Robert Falls

ROBERT FALLS

*Interviewers: Hill, Cox, Pawelek

 

[HILL]* Good morning, our guest this morning is Admiral Robert Hilburn Falls. We are very grateful to you for agreeing to participate in this project, Admiral Falls, and are delighted that you could join us this morning.

 

[FALLS] I’m pleased to be here.

 

[HILL] Admiral Falls, as you know what we are engaged in here is an oral history of Canadian policy in NATO. We are trying to trace the development of Canadian interest in NATO since the post-war period, and also to examine some of the detailed work inside the organization. So we were very keen to have you with us, owing to your work as a naval officer, as a military planner, and as a senior commander. The way we will approach this interview is to try to obtain some idea of your background and thinking, by touching on the various phases of your career in the Navy, and then to go on to look at your work as staff officer, Chief of the Defence Staff and Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, in more detail. We want to focus on the key questions in the last two of these periods, and to ask how you saw them at the time and how you have assessed them since. We are interested not only in information and explanations, but also in your reflections on specific issues and what they have meant to Canada, to NATO, and to international peace and security in general. First of all, I think I should spell out the main details of your career. You were born in Welland, Ontario, and educated in Southern Ontario. You enlisted in the R.C.A.F. in 1942, and trained as a pilot. You transferred to the Royal Navy and served overseas in the Fleet Air Arm. Then you returned to Canada in the Royal Canadian Navy, where you served in aircraft carriers, destroyers, a number of air groups and various staff positions. You rose to Command of BF 870, the RCN’s first jet fighter squadron, and afterwards commanded H.M.C.S Chaudiere and the aircraft carrier Bonaventure. Your last seagoing appointment, as Commander of Atlantic Fleet, was in 1971, when you held the rank of Commodore. At that time you were promoted Rear Admiral and went to Headquarters in Ottawa as Associate Assistant Deputy Minister for Policy. Next you were appointed Deputy Chief of Defence Staff. In 1974 you were made Vice-Admiral, and became Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff. In 1977 you were selected to be the Chief of the Defence Staff and promoted to Admiral. In 1980 you became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee in Brussels, a position you held for the next three years. Since retiring from the Navy in 1983, you've become President of the Canadian Centre for Arms Control and Disarmament, and a member of the Board of the Atlantic Council of Canada.

 

Just before we get into the first phase of our discussion, perhaps it would be useful if I stressed the kind of things we are looking for in this exercise. As we examine the various events in Canadian and NATO history over the past forty years, we are posing two basic questions, as a kind of rule of thumb test of the utility of Canada's involvement in NATO. Firstly, how did Canada contribute to NATO's efforts in collective defence, East/West relations, arms control and disarmament, inter-allied relations, and consultation about third areas, by which I mean outside the NATO area, and how did this benefit this country and how did it further the general pursuit of international peace and security? The second question we are looking at is, how did Canada contribute to and benefit from, NATO's work in other areas of interest to this country. One is referring here to the kinds of things mentioned in Foreign Policy for Canadians and the recent report of the parliamentary Special Joint Committee on Canada's International Relations, including all the things that are important to Canada as a country, like the pursuit of national unity, sovereignty and independence, economic prosperity, and so on. There are also those aspects of the pursuit of international peace and security which are not directly related to the work of NATO, such as peacekeeping, the containment of regional conflicts, and resistance to terrorism, although sometimes NATO does get into those things to some degree.

 

[FALLS] Well, those main areas are all-encompassing, and imply that I might have special opinions that evolve from my position, my career, and I think that is only partially so, in the sense that might come out as we go through the interview. In the application of these subjects to my involvement, for instance, in the Navy, it's not very large.

 

[HILL] Well, let's put it this way, I think that these are the issues, that these are the criteria which lie behind our approach to the whole thing. But in the way we approach them, we are trying to draw on people's experiences as a totality, so that we have some idea "where you are coming from". That's how we are approaching things. We're trying to be fairly well-disciplined but without being overly rigid.

 

Part I - Early Years, to 1942

 

[HILL] Admiral Falls, you were born in Welland, Ontario, and educated, I believe, partly in Chatham, Ontario. I wonder if you could tell us a little of those early years and how you believe they helped colour your outlook on life in general and also particularly on questions such as Canada's involvement in the world, and problems of international peace and security?

 

[FALLS] I'm not sure that I gave them much thought in those early years; I had a very mundane education in Chatham public and high schools. And of course during my high school years war broke out in Europe and I can only remember one rather curious thing that happened. My best friend and I were walking to school on the day that war was declared and he said "Gee, Bob, I hope this lasts long enough for us to get in it." And I thought that was a remark that I would not have made, since my mother had always said "I have not raised my boy to be a soldier". As it turned out, he carried on to University and became a doctor and is now an eminent pediatrician in London; I went on to join the forces. But I certainly didn't have in mind a military career as such, even joining the cadets was a voluntary activity, and I did not join the cadets in high school because I was discouraged from so doing by my parents. Nevertheless, during my high school years, it seemed to me that — I guess I got itchy at that time — that more and more of my friends were leaving to join the service. Finally I decided that I would join them and go on into the forces rather than continue with my schooling, and that I could always pick up my schooling later, because that was the plan I guess for most people. And as it turned out it happened for most of my colleagues. They came back out of the service and went on to University. I did not do that, therefore my education was somewhat truncated. That's about where we could leave it I guess for the early years unless there's anything else you want to know about that.

 

[HILL] You mentioned that your parents were not so keen on you going into the Armed Forces. Was there any particular reason for that?

 

[FALLS] No, they didn't object to my joining the Armed Forces in the sense that it was my decision and there was no pressure at all for me not to. I think there was some disappointment on my mother's part. My father was not in the First World War, he was born in 1900 and therefore was not old enough to go into the war when it ceased, so he missed the First World War. There was therefore no history of any military involvement in our family, none at all, that I'm aware of, not in my close family anyway. So I think basically I decided to join the Air Force because I thought flying was glamorous, as did many other people, and indeed it is. And because there's that sort of feeling when there's a war going on that school is perhaps not very relevant, and I think I got less interested in school and more interested in the idea of flying. It was inevitable, in any event, that one either had to stay in school or join the forces, there was no in between, and I elected to go into the forces.

 

Part II - Wartime, 1942-45

 

[HILL] As you mentioned, you joined the R.C.A.F. and I believe flew fighter aircraft in the beginning. And then you transferred to the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm after that. I just wonder if you could tell us a bit about that period, what kind of duties you had and what kind of impressions wartime service left on you.

 

[FALLS] In a chronological sense, I guess I happened to have been a good pilot, mechanically that is, and I also got good ground school marks and so I graduated fairly high in the class, I think number 2. And the penalty for doing that, at that stage, was you were sent off to be an instructor, because the Air Force had in those days about as many pilots as they needed operationally in Europe. In fact there was a glut of pilots, and had I been sent overseas as some of my colleagues were, they sat out the war in camps, I've forgotten the names of them, but in effect they were just waiting, and waiting, and didn't even do any flying, let alone get into operations. So it was, I suppose, advantageous to have been sent off as an instructor, and I went to Borden and put through a couple of courses of students, graduated them as pilots. During that time, the Royal Navy was looking for experienced pilots, they could see a requirement for it. They could see that the European war would be finished fairly soon, but they were not aware I suppose of the effects of the atomic bomb at that stage, at least not officially, and therefore had to prepare for a Pacific campaign. And they needed more pilots and so they put out a call to the Canadian Forces for experienced pilots to transfer to the Fleet Air Arm. And this was an opportunity to do what we'd started to do in the first place, which was to become operational, and so I had enough flying experience by then — I didn't really qualify, they wanted a thousand hours and I only had 700 — but in any event I got accepted. I transferred in Halifax from the light blue of the Air Force to the dark blue of the Navy and was paid in pounds, shillings and pence. We took a terrible drop in pay, which didn't seem to matter in those days because money wasn't very useful. You were being looked after with your food and clothing, food and lodging I should say. I went off to Europe, to England, initially and subsequently to Scotland, where thirty-two of us, ex- R.C.A.F., formed a fighter squadron in the R.N. on Seafires, and we started a workup in Arbroath, Scotland.

 

I should say that about a week after I arrived in England the European war packed up and so we continued training for the Pacific. I have forgotten the actual dates of when the bomb was dropped and when the Japanese sued for peace, but I was up in a city in Scotland, having a week-end away, one of my first holidays, when that news hit the fan. At that time, of course, peace had broken out all over and obviously behind the scenes the Canadian Navy had decided they would like to have their own major acquisition of an aircraft carrier. So as I mentioned, I was in a fighter squadron, there was an equivalent of an anti-submarine squadron, called 825 Squadron, of Canadians. And both of those squadrons were reduced significantly, we were cut in half from 32 down to 16. Essentially those who wanted to go home did, that is to say the married men, and those who were rather keen on pursuing their education. Those of us who were not married and who had no responsibilities and were having fun, decided to stay on and became the nucleus - we in 803 as the fighter squadron and 825 as the ASW squadron - of the Canadian Fleet Air Arm or Naval Aviation. So we moved to that squadron in Ireland and continued training. We upgraded our aircraft - Seafire 3s to 15s - and carried on with our operational training to the extent of deck landing training. We qualified in deck landing on HMCS Warrior which was a Canadian carrier. Somewhere in that era, between, I guess it was, about the time we reduced from 32 to 16, we had actually made the transition from the R.N. to the R.C.N.R., become Canadians again, and then started getting paid in dollars, all of which was good stuff. So we were, in fact, in the Canadian Navy Reserve when we came back into Canada in 1946. I think the major impact of that, in terms of how I felt about things, was the enormity of the dropping of that nuclear weapon. But I'm not unique in that, I think everybody must remember, anybody who is old enough, must remember the impact. I don't think I was horrified so much as astounded at the power of the thing, it seemed to take a while before the implications ever sunk in.

 

[HILL] I think that's a point that John Holmes mentioned in one of his books on that period. In fact there was a consciousness that this was a new world that one was going into. And in fact there was already thinking about the impact of all this on Canadian security. He mentioned that in 1946 people were already thinking that Canada was no longer a "fire proof house", as it had been described in the pre-war years. That was no longer the case, because you could see, as a possibility, the marriage between atomic weapons and long-range bombers, and that nuclear missiles were over the horizon.

 

[FALLS] Yes, I'm surprised that my first reaction wasn't the fact that, as it was with some people, that surely this makes us military folk kind of irrelevant, now that war can be conducted, or the threat of war, with atomic bombs. I don't recall that happening, I'm just surprised that it didn't.

 

[HILL] I think that was more of a sentiment, let's say, in the late '40s, the feeling that conventional military power had gone out of the window almost. But then it became apparent that it hadn't. Nuclear power has changed the world but it hasn't ruled out some of the need for military forces to maintain stability.

 

[COX] Four times ten to the power of three - that was the per pound difference at Hiroshima, four thousand times larger.

 

[FALLS] Incredible. And that was the part that was hard for us to grasp - the enormity of that great big bang. Mind you, all we had at the time, and subsequently, were news reports.

 

Part III - Operational Career, 1946-71

 

[HILL] This covers your career in the Royal Canadian Navy from 1946 to 1971. You returned to Canada, served in the Navy and in due course received command positions, and worked your way up the ladder of command. By the end of the ’60s or by 1971 you had held command of the ships that I mentioned earlier and also the first jet fighter squadron in the R.C.N. You'd commanded the Chaudiere and the Bonaventure. I wonder if you could fill us in a little bit on that period and how it developed. How did the establishment of NATO affect serving officers in that period, towards the end of 1949?

 

[FALLS] This might be a good time to look back at these two statements, questions or ground rules if you like, that you spoke of earlier, Roger, to qualify what it meant to be a naval officer in the post-war years.

 

I think that, as far as I was concerned, being a naval officer was reasonably well prescribed in a sense that you had a job to do. One knew what, in general terms, and why you were doing it. In other words I think that there was a certain ideology that we all believed in, and I think was reasonably valid, that there was a need to have a post-war Canadian Armed Force to ensure that the repetition of the earlier two wars didn't take place somewhere in the future. The nuclear weapons had a large and as yet undetermined place in this, but we thought there was a future and a need for Armed Forces in Canada. But I'm not sure if I thought at that time, and in fact only very gradually thereafter, about the implications for Canada and the broader aspects that you outlined here in these two sentences. Being a naval officer, or in fact I suppose, any kind of military officer, but more particularly in the Navy, you are a bit isolated if you go away from home, go out to sea. It's incredible how little information you get at sea about what's going on around the world. Despite the modernity of communications, certainly in my days at sea we had a sort of one-page summary that came over the wires that was sometimes garbled, supposedly world news. You know I'm kind of a news junky, so I really missed that as part of my daily ration. Even in command when I should have been able to do something about it, I couldn't; I mean the material just wasn't there from the other end. Anyway, there was no great tendency, unless someone had a natural interest, which I didn't, to take part in very much strategic thinking; and as a matter of interest, I never did have a staff course in all my career. I think this wasn't a question of avoiding it at all. In fact I kept thinking I'd make an effort to get one, because I felt it was a lack. Somehow I seemed to have been posted, before I could sort of apply or think about it. I was posted to jobs that were just too interesting to try and avoid and I had, in fact, one hell of an interesting, enjoyable career. And I'm not sure how I would have been able to fit the staff course into it without subtracting from that. The fact is, basically, I was having too much fun, enjoyment and satisfaction doing those things which I had to do during that time. So with that background maybe I can run over what I did do.

 

When I came back to Canada, having been an instructor, I got back into the business of instructing again in Dartmouth, locally I should say, getting people up to the carrier stage, not basic instructional flying, but getting them from pilots to being able to fly in a carrier. That was a short period. I went back then into operational flying as a member of a squadron. I think about three years after I came back, in fact, I went off somewhat reluctantly to get a watchkeeping certificate. This was, I think, the difference primarily between the Canadian Navy and the Royal Navy. The Canadian Navy had made a deliberate policy decision to integrate the aviation component as much as possible, indeed there never was a Canadian "Fleet Air Arm". The term was not to be tolerated. If there was a generic term at all it was just "Naval Aviation".  And so all pilots were expected to be, all air crew I should say, were expected to be naval officers first and pilots second.

 

So in 1949 I was sent off to get my watchkeeping certificate in H.M.C.S. Haida. This usually was somewhere between six and nine months, I think six months was the minimum and I think I got my watchkeeping certificate in six months, but I stayed on because, I guess, I was needed as a ship's officer. This turned out to be an eye-opening experience and a very enjoyable one. So from then on I became kind of a fan of this dual career bit. However, I didn't get back to sea again as a so-called fishead, a sailor, for a long time. I immediately went back to sea of course, as a pilot, in the carrier "Magnificent". As a member of a squadron, I was also, after a tour in Seafuries, selected to go down to the United States to become a Landing Signals Officer or Batsman. And so I went off to Pensacola for six months and came back as an L.S.O. and became a Landing Signals Officer.

 

I guess it was in this period of time that NATO was formed, and that I became conscious of it and of the opportunities that this might have for Canada's Navy. But I'm kind of digressing now from the chronological to the opinion.

 

[HILL] That's useful.

 

[FALLS] I don't think the occurrence of NATO sticks in my mind as a highlight of Canadian history or certainly of my history. Except that I was conscious of it. It was in 194 9 I think, and in 1949 it was when I was doing my watchkeeping, training in Haida; and I was far too busy losing sleep and trying to learn the ropes to worry too much about what went on outside the ship, and again as I mentioned, there was a lack of communication. Anyway, because we were in NATO, we started to work with other ships. I think there was also, too, a feeling of pride in all of us in what Canada had done during the war. We were left with a reasonably good Navy, in fact from my point of view it was a much better Navy because it contained an aircraft carrier which the wartime Navy didn't. We, of course, had to reduce in size after the war, down to basically what were our major ships, which were destroyers and frigates, and to get rid of most of the corvettes, and we had a few mine sweepers for awhile, but the carrier was basically my life.

 

I remember in fact being in Norfolk on the fifth anniversary of NATO in 1954 and that was quite a celebration. A lot of navies of NATO, all of the navies had representation in Norfolk at that time, and there was a large gathering of ships and social events and so forth, and NATO started to become prominent in my eyes.

 

I remember too, I think it was 1953-54 - I know I was Batsman by then and I took my Signals Officer Training in 1952 - we had an exercise called Northern Wedding which was a NATO exercise and it was a rather dramatic occurrence. I'm not sure that I should bore you with it, but it was almost a disaster, from the point of view of a sudden fog rolling in, while all our airplanes were airborne, and this was out in the middle of the North Atlantic. It was either bad weather forecasting or bad luck. Fortunately the fighters, we'd gotten them all back on board before, but the long-range airplanes were too far away. Fortunately they were also long-range and so they had lots of fuel left, but they came and they flew around overtop for a couple of hours. I know one of our guys wanted to take his flight and head straight west to get to Greenland, and they didn't know where they were going but at least it was land, so they would be over Greenland when they ran out of fuel. Then a United States submarine came up on the air and said, hey we've got a clear patch where we are, and so it happened to be — this gang had already taken off for Greenland — it happened to be in the same direction as the carrier and there was an American carrier with us and we all steamed off toward this submarine and he said he had a couple of hundred feet of ceiling. We got there and sure enough he did and we got these airplanes on, dusk was there, we got all of ours back, and one American A.D., which is an attack aircraft who was right down, he didn't have enough fuel to do one more pass and he came in high and fast and I cut him and he came by at a hell of a rate, and got a wire fortunately. He got very drunk in our bar that night.

 

But that again was the sort of feeling that NATO meant something to Canada. We were in the big leagues. We were playing with the American carriers, and the pros, and of course it gave us a sense of competition too, competition that carried right on throughout the life of naval aviation, because I think, as objectively as I can think, that we were able to out fly the Americans in terms of size. That is to say, the closest thing we can compare ourselves to was the Essex Class Carrier and we had Bonaventure. And the Essex Class was a considerably larger carrier, we would have loved to have had one, they were faster and bigger. Nevertheless we managed to fly in weather that was as bad as they did and keep as many aircraft airborne for as long as they could.

 

[HILL] I think there is one point here I would like to pick up on. I have the impression from what you say, that when you are at sea, and when you are a naval officer, as you say, you get on with the job at hand, and that's what you’re mainly thinking about. You've got to. But I have the impression also, that in the fifties, as compared to an earlier era, you had a kind of fixed reference for the Navy, because the Navy was now in NATO. And I guess at that point there was also the thought that there probably wouldn't be cut-backs of the forces, of the kind that might have been carried out otherwise. Presumably one of the problems with naval forces is that if you don't have some fairly established commitments and goals of that kind, then there is always the danger of being cut back. But in that period, with the NATO commitment, there was a fairly clear goal. NATO provided a fairly fixed reference. The Navy simply got on with its operations in support of fairly well-established commitments. And you as a naval officer got on with your job, without having to think too much about what was the political basis of all this. Is that a reasonable interpretation?

 

[FALLS] That's absolutely right. As far as I was concerned there was very little difference between, or there was no distinction I guess, between Canada's security needs and those of NATO. I think NATO just loomed very large in our thinking. It was a sort of gradual process that I didn't become very conscious of when it happened, but I think we considered that we were as much, or more, a part of NATO almost, as anything else. That was where the action was because that was where we saw ourselves, with the possible exception, I should say, of the Korean war. But again, that was a UN function - I don't suppose many of us stopped to think, about the distinctions; in other words, it was an alliance, a western type of an alliance, reaction. I didn't personally get involved, I guess we got close to it. Someone in Ottawa, in fact, was trying their damndest to get the carrier as part of our Korean commitment and I was L.S.O. at the time and I thought that this would be great.

 

[COX] Were the carriers mainly in the ASW role?

 

[FALLS] Yes, ASW was the primary role and the fighters were there basically to do that, just as a reflection of the wartime need to protect the fleet in a defensive role. But more and more the carriers became ASW oriented, to the extent that we acquired ASW helicopters, and this was an evolutionary process, but I guess the first squadron of ASW helicopters were the HO4S Sikorski. Then it became a competition, because the carrier could only handle two squadrons and we had now three, two ASW, one fixed wing, and one rotary wing, and a fighter squadron. And so more and more the fighter squadron was left back and the anti-submarine aircraft, both the helicopter and fixed wing, went along and this was, I think, one of the reasons why the Banshee was never replaced. The second reason was of course that we lost the carrier. But I don't think even if we had maintained a carrier we would have probably replaced the fighter, because it was becoming obvious that the whole job was too big for one carrier, for a carrier the size of the Bonaventure. And so we would have had to have become even more integrated in the NATO forces in terms of convoy support, resupply of Europe, that sort of thing. I think there was and there still is an argument about whether the carrier is better off in this role or a hunter killer group, when fighters might be more use than in convoy support, and indeed there's an argument about whether convoys are valid. But in any case the whole thing was just getting to be too big for one carrier, and inevitably one has to think about the major task which was anti-submarine.

 

[COX] Did you basically operate within the barrier role, back in the West Atlantic?

 

[FALLS] I don't think so, David, the only barrier operations that I can recall were submarine barriers, that, of course, had to be backed up ultimately by surface forces. We did a lot of training, quite frankly, in the convoy support role, and we did a lot of training in the support of the American ASW, or the American Attack Carrier Groups, when we would go up into the Norwegian Sea and antagonise the Soviets.

 

[HILL] Was it mainly anti-conventional submarines at that time? You weren't looking for Soviet Polaris-type submarines, because they didn't exist at this time, in the ‘50s.

 

[FALLS] No, not in the '50s. No, it was conventional. When did the Yankee boats first time come on the scene? They were the first as I recall.

 

[COX] They were the first S.S.B.N.s, but the Soviet's had S.S.N.s. in the '60s, presumably going after US carrier groups.

 

[FALLS] I remember, I don't think we ever actually tried to make contact with them, but we certainly trained. The Brits for instance had an exotic submarine that was propelled by hydrogen peroxide and it was fast. And that was used as kind of a training vessel. We did some runs against that, I remember, when I was in Chaudiere. And it simulated the Soviet nuclear development in the sense that Soviet subs, by being fast, were very noisy.

 

[COX] But then the carrier was used, at least in part, as an element in a larger carrier battle group.

 

[FALLS] Yes. The carrier of course needed protection, by destroyers, hence the term destroyer escort, the escort meaning to escort the carrier more than convoys, I think. When we operated alone, of course, we would do whatever we could to cook up training and a lot of basic training didn't even need a scenario, one just went out, with the submarine and tried to find him and practiced tactics and so forth, and the carrier basically was just a platform from which the aircraft worked. In fact, it was very expensive to create exercises and I think if we got one major exercise a year with a naval force, we were doing well. But we went into every one that we could, obviously. I've been in literally dozens of them with American forces and it's always a useful learning process. Another job I had, in fact in 1966, was Commandant of the Maritime Warfare School and that essentially taught NATO doctrines. We used NATO publications, we trained ships' captains in tactics that were NATO tactics, we developed our own tactics and we had a procedure for getting them into NATO publications. We had a very close tie with the Norfolk ASW School and they had a trainer down there, and we conducted exercises that were quite costly, because we had to hire tie lines to connect our computers, land lines, and that was big money in those days. But every couple of years we'd conduct one of these major exercises where we would simulate convoys crossing the ocean, and the change of command and control, and it was all in the NATO context. So, as I say, gradually, during this period, that we were in NATO, the Navy became more and more NATO oriented. It was just a part of my life.

 

[HILL] At one point there you mentioned the Norwegian Sea. One always has the thought that by and large the Canadian Navy is a convoy protection and ASW force. But when you were associated with American forces, and going up into the Norwegian Sea, was ASW partly for protection of the battle fleet, whose task might be to deal with the Soviet surface fleet?

 

[FALLS] That was the unstated aim. Basically, these were exercises that were stated to be for practicing in the environment that we might find ourselves in wartime. And the Norwegian Sea was construed to be part of NATO's primary area of interest. One shouldn't be so crass as to say that you were up there to allow the Americans to pound the hell out of Murmansk with their carriers, but that in fact was part of the game, I suppose. And the Soviets kept a very good eye on us while we were doing this. But operating up in those latitudes is different you know, it's cold. In summer time there are long periods of daylight, short periods of darkness, and in the winter time it's just the opposite. And ASW conditions are different, and as I recall, not very favorable to the surface, to the anti-submarine forces. You're out of good SOSUS coverage. I guess also SOSUS at that stage was very highly classified. I don't know when the Norwegian arrays were put in — but I don't think there was any direct feedback from that, certainly not to the fleet. But we would get feedback from our own Shelbourne and Argentia arrays in our exercises back home. When we were up there it was always with the US carrier group, often a British carrier group. It could get to be quite a melee and good fun. And as I say the Soviets, when we were playing around like this, kept very close.

 

These were the days too when one could learn a lot about the Soviets by conducting exercises. I remember, to my own horror, later in my career when I was captain of the Bonaventure, so that would be in the '60s, late ’60s, watching the Soviets doing a stern method of refuelling at sea. We'd given that up years ago, and yet they were still struggling along trying to pick up this floating hose in the heavy seas, pump up their ships, and we'd gone to the along-side method years ago. And they watched us too. And there was a certain amount of antagonism too. I remember, if you're looking for salty dips, one time when a Soviet cruiser insisted on sitting on my starboard bow for an hour or so, just keeping station, and whenever I had to turn, he would turn and so forth. And this was not uncommon. It happened to be the first time it happened to me, but why the starboard bow I don't know. But at one stage he made a quick dart across my bow, and it was a kind of close thing. It was the only time, in fact, I've ever had to go full astern. I think it was a mistake on his part, because he immediately turned back again, as I turned, and came up all standing. Because he left after that, I think it was probably as I say a mistake; they have never really ever tried to deliberately create a contact. But there was an awful lot of harassment in those days, and of course it led to an agreement between the US and the Soviets about conduct at sea. There was a lot to be learned from those exercises, about the Soviet Navy.

 

[HILL] That period in the '50s and early '60s has often been described as a kind of golden age of Canadian diplomacy. At least it's an expression that is used to some degree. People have also seen it as the golden age of Canadian military performance and stature, because the armed forces were by and large well equipped in that period, and the Navy had quite a lot of ships and Canada was quite a big player in NATO. I suppose, on the other hand, there is also a question as to whether this didn't go too far sometimes. I mean, for example, could there be a possibility of Canada creating a navy or creating an armed force which is out of proportion to the size of the country, and then to have this mainly focused on NATO at the expense, perhaps, of Canadian domestic requirements, especially if it got involved in performing roles with US carrier groups going off to the Norwegian Sea and so on. One really wonders how far Canada should go in that kind of direction?

 

[FALLS] I presume you are asking me to comment on that, as I saw it then, not as I see it now.

 

[HILL] Well, either perhaps. I think it's a question in some people's minds.

 

[FALLS] Well, from our point of view, at that time, I think we thought we were not overly endowed, but we were not terribly unhappy either. I had seen a succession of new airplanes, for instance. We went from having Seafires at the end of the war, to Seafuries, which were the most modern and still are the fastest propeller-driven airplane, to Banshees and then Trackers. They were brand new and very efficient and made in Canada and all that stuff. We had a series of made-in-Canada, designed-in-Canada destroyers, that was getting NATO-wide acclaim as being excellent ships. Our tails were pretty high and so we were proud, and proud of our position in NATO and proud of our contribution to NATO. We still had the hangover of World War II where the Navy had a good reputation. We came out of that war as - what's the statistic? - I think it's the third largest Navy in the world. And so I didn't much care about the air force or army in those days; in fact I didn’t pay much attention to it at all, except to the effect that I guess I knew that they were, perhaps relatively speaking, they weren't able to contribute quite as glamorously, obviously as we were to the NATO cause. The air force, I think, well I guess they did have a succession of more modern airplanes, but I don't know that they somehow kept right up to the leading edge as we did. Your question brings another aspect that I didn't really think about, Canada's national security needs, in fact, until such time as I had this Banshee squadron in 1955. And suddenly here we were on the east coast of Canada, with the only all-weather fighter airplane in Canada. I don't think the CF-100 was. When did that come onto the scene?

 

[COX] Mid '50s.

 

[FALLS] Maybe it was just on the east coast. Certainly there weren't any CF-lOOs. I remember dog fighting with the Sabres CF- 86s. We did army co-operation, so that we always had an army liaison officer with us, but this was for an unspecified role. The army had a role in Europe of course, but they also had, I suppose, a role wherever it was required. It was that set of ideas that we would go anywhere in the world where we were needed. And there were all sorts of times when the army needed air support and so we had a role of training for that. When we got the Banshees, we became all-weather jets; and the Pinetree Line, the Pinetree Station at St. Margaret's, really hadn't had anybody to play with before. In fact we created a formal arrangement whereby we became part of that, of Canada's national defence against the bomber threat, even though we knew it wasn't very strong on the East coast. In fact that's why, I guess, all of the fighters were concentrated more in the centre.

 

[HILL] I wonder if you could just fill us in on your career up through the '60s? And what were your views on the decision about the Bonaventure?

 

[FALLS] I left you, I think, when I became Squadron Commander of 870, the jet squadron. And from there I went to Bonaventure as the Lieutenant Commander Flying, that's the guy who runs the flight operations from the control tower if you like. And from that job, I was promoted to Commander and went off to Ottawa for a desk job and came back as the commander of Chaudiere. Remember I had said I had a watchkeeper certificate in 1949, and hadn't spent much time on the bridge except the occasional bit on Bonaventure and various carriers, when one was tolerated. And so I scurried around and went out for a few trips with my friends to see how destroyers worked and suddenly found myself in command. One might think that that's a funny way to do things, and I guess I thought so myself. Because the captain, there are certain things he can't delegate, and one of them is berthing the ship alongside. Nevertheless, it worked and we survived and it was an interesting part of my career. I really enjoyed that sixteen months in command of the destroyer, and it provided another perspective. Again, most of that time, or a lot of it, was spent in NATO exercises. Then back to being Commander Air, where one controls the whole of the air operation of the carrier. I guess I went then to Maritime Warfare School, as I mentioned earlier, and spent a few years there. I was promoted Captain out of that job and went to Bonaventure in command. This was right after that very expensive re-fit, the one that caused all the problems about recovering of chairs in the briefing room, and that sort of thing.

 

[HILL] Wasn't that specified in the '64 White Paper?

 

[FALLS] Well, the Bonaventure re-fit was a lengthy affair. I remember I stood by her for over six months. But just to comment on the re-fit, I think the estimates of that refit were deliberately made low, but this is a personal opinion. It's not meant to be definitive, because I haven't gone into it in order to prove it, but I suspect that the estimates were made deliberately low in order to get it approved, or in order to make it fit within a budget or something. I don't know. Because the estimates were obviously too low to do what was needed to be done, and, of course, as soon as the ship was opened up to do some of this work they found even more work that had to be done. It was an old ship, and so obviously the thing cost more than it should have. But in any event I don't think, in retrospect, that that refit cost any more then than it would have at any other time. It was just the comparison of the cost of the refit with its estimates. The same thing happened with the National Arts Centre contract, and there wasn't nearly as much curfuffel, even though the National Arts Centre was overrun by a greater percentage even than the Bonaventure. The ship came out of that refit, in fact, in very good shape and we ran her well and hard for a couple of years. What caused the retirement of the Bonaventure was basically the reduction of funds to the Canadian Forces. This was the Trudeau time as you may recall, in 1967, when he put the screws on, and the screws went on year after year, to reduce the funds. The only real way that you can save money in this sort of caper is to get rid of people, because of the personnel budget, the cost of people. You can stop capital spending as we have done, for long periods of time, but if your budget will still not handle it, you've got to get rid of people. In fact you've got to bring everything down at the same rate because you can't go on spending money on maintaining equipment that you cannot man.

 

I was no longer in the Bonaventure when the decision to pay her off was made. Where the hell was I? I guess I was up in Ottawa, in the personnel business, I was a Commodore then and I went up as a Deputy Chief of Personnel, Postings and Careers. But I remember going down to Halifax on business and talking to Nibs Cogdan who was the Chief of Staff at the time. And he said, "Boy, it looks like we're going to have to get rid of Bonaventure". And he thought I would jump and scream and kick and so forth, which I felt like doing, because I loved that ship, and I loved our life with it and I loved what it represented to the Navy. But it also represented about one thousand bodies and if we hadn't disposed of the Bonaventure, it would have meant disposing of something like five destroyers, which would have cut the heart out of our fleet, more so than the Bonaventure. The other thing is, although the Bonaventure was in good shape and had just undergone the expensive refit, there was, definitely, a time when it would have had to have been replaced. That may have been in three years or five years or ten years, I'm not sure, but it was pretty obvious that that time was coming; and that there weren't any reasonable options to replace it. In other words the technology was such that the Americans were going to nuclear propulsion, bigger ships, we were not any longer able to play in this league of aircraft carriers. Most other countries found it the same. I'm not sure if there are any South American countries with carriers left or not. I think Argentina maybe has one, which is in harbour. The French of course still have a capability. Even the Brits have gone away from wires and they're using jump jets now, so it's left to the American's basically, and the French. And rumours of the Soviet Union doing it. But it was so inevitable, there was no way that I could make a rational defence of keeping the carrier, if I was asked. The reason for the decision, in my view, was the fact that they reduced the defence budget. We weren't told, the Navy wasn't told, to get rid of the carrier. It was more subtle than that. It was, here's your budget, what do you want to do with it. And the powers that be decided that the carrier had to go, despite the fact that it was in good shape, a first class ship at the time. It was just sent off to Taiwan to become razor blades, and too bad. But as I say, it was inevitable that we would lose the carrier in a few years in any event.

 

[COX] Could you tell us a little bit about your response to the unification debate? Of course the Navy took it very badly. Some leading Commanders voiced their disapproval, didn't they?

 

[FALLS] Yes, it was a very emotional time and it split the Navy rather badly into three camps, I guess: the ones who couldn't abide the idea and left, led by Admiral Landymore; the ones who thought it was a good thing and supported it, led by no one that I can think of, and they were very few; and the remainder who thought, well, you know, if this is a ministerial decision, there really isn't much choice but to go along with it. Either you go along with it or you leave, and the choice was just that stark. And Bill Landymore, bless his heart, I've served under him and I have the greatest admiration for him, he's stubborn and he's principled, and therefore he decided, and he was the Maritime Commander at the time, that he would fight this as much as he could. But he certainly didn't encourage anyone to go along with him, and I admired him for that as well. Other senior people had similar problems, Geoffrey Brock, I think, suffered from unification, I'm not sure that he left voluntarily. It was a difficult time. Paul Hellyer, I remember, came down and spoke to the officers of the Maritime Command, in the Maritime Warfare School, after Landymore left, and O'Brien was the Maritime Commander; Scruffie O'Brien, I don't think was any more enamoured of the idea of unification than the rest of us, but was one of those who had decided to stay in, and try to make it work. When Hellyer was badly received with boos and catcalls by the officers, Scruffie got very angry and stood up, and told us to behave like gentlemen, in no uncertain terms. My own reaction was one of, I guess, the majority, that I had no brief for unification at all, but I guessed if it was going to be thrust on me I would rather stay in the forces, which I had come to enjoy, than to get out. I must say I thought about getting out, and I had come to the conclusion that the option that I was looking at was not unattractive, but nonetheless, I felt that I had a good career and I thought I was enjoying it too much to go out on a matter of principle and so I would stay. I think that I could also see some of the benefits that the minister was trying to demonstrate could come from unification. I had obviously seen some of the duplication, the problems, the in-fighting. I had been up in headquarters enough to see some of the grabbing that went on, for what little money there was, between the services, and the sort of things that I could tell were bugging the minister, in -terms of inefficiencies, and so I was not entirely unsympathetic to his trying to resolve some of these problems. I guess, in the end, this is after a period of time, I'm sorry that unification took place, in the sense of the personal morale and the attitudes of the people involved and the definite, without a doubt, the definite lack of the esprit of belonging that is bound to take place. But I've also had a better look at other navies and organizations including our great neighbour to the south, and I think it would be impossible to think about unification in military organizations of that size. On the other hand, they could well do with something that would diminish interservice rivalry. They could well do with the benefits we achieved by unification, if in some way they could do the unifying. I find that it is very disturbing that the Americans are wasting so much time and effort fighting with each other, instead of improving their own forces. And so there were benefits that I could identify, I didn't much like the new uniform, I still don't. I would have, when I was CDS, if someone had come up with a way of going back into the three uniforms and still maintaining the principles and the benefits of unification, I would have done it a long time ago, and I'm sure others would have as well. It has now taken place by edict, by the Conservative Government, and I'm not sure they have, in fact, not lost the benefits of unification. But time will tell, and I don't think it is appropriate for me as an ex-CDS to comment on that particular aspect of unification, that is to say, the re-integration or whatever it is called. The claim is made, of course, that we are still a unified force. I think that time will tell. We still have the green uniform, we have these guys walking around in light blue and dark blue uniforms that don't look much like the old ones, but certainly they are more identifiable as sailors and airmen. I don't know what a ship looks like these days, I haven't gone aboard because it must have, still, a mishmash of uniforms. It will always; and that was what bothered me about deunification. But as I say it will take time, and I think we shall see.

 

[COX] Do you think that the government and the minister in particular, at the time, simply misjudged, or failed to understand, the importance to the armed forces of identification with units and other services.

 

[FALLS] Oh absolutely. I don't think that Hellyer had enough time in the forces to become aware of the ethic. In fact, I guess even I wasn't aware of the ethic, as it existed in the Army. Boy that's strong, this regimental identity. I had no idea how strong that is, and I respect it you know, this is what makes guys lay down their lives for their brothers in war time I think. And I think you play with that at your peril. This ethic is not so terribly important in the air force, as it fights in a much different way, basically, from afar. It's an individual sort of man-to-man kind of thing in the air, I suppose. The question of cohesion and the family identity is not nearly as important.

 

The air force right now, today, runs air stations in a kind of, what we used to call, a factory mode. In other words the squadrons are squadrons of pilots; they do not include the ground crew, which to a naval officer, a naval airman, is just incomprehensible. A squadron is a group of cohesive people that fly off a carrier, or they fly off some other place as a unit. The airmen have factory maintenance or base maintenance, and the squadrons consist of the airplane and air crew, not the ground crew. And that is the difference, I think, and that's why unification, why perhaps the question of, what was the word you used, David, morale and cohesion, identity, legitimately was not so important. Hellyer's background was air, and he was being « advised by a fellow called Bill Leigh who was also air, and I guess what they needed was a good Army type to try and explain what this was all about. I couldn't have done it, I suppose, at that time, because, although I was aware of what unit identity was to a sailor, which was much stronger than to an airman, I didn't realize that is was not nearly as strong as it is to the Army in a regimental system.

 

Part IV - Staff Positions. 1971-77

 

[HILL] I think we already have a fair idea of the positions you held in this period. Just perhaps one thing at the outset, could you just briefly describe the difference in the functions of Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff and Vice Chief of the Defence Staff.

 

[FALLS] Vice Chief of the Defence Staff is the guy who essentially runs the Armed Forces on a day-to-day basis. He is responsible for the total budget of the Armed Forces, for responding to all the day-to-day operational activities. If he's doing his job right the CDS can relax and do very little, I suppose except liaise. The theory is that he would liaise with the government, I suppose. But the Vice Chief is the person who, on a day-to-day basis, I think, is the focus of the activities of the Canadian Forces. And I found it I guess the hardest job in terms of the amount of time you have to put in and the effort and the spread of responsibility.

 

[HILL] How about Deputy Chief?

 

[FALLS] Deputy Chief is where the three services come together, if you like, in the headquarters. And he operates as the buffer, I suppose one could say, between the three services, and attempts to share expenditures, or to ensure that the three are properly balanced in terms of their capital programmes. And the capital programme in fact starts, I should say it starts in the three services, but it comes together at the Deputy Chief level, and he makes recommendations to the Vice Chief. Again, the Deputy Chief tries as much as possible to absorb those things which he can on a day-to-day basis, the decisions that have to be taken, that he can do, that don't have to be kicked upstairs to the Vice Chief. It's, if you like, taking part of the load off the Vice Chief. But his liaison basically is with the three services, the three service chiefs or what have you, whereas the Vice Chief has the responsibility of personnel, finance, of materiel to the extent that it is on the military side -- I mean a lot of these things are on the civilian side, but that distinction is more and more blurred.

 

[HILL] I wonder if I could just ask one general question about this period of 1971-1977. This was in some ways a rather traumatic time for the Canadian Armed Forces. As you mentioned, the budgets were stagnant or in fact they were really being cut because inflation was going up and budgets remained constant; they weren't even getting an increase for inflation. Then in 1975, or so, there was a turnaround, when things started to go up again; that was the period of the Defence Structure Review and also the time when the Prime Minister went to Europe and had one or two talks with Chancellor Schmidt and other people and was convinced of the need to do more in NATO. And then we had the start of the capital re-equipment programme and so on. I just wonder if you could tell us something about the sense or the feeling in the Armed Forces in that period, how they felt about themselves, I suppose especially on the part of the Navy, but the others as well, and how they felt about what was happening to them and how this affected Canada's place in the world.

 

[FALLS] How do you want me to do this, Roger? Because there's another pretty interesting event, I think, that preceded those events in '71 or '72, which was the reorganization of the Headquarters, which I think in fact was probably more significant to the events that you are thinking of than unification. It sort of fits in chronologically, because I came back to Ottawa as the Headquarters was being reorganized to meld the civilian and military sides. And indeed there was an awful lot of objection to this, and again it created some more resignations. People left the service because of it. Our friend George Bell being one of them. Though I shouldn't put words in his mouth, but that is my understanding. I don't think George would deny the fact that he felt that this was not the right way to go. He left early and I think that was the reason. As far as I was concerned I was always enthusiastic about it. In fact I had to sort of agree. I was interviewed by David Kirkwood, to find out whether I would support the principle of the unification of the two, military and civilian sides, in a reorganization, before I was able to accept the job. I agreed whole heartedly. And there was an awful lot of trauma about in the Headquarters and throughout the forces, because there was a feeling that the civilians were now in control of the military and those of us who supported it were betraying once again the Armed Forces. And I guess my answer to that has always been that the military never was making its own decisions; it was always the civilians who had been making the decisions about the Armed Forces. And finally with this amalgamation the military was at least on an equal footing and were able to make their own decisions if they were sensible. The reason for saying this is, that the three services in the traditional fashion had their wish list of equipment which was, I suppose, in support of the overall policy objectives of the Armed Forces, which hopefully represented those of the government. And the wish list was always about four times, at least, what the budget allowed, even in the good times. So when hard times came upon us it was just impossible. So what was happening, in fact, was that none of the services would back off, really, except that there was I'm sure a lot of "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" among the service chiefs. One would support this guy if he would support me and so forth. So the really important things probably got done with co-operation. But a little further down the line, as opposed to major equipment, other types of modernization or ancillary equipment, or buys such as this, kind of got lost in this great big amorphous mass of stuff that everybody said was absolutely essential. And they would not agree among themselves and so it was the ADM Materiel, a civilian, who eventually had to say: "Well there isn't enough money for this and you guys can't make up your minds. I think this is what most closely resembles, or represents, the policy or whatever". He made the decision. When the services became unified there were associates, and this Associate Assistant Deputy Minister bit. I threw that in very deliberately because that was the real title, to reflect the fact that there were civilian and military persons in each of the non-operational, that is to say non-service departments i.e. personnel, finance, policy and procurement (leaving only the three operational or service-oriented air, army and navy units under the Deputy Chief, where there was no civilian entity). I think it did marvelous things to the Armed Forces. I think without that structure the defence review could not really have succeeded. And I'm not sure, you know, its hard to say, what the evolution of the forces would have been. I guess I was told by pretty good authority that when Pierre Trudeau froze the defence budget in 1967 for three years, that the intent was to give the Armed Forces three years to get their act together, you know to consolidate so that they could be reduced further. Well, that didn't happen for various and sundry reasons. It just was impossible and it took more than three years, in fact, to consolidate it and that was the time that caused the reduction of the armed forces in Europe, and all the political as well as military curfuffle that that caused in our relations with the Alliance. It caused the Prime Minister to listen to Helmut Schmidt, as you mentioned, and others, and it allowed, I guess, the Prime Minister to broaden his perspective in those three years from guys like Schmidt and Ivan Head and a few people like that. Of course it seems presumptuous of me to talk about the maturation of the Prime Minister, when he is such an intellectual giant I think, but nevertheless he has changed, and therefore he must have somehow learned a little about the practicalities of life, if nothing else, during that time.

 

[HILL] I think this leads to a question on Canada's role in NATO, with reference to the Prime Minister. My impression is that when the Prime Minister came to Ottawa as Justice Minister and then became Prime Minister, in fact his inclination was really to pull Canada out of NATO. I think that that simply reflected his own appraisal of the world as he saw it. But in time, he changed around somewhat. How would you see that?

 

[FALLS] Well, I think, I'm not sure that’ he changed fundamentally. I think that he probably appreciated more, later in his tenure, that there were certain things that he could do politically and certain things that he couldn't, both domestically and internationally, and perhaps some of them just weren't worth it. I doubt very much that he has changed his morality or his views, and in that respect I think perhaps that I've learned a lot more from Trudeau than he ever learned from me, if he ever listened to me. Because I think he was a very pragmatic person. He was not an ideologue. He would not absorb all of this propaganda that was put out by NATO and by the military particularly. I didn't see much of Trudeau quite frankly in my time as CDS and not anything of him other than that, and so there's no personal relationship whatsoever — but certainly there was one time when he talked of submarines to me, and that allowed me to believe that he knew a hell of a lot more about the ASW aspects of the Navy than I certainly expected him to, and that he differentiated very clearly between an attack submarine and a "BOOMER," an SSBN. He was in fact using this kind of Jesuit logic, I suppose, to try and destroy what he thought was my position. Well my position wasn't that we should go after SSBNs but perhaps he thought that it was. But he was very clear that, you know, it was destabilizing to be trying to develop an ASW capability against SSBNs. I don't think perhaps he was quite as well informed about the fact that we needed ASW capabilities for other reasons, if we were in fact to maintain our NATO commitment of supporting a supply to Europe and that kind of thing, where you need a capability against the attack submarines. But you know he was very conscious of that difference then, to an extent that a lot of modern day naval officers are not.

 

[HILL] My impression of Mr. Trudeau is also that he really didn't change his perception of the world fundamentally. What his government said in Foreign Policy for Canadians was that, in effect, NATO is fine for the time being, but once we've sorted out these problems with East/West relations, which may well come at some point, then NATO would melt away, its function would have virtually disappeared. At least that's how I would interpret that myself, and I think in a way that comes out in the Defence White Paper of that period too, because there's a shift of the priorities there also. I wonder if you'd care to comment on that question. How would you interpret Canada's view on NATO as expressed in Foreign Policy for Canadians and in the White Paper?

 

[FALLS] Foreign Policy for Canadians, well wait a minute now, I think the — which came first?

 

[COX] Foreign Policy for Canadians.

 

[FALLS] Yes, and that was where he laid out the priorities of, if you like, starting with Canada and expanding, from which the White Paper developed, the policy of sovereignty first, and then North America second, NATO third, and then peacekeeping. And I don't think that I could find any fault with that. I was in policy in 1972 and this had taken place by then, and so I just accepted it as a logical and rational piece of work. And I saw no conflict, quite frankly, in that policy with any previous policy that we'd had. The only difference was on emphasis, and the only danger as far as I could see was an over-emphasis on sovereignty, and I guess I tried, and still think, that that is a danger still today, that we haven't yet defined what we mean by sovereignty and what it means in military terms, so that we know what to do about it. But I was comfortable working within those guidelines and in fact when we got around to the defence structure review, that was the way we tackled it, starting from that White Paper, starting from those principles. I'm not sure now who negotiated this defence structure review, but you know my recollection is, and I was Vice Chief at the time, that we decided to do it. I'm not sure that we were told to do it.

 

[COX] I think Buzz Nixon said it was a departmental decision.

 

[HILL] It was also a question of fitting the budgetary situation at that time, I think. There was a certain sum of money available, and then the Government said: here is what you are going to get in the budget, more or less, and why don't you go and design something to fit within that. They tried to do that but they couldn't.

 

[FALLS] Well, I think that's right. Buzz was not yet in the department, I don't think, I think Clouthier was still there. And I know that prior to that I was Deputy, and this was where I had this problem of all these shopping lists, and a reducing budget, and I inherited this, a mess. It was just ridiculous. So as a start we just got the three heads together and hammered them and there was a lot of blood on the floor but we finally got the budget, a capital programme, that was pared of all of the "nice to haves" and was down to what we thought was the really, really essentials. But even then it was pretty apparent that if we tried to maintain the forces as they were, then this capital budget was not going to maintain the forces, and so I guess departmentally we decided we needed a defence structure review. I had just gone into the Vice Chief's chair at that time and I had a very good staff and we thought a lot about it and came up with this idea of a bottoms-up review (as they called it). And we used this very policy; it became useful. What is the minimum we need to do the national sovereignty, the North American defence, to make a reasonable contribution to Europe, and then peacekeeping. If you establish the minimum for national security then what more do you need to do the North American task? And so on. And if you look at it in this way, you can say, well, this is the minimum sized force, below which you cannot go and still maintain certain criteria. That is to say, Canada is a large nation, we have to have, for sovereignty purposes, our geography covered. This in fact led to a reassignment of military forces in Canada to react to aid of the civil power more regionally, because we weren't so far from the October Crisis at that stage and it was still kind of close to our minds. And the next thing of course was to sell that to the Treasury Board, once we had done all this and then costed it. I don't think it was coincidental at all that what we came up with happened to be pretty close to what we had, that is to say a bare minimum. If you're not going to fund that you know you are going to have to make some hard choices like, do you want to have only an East Coast Navy? Those are the kind of hard choices that were going to have to be made and I think that it was probably this real hard look at it from the bottoms up and the honesty with which we tried to conduct the review, that halted the decline of the defence budgets and started the turn around.

 

[HILL] In other words the NATO commitment, having forces in Europe, had some cost associated with it. But in fact there is a limit to what you can cut, because you need a core organization in Canada to do the tasks here.

 

[FALLS] The incremental costs are not great. They're not insignificant, but the money, a lot of it, has already been spent in the infrastructure in Lahr, and of course it costs more money to keep troops in Europe than it does in Canada, because you've got dependents, schools, school teachers, allowances, that sort of thing. But if you determine your minimum requirements for sovereignty purposes and for the North American defence, and then say how have we looked after NATO in that, you don't have to add very much to do what we are doing already.

 

[COX] Did you ever come close to saying: "OK, scrap the army and reduce it to a militia”.

 

[FALLS] We never got to where we said this would be our first recommendation. What we did say was that below this you cannot go. And I think the obvious thing at that stage, as I recall, was the good old one coast Navy. The other thing was too, you could reduce the air component, but then you could not pretend to have any identification capabilities. Well, you know, you don't have it anyway. The idea of the Pine Tree becoming obsolescent was upon us. God, we tried to get those politicians to close Pine Tree! I noticed they did close two stations today. Those were the ones we were trying to close ten years ago. We wasted so much money in the meantime. They have been useless for that long, but politically unclosable. One could have whittled away at the Air Force, I suppose. You could say if you didn't have a commitment in Europe, you wouldn't need the transport, but then you wouldn't have the capability of deploying peacekeeping forces in a hurry, and that would have affected our peacekeeping capabilities, which nobody wanted to touch either. And so it wasn't exactly a bottom-up study; but in other words there were a lot of "what if's" and "well you can't do that", so it did extend to the fourth priority, that is peacekeeping, in many instances. You could have regionalized, I suppose, the Army, and said: "Well, lets hope that we never have to worry about an Army's presence out West, because there's never, except in the minds of a very few Army officers, there is never any thought that anybody is going to invade Canada". There's still a lot of guys who think, well we have to worry about lodgements up in the Arctic. I'm not sure what they mean by that. The Soviets parachuting in, I can't for the life of me understand why, and why it is that they would do it and how you would go about getting them out. But there are people who try and make a case for that. They would rather make a case for defending Canada from an invasion but realise that's just too much. So the Army is flexible. What do you want an Army for? That was a hard question to answer, but we answered it on the basis of regionalization and aid of the civil power, and the contingencies for everything else. You have to have a base, a geographic base, and it couldn't go much further down than it was now without losing some of the regionality. There was no point in talking about one of the arms, that is to say the infantry, artillery or armour, although armour came very close to being put on the block - the tanks are a bit expensive, they're not usable in Canada. It was something that Trudeau felt very strongly, we should not have tanks. It wasn't until we bought them specifically for the NATO role, that he declined to approve the use of any tanks in Canada. I don't think today, there is a tank in Canada.

 

[HILL] In training, yes. The Leopard.

 

[FALLS] Perhaps, I think he collapsed on that one a little bit. So we got the wheeled vehicles instead, armoured personnel carriers. But I don't think, to answer your question David, that we ever came down to saying this would be our first choice, that we would do this or that. But these were some of our options, and I think essentially we put together an analysis that demonstrates pretty clearly that you couldn't go much below what we had and still have a three-pronged armed force. And even so the bill for the equipment was going to be substantial and that we'd better get on with it.

 

[COX] Who did you have to convince? You did the defence structure review. In a sense the outcome was the decision to increase the capital procurement by 12%. Who had to be persuaded and what was the process?

 

[FALLS] The process of persuasion, as I recall, was first with the Treasury Board, a guy called Marsden, who happened to be the guy at the time. They changed over there about every year or so. I remember long sessions with him.

 

[HILL] Buzz Nixon also remembers long sessions with him.

 

[FALLS] I guess at this stage, Buzz was DM, I think about the time we started to sell it, because I remember that 'when I did - - but after the Treasury Board of course — the formal stages were to see the Priorities and Planning Committee — well Cabinet eventually, but P.P.C. was chaired by the Prime Minister, and we went before that on several occasions. And when they examined it there was also another interdepartmental thing chaired by Pitfield, because I got to know Pitfield fairly well in those days.

 

[COX] Would that have been the Mirror Committee, because it was intended to be the departmental equivalent.

 

[FALLS] Yes, that must have been the one, because it was chaired by Pitfield and he was mighty hard on us in the sense of asking pertinent questions, and I think it was the integrity that we built up, quite frankly, from not trying to B.S. anybody during this defence structure review, that convinced Pitfield that what we said was about as factual as could be. And he realized that there was a certain seriousness to it. Pitfield had a lot of influence on other people in those days, and once we got past him it was a question of going to the Priorities and Planning Committee, and I guess that must be where Trudeau asked me questions that showed he understood. I'm not sure that he showed that much interest except spasmodically. It was approved. I can't quite remember when, but that's when we started getting our incremental improvements.

 

[HILL] '75, I think. What was the morale of the forces like then in that period, in 1972-73?

 

[FALLS] Not very good, but strangely not as bad as one would expect. I think there was a feeling that, in the first place, we were not firing people. It was all by attrition, all these reductions were by attrition. The forces was getting older unfortunately; you know they weren't able to recruit the young people and we were in that sense living off our fat. It was disrupting training, and the schools were not training; but you know individually people didn't feel threatened, they thought, well, you know I've got a career, and besides which something always happens. As it did, it did turn around, and I guess everybody thought eventually it would have to. So morale was not good, but it wasn't as bad as it should have been. Because I don't think people realized the seriousness of the problem, who were not that close to it. And those of us who were close to it were not about to try and tell everybody inside the service, I should say, how desperate it was. I think people had enough of a grasp of it anyway to know.

 

[HILL] You must have had some dealings in that period with the Americans, the American service chiefs, and other NATO allied military chiefs. What about their attitude to what was going on?

 

[FALLS] Strangely enough, as Deputy and Vice I had very little contact with anyone outside the services and the Ottawa civilian community. The Vice Chief, and the Deputy for that matter, sit very close to home. I did a few relaxing trips like going over to Europe to inspect our troops here and there and that was mainly for my benefit to know what the hell we were doing in peacekeeping and in Europe; because you know a naval career doesn't give you a chance to know what the others are doing, and so it wasn't until I became Deputy Chief that I did my first familiarization trip to Lahr, and I'd never been to Soest. And I think that was a pretty important thing for me to do. So I did it, but that was to visit Canadians, that wasn't to visit NATO.

 

[HILL] That was not done as part of the meetings of the NATO Military Committee.

 

[FALLS] No.

 

Part V - Chief of the Defence Staff. 1977-80

 

[HILL] Admiral Falls, from 1977 to 1980 you were Chief of the Defence Staff in Ottawa. This was a time of steady re-equipment in the Canadian Armed Forces, when the LRPA programme was being completed and the Leopard tank was coming into service, the New Fighter Aircraft (NFA) was agreed on, I believe, and the first steps were taken to move towards a definition of the Canadian Patrol Frigate Programme. There were also many important developments in NATO in that time. But I guess the question I'd like to ask first of all this: how did you see the role of the Chief of the Defence Staff and what sort of part does he play in policy-making and in relations with NATO?

 

[FALLS] Well, strangely enough, I think that the part that the CDS plays could well be overrated in the minds of many. For instance, some of the things that you talked about here were currently under my purview, I suppose, as Chief of the Defence Staff, indeed took up a lot of my time; the LRPA programme for instance, was carried on during that period of my tenure in fact. I remember vividly Buzz Nixon and I stomping around the halls of Ottawa trying to sell the idea of refinancing and a lot of other things to people to get this programme off the ground, even after the selection was made. I know it was started in the time of J. Dex (General Dextraze), but I think the selection was made and the idea of getting it through took a lot of my time. The tank programme, as you say, was pretty well finished and decided upon, and of course the LRPA programme, when that was out of the way, led into the fighter programme, which again, took a lot of my time and persuasion and what not, in order to get what I think was the agreed project team solution sold to the rest of the Armed Forces and to the Government. In other words, that, plus the sometime ceremonial duties, plus the fact that there are certain things the CDS cannot delegate that have to do with personnel, redress grievances and things like that, which are time consuming, take up an awful lot of the time of the CDS, and leave very little time in fact to think about or to act upon strategic and broader issues.

 

The fact is that the Chief makes three trips a year to Europe to the NATO forum of the Military Committee, and usually between those three periods there's very little time to give thought to the issues because they are not emerging as immediate issues requiring attention. The fact of the matter is for myself, and I know for my predecessor, I can't speak for my successors, but in fact one did not pay much attention until a few days before the meeting when one was briefed by the staff and tried to be brought up to speed on the issues. Some of these issues may have been, seemed to be, and were, important. But in any event, in international relationships with NATO, even military ones, I found it amazing how much these are conducted by the Department of External Affairs, with input at the staff level, that is to say lower down in our organization, ADM Pol or in the Plans Organization in the DCDS area of Plans.

 

[HILL] Of course there is a permanent Milrep representing the Chief of Staff on the NATO Military Committee in Brussels, who's there dealing with these issues on a full-time basis.

 

[FALLS] That's right.

 

[HILL] So, there are reports and dealings going back and forth, between the Milrep, on the spot there, and the defence chiefs and senior officials in Ottawa.

 

[FALLS] Yes, in fact, it's important that the Milrep and the CDS have a good rapport and a good understanding, so that he can in fact work. And indeed my relationship was such that I tried to keep him in the picture on any sort of decision-making process or thought processes that I may have had. He was required to come back to Canada from time to time to sit on various meetings so that he would know me better, so that he would know how I would want to react if I were there, so that he could in fact act without constant access to Ottawa.

 

[HILL] I wonder if I could just follow-up with a couple of questions on this one here that occur to me. You mentioned the role of External here. Do you feel that the military side has an adequate voice then in terms of Canada's military role in NATO?

 

[FALLS] That's a hard question to answer yes or no. This in fact gets into a very deep discussion about the Military Committee, if you want to do that right now, and the role of the Military Committee within NATO.

 

[HILL] I think we should leave that for now. I was thinking about seeing it from a national perspective.

 

[FALLS] I think Canada sees its NATO relationship more from a political point of . view than a military one. I'm not sure that this isn't correct, considering the genesis of NATO and of Pearson's thought when he was External Affairs Minister.

 

[HILL] How much of a role does the CDS, as the head of the military and supported by the VCDS, the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff and so on, have in national policy. You obviously must be seeing the Defence Minister continually, must be dealing with him virtually on a daily basis, but what about others? What about the Prime Minister and other key figures like that?

 

[FALLS] I think that there again, it might be surprising, but there is relatively little direct contact between the military, that is the CDS, the Vice Chief, and Deputy, and the government beyond DND in the overall policy-making process of the government in terms of NATO. In national areas of course I would' like to think that the CDS of today is involved in the preparation of the White Paper or at least gets his views on the table. But to answer your question, I never, in the time of the Conservative Government, met the Prime Minister to say hello to him, even. The major part of my time as CDS was with the Trudeau government and I guess Mr. Trudeau knew who I was. He invited Buzz Nixon and me to lunch one day, which was the closest contact and the most intimate contact that I had with him during that time. It was very pleasant, although it came rather late, I thought, in my tenure in terms of him trying to get to know his CDS if that was indeed the exercise. And I saw him a few times in meetings of the Cabinet Committee on Priorities and Planning. In other words there was not any kind of high level profile for the CDS, as one finds say in the U.K. or the US forces. There's a corollary to that. In other words, the CDS has a hell of a lot more authority within the forces than he does in those other two organizations, but that's not really important or relevant I think to this discussion. With respect to the comment about the Minister, yes there is a close relationship. Well, again I think that depends on the personalities. I certainly have had a very close and a good relationship with the Minister who was Minister through most of my tenure, that was Barney Danson. He sought my advice, he didn't always follow it. We had the occasional mild disagreement and one major one, but by and large, it was a good and warm relationship. I did not have nearly the same relationship with McKinnon when he came in. I think that this business of not trusting the Public Service and construing them all as being Liberals automatically, instead of assuming that both the Public Service and the Military will serve a government; this was a problem. There was immediately suspicion to start with, and despite our efforts, I say "our", meaning that I tried to get everyone who had any contact with the Minister to support him thoroughly and absolutely, despite this, the suspicion remained. I guess finally I just gave up trying and rode it out. The third minister during my time was Lamontagne; our relationship was okay, not close though. I think he was much more of a political animal perhaps than Barney is, if possible. But we got along well. However, there did not seem to be the automatic acceptance of military advice as being objective and sincere that I would have hoped. So those comments try, I think, to put the relationship of the CDS with the government in its perspective.

 

[HILL] Perhaps if I could ask you one more final sub-question here. Obviously, in this system of government, as in the rest of the western democracies, the principle of civil authority having paramountcy is well established, there's no question about that, in the sense I mean of being over the military, and so there's no question about your wanting any sort of specialized place, shall we say, or autonomy. But did you not feel, though, that the fact that the CDS is not brought in much more to things, and did the Armed Forces not feel, that this was an inadequate situation from their point of view?

 

[FALLS] Yes, I think so. I was surprised. When I say I was surprised, I wasn't overly surprised, because it came gradually to me having watched from the position of Vice Chief, through an evolutionary process. I guess before that, I kind of assumed always that the CDS would have been very much in the pocket of the Prime Minister in all of these momentous decisions. But I guess that the process in Canada is much more ministerially oriented. The Prime Minister goes right to the Minister of National Defence for his military advice and he gets it from CDS through direct access to the Minister. So I was surprised. But I guess I didn't think that it is all that bad, you know. Certainly there were times, not with Barney, but with McKinnon, that I thought it was definitely important that the Prime Minister knew what the CDS's views were, because I didn't think he was getting them. And there was a lack of rapport between myself and McKinnon.

 

[COX] The tradition of the Cabinet Committee system is in fact to exclude civil servants by and large. My limited experience with this is that Ministers are very jealous of that forum in which they speak to each other without a large number of civil servants present. And that perhaps partly accounts for the apparent lack of access or communication. I don't think it really takes care of the problem of how the Prime Minister gets to know what you want him to know.

 

[FALLS] I think you are right, David. However, even in the cabinet committee system which excluded the public servants, they did certainly, and probably still do, involve the public servants when they want expertise about a particular issue at hand. And I know that Buzz and I on many occasions went up and sat in the corridors in case we were needed, and there were other occasions of course when we went in, and so I have been in enough cabinet committee meetings. The most interesting ones were in Priorities and Planning, PNP, because of the involvement of the Prime Minister, but there are others that are chaired by various ministers. But you don't stay for — you know they don't want you hanging around for other items, and you're there to kind of respond to the question, not to give judgments. So I don't think they exclude, and thankfully they don't exclude, the expertise of the public service when they need it, experts of any sort.

 

[HILL] I find some of this quite surprising, in fact, because I had the impression that the CDS would be in the middle of the policy debate, somehow or other, and involved with the major issues of the day. Perhaps he is through the minister, and through the deputy minister. I mean I'm not saying that he is excluded, but, just to take an example: when you became CDS in 1977, that was a period when the Carter administration was coming in in Washington and I remember going to a number of international meetings just prior to that, at the outset of 1977, where the whole question at that time was here was a new development, a new phase in world affairs. Carter was coming in. He was going to be different from President Ford, they thought. There was a lot of talk of re-launching the international economy, perhaps re-launching detente. In practice it didn't work out that way, maybe in part because of Carter's deep interest in human rights, which obviously created some problems in dealing with the Soviets and others. But one wonders, then, what kind of a debate went on in Ottawa about some of these things at that time, and whether you as CDS were involved with this kind of discussion?

 

[FALLS] No, that's one of my little notes here, I was surprised almost to find the question in there, because I could not give you any particular opinion on what Canada thought about these things, because there was no forum in which I would be included. Because there was no direct involvement of the military in these issues. There was nothing that required a military opinion, because Canada could not see itself, I suppose, as responding militarily to any of these major issues in such a material way. But to kind of balance this, Roger, let me give you another couple of examples, one that took place while I was Vice and the other one while I was Chief and had to do with peacekeeping. Now there was an issue that Canada was brought into very much in an international forum. I'm thinking first of Indochina, where the Americans were pressuring us greatly to provide a peacekeeping force in order to allow them I guess to gracefully get out, as gracefully as they could. And my predecessor and I worked very closely with the Minister in the formation of that and what the rules would be. He was adamant about the way that Canada would partake in this peacekeeping force and some of the ground rules and some of the safeguards. Subsequently, we were asked to provide a large contingent of people for Lebanon after the Israeli invasion. And my advice was sought on that. Again I knew that the Prime Minister wanted to know but he didn't ask me directly, and I can't remember now whether it was through External or through the Minister, or the ministerial process. Certainly I made it quite clear that it was a no-win situation for Canada. As it turned out it was a correct decision, I think, for Canada not to get mixed up in that. And that was our advice to the government and they accepted it. But it wasn't a one-on-one, as I say the P.M. and me, by any shot. Although, of course he was involved in and interested in that decision.

 

[HILL] But the ADM Pol for example - as we are talking about civil servants and the CDS dealing with External as well as relating upwards to the Ministers - the ADM Pol is involved presumably in all kinds of discussions of one thing and another. How does he relate to the CDS?

 

[FALLS] He relates to the extent that I would hope and I think there has been — you know I think there were gaps in this quite frankly — but he had an open and immediate access to the CDS if he wanted to, and I-think like any other head of department he had an obligation to keep the CDS informed. And in any cases where there were questions of judgement, as I say I think this may have broken down once or twice in the sense that things kind of got off in a certain direction in some cases well along the way, before the CDS got into the act and could do much about it. I guess I'm thinking of the Canadian participation in the AWACs programme, where I think it got so far down the pipe that we didn't have a choice, but it would not have been my choice to get involved.

 

[COX]     Could you say why, not in any great detail?

 

[FALLS] Maybe my nose is out of joint in the sense that the decision was made before I had a chance to get involved, but we had such a terrible problem in our own forces in the capital budget that to take money out of that and to put it into an international c programme, which at that time, was not agreed to by all nations - - when I'm talking about this, Belgium particularly had still not agreed. And once Canada got on the bandwagon of course Belgium was cornered like a rat, couldn't get out and had to sign. It was a terrible sort of process of consultation and agreement. And I guess I too felt that AWACs was a highly overrated thing. It's the tip of the iceberg and I don't think it will ever happen again. But I didn't want it to happen in the first place. I don't think it's proper for NATO as an organization to own hardware that will in fact wear out, you know, and somebody then is going to have to think about the replacement of it. If this sort of thing spread it would be I think disastrous for the cohesion of the Alliance. Much was made of the AWACs once we bought it and all of its capabilities, and how useful it would be, and when the Polish crisis emerged, when it appeared as if there might be an invasion, and everybody said ah ha lets bring the AWACs over, at some concern to the Atlantic Fleet Commander I might add, SACEUR took the AWACs out of Iceland and sent them to Germany, because the NATO AWACs hadn't arrived on the scene at that stage. I was very disappointed when I got in one of those airplanes for one of their operational flights, up and down the inter-German border, and found that you couldn't even see past the middle of Poland, where the action was going to be. And so I kept wondering why in the hell we bought those AWACs with all the publicity that surrounds it over there, and everybody is ohing and ahing at what wonderful airplanes they were, and indeed they are, but they were not much good for what they were supposed to be there for, as far as I could see. Anyway that's purely my judgement, purely my opinion I should say, and, as I say, once I got involved or was aware of it, Canada was too far gone really; but I think I was a bit blindsided on that one.

 

[COX] Admiral Falls, I find listening to you and thinking of the comments that we've made on the policy-making process, I don't mean just in DND but in matters of defence, that it's quite difficult still to understand. Part of the difficulty is in the unique structure. The military structure, you said last time, is now integrated. But clearly, to some extent, there is a tension between the civilian and military sides. What I still don't really understand is the way in which policy is generated.

 

[FALLS] What specific kind of policy are you speaking of?

 

[COX]     Well, I'll take your example of the AWACs. Could one describe the normal way in which such a policy would develop in DND.

 

[FALLS] Well, in the first place the policy didn't start in DND, and that is the problem. The policy started with, I suspect, with Lockheed Corporation, as an American initiative to sell AWACs to NATO. And it was something that was cut off at the lower levels and was very carefully and cunningly designed to do it this way. So that it got an enthusiastic backing within staff levels here and there, and then the idea was to sell it up the ladder. And that's the way most policies get made. They don't come from the top down, they come from the bottom up. And so it all gets to a certain level before one at the top even hears about it. There had been an awful lot of discussion and talk of cost sharing, and if we had to go in what would our negotiating position be and one had to do this in order to be able to give your bosses a reasonable kick at the cat. Well, before you know it, the policy is there, you know what it is going to cost you, you know what the offsets are — we did in this case, I've forgotten what the offsets were but they weren't bad as I recall, in fact I think we might have sold them a trainer from CAE — but the fact is that by the time one hears about it as CDS it's so far down the pipe that if you withdraw your support, considering that there are a lot of other reasons to contribute to the programme, for example by saying well you know we haven't got much money, that is not a very good excuse. But that's the way policy generally emerges. Well, it did in this case, bottom up. This is often the case except where there is a governmental initiative which comes down through the Minister, which is the way it should work and does from time to time. And when it comes down through the Minister you sit and you study what he wants to be studied and come back with the answers. This is the most fun in fact, from the point of view of the CDS, because he's in it from the beginning.

 

[COX] Could I just change the example. The object of this question is not to ask you to second guess yourself. One of the examples that's always interested me is the CF-18, and I would contrast it with the Long Range Patrol Aircraft where it seems to me you have a procurement decision which in retrospect stands up extraordinarily well. But in the case of the CF-18, I assume, obviously, that at the time when the decision was made, it was understood that the CF-18 is not an aircraft which is optimised for long range interception in the North American context. So one assumes that the decision was made to try to accommodate different roles. Would you be able to comment on that decision in terms of the policy process. The decision to get one aircraft to do several roles, is that an early on decision which is made before the main steps of procurement? Is it an issue which is open at various levels?

 

[FALLS] The decision, you know, the process — in retrospect I can't find fault with it, the process of arriving at the decision on the CF-18 — it was the same process that arrived at the Aurora decision, and it all starts with money. We had a turnaround as we talked about yesterday, when we got a real increase in our budget, and that built-in increase was to go to capital equipment. It was a bit of a fight, and it still is I presume to keep it within capital and not spend it on other things. And so one had to plan one's acquisition programme out into the future. It was kind of a tough decision. I can answer your question about how satisfied were the Canadian Armed Forces at this time, that is to say 1977, with the government's re-equipment plan. And I was going to say they were by and large very satisfied, except that the Navy were still very nervous because they hadn't seen much except a few plans about ship replacement.

 

Well, I was conscious of this fact — that the first order of priority in the re-equipment was tanks, for Germany. The Centurions were falling apart, and the CDS was a land officer, General Dextraze, and therefore it made sense to everybody that we would get new tanks. Unfortunately, when a naval type got to be CDS it was assumed that the naval type would look after the Navy. Well, the obvious requirements for sheer safety, if you like, were air programmes, Aurora being the first ones, because the Argus was absolutely useless by that time, and the fighters to replace basically the 101s — the 104s — it wasn't anymore a safety problem than it always had been, in the sense that it was known as the widow-maker but it was still maintainable, whereas the CF- 101's were getting to be hard to maintain, and I think there were structural problems that were causing a lot of concern. And it was obvious to me and to a lot of other people that this air programme should go ahead first.

 

However, in that process we still maintained, or blocked out over a period of time, how much money would be spent on cleaning up the tank programme and cleaning up the Aurora programme and how much would be spent on them. It was a very complex and difficult and interesting problem, to try and programme all of your capital acquisitions so that it showed X number of bucks for the fighter programme with the long-range expenditures for the naval ship replacement programme, plus all the little programmes that have to go in there as well. These are the major ones. Now, one of the first criteria was that the programme shall not exceed X number of millions of dollars. Okay? That had to be, in order to keep the programme from falling apart, that had to be the primary goal. You buy as many airplanes as you can fit in that budget and that's supposed to maintain X number of bucks for spares, the first weapons, ground equipment, that was part of the capital programme, you know, land, test equipment, things like that; any ancillary equipment was all supposed to come within that.

 

So that was what the task group, what was it called, the NFA, Paul Manson's group, that was their first criterion. Secondly, and this was all done as a matter of military policy, we looked at the government's priorities and policies, and said the programme will thus have to provide an airplane that will — well first of all we wanted one airplane rather than two or three or four, one airplane to do the air defence role, and it would have to do the European role, because that maximizes the number, and minimizes the stores, the procurement, the logistics problems. You know this is a problem when you've got a minimum, X number of bucks and we were talking — if one wanted to go for the CF-15 you're talking 50 - 60 airplanes which would have been the total Air Force - that's not very great. So, it was obvious to everybody, and it was agreed by everybody, that one airplane would have to be chosen. It should be able to do all the roles. It shouldn't be optimised necessarily.

 

I'm not sure how we prioritized that. I guess Paul created a weighting kind of graph, where he allowed so much for air defence and so much for ground attack and so much for interaction in Europe and those sort of things so you could weigh each of the contenders in the various lines. The F-18 came out in a very objective judgement on the top of the heap. It was that simple. There were was an awful lot of public speculation. There were, I think, accusations of bickering and uncertainty. The only thing that I think might have biased the decision a little bit, — in the first place I think the airmen wanted the F-15, it was the biggest and the best, and it took a little persuasion to tell them that they weren't going to get any more money and therefore if they wanted an F-15 it was going to be a 50 airplane airforce, and I think they always had that idea that well once we got started, we'd get more. So they were disabused of that. Then the question became the F- 16 and the F-18 and I think I was the devil's advocate for the 16s simply to keep the objectivity of the programme.

 

[FALLS] In fact I was quite prepared to let the evaluators do their evaluation, and accept their judgement. The only thing that I think was an overreaction was over the one engine of the CF-16 - the single engine. There was an awful lot of emotion about it in the fact that we can't expect our boys to fly over the cold Arctic in one engine airplanes and that's very dangerous and that we have a commitment to Norway and we had to fly across the Atlantic and that one engine 'ain't on.' It's pretty hard to tell that to the Americans who do that all the time. They fly over the cold North Atlantic to Europe in F-16s, and the Norwegians have an awful lot of flights out over the Norwegian Sea and it's very cold there as well. So there was probably a little bit of emotion in that. But I think that by and large the F-18 is still the best compromise, and I was certainly content to see that decision being arrived at. I think it was arrived at honestly, and fairly, and without any undue pressures from either industry or government.

 

Certainly NATO made its views clearly known that they would have preferred to see us go to F-16s because it would have been the common NATO airplane. In particular, one of my good and close colleagues, the CDS in Norway, expressed his disappointment because he was, in a previous incaration, one of the people who had negotiated the F-16 for the European consortium. However, I don't think they put undue pressure on Canada, as far as I'm aware. I think they were disappointed and that's about all. So that's my appreciation of what happened with that fighter.

 

[COX] It is in fact a situation where once the basic assumptions were made about government policy, then the process took place within DND, as you described it, and was step by step.

 

[FALLS] Where there was a problem, or could have been a problem, is if there had been a major difference in the industrial benefits. There were a lot of promises made and there were a lot of full page ads taken out in the paper and that sort of thing. Had there been enough of that to have influenced the decision against that which DND wanted, I suppose it might have been a different story. There may have been some acrimonious discussions. I suppose there might even have been some resignations. But it didn't happen that way. And that's another good reason to have a good rapport between the CDS and the Minister. The Minister can do a lot, and he's your only ally in fact, to ensure that these things which have to be taken into consideration, which are part of the political facts of life in Canada, don't take on an over riding importance.

 

[HILL] Could I go on to ask one last question on your period as CDS before we go onto the other period. You mentioned that your duties as CDS included a whole range of tasks. It wasn't a case of spending all your time working on or thinking about NATO. However, there were people in the Department who were of course linked to NATO. This was a period when there was thinking about a longer war in Europe and so there was more talk about mobilization plans and so on. It was also the period of the three percent decision of NATO, which Canada participated in, to increase defence spending by three percent real growth per year. It was also the period of the INF decision, the two track decision of December 1979. There were a lot of things going on. I guess the main question I'd like to ask is this. Canada participated in these decisions, but who was leading all this work? I mean, what was the reason for this shift of thinking away from the short war? Why was this three percent policy proposed? Who led the thinking about the INF decision? Was this, do you think, a necessary response to what the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were doing, or were there other reasons behind this; and what part did Canada play in all this?

 

[FALLS] I think it's fair to say that Canada always plays a reactive part in these decisions and these trends, as do the other minor NATO players. The Alliance is led by the United States. If the United States is not providing adequate leadership, as perhaps in the Carter years there may have been a perception, then the Alliance gets very unhappy and criticizes the Americans- for not providing the leadership. And when they provide too much, as in the Reagan case, they get unhappy about the way they are led. But in fact most of the initiatives, in my judgement, in my observation, I think have come out of the American delegation or directly as American policies. Don’t you agree from your time in NATO?

 

[HILL] Well, I think when the Americans don't provide the leadership, at least while I was there, what happens is that the Europeans tend to jockey for position, then nobody winds up leading. But that may have changed a lot because I think the Europeans are a lot more together these days than they were when I was there, because of the European Community. I've never been quite able to understand why the short war idea went out of the window. I've never seen any reason to demonstrate that the strategic equation had changed all that much to justify this change in thinking. I had the clear impression that it was coming from the US, as you say, but I'm never quite sure why.

 

[FALLS] Well, I can only give you a few opinions, not from any inside information of from being Chairman or CDS, but sort of observing the scene and assuming that. The Americans have always been very sensitive to the German position, from the very early Post-War years in my view, but this has always been the case. The German question looms large in their minds in everything. I suspect that was probably the reason for this change from the short war to the long war. For instance, the short war scenario, if you like, would have been, of course, a nuclear, a trip wire, and Germany thought about this for a while and suddenly realized, my God we'd be devastated, we'd be a rubble of a country. Most of the weapons of mass destruction would have fallen, it seems to me, on German soil, and I think what they were trying to generate there, in retrospect, was to get a little less emphasis on nuclear warfare and on the trip wire concept. In other words, it was a genuine desire to have a more deterrent posture I think. But what this meant, in fact, was a new linkage between Europe and America. It was that link that Schmidt was looking for, that he spoke of in his Buchan lecture in London; more of a linkage between problems in Europe and the use of this strategic deterrent or the American nuclear deterrent. And so, I think, probably, it was in trying to respond to Germany's concern that the Americans, and I think quite rightly, decided that it was time to put more emphasis on conventional forces and therefore less reliance, not less numbers or anything else like that, heaven forbid, but less reliance on the nuclear trip wire aspects. There was never any formal, as I recall, any formal judgement as to whether it would be a long war or a short war, but what there was of course was a specific decision to go for a three percent growth. This, if my memory serves me correctly, took place at a meeting of Heads of State in London, in about 1977, when Jimmy Carter was President and he got the other NATO nations to agree to this three percent real growth for three years. In 1977 — that was to have expired in 1980 — and then we would have been fine. And the impression was that we would have had enough conventional weapons to have reduced our reliance on nuclear weapons. Now what that less reliance was supposed to be, I never heard. You know, would they have changed their policy? Would they have changed their no-first-use policy? I don't know.

 

[HILL] David, do you have a quick one on INF before we go onto the next phase?

 

[COX] Well, I'm just interested in this account. In fact the decision to boost conventional forces came before the two track decision on the INF?

 

[FALLS] I'm sure it did. The INF decision came in 1979 and it was more as a direct result of Helmut Schmidt's initiative.

 

[COX] It does immediately raise the question of the Canadian role in resupply. As the CDS, you would have turned your attention to convoy protection again?

 

[FALLS] No, I think it has always been my assumption and perhaps that of our colleagues, that if there is a short war there is no part for Canada in it. And furthermore — I suppose the military is supposed to think that way — but you know after all it is a game of deterrence and people I don't think, yet, always make the distinction between what is a deterrent posture and what is a war-fighting posture, despite the fact that most military people will admit that if there is a war it will be a no-win situation for both sides. So I tended to try and avoid personally any thoughts of whether it is a long or short war. There shouldn't be any war. But what is therefore the best thing for Canada to do to prevent a war from happening? There is a very fine distinction: if you haven't got a war fighting capability, then you are not demonstrating any deterrence. But it is incredible, too, how often if you do make this distinction you will make a slightly different judgement. But in the case of Canada, as I say, if there was a short war and it was a nuclear war, we wouldn't play a part. Therefore, we assumed, at least I assumed and I think my colleagues did too, we had to assume that if we were to play any part at all it would be, unlikely as it might be that there would be a long conventional war, that we would be in the resupply business, or that we would have to demonstrate our resupply capability in times of tension, and therefore that was a proper and adequate role for Canada's forces. And I think that coloured our thinking in terms of a Norwegian commitment and it certainly coloured our thinking in terms of our commitment in the central front and in the mobile group. And indeed in the frigate replacement plan. It's all part of that philosophy I guess.

 

[COX] So if one sees a single thrust to it, it is to contribute to the deterrent by ensuring that, certainly within the capabilities of the country, that there would be a prolonged conventional phase in the event of a war.

 

[FALLS] Well, let me say that could be your judgement. But as I said before, I just feel that, if there were a long conventional phase, that is to say if there was a war at all, we have failed in what we are trying to do which is to deter war. That doesn't just apply to Canada, it applies to the whole world.

 

[COX] I think what I am trying to reach for here is to ask you whether you think the resupply, and contributing to maintaining the sea lines of communication, is an intrinsically invaluable Canadian contribution, not to war fighting, but to deterrence.

 

[FALLS] I do, I think that it is important to demonstrate that, and in this I think — there are further questions that you had about rapid reinforcement, but I think that is fundamentally what the SACEUR of the time felt once he put this finally into the programme; that if you could demonstrate a rapid reinforcement capability then there would not be a tendency of the Soviets to think they could overrun Europe and get to the Channel in a couple of days (for what reason I'm not sure), and have the Allies too befuddled or something, or too frightened, to react to nuclear weapons. Let me reinforce the fact that I think that the resupply of Europe is a legitimate role for Canada in NATO in its primary role of deterrence.

 

Part VI - Chairman of the Military Committee, NATO, 1980-83

 

[HILL] Admiral Falls, in 1980 you were appointed Chairman of the NATO Military Committee. That made you the first Canadian to hold that position. And if I'm not mistaken that made you the senior allied military officer, since the Military Committee is the governing military body under the North Atlantic Council and sets the policies which commanders such as SACEUR then have to flesh out and implement. I have a whole series of questions in my mind about relationships here between the Chairman of the Military Committee, the members of the Committee, and the relationship between the Military Committee itself and the NATO Council and so on. I wonder if you could tell us something about the question of modalities, and how you as the Chairman of the Military Committee fitted into the hierarchy, and what dealings did you have with SACEUR, and so on? I think if we could put that all into one basic question, we'll go on to talk about more substantive issues afterwards.

 

[FALLS] Okay, this is something I might have a problem rambling on about. The way you posed the question is absolutely correct in terms of the position of the Chairman of the Military Committee, and the way in which NATO was formed and the structure created. The Military Committee was formed to provide military advice and it was deemed that the best military advice would come collectively from the Chiefs of Defence Staff, and their spokesman is the Chairman of the Military Committee. And the Military Committee is CDSs, not their representatives as you are aware. This is a body, however, that is meant to provide advice and counsel to the Council and has no operational authority. The operational authority is SACEUR and the other major NATO commanders, SACLANT and CINCCHAN. However, you talked about influence. The first thing you have to think of is that CDSs should not have a different view publicly than their masters. The CDS works for a minister of national defence in every country and he should be giving advice to that minister, and, therefore, in a sense the Military Committee, because of that very fact, is almost redundant. To think that you could have a meeting of the Military Committee that would come up with different recommendations or solutions to the Council of Ministers, the Defence Council, is to ask a lot from the democratic process. There's just no room for maneuver. And that indeed is the root cause, if you like, of where I see the problem of the Military Committee and its lack of prestige in NATO. I don't know how you felt about it, Roger, when you were there, but certainly I felt and was told in no uncertain terms by many' people, including, very bluntly, by one of the heads of government, amongst a few provocative remarks about NATO itself, that there was absolutely no room for the Military Committee and they were a useless group. I think that view was shared in many ways in the NATO headquarters itself in Brussels. Because there was very little room for them to initiate anything or to do other than react and of course to make resounding noises about the terrible military situation in Europe. And so I, indeed, was aware before I took this job about the lack of respect if you like and influence in the Military Committee. I had been taken to Europe by my predecessor, General Dextraze, to have a look at one of these meetings and yet I suppose I thought there was a possibility of making a small and modest change to the way in which they did business. Because I think there was room for them to make a better contribution in being a bit more active, in taking a slightly more independent view perhaps. But it was not to be. The Military Committee will not change because it really can't change for the reasons I mentioned.

 

[HILL] I guess I didn't have quite that same impression. I guess what I see as being the utility of the Military Committee is the fact that, since in peacetime NATO is largely a planning organization, this body is one element in the planning process. And the other thing is, if you didn't have the Military Committee, then you wouldn't have any multilateral group at the head of the main commanders, all of whom, with one exception I think, are Americans. That was another question I wanted to come to: presumably as Chairman of the Military Committee, your job was to reflect the views of the collectivity of the membership of your committee, which was of course from all of the NATO countries. And what about your dealings with SACEUR, who of course is a US officer? Did you find that you, as a sort of NATO person in the sense of representing a collective viewpoint, and also being Canadian, had differences of perception from SACEUR, who is not only a NATO officer himself but is also the Commander-in-Chief of the US forces in Europe. So was there any sort of conflict? How difficult was the coordination process?

 

[FALLS] It could have been, and apparently was in the past, difficult, this coordination process. In my case, I arrived after Bernie Rogers had been there for I think only about six months or so, and he had decided that he would like to co-operate and get along with the Chairman of the Military Committee, whoever he might be. When I came he made an effort and I responded and we had an excellent relationship throughout the whole time. You talked about the fact that it’s a planning organization, but one has to remember where most of the planning starts in the process; and the planning starts in SHAPE. They're the ones with the massive international or multinational staff and I say massive in comparison to Brussels. They've got the talent and the intelligence and the muscle to do all the planning, and it is international because he has other nations on his staff, although lets face it it's basically an American organization. And there's no way you can compete, nor is it such that you try to compete with the system, which is that they generate the staff paper, and it comes to Brussels and we kind of massage it and then it goes up to Council and that just puts us as a link in the chain and nothing ever changes. Nothing is really ever changed by the Military Committee, or at least I can't remember anything significant, being changed by the Military Committee. So I knew that, and I said, if this is the way it is, I might as well not fight with this guy, I might as well try to get along with him and influence him if such can be done on a personal basis. As I say we got along very well, we met for lunch once a month, as a matter of routine almost but we set it up so we had some worthwhile discssions; and we protected it and achieved it. These lunches were one-on-one, no note takers, no nothing, no spies, no tape recorders running. And some of them lasted for three or four hours and so we each knew what the other was thinking, pretty well. So to that extent I guess I was able to get my views across in a private way where they counted, and I guess that's the way most organizations do business on a one-on-one basis.

 

[HILL] Of course SACEUR is only twenty miles down the road from Brussels and he's got plenty of high powered cars and he's got a helicopter, if he wants to get up to NATO Headquarters. But the fact was that you were on the spot, and I'm thinking in terms of talking with the Secretary General and the Ambassadors and so on, if they needed someone on the spot to advise, or for an on the spot input by the military. You were the person there, and I presume that's an important element.

 

[FALLS] Yes, this would be important in the event of an immediate crisis that involved NATO. Most of the crises that occurred didn't involve NATO, but world problems, and NATO jealously guards the fact that they have NATO borders, and there are Turks and Greeks and people like that who won't let them forget it. But surely the Chairman is there, and I had access to any of the Ambassadors and to the Secretary General. I used to try and meet with the Secretary General once a week. Now this didn't always occur, because we didn't often have that much to discuss. But we used to kind of try to make some excuse to have at least five minutes together somehow. But his door was open — I never had a problem with Joe to get into his office. He never made it difficult at all for me to approach him, and I think it's fair to say that the other Ministers were the same. There was never any lack of rapport between myself and the members of the Council in Permanent Session.

 

[HILL] I think that one of the advantages of NATO is that it really is a rather small organization. I guess the ease of your contact with the Secretary General in NATO may have contrasted with what you said earlier about being the CDS and the difficulty to get in to see the PM.

 

[FALLS] I think there are two reasons. One is the fact that NATO is very much a lot of form rather than substance, and that therefore the form of the chairman being in that hierarchy is important to maintain. The second thing is that NATO is not an overworked organization, and therefore there is time for these things to happen. People do have time to sit and talk about substantive things on a one-on-one basis or to form groups. There are very seldom times when Ambassadors are over-committed.

 

[HILL] Let's turn now to a more substantive point. In the Polish crisis, there were differences of perception, I think, among the allies. How were your relations with SACEUR in that period. I mean SACEUR was an American officer as well as being a NATO officer. You're there as the head of the international military organization, the military side of the organization. Were there differences of perception as to what was happening in the Polish crisis and, if so, how was that coordinated?

 

[FALLS] I don't think there were any differences of perception because it was hard to argue with the facts. The buildup of Soviet troops and the pressures against Poland were obvious. I think what surprised everybody was Jaruzelski declaring martial law. That was an eye-opener and a great surprise to everyone. And I don't think that there was any feeling either that there was a damn thing that the West could do about that situation in Poland, other than those sanctions that were imposed. And there was never any question of a military response to a Soviet invasion of Poland, never.

 

[HILL] I mean, even in terms of moving to higher states of alert?

 

[FALLS] Well, sure, it was obvious that that was going to happen. I mean, that is just an automatic kind of military reaction. If we don’t know, then lets just go up the scale. That's just a good prudent reaction.

 

[HILL] Were there differences of perceptions as to whether the Soviets might go into Poland or not? I mean, why I ask this is that I happened to be in Cuba at the time and there were scare stories running around at the time that if the Soviets went into Poland the Americans would go into Cuba. Now it was hard to judge at the time, but it certainly gave one cause to think, and there was certainly a sense that the Americans were going to be tough about this thing, that they were taking a tough line on it, or wanted to. And I don't think the rest of the allies were quite so tough.

 

[FALLS] That's absolutely true. I think that all the initiatives came from the Americans and there were a hell of a lot of go-slow and cautionary remarks from other countries. In NATO it was always that way, the Americans wanted the action, they were always pushing the others to do this and that and this was the whole situation. It was the same in that gas pipe line problem. Well, any American problem. The Iran-Iraqi or the Iranian hostage problem. The Americans were always, of course, trying to get the allies to do more.

 

[HILL] But there wouldn't be any question of NATO actually sending forces into Poland or anything like that. I mean that's totally out of the question. So there isn't any actual potential requirement to use military forces in any way. So the degree of possible differences is relatively small. There's not that much room for differences of opinion, really.

 

[FALLS] No, I don't recall, quite frankly, if there was an increase in the official alert status, I don't think there was. Bernie Rogers has the capability, a pre-delegated capability with the air defence forces in Germany. Whether he did something with that, I don't remember. And of course there was always the feeling that we've got to do something, clear the air, the Soviet's are about to — and yet this was not an act of war against NATO. It's nevertheless disturbing enough to be seen as some kind of a crisis, and so there's sort of this automatic demand that we've got to do something and I could see him floundering over it, you know. What could we do, what kind of sanctions, and then what could we do militarily? Well we can bring AWACs over, and this was seen as a salvation of some sort, as I mentioned before, I'm not sure why. If this had of course led to an expansion and military forces carrying on in to East Germany, if there was a lot of air activity going on, sure the AWACs would have been useful to indicate that that was the case. There would have been lots of other indications before that, however. It demonstrated that there was some action and that's what people wanted to see.

 

[COX] Is it possible that the issue was perhaps another one, i.e., how the Soviet action presented itself to the Western public. Some people have said, from the vantage point of Moscow, that there were many indications that the Soviets did not intend to go into Poland.

 

[FALLS] You are asking me to try to dig out some detail in my7 brain, that I doubt is there, but I do remember that the major cause of concern was movement of helicopters — Soviet helicopters — that put them in a position to move Soviet troops. I don't recall massive troop movements and when I say massive, I am sure there were some — but it certainly didn't look to any of us, in looking at the intelligence, as though there was going to be a possibility of a complete Czechoslovakian type thing. Now, I don't remember how it was presented to the public, quite frankly. But that was all that was presented to the NATO Council. I think that they gave a very objective and factual assessment of what was happening. Now as to the implications of this, of course, there is always a tendency — and it has existed since NATO was formed, and perhaps since military forces existed — to over estimate the enemy. Hence, you have such words as massive military build-up of the Soviets, the terrible imbalance between the forces, and all that sort of thing, which on closer examination, perhaps, are over statements. But there is enough truth in all of this to generate it. I don’t know. I think that NATO got the right military and intelligence briefings plus the offer of AWACs, which they accepted, because they wanted to be seen as doing something.

 

[HILL] On the NATO-Warsaw Treaty Organization forces balance that was published by NATO in '84, would the Military Committee have been involved in the discussion of the details of that paper?

 

[FALLS] Yes. That started while I was there in '83. I'm not sure if you are talking about the first or the second version. The first version was such that I threw up my hands in horror. I knew that I was leaving anyway, and I knew that I couldn't do much about it. That version didn't last very long. They were forced into a revision and came out with a revised version which was a little closer to the facts. Initially, when it was decided to respond to the Soviet publication with a NATO one, it was done in Brussels headquarters as opposed to SHAPE, to permit all military representatives to assess the military balance, and it was so badly distorted as to have been a farce. Everybody had to have their own threat. Every nation had to have a big threat in order to justify its increases in military expenditures and so forth. It was so obviously unfactual as to have to be revised later. I think that first issue, indeed, was published and retracted almost immediately; and the second, more rational, version remained. As an example, all of the Soviet reserve divisions that were just mere cadres were counted in the divisional count. It was, as I said, an exercise that was designed to satisfy every country, and it was done by military people, without too much regard for genuine analysis.

 

[HILL] I guess that leads on to a question that I have as well: what was your perception of trends in the period you were there?; and another thing, do you think that Canada is well served by the fact it receives perceived wisdom from NATO, which may have some flaws in it in terms of analysis and so on?

 

[FALLS] I think that NATO is a self-serving organization to the extent that like any organization, they want to self-perpetuate. And, therefore, it is in the interests of the organization, itself, I am talking about the NATO bureaucracy as opposed to the NATO structure and agreement — they need a good military threat to maintain an existence. And so, there is always a natural tendency to exaggerate. What happens, of course, is to generally create a kind of one-sided picture, or to not give a complete, full story. There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviet forces are superior in Europe. Whether they are massively superior — these kind of adjectives keep creeping in, that don't allow a reasonable approach — and it is very difficult to arrive at a reasonable approach as to what is the balance of power in Europe. One of the best ways to get at it, because this bothers a lot of civilians, including politicians — and I have seen some of the senior politicians question some of the senior military people, like Rogers and some of his major subordinate commanders — and after hearing about this terrible situation, the question is often asked: "Would you be better off if they had your forces and you had theirs?". Well, not really. I have heard responsible NATO commanders — when they are not preaching to an audience — so that one is getting the best judgment possible — say that yes, they think that they are able to do their job. You don't need equivalent forces, you don't need superior forces — you can accept inferior forces and still do your job of defence. And all of them that I have spoken to are well satisfied — not well satisfied — but they are satisfied that they are able to fulfill their role in protection of NATO from attack. And, usually, there is that caveat, "until reinforcements can arrive," but that doesn't always get said either. But in any event, I think to ensure that these people continue to feel the same way, this is a good reason for Canada, as well as the Americans, to demonstrate their capabilities for reinforcement. And incidently — this is without recourse to nuclear weapons.

 

[HILL] How do you see NATO processing of intelligence affecting Canada's perceptions of the world?

 

[FALLS] I don't know. I think that the thing kind of works its way out quite naturally. The fact is that there are organizations such as the IISS who give a reasonably good appreciation of the situation — an objective one. I think so does the Stockholm Institute. There is enough information to kind of give a reasonable picture. That is to say that there is no massive imbalance. There are areas of concern, obviously. And I think that is what the smart guys are trying to say — the objective ones — the ones that are trying to paint the right pictures — that there are areas of concern, that we need a better conventional force if we want to have less dependence on nuclear weapons. But the situation is not quite as critical as has been stated over a period of time. And my concern, as Military Committee Chairman, was that our voice has lost credibility — our voice in the military; we have been over-stating the case for so long that nobody believes us anymore.

 

[HILL] You mean when you say 'our'...?

 

[FALLS] 'Our NATO military leaders', be they Military Committee, or SACEUR, or SACLANT, or what have you. I kind of thought that I might be able to change that, but I couldn't. It is just not in the nature of military people to admit to anything other than that they need more funds for more equipment; and indeed they do. But I think long since the politicians have made their own assessments and analysis and they will know, somehow, instinctively, when there is a need, either politically or militarily, to increase, as happened in Canada in 1974 and in NATO in 1977.

 

[HILL] I think that to me, there always was a problem in the structure of NATO headquarters. You get political committees and senior political committees making political assessments, which tend to be purely political because that is their sort of function and they are supposed to keep out of anything to do with military things. Security things, yes, but certainly not military ones. And you get the Military Committee and the military SACEUR making their analyses. And these two quite separate things are kind of fed into the Council which doesn't really marry them up. You just get a sort of conjunction of these two things, whereas, let's say in Washington, for example, you get the National Security Council, which when it is functioning as it is supposed to function, does a kind of assessment — an overall assessment — which takes segments of these two different types of things and puts them all together. But there isn't that in NATO Headquarters.

 

[FALLS] There should be, Roger. The whole process — this bi¬annual force development process, is supposed to work that way. It starts in SHAPE and it comes to the Military Committee and it goes up and down, and up and down to the Council, where it gets the political input, surely, before the force implementation plan is approved.

 

[HILL] But there isn't any collective, really joint civil- military group with a little bit of autonomy of its own, which could look at these things in an overall sense. I mean, I had some experience with this myself working on MBFR — you write things, you put in some things, some judgments which go over a little bit into the military domain, then what happens is, you get a judgment from the military organization on those things and then one doesn't have any authority to make a response. It is simply taken that it is the military who know about military things, therefore you keep out of it, which is a sort of structural flaw in my opinion.

 

[FALLS] I think that you are right too.

 

[HILL] I guess what I was driving at really is this: do you still feel, on the whole then, that Canada is relatively well served by being in NATO? Seen in terms of what Canada is trying to do in foreign policy, defence policy and military policy, is it well served, or relatively well served, by being in NATO? Or are we being pulled, through excessive assessments of the threat and so on, in directions that Canada would probably prefer not to go?

 

[FALLS] No, I am very strongly of the view that Canada is being well served by her membership in NATO, but only in comparison with not being there. I think that it probably makes relatively little difference to the world as a whole whether Canada is in NATO or not, in terms of either world security or even our own security. But I think that our well being would suffer, if you like — I'm not sure quite how to describe this or explain it — but in our relationships, probably economically, socially and in many other ways with other nations, we would suffer if we tried to get out of NATO without offering something else in lieu. And neutrality is not what they would be looking for. So I think that perhaps Canada demands a bit too much from its NATO commitments. We seem to be forever wondering what is our influence in NATO, would it be more, lesser or greater if we were to reduce or increase our commitments, etc., etc. The answer to that is, not much. I don't think that what we do in NATO is very important because we are not very important to NATO. What we do is of interest for a few minutes and that's it. However, being in NATO, we are at least able to create and present opinions on this world leadership of the United States — it is probably our best forum — it is probably as good at least as the bilateral forum we have with Washington. It's a place where I think we are very well served by our Canadian Ambassadors — the three that I saw, in any event, and I attended every meeting of the Council that I was there for, so I was able to make judgments about the various Ambassadors and how they reacted and I think Canada can hold up her head quite well. There were obviously times when I wished that we could have done more and been more independent, but I think that is the case with almost anyone. If one accepts the fact that NATO is kind of a funny organization, which perhaps isn't as important as the bureaucracy thinks — by that I mean the SECGEN and all the hierarchy there — is not the forum, really, to make massive changes in East-West relations, that these things will occur from a multitude of things, of which the NATO body is one of them. I think it is very valuable for Canada to maintain as much influence as we can in NATO and not to worry very much about whether it is going to increase or decrease; whether or not we have a six percent real growth or a three percent real growth. I don't think that it matters a hell of a lot. I think that we ought to stop denigrating our contributions and perhaps use some of the figures that are favourable to Canada in the way we do contribute to the Alliance, and hold our heads up a little higher. I furthermore don't think that we should deliberately do things that will antagonize our NATO allies, as we may well do in this defence review or in this white paper, depending on which way we go. I think that should be very clear in the minds of our politicians now, when they are constructing this White Paper. What is the impact on our NATO allies? It will undoubtedly be a transient impact and, whatever it is, I'm sure that NATO will get over it. But, I don't particularly think that it is a good idea to do something stupid that would antagonize them, and cause them concern. I'm thinking primarily of the Norwegian commitment.

 

[COX] I guess that I find that I am being pulled along by your line of reasoning. So I don't have a question, but it is more a reflection of what you are saying. From that vantage point, your position on the Military Committee, as you look back at Canada, did you come back with some strong convictions about what we should be doing, what we should not be doing?

 

[FALLS] You mean in the military or the political field?

 

[COX] In the military field.

 

[FALLS] The strongest conviction, as I said, is, don't rock the boat. When I came back from Europe, we were still in the process of building up the armed forces. As far as I was concerned, we were still in that climbing slope of real growth that was really going to equip our Armed Forces, and I was pretty sanguine that this would go on. That was three years ago; I am not as sanguine now. In fact, the six percent that we had is now down to about three, and it might even be less than that. In other words, there was a time when we were able to say to NATO, we are exceeding the NATO standard of 3%; and they were able to say back — well, it is about time, because you were so low. Now we are back to where we have less than a three percent real growth. The government made kind of a futile gesture of sending some more troops to Europe, but I don't know what good it did. It was a kind of a messing about with something, with the structure, that didn't have much of an effect, either on our capabilities in Europe or on our commitment to Europe; but I think that I came back with a conviction that Canada, for her own reasons, ought to continue with the modernization of the Forces. So that what we say we have got is what we've really got. And this, unfortunately, is going to cost, still, a lot of money, primarily because, whilst we have done the air component reasonably well, there is still a lot of money to be spent in dibs and dabs on the land forces and there is a massive amount of money to be spent in the Navy, if we are not going to have a six-ship navy. I think we deserve a better navy than that. And so we've got to keep on biting the bullet. I think, as I say, I came back thinking we were doing not badly. But in the process, in the meantime, we have started to slip. And, I gather from a chit chat here and there, that Beatty is having a hell of a time with Wilson in creating this White Paper. There is never enough room for defence, unfortunately, in Canadians perceptions.

 

[HILL] Could I perhaps continue on that one, on a number of issues here. I think that basically what you are saying is: the optimum solution for Canada's force in NATO is to do more or less what we are doing, and not to rock the boat, as you said. My feeling is that some changes might be made in specific arrangements, if they can be properly worked out. This is not an oblique reference to CAST. What I am talking about is this: one can't accept that Canada is necessarily going to stay in its present position, just because we happen to be there now. As time goes along, things might change. But what seems to happen is that abrasive types of cuts in our NATO forces or things like that are the things that get attention. They often don't bring that much value to Canada, but they do get people in NATO a bit riled up. On the other hand, increasing Canadian forces might not have that much of a pay-off. I mean the Europeans would be almost as astonished at that as they would be upset at cuts.

 

[FALLS] I agree with you entirely. I didn't try to imply that by not rocking the boat, that we shouldn't make changes. What I meant to say was that we shouldn't rock the boat in the sense of antagonizing our allies about what we do. Now, if we withdraw our CAST combat group, that is obviously an option, and an option that need not necessarily antagonize our European allies, if we do something else to counteract it. But somebody is going to have to do that commitment, and I think if it is a burden to either the Americans or the English, who are the only people who can; and if we don't take on some other tasks to relieve them of their burden - - you know, it is sort of a circular thing — then we will be seen as, once again, creating a problem for NATO. We don't need to leave our European contribution as it stands. There is a strong argument that can be made for bringing back the air component and increasing the land component, making it much more efficient in fact. It's costly, though, because there is no room in Lahr. We couldn't stay where we are. We would have to move up to take on a part of the Central Front, maybe up in Schleswig-Holstein. It is more money, but, you know, that's an option. It is an option that the airmen would not find favour with, because that's their only operational role, and for that reason I would never have supported it as CDS, and would not support it publicly, I guess, just because I don't want to antagonize all the airmen in Canada.

 

[COX] The argument that is frequently made is that you have to have an all arms combat force, that no matter how small it is, it has got to be all arms. Do you agree with that argument, because when you talk about moving to the north, doesn't that imply that you don't have to be all arms?

 

[FALLS] Yes. I don't think that when people speak of all arms, they are including the air. They talk about army, land, infantry, artillery, armour as the all-arms, and I think that that is quite true. They have to fight with the three arms in modern day warfare. And they have to be provided with air defence, be it in the low level air defence that we are in the process of purchasing or by some umbrella where they can fight without being hammered to death by airplanes. I mean, we have been in the attack role before, where there was no relationship between the role of the 104s and the role of the brigade group. And, indeed, with the acquisition of the F-18s, they would not necessarily fight with the Canadian land forces. No, in my view, there is no connection.

 

[HILL] So when the argument was made that NATO does not like specialized forces, that is not to be taken to mean that NATO expects us to field an air group with the land group?

 

[FALLS] No, I don't think so. Not, certainly, in my understanding of it. Incidently, when one asks General Rogers about these things, he just says, don't take anything away. So you don't get a good answer.

 

[HILL] Would it help the CAST commitment if the brigade were re-located in Schleswig-Holstein?

 

[FALLS] Would it help the CAST?

 

[HILL] Yes.

 

[FALLS] Yes.

 

[HILL] What actually would you form the CAST commitment from?

 

[FALLS] I think you would get a better answer from an army type. But I think that the logistics of the CAST combat group would probably be separate from the logistics of the brigade group in Schleswig-Holstein. There may be some merit in that, I don’t know. I hadn't thought about it very much. I think what bothers the army most about this CAST combat group, is that part of the commitment is in the ACE Mobile Force, and if that brigade that we have in the ACE Mobile Force is somewhere else, in Turkey or somewhere, and we send the CAST off to Norway, how do they get married up?

 

[HILL] They've been separated up now, actually. They were separated up about a year and a half ago.

 

[FALLS] Oh yes, I guess I do remember that too.

 

[COX] Can I go back to something drawn from what you said earlier? My impression is that there was a phase, mid '74 or something like that, when it was very visible to the NATO allies that, although Canada had a fair number of forces in Europe, the eguipment was pretty redundant. The sort of tokenism that was there at one time doesn't serve its purpose after a point. And this is what I want to ask you about. Is it not very clear, to the allies, what state the Canadian Armed Forces in Europe are in? Is it well known to the others? I mean by the NATO review processes...

 

[FALLS] Well, I can’t accept your premise for starters. And since we are speaking to history here, and not for being quoted back by the press tomorrow, let's talk about our contribution to Europe in terms of what is most important, and that is the same reason that the American troops are over there, a form of presence that one can call a hostage group, if you like, but certainly a demonstration — a clear demonstration — of Canada's commitment to the Central Front and to European defence. The fact that they are there and the fact that their dependents are there: I can't think of any clearer demonstration by Canada of its support of NATO, and that is the way the Germans see it, in my view, when I talk to Germans. They don't care whether they have bullets for their guns — they do, of course, but the quality of that contribution is not as significant as the fact that they are there. Now to go back to the quality again, I don't know what people are complaining about when we have managed to demonstrate, time after time, in competitions — military competitions — that we are second to none against the quality of our competitors. We come out near or at the top of these military competitions, that are taking place just to keep everybody on their toes — country against country — and we have never collapsed in that. Even with our old equipment, we managed to keep up with the best of them. And I think that there is a genuine feeling of pride in our troops in Europe, that they are good. And, certainly, I am absolutely convinced that they are worth one for two of every American over there.

 

[HILL] I remember being in the mess in Lahr one day. We were stuck there one day on some trip that I was on, about 1977, in that period. I got an ear-full for about three hours from an air force officer who was flying a CF-104 and telling me about all the miseries of flying those at that time. So the pressure then, in your view, is really all from the Canadian military, rather than NATO as such, to do the re-equipment?

 

[FALLS] Well, no, there is a mutual back-scratching here, you know. The Canadian military wants more equipment, therefore General Rogers, SACEUR, will support that. And he will make noises about the terrible state of the Canadian equipment. You know, that is automatic, and one should expect it. If you are talking about the morale of the people themselves, when you go back to those CF- 104 days — I don't know if you have ever flown in a CF-104 over there — I had a chance to fly in one, and it is a most interesting, frightening airplane — you know, it demanded a pretty high level of skills, and therefore these guys were pretty proud of their skills. And they did a very useful role in those airplanes. They just got kind of old. I would hesitate, yet, to say they were obsolete. For what they were designed to do, they were still pretty good at it. But the airmen were pretty happy, I think, on the whole, especially knowing that a new plane was coming. The army was a different kettle of fish. But by the time I got to know them, in '77, the tanks were on their way. I don't know what their morale prior to that was; I assume that it may have been a bit down, because of equipment.

 

[HILL] We hear people say that, for example, just to take three cases: (1) where the destroyers may be old, they are still very good ASW platforms; (2) that if they were in combat, the mechanized brigade group would give a very good account of themselves; (3) and that it wouldn't be so easy at all for the Soviets to come down through northern Norway, partly because of the CAST commitment. What we hear are really two somewhat discrepant views. We are in a terrible state, but we will give a very good account of ourselves if we have to.

 

[FALLS] That is military pride. Gosh, you can't think otherwise, can you. I don't know, I think that it is all very subjective. The main thing is that we create a deterrent process in our armed forces. But, nevertheless, you can't help thinking, in fact one has to keep in mind, that people are in the military for purposes of fulfilling the ultimate, which is to fight. And it is unfair to ask people to be in the military unless you are going to give them the equipment and the tools to do that, and that is one of my strong points before parliamentary committees and things like that. There is an obligation of the country to ensure that the guy is not put into a position to have to do this without proper equipment. It is bad for his morale. You know that war will never take place, hopefully. But that is no excuse, really, to deprive him of the tools to do his job. But you know, as I say, it is very subjective, and you can go either way, in terms of what you think. I happen to think very highly of Canadian troops, be they sailors, or airmen, or soldiers. Not just from chauvinistic reasons, but because I have seen others. There are other troops in this world, too, that I have the greatest admiration for; and the Soviets are not part of them. So that is another part of the balance that I think is so terribly important, that is ignored. If one were to invade the Soviet Union and give them a raison d'etre to fight, then, my God, they would be hard to beat. But in terms of a bunch of Soviet conscripts fighting in East and West Germany, or something, you know, again, two for one would be about right.

 

[HILL] I just have one very last question: as Chairman of the Military Committee, you also presided over the MBFR Working Group and things like that, where you had military officers analyzing the overall balance of forces, the conventional balance and so on in Europe, and participating in the decision-making process in regard to NATO's positions on MBFR. How valuable is NATO in terms of promoting detente and arms control, and how valuable is it to Canada in that way?

 

[FALLS] I didn't find that the NATO Military Committee could get very exercised about MBFR or the CSCE process or any of the other arms control questions. My colleagues, that is to say the Permanent Military Representatives, didn't seem to be able to generate much interest. There was of course a staff that looked at them and they would make reports. But the only time I saw the Military Committee get exercised about anything along these lines was in the CSCE process, when one of the confidence building measures was to notify military movements from the Atlantic to the Urals. When somebody said the Atlantic, the naval types all screamed and kicked and said you can't do this because it's always been a law of the sea that you can go anywhere and seas are free and you can't tell people ahead of time - ignoring that maybe there are a few satellites up there that can do the job for you. Aside from that I don't recall anybody getting very interested in these processes.

 

[HILL] But speaking as a Canadian and knowing NATO in general, not necessarily in your capacity as Chairman of the Military Committee, how useful do you think is NATO in this respect, and how useful is it from Canada's point of view to be in NATO in order to promote those kinds of things.

 

[FALLS] I think it's important for Canada to be in NATO, not through a military process particularly, I mean not through the military voice, but because we have an Ambassador at the table who will join with others to give the Americans their views on bilateral US-Soviet relations, as well as to participate in multilateral process. It is a good forum in which to have discussions about substance and to make Canada's views known.

 

[HILL] So you do think it's valuable to be in for that sort of reason.

 

[FALLS] Absolutely.

 

[HILL] And do you think that, in that way, one helps to promotes international peace and security.

 

[FALLS] I do. Very strongly.

 

[HILL] Well, on that note, we will conclude. We're very delighted you could come. Admiral Falls.