Best Defence Conference 2021 Report

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Nov 21

The city of Las Vegas, Nevada, is an extremely popular destination for conventions.  The city offers many and unique diversions from the drudgery of actually sitting through hour after hour of power point presentation in which the speaker reads off the slides as a substitute for prepared remarks.  If a conventioneer needs a stiff drink for fortification at ten in the morning, well, it’s five o’clock somewhere.  And what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

With the disastrous loss of The Beef Baron, London cannot even pretend to be Sin City, Ontario.  London was the ostensible location of the 2021 edition of the Best Defence Conference, of which Esprit de Corps is a sponsor.  I say ostensible because the conference was held virtually, which meant everyone had to pretend to be in London and meet the timings of London, even those of us who live in the Las Vegas time zone.

At least a live conference has the benefit of other living beings nearby with whom one can commiserate, and perhaps flirt with; but a virtual conference has the disadvantages of sitting through hours of drudgery but without diversion or relief.  The organizers promise that next year will be live.  And perhaps London will regain a semblance of night life.

Conferences like Best Defense do serve a purpose besides getting people out of the office for a couple of days.  The conference obliges DND/CAF to make presentations to an audience of civilian taxpayers who understand most of what is being said.  A DND/CAF supplier has to know what’s going on, what the thinking is, and what the future may hold in order to adapt and prepare to meet the needs of DND/CAF, or the lack of need, as the case may be.  It is a friendly confrontation to be sure.  And defence folks get to see each other and evaluate who’s who in the zoo.

The conference covered two full days.  The first opened with the Directors of Requirements of the three services each giving presentations on the various programs for which they were responsible.  I can attest that no program in DND contains the letters ‘Z’ or ‘X’ in its acronym.  Don’t ask me how I know.  The CAF is a death-dealing organization, and by the time you reach senior officer rank you develop some pretty exquisite ways of inflicting it.  Power point, for example.  Busy slides full of artwork portending meaning but really having none, accompanied by words in small type, or columns of acronyms all passing in succession, accompanied by a dull intonation of a voice reading bits of them here and there.  Death is almost painless, and welcome.

One thing did shock me, and that was the opening slide of the presentation of the Director of Naval Requirements.  It looks like a DND recruiting poster, and features a saucy-looking A/SLt posing like she had just jumped out of a cake and with ‘come-hither- written all over her.  Behind her were two muscular and handsome sailors with grins on their faces.  If we’re going to take this sexual misconduct business seriously, that poster has to go.  Women have to be depicted with all their blouse buttons done up and taciturn looks on their faces.  You can’t propose libertinage, and then when it happens, punish it like a Puritan.

The most dynamic of the three service presenters went by the handle “Super Dave,” which, I’m sure, was bestowed in admiration of his ability to drop lots of heavy ordinance from a great height in either official language.  He merely read the initials of the various programs he was talking about and couldn’t be bothered to actually pronounce the full name of the program – if it actually had one - perhaps for fear of embarrassment of their triviality.

Strangely, while the navy guy mentioned programs concerning submarines, the requirement for new surface combatant vessels didn’t seem to appear on any slide.  The Air Force guy seemed to have hinted at fighter jet replacement on a slide, but my question about the number of Aussie F-18s that have been refurbished and put into RCAF service went unanswered.  The army guy flat out showed his empty pockets, admitting that the army has no plans for any new major acquisitions in the foreseeable future. He’s limited to $5 million buy-and-try per program.

The characteristic of a DND/CAF acquisition program is that it be non-lethal.  Oh, the army did talk about recovery vehicles and logistical vehicles and that sort of thing, but nothing that directly increases the lethality of any service was prominently mentioned.  Certainly, nothing was featured that caught my attention.  This aspect of the presentations demonstrated well the political atmosphere in Ottawa as it affects the military, and how closely attuned the top brass is to that attitude.  Military spending is good if it creates jobs for the right people, but let’s not talk about what a military is actually for.  The military is good if it can make the government look good, as in helping out during COVID and the B.C flooding.

Consistent with that was the presentation by BGen P.C. Sabourin, Director General Information Capabilities Force Development, which well demonstrated the peculiar thinking of DND in Ottawa.  Sabourin’s presentation was without slides, and his words sketched a world of abstractions, abstractions piled upon abstractions, and the inner workings of abstractions with each other.  Plus the accompanying ethics.  When you live in a world of abstractions, the happenings in the world of the concrete don’t affect you.  Transformation was the buzzword.  Everything was about transformation and how essential it was.  Transformation was itself the goal.

Philosophically, this is nonsense.  You have end-state A and end-state B and transformation is the process by which the thing in question changes from A into B.  The goal is end-state B, and the value of the transformation is found in the value of B relative to A.  But why transform from A to B at all?  To remain relevant is the answer.  So, why not just say what B is?  The question “whose army are you planning to attack?” kept cropping up in my mind, but “to remain relevant” gives the game away.  It’s about remaining relevant in the politics of Ottawa, and “transformation” is an incantation that keeps everything in suspense until what is relevant in the politics of Ottawa becomes clearer.

Continuing with the theme of inoffensive non-lethality. Sabourin talked about the centrality of data, as if data were the uber alles of the modern battlefield, as if enemy soldiers were killed by bytes instead of bullets, as if that view’s refutation in Afghanistan hadn’t happened; shooters and their morale don’t even enter the picture.

Best Defence is a conference of real value because it forces DND/CAF to speak to knowledgeable audiences about serious business – because serious money is involved.  The DND presenters may reveal as much by what they don’t say as by what they say and by how they say it.

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