Customs And Traditions Of The Canadian Armed Forces

Culture has been described as the "bedrock of military" effectiveness because it influences everything an armed service does. The recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have highlighted the importance of culture as a concept in analyzing the ability of military organizations to perform certain tasks. In fact, a military's culture may determine its preferred way of fighting and dealing with other challenges, like incorporating new technologies, more than its doctrine or organizational structure. This book examines military culture from a theoretical and a practical point of view. It focuses on the Canadian and American military cultures, and it provides the first detailed examination of the culture of the Canadian Forces. It also compares their culture to that of the US armed forces. The book concludes that while the culture of the Canadian Forces has been "Americanized" to a certain extent, the culture of the US armed forces, due to changes in their personnel and roles, has experienced a certain degree of "Canadianization" at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries.

Countries have instituted policies to make their armed forces more inclusive, and soldiers now undergo cultural awareness training before seeing active duty. Policy makers and military organizations agree that culture is important. But what does “culture” mean in practice, and how is it important? Culture and the Soldier answers these questions by examining how culture both shapes the military and can be wielded by it, to good or ill effect. Through case studies from Europe and North America, this volume offers provocative insights into how culture can be deployed to improve armed forces at home and in military engagements abroad.

This study examines one possible socio-cultural explanation for the events which took place in Somalia in early 1993, asking to what extent military culture (particularly the culture of the Canadian Airborne Regiment) affected the behaviour of Canadian soldiers there. The study methodology included examination of visual and written records as well as extensive interviews with Canadian Forces personnel involved in those events. The study is organized into sections reflecting the factors affecting the events discussed: contradictions within the military establishment, the culture and organization of the Airborne combat unit, and the situational contingencies that arose from the external environment in Somalia (physical, social, and cultural).

During the four decades following the Second World War, the Royal Military College of Canada has adapted to the need to produce professional career officers by evolving into an academic centre of excellence and one of the country's leading universities. Along the way, it has responded to the challenges of service integration and unification, bilingualism, the emergence of Collège militaire royal and Royal Roads Military College, the employment of women in non-traditional roles, Canada's changing cultural make-up, and the rapid pace of technological change. In a society in which the precepts of military service are increasingly remote, the continued competition for entrance into RMC speaks of its resilience as a centre of learning and leadership.

In Hometown Horizons, Robert Rutherdale considers how people and communities on the Canadian home front perceived the Great War. Drawing on newspaper archives and organizational documents, he examines how farmers near Lethbridge, Alberta, shopkeepers in Guelph, Ontario, and civic workers in Trois-Rivières, Québec took part in local activities that connected their everyday lives to a tumultuous period in history. Many important debates in social and cultural history are addressed, including demonization of enemy aliens, gendered fields of wartime philanthropy, state authority and citizenship, and commemoration and social memory. The making of Canada’s home front, Rutherdale argues, was experienced fundamentally through local means. City parades, military send-offs, public school events, women’s war relief efforts, and many other public exercises became the parochial lenses through which a distant war was viewed. Like no other book before it, this work argues that these experiences were the true "realities" of war, and that the old maxim that truth is war’s first victim needs to be understood, even in the international and imperialistic Great War, as a profoundly local phenomenon. Hometown Horizons contributes to a growing body of work on the social and cultural histories of the First World War, and challenges historians to consider the place of everyday modes of communication in forming collective understandings of world events. This history of a war imagined will find an eager readership among social and military historians, cultural studies scholars, and anyone with an interest in wartime Canada.