and other capabilities are budgeting problems of the future, Hillier warns.

The legacy Hillier leaves the CF and Canada is his “recruit the nation” campaign.  Canadians responded to the casualties of the Kandahar mission in a way he did not expect.  To Canadians, the political machinations that led us there were nothing, while the sacrifices our soldiers make in the cause of Canada became everything.  Our soldiers fight in Afghanistan for the cause of Canada: everything else is consequential on that.  The public sensed this and began to embrace the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the CF as their own, as Americans do of their armed forces.  Hillier sought to cultivate these feelings, in ways he details, as a means of preventing the CF from backsliding into the dark days of neglect, a period which encompassed practically the whole of his career.  Hillier wishes to see the CF stand in the same relation to the Canadian public as the US military stands with Americans: not as a thing apart, but as their armed forces.

            Hillier names a lot of people.  Grant did also, both to praise before history and to disgrace.  With few exceptions, Hillier only praises.  That is his leadership style, and his personality.  He was also never tested as Grant was.

            A Soldier First is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in Canada’s current defense matters and in the likely future of our defense policy and mission in Afghanistan.

                                                            -XXX-

A version of this was published in Esprit de Corps magazine.