Purchasing Power: Explaining Variation in the Canadian Armed Forces’ use of Contracted Services
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2012 decision to cut service contracts in Canada therefore presents a puzzle that has been acknowledged in the literature, but not explained.11 The existing explanations for previous variation in Canada's use of PMSCs, detailed below, offer little that would explain DND's decision to reduce its use of service contracts in 2012.Most suggest that service contract use would continue to increase steadily, although one, the functional explanation, indicated that the overall use of service contracts might have declined naturally with the end of Canada's operations in Afghanistan.Canada's combat operations there, which ended in July 2011, relied extensively on operational support contracting, as detailed in Chapter 7. As a result, when that mission ended in 2011, the overall use of contracted services by the Canadian military would have declined somewhat as the operational support contracts tied to operations came to an end.The literature therefore offers a explanation that can partially explain why Canada's use of service contracts has declined in consecutive years since 2012.12 The literature, though, does not explain why DND announced a $445 million reduction in its use of service contracts a year after combat operations in Afghanistan ended.The literature therefore offers an explanation for the increase in the use of defence service contracts in Canada, but cannot account for decisions to decrease their use.As the subsequent section details, service contracting is a critical component of Canadian defence policy and defence procurement as well as the Canadian defence industrial base.A better understanding of the variation in the use of Canadian defence service contracts by the Canadian military that accounts for both increases and decreases is therefore needed.This topic warrants further study for several reasons.Simply put, the service contracts provided by PMSCs are a crucial component of Canada's national defence.They 11 Spearin, Canada and Contracted War, 525-541.12 Canada.Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, Public Accounts of Canada, See Figure 2 in Chapter 3.became one of the only means of reducing the defence budget after DND lost the ability to save money in the short term by cutting expenditures on Capital.The hypothesis that will be tested is as follows: Variation in the use of PMSCs by the Canadian military has been driven by changes to the defence budget and constraints on how it can be allocated.The direction of that variation is attributable to the nature of the constraints on how it can be allocated. Literature ReviewA significant degree of attention has focused on variation in private actors' involvement in conflict over time.18 The origins of the private military industry have been 18 Renée de Nevers, "(Self) Regulating War?" Security Studies 18, no. 3 ( 2009)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".