18. CAF Operations: A Comprehensive Approach to Enable Future Operations

Despite increasing calls to harness and integrate the entirety of state power in response to defence and security challenges under a Comprehensive Approach, the benefits posed by such integration often go unrealized in Western nations. Simultaneously, hybrid actors, possessing strategic outlooks incompatible with Western security objectives, seem increasingly able to harness multi-spectral elements of national or group power to achieve their desired ends. This chapter examines insights provided by recent Canadian operations, and those of hybrid actors, to understand how Canada can improve its ability to apply Comprehensive Approach principles. Moreover, it draws linkages to Canadian institutional, bureaucratic and cultural features to stimulate thinking about what will be required in future security environments. In doing so, it argues that strong, decisive leadership, robust institutional structures and inter-organizational processes are necessary to facilitate development of holistic approaches in response to contemporary security challenges.