6. From Policy and Strategy to Outcomes

This chapter suggests six interrelated reasons that explain why statements of Canadian defence policy and strategy have so often failed to result in the expected outcomes: (1) Canadians don’t typically develop policy and strategy through a rational process; (2) defence policy outcomes are often expendable because they are rarely linked directly to Ottawa’s grander strategic goals; (3) Canadian governments have habitually refused to accept the cost and level of commitment necessary to achieve policy aims; (4) the Canadian Armed Forces’ traditional military culture, characterized by an unwillingness to admit failure, interferes with rational analyses of the relative success of defence policy initiatives; (5) because Canadian defence policy is regularly operationalized in an alliance context, and since Canada is typically a supporting player within such alliances, Ottawa has limited control over the outcomes; and finally, (6) measuring defence policy outcomes is difficult in the best of times; it is near impossible in the context of Canada’s forward approach to defence.