Stress Tested by Leah West

Author:Leah West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science;security
ISBN: 9781773852461
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Published: 2021-11-23T19:22:31+00:00

8

COVID-19 as a Constraint on the CAF? As Always, the Mission Matters

Stephen M. Saideman, Stéfanie von Hlatky, and

Graeme Hopkins1

Introduction

COVID-19 presented the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) with personnel, training, and operational challenges, but there is variation in how the CAF has responded. While the government and the public’s primary focus may have been on operations at home, first with the troops replacing depleted staffs in long-term care facilities (LTCFs) and later, in helping with the vaccine rollout, the CAF continued to be involved in several international missions. These missions varied in terms of how exposed troops were to the virus, and as a result the CAF entirely halted some operations while adapting others. In this chapter, we discuss the increased focus on domestic operations and provide an assessment of international operations, highlighting which ones mainly continued as planned, which ones were modified, and which ones were largely frozen. The domestic efforts produced more controversy than the deployments abroad. For the international efforts, the key variable was how much contact with foreign troops the CAF had, although other factors mattered. We conclude with a consideration of the implications of the pandemic for the future of the CAF.

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