"We, reposing especial Trust and Confidence in your Loyalty, Courage, and Integrity, do by these Presents Constitute and Appoint you to be an Officer in our Canadian Armed Forces."
Opening line of the CAF commissioning scroll.
I was sworn-in on a week night in the Officers Mess of my local armoury. Waiting nervously for the ceremony to begin, I let my eyes wander over the hardwood tables, antique chairs, and display cases which held the shiny relics of a regiment who counted socialites and scions of industry on its nominal rolls.
I had come to the armoury straight from class and forgot to pack a dress shirt, so my mom picked up a cheap button-up on her way to watch the ceremony. We made the hand-off with just enough time for me to change, tie a sloppy half-Windsor, and walk into the room at the appointed hour. Standing at attention for the first time surrounded by spectators, war trophies, and the portraits of august Commanding Officers, I solemnly affirmed my loyalty to the Crown, to do my duty for Queen and Country, and if necessary, to die for them.
Years passed before I entered the Officers Mess for a second time. That night, the mess cook had laid on a full buffet of Indian food and there was money on the bar. Myself and a couple other soldiers from the Junior Ranks Mess had been invited across the parade square to socialize. Each of us had been flagged for showing officer potential and the brass wanted to take a closer look at us.
The buffet was just bait. One-by-one, a captain quietly pulled us away from the revelry. When it was my turn, I was ushered into a separate room where half a dozen regimental officers were sitting on one side of a carved wooden table. One of them gestured for me to take a seat in a chair positioned four paces to their front. Reacting to the ambush, I dragged the chair up to the table and sat with my fingers laced on the tabletop. They could have their game but I was going to play it on my terms.
For what seemed like an hour but was probably no more than a few minutes, the board went through an elaborate good-cop-bad-cop routine, poking at my ego and prodding for weakness. One of them asked point-blank "why do you think you're good enough to be an officer in this regiment?" I wasn't sure what the right answer to that was (but I knew it wasn't "the Junior Ranks Mess doesn't serve Indian food on parade nights"). I pointed to my record instead: impeccable training attendance, taskings volunteered for, had X and Y courses etc.
The board deemed this acceptable. They followed up with a harder question: "what is more important: loyalty up or loyalty down?"
I didn't hesitate: "loyalty down."
Every soldier learns early that simply being in charge doesn't make a commander reliable or worthy of respect. Subordinates have to show respect for position and rank, but that just signals submission to authority. The trust of soldiers is earned by sweat and sacrifice. It's hard-won, and if broken it never heals back as strong.
"Wrong."
My mind blanked. Back then I wasn't used to getting things wrong in the front of the higher-ups. The teaching continued: "as an officer, loyalty up the chain of command is the more important than loyalty down."
In the end, my confused loyalties didn't seem to matter much. The board decided that I would be the one to advance, so my Voluntary Occupational Transfer went through and I was commissioned as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces.
I didn't join the Canadian Army to be an officer. Friends in the Army advised me to join as a Non-Commissioned Member or NCM i.e. an enlisted soldier, and work my way up from the junior ranks to Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) status. Officers, so I was told, spent most of their time drinking in the mess and playing politics while NCMs did the honest work of actually soldiering. I won't say that this narrative was flat out wrong, it's enough to say that it's bullshit.
At that time I didn't want to be an officer that badly. I saw that the Regiment needed officers, they wanted to promote internally, and I was recognized for showing the necessary traits and aptitude. I felt like stakeholder in the Regiment, and so I was loyal to it. I was loyal to my soldiers too, and wanted to be the leader they deserved.
These days it seems like everyone wants to talk about rights but no one wants to talk about duty. On the obverse face of every right is a duty, a mutual obligation which makes us accountable to each other, even to people we have never met and will never meet. I volunteered for a commission because I believed I had a duty; that "could" implied "should". By that point I had worked for many officers, some were good and others not so much. I was determined to be one of the good ones, to give better than I got, curry and crystal glasses be damned. It's often said that command is a privilege. That is true, but command is also a burden, that is if you do it right.
II
I spent my subaltern years in the light of Operation HONOUR, the signature project of then-Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance. Operation HONOUR was a massive culture change effort intended to address the findings of the Deschamps Report, which had exposed the "underlying sexualized culture in the CAF that is hostile to women and LGTBQ members, and conducive to more serious incidents of sexual harassment and assault." General Vance went to great lengths to emphasize that Operation HONOUR was, in fact, a military operation and not a mere policy. Slicing out the tumour of sexualized culture was our mission and the General's words were our orders. During my first ever round of quarterly performance evaluations, I reported to the company commander that one of my NCOs was non-compliant with the principles of Operation HONOUR.
Loyalty up, remember?
As a young soldier, I had actually worked for this particular NCO. He was an artifact of the Old Army and had a reputation as a hardman. He liked to brag about picking Friday night fights in Native bars out on the Prairies (he wore weighted gloves for extra knock-out power). He described to us in detail what he would do to his wife after a training weekend. He told us she would never say no, followed up with a chuckle and "like she has a choice". If you were weak in his eyes, he'd belittle you publicly as a "queer" or a "faggot". The funny thing was that this guy was overweight and never showed up for ruck marches or PT tests. His annual conduct-after-capture briefing was basically forty minutes of "you're gonna get raped but that doesn't make you gay". One of his favourite war stories was about stray dog duty in Bosnia. He'd lure in the strays with peanut butter on the end of shotgun then blow their brains out. Riveting stuff.
Overnight I had gone from from being this man's subordinate to being his superior, so when the General said we had a duty to report, I did my duty. The next week I was in front of the Regimental Sergeant-Major being asked why I was interfering with a strong NCO's career prospects. That's when I learned that loyalty up meant loyalty to the Regiment, and that sensitive matters such as this were handled internally and off the record. That one-way conversation was a major push towards putting in my application for the Regular Force. I didn't want to be around that type of nonsense (“oh my sweet summer child” says the peanut gallery). Not long after I left, my former supervisor sexually assaulted the mess steward.1
III
The Regular Force combat arms are also divided into regiments, multiple regiments per branch or corps (artillery being an exception, they all fall under Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery (RCA)). The regiments are administrative organizations which have no operational function. They force generate personnel for operations, manage the careers of their members, and are supposed to promote a sense of in-group loyalty and esprit de corps. Members going through their basic courses can express a preference for one regiment over the other, but at the end of the day it’s still the Army; you'll get what you get and be grateful for it. Unless you have a notable last name, the assignment of recruits to regiments is mostly random. This doesn't stop the regiments themselves from pushing the narrative that there is something unique about their members, "once an X always an X" and all that.
We inherited this system from the British and have been trying to keep it going ever since. In the Reserves, the system works fairly well because the local regiments have deep community ties and a greater stake in recruitment of their personnel. In the Regular Force, you get the cap badge you're assigned and are expected to make it a cornerstone of your identity henceforth. It's a bit contrived, like being a Leafs fan from the Maritimes.
Now, just because it's contrived doesn't mean it's not important. Regimental business is serious, since it involves "succession planning" i.e. who is going where during the Annual Posting Season. Behind the scenes, the regiments are controlled by councils and senates composed of senior officers and Chief Warrant Officers. Councils and senates are influenced to some extent by retired members of the regimental associations.
Canadian Army promotion boards are structured to be meritocratic, but regiments are the gatekeepers to the boards. It's impossible to meet promotion board criteria unless your regimental mafia employs you in a fairly strict sequence of high profile positions, known as "high-range employment" or "A-jobs". For captains, typical A-jobs include unit operations officer, adjutant, and second in command of the Combat Service Support sub-unit. Other A-jobs are scattered throughout various schools and headquarters. These are mostly divided up into regimental turfs.
Technically, colonels relinquish regimental affiliation on promotion to that rank. In reality, it's "once an X always an X." So every regiment competes for the high-value postings which create colonels, because colonels become generals, and generals are in charge of allocating scarce resources. The primary objective of every regiment is to survive and perpetuate itself like a selfish gene. Therefore, the regiments must pursue their own interests even to the detriment of members' quality of life and the effectiveness of the field force as a whole.
The rules of the regimental game are mostly unwritten and its currency is social capital. So we play the game, salute the colours, and show fealty to a shadow cabinet which is accountable to no one and holds our prospects (and so those of our families) in its hands.
IV
The degree to which a member self-identifies to their organization, its sub-culture and status hierarchy falls along a spectrum known colloquially as GAFF, or "Give-A-Fuck Factor". Someone with high GAFF cares a lot about how they are perceived by others, usually people in positions of authority or influence. These are your "young thrusters" and "hard chargers". At they're best, they set the standard for others to follow. Many however, are just afraid of failure. They're so afraid of failing or saying "no" that they'll burn their subordinates at both ends to achieve an endless series of flashy but meaningless tasks, just so they can show their boss how much work is being done. Planting the seeds of trees to shade future generations means nothing to people like this, because they won't be around to take credit for it.
Soldiers with low GAFF come in many forms, but none of them care much about playing the game. There are hard-nosed professionals who love the job but hate the bullshit; there are neurodiverse battlenerds who are good at analysis and bad at social drinking; and then there are the broken souls who are grinding to their pension and see that $150 has more utility as an RESP contribution for their kid than as tickets for a mess dinner.
High and low GAFF are the yin and yang of Army life. In a well functioning unit, there is harmonious balance between them. But when there isn't an actual mission on the go, folks with low GAFF face a social disadvantage. The problems of peacetime tend to be bureaucratic in nature and nobody gets kudos for rocking the boat and prioritizing results over status games. Without an outside adversary to fight, low GAFF outer-ringers will struggle to advance by merely being good at their jobs while high GAFF inner-ringers talk postings after playing hockey with the boss.
High GAFFers show loyalty up the hierarchy; they play status games well and are rewarded for it. Low GAFFers show loyalty out of the hierarchy, to the organization’s purpose as expressed in its stated principles and values. High GAFFers are happy to excel at bullshit tasks if it helps them get ahead (or at least avoid the risk of falling behind), but low GAFFers will weigh such incentives against the moral imperative to serve the interests of the broader institution, the state, or society. In short, there is a difference between working for success within the organisation and working for the success of the organisation. An officer with high GAFF may be a modern Achilles, but low GAFFers know that the real hero of The Iliad is Hector.
When there are no battles to win, and therefore no definitive metric of success, high GAFFers gain a competitive advantage over their low GAFF peers. All else being equal, the officers and NCOs who display the strongest loyalty to their regiments get to go first and go further. Being the beneficiaries of regimental favour, they in turn perpetuate the system by stewarding the careers of younger members like themselves.
In short, the ecosystem of the peacetime Army selects for loyalty up the hierarchy over loyalty out to principles and values. This isn't a secret, merely an unwritten rule. I once asked my Commanding Officer what the Regiment looked for in its junior officers. Their answer was straightforward: "performance, potential, and patronage."
V
I am not the first person to make these kinds of observations. Jim Storr has written about peacetime promotion culture in the British Army and Thomas E. Ricks did the same with U.S. Army. Here is an excerpt from Storr:
"It appears that many of those whom the British Army promoted in peacetime during the twentieth century were found wanting on the outbreak of war. Promotion to high command in peacetime very much reflects the values of existing senior commanders, themselves largely the products of a peacetime promotion system. To that extent it reflects deeply held values, and has an obvious impact on operational effectiveness in war.
Roughly two-thirds of those who commanded formations in the BEF [British Expeditionary Force] of 1940 were either sacked, retired immediately, or were never given another formation to command in the field.'"
Ricks describes a similar phenomenon occurring in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. Many senior leaders who had risen during peacetime couldn't perform under real-world conditions. Under the stern hand of George C. Marshall, then Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, generals were removed from command at a rate that is unheard of today. Many of those who were fired had glowing records and some went on to redeem their reputations in later commands, which suggests that they had been promoted too soon or too high above their level of competence.
More recently, Russia has been churning through general officers in Ukraine, seemingly desperate to find someone who can achieve Putin's war aims. If an army systematically promotes its officers above their level of competence in peacetime, then clearly their selection and assessment criteria are not aligned with the actual job requirements.
To illustrate the point, Storr compares careers of Second World War British Field Marshals. The first, Field Marshal John Verreker a.k.a. Lord Gort, was Commander-in-Chief (C.-in-C.) of the BEF during its disastrous efforts in France in 1940.
"[Gort] was the epitome of the system: young, highly decorated, charismatic, promoted through and entirely within the system. He was only 51 when appointed CIGS [Chief of Imperial General Staff]... As C.-in-C. of the BEF, he 'fussed over details and things of comparatively little consequence' and had a 'constant preoccupation with things of small detail'."
After he oversaw the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk, Gort was removed from command and served out the rest of the war in non-combatant posts. It should be noted that Gort was not a bad soldier. During the First World War, he rose from the rank of captain to acting lieutenant-colonel and in the process earned the Distinguished Service Order (with bar) and the Victoria Cross. It was during the interwar years that Gort ascended from the substantive rank of Major to Field Marshal. Battles may be won with good-enough tactics and a lot of chutzpah, but Gort was unprepared for the complexities of wartime command at the strategic level. He did, however, excel at playing politics.
For contrast, here is Storr's description of Field Marshal William "Bill" Slim:
"[The] 47-year-old Bill Slim was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1938, perhaps at the last possible opportunity. Slim had not been to Sandhurst; he had gained his commission 'through the back door' and had come from a modest background. The outbreak of the Second World War saw him commanding a brigade in East Africa. Within four years he was commanding the Fourteenth Army in Burma... Slim was obviously not the product of a stable heirarchy in peacetime. His rise to fame came entirely during wartime. He was arguably one of the greatest British generals of the twentieth century. The contrast with Gort could not be more marked."
For his part, Ricks has a takes a wider view of how the post-war U.S. Army made some officers too big to fail:
"Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq were all small, ambiguous, increasingly unpopular wars, and in each, success was harder to define than it was in World War II. Firing generals seemed to send a signal to the public that the war was going poorly.
But that is only a partial explanation. Changes in our broader society are also to blame. During the 1950s, the military, like much of the nation, became more “corporate”—less tolerant of the maverick and more likely to favor conformist “organization men.” As a large, bureaucratized national-security establishment developed to wage the Cold War, the nation’s generals also began acting less like stewards of a profession, responsible to the public at large, and more like members of a guild, looking out primarily for their own interests."
It seems like loyalty up became more important than loyalty out.
VI
Lest the reader reach the conclusion that I'm just salty about Canada's regimental system, consider that David J. Trier had this to say in 2015 about U.S. Army promotion culture:
"the system will continue to encourage bureaucratic gamesmanship at the expense of combat-effectiveness, ingratiation at the expense of candor, and continue producing homogeneous senior leaders that have been more successful at earning their boss’ favor than achieving true merit.”
The valuation of loyalty up over loyalty out is a trait common to systems of people with vertical hierarchies, and to some degree this includes every organized society. In their analysis of Western counterculture movements, Canadian philosophers Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter note:
"It's easy to forget how rule-governed everyday life is. For the most part, we are all so well socialized... we quickly lose sight of the fact that there are any rules at all... Next time you get on a crowded bus, try sitting down in someone's lap... Or stare straight into the eyes of everyone you pass on the street... This kind of social deviance is normally met with reactions ranging from expressions of disappointment to outright punishment.
The social order, in other words, is enforced. Even the weakest, most well-socialized members of society will eventually get around to taking action in the face of blatant disregard for the basic rules of social order."
Every social organization has rules, some explicit and some implicit. The rules privilege some forms of behaviour, which we call conformity, and are biased against other forms of behaviour, which we call deviance. The position of an individual on the scale from deviance to conformity is expressed by their GAFF. There is really no way out of this game. South Park said it best: "If you want to join the non-conformists, all you have to do is dress just like us and listen to the same music we do."
Systems enforce conformity and punish deviance by passing judgement through the lens of morality and cultural norms. This is the realm of game theory and collective action problems, which Heath and Potter describe as "cases where everyone would like to see a particular outcome but no one has the incentive to do what is necessary in order to bring it about."
As an example, consider municipal water rationing during a drought. There will be enough water for everyone to cook and bathe if nobody waters their lawn, but if one person breaks the faith (defects) by watering their lawn, then they can get a free ride off of the sacrifices that other people are making. If everyone knows (or merely believes) that there are free-riders in the system, then the incentive for them to make personal sacrifices for the collective good rapidly evaporates. Thomas Schelling captured the essence of the problem when he wrote "virtue may be its own reward, but the reward is too often a collective good, shared only minutely by the individual."
Without resorting to forceful coercion, moral norms decentralize the incentives to cooperate within and between groups of people for the collective good of all. This is why military culture puts such heavy emphasis on duty, sacrifice, and subordination of the self for the greater good. During basic training, recruits learn to fear being called individuals, because “individual” is a code word for “selfish”. Cowards are individuals, because they break ranks in the face of danger. Hypocrites and slackers are individuals, because they exempt themselves from the expectations that govern everyone else. Extending this line of reasoning can lead one to believe that whistleblowers are individuals because they break faith with the group. It is possible to have too much of a good thing.
Social hierarchies create a zero-sum game for status: for you to have higher status in a hierarchy, there must be someone else with lower status. When there are perverse incentives for individuals to advance their status at a cost to everyone, this creates a collective action problem known as a social trap. In a social trap, every small action taken out of self-interest seems rational, but in the long term these actions bring about harmful outcomes.
It is self-evident that people who care a lot about their relative status in the hierarchy will naturally be drawn to positions which confer high status and will be more willing to game the system in order to get there. For these people, it's advantageous to create the outward appearance of conformity (cooperation) while acting selfishly (defection). These defectors enjoy can unrestricted freedom of action while free-riding off of the honest cooperators. This creates a social trap, because defection cannot be concealed forever. You can bullshit your boss but you can’t bullshit your troops, because they’re closer to the ground truth than you are and will see through your act. As defectors are exposed in the system, cooperators get fed up and leave. The delta between the organizations image and the day to day reality on the ground will drive good people out.
Left unchecked over time, hierarchies naturally become dominated by defectors. They will cooperate when they have to, not because cooperation is in everyone's collective interest, but because it helps them get what they want. This is known as the Iron Law of Institutions or Iron Law of Oligarchy. Essentially, power in an organization will come to be exercised by approved members of the leadership class, who now have freedom to behave in ways that do not accord with organizational values. The way regimental mafias exercise a stranglehold on career management in the Army is merely a local expression of the law. The situation will persist until an outside threat forces the organization to adapt or perish, which is the Iron Law of Darwin.
VI
In February 2021, an investigation was opened into General Jonathan Vance, who had just finished his tenure as Chief of Defence Staff. Major Kellie Brennan, a subordinate of Vance at various times, accused him of a preventing her from disclosing their long-running affair. Since their relationship began in 2001, Vance had been married twice. DNA testing confirmed that Vance was the father of one of Brennan's children, but he had never acknowledged or taken responsibility for the child. Vance plead guilty to obstruction of justice in March 2022 and received a conditional discharge with twelve months of probation.
The heat and light generated by an investigation of the outgoing Chief of Defence Staff led to an unprecedente level of scrutiny on the CAF's senior leadership. In 2021 alone, the Governor General of Canada, the Minister of National Defence, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, the Vice Chief of Defence Staff, Commander Canadian Special Operations Command, and Commander Military Personnel Command, amongst others, would resign, retire, or be re-assigned amidst allegations of impropriety. Since 2021, recruiting and retention levels have continued to free fall and the federal government has set aside $900 million in class-action lawsuit compensation for current and former CAF members who experienced sexual harassment, assualt, or discrimination. The social trap has been sprung.
The last time I checked, all three of the men I mentioned in Part I were still in uniform. One actually became an ethics advisor. They were loyal to the Regiment and the Regiment took care of its own.
So what matters more, loyalty up or loyalty down? It’s a bullshit question. If I could go back and answer it again, this is what I'd say: "I'm loyal to the soldiers but not the Regiment. I'm loyal to the chain but not to you. An officer is a servant of the state and must be loyal to their duty, because none of us are more important than all of us."
Note added 18MAR23: this supervisor a different person from the NCO mentioned earlier.
I was never in the regular force, but my experience in a militia regiment in the 1970s led me to believe that there was no worse military sin than reporting someone to higher authority, regardless of the offence. We didn't know the term "omerta", but we sure understood the principle. None of our NCOs were as bad as that example you give, but one or two of our officers were the sort of men you'd never trust if your female relatives were around. The sexual exploits of one of our company commanders may still be part of the mythology of the regiment to this day (the QM sergeant used to tell some stories about him with great relish, usually finishing off with "... and I had to send the jeep in for suspension repairs the next week."
I can only think of one instance of someone getting commissioned after spending time in the ranks. I didn't know him well, as he'd been the RSM of my cadet unit when I was a lance-corporal ... that's a lot of social distance even in cadets. He certainly brought his RSM attitude along, and was by far the most disliked/feared junior officer we ever had. For all I know, he retired as a Brigadier General ...