The doctrine manual Fighting Spirit: The Profession of Arms in Canada was the focus of extensive discussion within the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) when it was published in 2024, but has gone largely unnoticed outside the military. Given the rising prominence of our armed forces in Canadian affairs, public familiarity with military doctrine is warranted, if not essential.

Fighting Spirit came at the end of bruising sexual-misconduct scandals of the 2010s and 2020s and was meant to (finally) cement the CAF to their parent society and its values. Its authors claim this has been done, that the CAF have adopted an ethos in line with Canadian society.  Yet a close inspection of the document reveals that our armed services are resisting fully integrating with the civilian world. The door to continued dysfunction and turbulence remains open.

A history of tension with “civilianization”

After the Second World War, the armed services enjoyed a brief period of growth and policy ascendency. This ended in the 1960s, when the Forces failed to make a convincing case for significant and expensive conventional middle-power forces in a thermonuclear, superpower-dominated world. 

Civilian dissatisfaction resulted in unification of the different armed services into the Canadian Armed Forces as an attempt to fix both structure and policy development, leading to military foot dragging and pushback. 

Civilians intervened again with the 1971 management review group, which ended the independent Canadian Forces headquarters and merged it with the civilian Department of National Defence.

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During the 1970s the armed services entered a period deeply hostile to Canadian society.   There was a fear of “civilianization,” not only of the national headquarters but of the fabric of the services themselves. 

Using methodology developed by the American sociologist Charles Moskos, the CAF conducted internal surveys that found members no longer viewed the military as an institution, but only as an occupation. Soldiering had become “just another job.” 

Although the armed services did not have an official theory of civil-military relations, that proposed by American political scientist Samuel Huntington was widely accepted and taught in the staff colleges. 

Huntington argued that civilian control was best achieved by “objective control” that focused the military on its “functional imperative” of war-making and isolated it from the “social imperative” of the civilian world. 

The military, therefore, should be allowed to govern itself internally, maximizing combat effectiveness, even at the cost of violating civilian social norms.

The Somalia scandal and the resulting inquiry challenged the concept of armed services divergent from society as did the failure of the CAF to justify exclusion from the Charter of Rights. The inability to demonstrate that the inclusion of women or LGBTQ+ individuals affected combat effectiveness was a signal failure of the concept of a divergent military. Policy changed, but culture did not. 

The result was a prolonged sexual-misconduct crisis, two judicial commissions of inquiry, and a Gotterdammerung of general and flag officers.  This launched the current re-examination of the profession of arms.

Attempts at greater convergence

The CAF’s first attempt to redefine the profession of arms was the 2003 publication Duty With Honour. Explicitly Huntingtonian, Duty With Honour described the relationship between a societal imperative and the military’s functional imperative as a “healthy” or “dynamic” tension. It stated that the military’s legitimacy requires it to embody the values of society and acknowledged the Charter of Rights.

Nevertheless, it argued that the military should reflect societal values only “to the appropriate degree.”

It claimed “rightful and actual authority” for what it called “the technical military matters” of doctrine, professional development, discipline, personnel policy and the internal organization of units.  The CAF was staking its distance from the civilian world.

The sexual misconduct scandals of the 2010s forced the CAF to go back and re-examine its thinking about the profession of arms. The first statement that emerged was Trusted to Serve, which focused on the military ethos rather than the profession of arms overall and was a radical departure from what had preceded it. 

Rather than justifying a divergent military and trying to carve out a niche of exceptions for it, Trusted to Serve instead championed convergence with society. “Honour” was discarded as a contested concept, as was “warrior.” “Inclusion” became a key military value and “character” was elevated over “competence” as the foundational quality necessary for promotion. Taken alone, Trusted to Serve would have marked the end of a divergent armed forces and their convergence with liberal Canadian civil society.

Two years later, the publication of Fighting Spirit heavily qualified the spirit of convergence in Trusted to Serve. While claiming that Trusted to Serve marked a “turning point” in the CAF’s evolution to better reflect Canadian values, Fighting Spirit nevertheless re-established the divergent view of the armed services.

Limited progress

Fighting Spirit is relentlessly Huntingtonian in its theoretical base defining the relationship of the military to civil society. It prominently features Huntington’s societal and functional imperatives and places the military functional imperative above the societal one. The latter is to be served only if the former is not compromised. 

Fighting Spirit insists that the armed services are separate from society in more than just organizational modes. The inclusive ethos of Trusted to Serve is diluted to be only a constituent part of a “professional ideology” composed of equal parts of ethos and expertise. 

Fighting Spirit repeats the doctrine of “shared responsibility” taken from Duty with Honour. It attempts to divide what civilians control (national objectives, defence policy, allocation of resources, deployment and employment of armed forces) from what the military controls (military doctrine, operational planning, the tactical direction of units, internal organization, professional development, career management and the code-of-service discipline). 

This is constitutionally wrong. Responsibility is not “shared” with the military being an equal partner to the government. Power is delegated to the military by the prime minister, cabinet, and minister of National Defence.

Moreover, the inability to define the boundaries between defence policy, doctrine and planning along with civilian insistence that civilian values be acted on in professional development, career management and military justice is what has led to repeated civil-military crises since the 1960s. 

The CAF therefore recognizes the expectation from civil society that the military share and reflect its values, but ultimately does not accept that the CAF is not, and should not be, an entity unto itself with the power to determine which societal values it accepts and to what degree.

So far, the profession-of-arms doctrine manuals have been the CAF writing to itself. Signed off by the chief of the defence staff, there is no sign that ministers or other civilians have been involved. 

There can be no long-term peace in Canadian civil-military affairs until the explicit military position is reconciled with the implicit civilian one. This will require movement by both sides. The military will have to abandon Huntington and its claims of a separate culture and exclusive control of aspects of it. Instead, it will have to see itself as an integral part of Canadian society.

Senior political leadership must actually engage in a dialogue about the military profession, clearly stating the roles they want it to play and the values that are non-negotiable. If these steps are not taken, civil-military relations will continue to lurch from one crisis intervention to the next with no final resolution.