A National Force: The Evolution of Canada's Army, 1950-2000

A National Force: The Evolution of Canada's Army, 1950-2000 By Peter Kasurak Vancouver, B.C. Canada: University of British Columbia Press, 2013. 348 pages $95.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The history of Canada's civil-military relationship after end of Second World War is a complex story, parts of which remain largely untold. Having started war as a significant yet still subordinate ally to British Empire, Canada emerged from war with a new voice of independence shaped in part by its wartime relationship with United States. Still, for much of Cold War Canada's military forces found themselves split between its British traditions and an emerging American way of warfare resulting from latter's dominant role in cooperative defence of North America, Korean War, and NATO's defence of Western Europe. In his most recent work, A National Force: The Evolution of Canada's Army, 1950-2000, independent scholar Peter Kasurak offers a broad and sweeping narrative of Canadian Army's history from Korean War to beginning of War on Terror. While general histories of Canadian Army are nothing new, Kasurak's study is very different from previous offerings in its analysis of chosen subject. Departing from what he describes as the standard narrative of army's history, Kasurak sets out to reframe a story often viewed through lens of Samuel Huntington's Soldier and State with perspective of Peter Feaver's Armed Servants. The exercise is novel and intriguing, if not at times outright controversial, with results often at odds with established scholarship on subject. The history of postwar Canadian Army is typically divided into two eras. The period from 1945 to unification of Canadian military in 1968 has at times been referred to as command era, followed afterwards by what many critics have referred to as a era. The former is often perceived as a golden age of Canadian Army--British roots, influential, worldly, combat experienced, and professional. The latter - during which army was integrated with other two armed services into a single unified service, ushered in what one military historian later described as a generation of professional decline. In post-unification Canadian Army values had been replaced with civilian business management concepts. British traditions and ethos were discarded. It is this established narrative that Kasurak takes aim at, and using Feaver's agency theory sets out to demonstrate it was in fact not civilian leadership but rather army that was the author of its own decline, beginning not after unification but instead right after Second World War. Any attempt to recast a military organization's historical characteristics and attributes so significantly in a single study is bound to run into difficulty, and Kasurak's book is no exception. …

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