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Hillier, who is still widely respected in military circles for having led the Forces out of that decade of darkness as chief of defence staff in 2005-08, agrees a review is overdue and could help address some of the major issues that have plagued the Canadian Forces in recent years. But it could also make things worse.

“Every time we run operations now we’re strained and we’re stretched and we’re scraping from other places,” he said. “I use fragility in that way. The funding issue makes everything fragile. You can’t hire enough people, you can’t get the equipment.

“What comes out of the defence review will either increase that fragility or perhaps crack it, or else it can make the confidence grow much, much stronger.”

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Hillier said he has a great deal of respect for Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, a former lieutenant-colonel in the military reserves. But he was “disturbed” by the Liberal government’s decision last month to withhold nearly $4 billion that had been earmarked for new military equipment.

That measure was announced in the federal budget, and continued a trend started under the Conservatives.

“(The government) said it’ll come back later,” Hillier said. “I never believed that as chief of defence staff. If it’s not in the fiscal framework, it’s not there. So that’s a $4-billion cut that occurred. That came mostly out of the acquisition capital funding, where we desperately need to spend even more.”

Hillier was also extremely critical of Canada’s slide to the bottom-third of NATO allies in terms of defence spending. All NATO allies committed in 2014 to spend two per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence, but Canada is spending less than one per cent.