Disarming Conflict

A recent report in the Ottawa Citizen quotes the US NORAD Commander, Gen. Gene Renuart, as saying that the US military “respect[s] the decisions taken by nations,” meaning the Canadian decision on ballistic missile defence (BMD), and so still gives Canada “full access” to information on missile threats to the continent.[i]

The suggested implication is that, BMD having been rejected by Canada, Washington’s continued willingness to share missile threat information is a surprising act of generosity. But two largely unacknowledged dimensions of the BMD situation explain why ongoing missile surveillance cooperation through NORAD is neither surprising nor generous.[ii] In the first place, it was the US, not Canada, that said no to joint Canada/US missile defence. In the second place, Canada/US cooperation in missile surveillance had already been formally agreed to by the time Prime Minister Paul Martin made his dramatic “no” to missile defence announcement in late February 2005.

At the time, public discussion was framed largely as a question of whether Canada would “join” BMD, so most Canadians were not particularly attuned to the possibility that "joining" was actually the one option that was not available. That issue had been settled, not by Canada, but by Washington. Operationally, the defence or interception part of BMD was to be a US-only system in North America. The ground-based, mid-course missile interceptors based in Alaska and California were to be managed by the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and decision-making involvement by Canada, either directly or through the bi-national North American Aerospace Defence Agreement (NORAD), was no longer an option.

Within the Pentagon at the time, the main struggle was to figure out how command and control of missile defence was to be managed and shared among the various military services and commands.  U.S. Strategic Command was in charge of the system’s overall operation, but the Army and the Air Force actually operated the interceptors, and the Navy would also get involved once the Aegis system came on-line. In addition, Northern Command and Pacific Command were angling for roles within their territorial jurisdictions.[iii]

So NORAD would not be involved on the defence side of BMD, but would be part of the surveillance side. This was confirmed in August 2004 when the NORAD agreement was amended.[iv] So sharing information is not a positive American gesture, it is a requirement under an international agreement. NORAD would link to BMD, but only and essentially in the same way that it links to other US-only military commands. The NORAD Integrated Tactical Warning and Attack Assessment (ITWAA) function has all along been linked, for example, to US Strategic Command, with STRATCOM relying on ITWAA information to determine whether a nuclear attack has been launched on North America, and against which targets – and based on that information the US would decide whether to launch a retaliatory attack. But, of course, the decision on retaliation, or the retaliation operation itself, would not involve either NORAD or Canada. Similarly, while the US Northern Command now relies, in its management of BMD, on the same ITWAA information coming from NORAD to alert it to an attack and to provide targeting data for the interceptors, the decision whether and at what point to attempt an interception, or the interception attempt itself, would not involve either NORAD or Canada.

So, while Canada could not join BMD, it had well before February 2005 already made the decision to cooperate with the US on BMD – which made it "hard to see what more Bush wants," as the American Brookings Institute analyst Michael O'Hanlon put it to a Canadian audience at the time.[v]

Of course, what Bush wanted was not really such a mystery – political support and basic solidarity with his general security posture. He wanted it, enough to publicly needle the Prime Minister on it during his November 2004 visit to Canada, but he certainly didn't need Canada's technical, territorial, or financial help, and he could easily do without a Canadian political endorsement (a president with the temerity to invade countries without UN endorsement was not going to worry too much about Canadian endorsement of an experimental weapons system).

The more relevant question was, "what more could Ottawa want?" And the answer by that point was – nothing. In their book on Afghanistan, Janice Stein and Eugene Lang also discuss the BMD episode, noting that “once the NORAD amendment, which permitted the sharing of missile warning data, had been achieved, he [Prime Minister Martin] accomplished all he wanted.”[vi]

When Paul Martin gave his public “no” to BMD in 2005, all the substantive issues that govern today’s Canada-US cooperation in missile surveillance had already been decided – all that was in play at that time was the spin.