Recent reports say Canada is near the bottom of NATO countries in military spending, equipment is outdated and capabilities limited. To find out how well armed our forces really are, we turned to historian and military expert Professor Desmond Morton. He's written several dozen books on this nation's military and social history, labour and industrial relations, and politics. A graduate of Royal Military College who served in the Canadian Army for ten years, he was founding director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

What is the present state of Canada's military?

Canada's military is worn out, after many years of economy, as it was worn out during every other period of peace time. In a very tough budgetary situation, it has been difficult to persuade the government to make new capital acquisitions to replace old equipment, so the military have fallen into obsolescence.

What kind of armed forces should Canada have?

We have had a priority since Confederation to ensure that the Americans are not worried about their northern frontier. That was the brilliant defence solution that the first confederation government came up with, and I think the Chrétien government is unaware of it.

That is our responsibility, but is it a military, naval, air force responsibility? In part, but chiefly it is a police, customs, and CSIS (Canadian Secutity Intelligence Service) responsibility. After 9/11, when the government put money aside to make the border more secure, very little of it went to the Department of National Defence - to their fury and indignation. But why should the money go there? Does Osama bin Laden own submarines? Does he have missiles? Aside from some small anti-aircraft missiles, no. So the military's response was inappropriate at the time.

You mention in your latest book, Understanding Canadian Defence, that there is pressure on us to replicate what the American military has. Why aren't we doing that?

We could, if we chose to do so, finance as much defence spending per capita as the Americans, up to 4% of our GNP. When I lecture, I tell audiences that we could do this by raising the Goods and Services Tax to 25%, for example; all in favour, say aye. Nobody does. We could take half the cost of medicare, and privatize the other half, to find the money. Nobody, certainly not in older audiences, says yes to that. Or, we could do what George W. Bush has done, which is to go back to having a roaring deficit, and great financial instability. Nobody seems keen on that, either.

So when I present audiences with realistic, tough alternatives - saying that you can have it if you're willing to pay - they're not willing.

You say we're not in favour of increased defence spending because we haven't been directly threatened in the past. Is the threat of terrorism changing that?

What changed is that the Americans closed their border, and suddenly, a billion dollars a day was not crossing the border, on the 12th, 13th and 14th of September, 2001. That's a big problem because we have tied our trade to one customer, and our imports to one supplier. That's where terrorism hit Canadians: in the pocketbook. That's why the border matters, and will until we can diversify our trade, which I don't anticipate happening five, ten or even 50 years from now.

We were hit, not by explosions, but by the fear that we would be held responsible for what happened. And I think we all underestimated the level of fear and panic that the 9/11 attacks had on our American neighbours.

Should Canada specialize in certain areas of defence, say, special forces or chemical/biological weapons detection, instead of maintaining a general defence program?

If I was confident that any of us knew what was going to happen, I might be prepared to buy into that. But on the whole, our capacity to prophesy has been abysmal, and our military prophesies have been worse than abysmal. I have spent some time looking at our white papers over the years, and the one thing that our defence white papers have consistently been is wrong. They always predicted something as absolutely certain, and it never happened.

Does underfunding the military affect other Canadian interests in foreign affairs, diplomacy and trade?

That's hard to say. Actually, it's easy to say but hard to prove. Canadians are supposed to be up there with the best, and the military argue that if we aren't, we lose influence in Washington. We are told that the softwood lumber deal went badly because we weren't with the Americans in Iraq. I don't think that's true, but how do I know? There is a powerful U.S. softwood lumber industry lobby, and it works better in Congress than any number of Canadian diplomats. They have votes down there, and we don't.

When you make yourself the sole supplier to your customer, your customer is king. That's the end of sovereignty. There are other arguments (for military involvement) than simply not participating in George Bush's favourite war.

Canadians have long taken pride in our forces' capabilities as peace-keepers. Can we still fulfill that role?

What do they take pride in? I'm not sure they understand the role, or ever did. When we went into peacekeeping, it was presented to Canadians as a very idealistic activity - but not by the military, who understood that they were fulfilling a perfectly rational alliance role. In Cyprus, on the southern flank of NATO, the Greeks and the Turks were practically at war over an island in the Mediterranean. When we sent troops, it was fundamentally as a NATO responsibility. So I see peacekeeping as very realpolitik. We went to Vietnam to help the Americans get out of a situation they had gotten into too deeply, and to Indochina 12 years earlier to try to save them, too. Peacekeeping is part of our international North Atlantic Treaty cold war responsibilities. At the core of all those problems was that if we didn't do something, the Russians would.

Did the end of the Cold War change the role of our military?

Well, we clearly don't worry about northern air space any longer, if we ever did. After the Cold War, we got involved in parts of the world that were anything but peaceful. When we went into Yugoslavia, a sovereign country, to sort out tribal conflicts, that was very different from anything that we did in peacekeeping before 1991. These were dangerous situations and people got killed; that happened in previous peacekeeping, but usually by accident. Now we go in not to keep the peace but to enforce it, and that's a somewhat imperialistic role. In effect we are telling the people in these countries, "You guys can't manage, we're here to help you, and if you don't like it, get out of the way." That's not the kind of gentle, soft peacekeeping that Canadians seem to believe that we practise.

When we went to Somalia, we got into terrible trouble. But we landed there as a foreign country, armed and loaded, ready to shoot our way off the airplanes, because we expected to be met with gunfire. That wasn't peacekeeping, it was peacemaking.

What's the difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking?

Peacekeeping is when both sides have agreed to peace, but can't quite guarantee that everybody is going to be obeying the message. Peacemaking is when you have a monstrous situation going on, from genocide to mass disorder. You go in, like a police force into a riot, and you enforce order. If you arrive with enough force and terrify people, they will, by and large, stand silently by. But if they think they can take you on, they'll shoot you.

The Americans and British seemed unprepared for the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. Why do you think that is?

They were certainly well prepared for the war effort; nobody seemed to be very interested in how you handle Iraq after it was defeated. To me, that should have been sufficient warning not to get involved in this sort of thing. The aftermath is the key part. The people who opposed it were very often U.S. army officers who did understand enough to know that the Americans were moving into something they really hadn't measured or prepared for.

I am concerned that Canadians are going to Kabul at a time when you can sense, across Afghanistan, the mustering of resistance. Countries don't like to be invaded; while Afghans spend most of their time fighting each other, after a while they figure out that there is one common enemy. When they do, they go after it, with considerable avidity.

The U.S. is calling for an international force to assist on the ground in Iraq. Should Canada join in?

At the moment, we have committed so many troops to Kabul that we don't have anything left. We can't do it, unless it was a major policy re-commitment of substantial funds.

Vietnam and Russia's war in Afghanistan showed that committed guerillas can defeat a modern army. Does a high-tech military mean you understand less about the enemy?

There is no mystery about how to deal with terrorist guerillas and the like. The Nazis handled resistance movements in Europe through a simple, awful method: utter brutality. So villages would not shelter the Maquis (the French resistance) because if they did, they would be annihilated. It's horrible to say, but it works. How do you do that with CNN and other modern media free to take pictures and ask people what's going on? You can't.

That's what inhibits the Israelis in dealing with the Palestinians, and the Americans in dealing with Iraqis. Because it's a ghastly, unfair, unjust, genocidal way of treating people. So yes, the military can cope with this kind of problem, but not in any way acceptable to civilized people. The military know that, and many of them were deeply opposed to getting involved in a no-win situation. We can see they're right, but who else does? President Bush? No, he blames anyone in sight for not helping.

What should the Canadian public and policymakers understand about our military?

They are people who have lots of institutional strengths and virtues, but they can't be misused as much as they often have been. They are people who believe in discipline and order, and you can't tear that out of them and still expect them to perform. At the same time, they will do as they are told, unlike most other institutions and individuals in our society. So understand them before you use them.

Desmond Morton was interviewed by Montreal writer Sylvain Comeau.