Failure with no loss of enthusiasm: Operation Honour – the latest update

 Operation Honour and sexual misconduct in the Canadian Regular forces and Reserves have been much of our focus in this campaign, mainly due to its high visibility and our mandate to support servicewomen, whether they are serving or retired. 

It also helps that the Chief of Defence Staff, General Vance, has made comments on Operation HONOUR during the 16 Days Campaign, on November 28, 2019.

In a plenary with the first ambassador for Women, Peace and Security, Jacqueline O’Neill, at a summit on Global Leadership, moderator Ketty Nivyabandi asked General Vance about the recent court settlement won by victims of sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces and Operation Honour. 

Vance replied: 

Operational effectiveness is what we’re about … You can’t be operationally effective, and how we are operationally effective is through good teams and you can’t have good teams if the team members don’t trust each other or if there is some insidious barrier to effectively working together… Whether it is sexual misconduct, racism, white supremacy, you’ve got to be a team. There has to be some homogeneity.

These remarks contain a lot. Making the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct an issue of “operational effectiveness” is highly problematic. It ignores the real, traumatic consequences of misconduct on a victim, and looks at it only in terms of outcome for the military. In short, the message seems to be “we want to fight sexual misconduct because it makes us less successful in the field.”

Equating sexual misconduct as an issue of operational effectiveness also ignores one important aspect of leadership in the Canadian military: duty of care. The Canadian Armed Forces’ doctrine, Duty with Honour, itself reads:

Members of the profession [of arms; i.e., servicemembers] must ensure the care and well-being of subordinates. All leaders must understand, both professionally and personally, that this vital responsibility is the basis for fostering and maintaining an effective and cohesive force with high morale. (p. 14, emphasis added)

Although this extract connects well-being and effectiveness, it clearly shows that leaders should care for their subordinates and pay attention to their physical, mental, spiritual health. On page 31, Duty with Honourdeclares: “...Canadian Forces members [must] be cared for, that their desires and concerns be heard and that their personal needs be tended to, both during the time of their service and after it.” 

The doctrine demands that leaders pay attention to their subordinates in and for themselves, rather than as a necessity to safeguard operational effectiveness.

The shortcut General Vance took stands in contrast to the very doctrine he is supposed to embody and enforce, which sends an ambiguous message about his intentions when he says he wants to eliminate harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviours in the military.

During the plenary, he also added: 

So who out there has a blueprint for a culture-change plan for an armed forces? Nobody…The biggest challenge for me is we’re alone and we’re in the lead. Honestly, there’s nobody out there doing what we’re doing. We’ve got allies copying us… We know what we’re doing is criticize-able, it’s frail in some respects, we’ve never done it before but I think the biggest contribution I’ve made is to ensure that we are a culture of learning as we go through. We will continue to learn, we’ll put the right structures in place, we think, and we’ll continue to learn.

The message there is misleading in a few ways. First, Canada is not the first country to try and change a culture conducive of sexual misconduct. The United States Armed Forces and Australian Defence Forces have tried before Operation Honour; through other means and to no avail, indeed, but the Canadian Armed Forces is not a precursor in the fight.

Second, by asking the question: “who out there has a blueprint for a culture-change plan for an armed forces,” General Vance ignores decades of academic work and internal research on the topic. Servicemembers such as Rosemary Park, Dr. Alan Okros, Dr. Michael Hoare, Dr. Karen Davis, and Virginie Thomas have made numerous recommendations to the Canadian Armed Forces on how to change its culture in order to advance gender integration in the 1990s. Scholars and veterans Dr. Allan English, Bernd Horn, Bill Bentley have written on culture change in the military many times. Feminist scholars and victims of sexual assault in the military have testifies in front of the House of Commons and the Senate on the issues they identified and how to address them. Former Justice Marie Deschamps has written 10 recommendations in 2015. 

The Canadian Armed Forces remains to implement fully the guidance it was offered over the last four decades (i.e., since the report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 1970). Nobody may have the true blueprint, but so far Operation HONOUR has not really followed what academics saw as effective measures to combat sexual misconduct. 

The military continues to portray itself as alone in the face of criticism, but this perception is misguided. What remains to be done is for the military to listen, instead of enthusiastically jumping from failure to another.