Restructuring Canada's Defense Contribution

Canada's defense contribution is an engima. Canada possesses the second largest land area, the seventh most powerful industrial economy, and according to the most recent report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), enjoys the second highest standard of living in the world. It was a prominent founding member of NATO and a valued co-belligerent in the Korean War. Yet today it has fewer forces and contributes less to the alliance than Denmark. In wealth and population, Denmark is one-fifth the size of Canada. But fully mobilized, Denmark can put almost twice as many people in the field as Canada, and Danish forces are more deployable. If Canada would contribute to NATO commensurate with its wealth and population, it would do much to solve the problems of western defense. Indeed, were Canada simply to spend the NATO average on defense (3.7 percent of GNP) and if this contribution could be designed to fill gaps in a framework of NATO division of labor, Canadian increases would be sufficient to help trigger a transformation of NATO's inferiority in conventional forces into a genuine military balance with the Warsaw Pact, thereby altering the strategic equation in Europe and reducing decisively NATO's reliance on nuclear weapons. The current imbalance in conventional forces in central Europe represents the single most destabilizing factor in East-West relations. NATO's relative conven

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