Wargaming offers Parliamentarians Greater Exposure to Military Realities

By Andrew Erskine. Originally published on 26 September 2024 by The Hill Times.

It is often expressed that defence is not a national interest because Canadians do not perceive it to be when compared to other societal needs like healthcare and housing.

However, a recent Angus Reid poll debunked that perception as a larger share of Canadians are choosing military preparedness as their top political priority. In the same survey, 53 per cent say Canada should increase its defence spending to two per cent or beyond the NATO benchmark. These findings were supported by another independent survey that reported super majorities of Canadians favouring increased defence expenditures. 

If the Canadian public is not the problem in advancing national defence in domestic politics, what is? The answer: parliamentarians.

In general, parliamentarians have forgotten their roles to ensure that the government of the day is held to account on matters of national defence. Unlike politicians in the United States Congress, Canadian political leadership, for the most part, do not come from military backgrounds. This lack of military awareness in our politics has resulted in an impoverished understanding of key elements for modern defence strategies aiming to make the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) a combat-relevant and effective force.

One only needs to look at the debacle of the long-delayed defence policy update to observe the lack of tactical, operational, and logistical understanding required to make realistic and pragmatic decisions on equipment and asset procurement. Complicating things further is the federal government’s tendency to make big announcements that promise to build up CAF’s combat capacity, but failing to deliver concrete actions to see them through. 

Coupled with a political indifference by all major parties to not see CAF as a combat-credible military that can deter war and protect our national security through lethal force, but instead as a humanitarian and peacekeeping service used for domestic climate emergencies and international relief missions, parliamentarians are desensitized to the atrophy of our military preparedness and combat capabilities. 

To rectify these shortcomings, parliamentarians need greater exposure to military realities, ranging from strategic, operational, or tactical problems that constrain defence planning to environments that can promote knowledge on all dimensions of warfighting. Fortunately, there is a tool that can resolve this issue: wargaming. 

Wargaming is a tool of national security where players’ decisions and their consequences highlight challenges and key decisions required to make informed government responses to armed conflict. It also brings politicians, armed service members, policy experts, and scholars together to work through a problem thereby creating an interactive feedback loop of knowledge on budgets, weapons, tactical plans, and defence policies. 

Wargames can be played for analytical and educational purposes. For parliamentarians, educational games provide opportune circumstances to work through military problems and scenarios ranging from land, maritime, and aerial-based warfare operations like cold-weather and urban combat scenarios, to amphibious landings, surface and subsurface engagements, and air-to-air or surface-to-air combat.

As such, educational wargames generate an interactive environment to boldly question military assumptions, test innovative solutions, and apply critical reasoning techniques learned during the games to the fog of war. Moreover, due to the inherent cost of the games, requiring thousands of hours to prepare and play, participants become emotionally and intellectually entrenched, leading to their pride and self-esteem becoming wrapped up in their performance as decision-makers.  

A prime spot to incorporate wargaming is with the Standing Committee on National Defence (NDDN), seeing as it is tasked with reviewing and handling defence matters and policies. By making it mandatory for all NDDN members to participate in educational wargames, our political system would see stronger debates and decision-making on Canada’s defence strategy as each political party would have more national defence expertise within their caucus. It would also help alleviate the problem associated with high rotations of parliamentarians joining and leaving the committee, creating a more streamlined list of competent politicians who are familiar with defensive matters. Lastly, wargames can help make parliamentarians more capable of divesting otherwise complex matters on defence to their constituents.

In getting parliamentarians immersed in the cost and seriousness of war, wargaming will carefully build the expertise needed to develop and implement policies that can strengthen Canada’s defensive capabilities and deterrence in a period when revisionist and revanchist powers are more willing to undertake armed conflicts to attain their goals. 

Andrew Erskine is a research fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a researcher with the Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers