Way back in the 1990s when the Canadian Army was intellectualizing itself after the Somalia affair, I was privy to a debate between some senior officers. Some asserted that if we were going to create doctrine, we just had to borrow American or British doctrine and forgo the intellectual effort of creating our own. Indeed, the argument went, Canada never did anything outside of a UN or NATO coalition context anyway. I informed those present that that was not actually true, that Canada did plan and sometimes conduct unilateral operations. “Bullshit! What the fuck do you know?” one exploded, “Prove it!”
This article was the proof and then-Captain John Grodzinski, the inaugural editor of the ADTB gleefully accepted it for publication. One senior officer tried to undermine the piece by passing it to some less than senior officers to refute it, but none were willing to do so, so it went forward.