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The problem, of course is that there’s only so small a military can be before it is no longer really effective.

But there’s every chance it won’t mean that at all. And that leaner will simply mean smaller and less capable … and therefore cheaper. For a government that was just elected with a slate of costly promises and an already softening economy, that has to be appealing.

The problem, of course is that there’s only so small a military can be before it is no longer really effective. Since the Second World War, Canada has generally tried to retain the ability to project and sustain meaningful military power abroad. Good equipment and good training is a huge part of that. But you just can’t get it done without old-fashioned mass. Quality cannot totally replace for quantity.

One can quibble over where precisely the balance should be struck. In the context of North American military history, we’ve generally leaned more toward quality, as it’s easier and usually cheaper to train and equip someone well than it is to send a greater number of less well trained and equipped troops halfway around the world, and then keep them there.

There’s no magical “right” number for how many planes, ships and troops you want to be able to sustain abroad. But whatever your number is — we’ll unimaginatively call it X — you need roughly three times X. For every soldier and ship we want to be able to commit to military operations on a sustainable basis, you need one more ready to take over and one more that just finished and is resting up. When Canada sent 3,000 troops to Kandahar, that really meant about 10,000 were needed, because 3,000 would always be getting ready to deploy and 3,000 had just come back and needed time off (the number is larger even than that, since there were troops here at home involved in the war effort in a support role, but the 3X rule is approximate and works well enough here for our purposes). Likewise, if Canada decides to commit a ship to a NATO or UN operation on an indefinite basis, that’s really a three-ship commitment — one deployed, one just returned, one getting ready to leave.