The end of peacekeeping, and what comes next for Canada’s soldiers
Mr. Trudeau loves the nostalgia of the Canadian peacekeeper and wants to pursue it as an idealized brand. The answer is the new Peace and Stabilization Operations Program. Up to 600 Armed Forces personnel will be deployed, in conjunction with the United Nations, to hot spots in Africa and elsewhere. These men and women will serve as ground troops, provide police training, and offer medical and engineering expertise. Afghanistan redux? Quite possibly.
Phi Beta Iota: Canada — moderately bi-lingual in French as well as English — could be most useful if it focused on peace intelligence and open source everything engineering (OSEE) starting with solar energy and desalinated water. What the US and other major powers refuse to pay for — “not an expensive enough problem” — is precisely this combination of inexpensive open source intelligence (OSINT) that can be shared broadly, and OSEE to solve problems that are not addressed by the dysfunctional industrial-donor paradigm that pretends to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) while delivering an average of 5% of the funding to the village level, and less than 5% of the SDG objectives. A bi-lingual French-English and then multi-lingual Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Russian Multinational Decision Support Centre in the context of an Open Source (Technologies) Agency, would position Canada for reinstatement as the most trusted third party, a role now dominated by the Nordics.
See Also:
Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) — a Nordic Manifesto
Robert Steele: Open Source (Technologies) Agency
Robert Steele: Peace Intelligence Biography, Graphics, & Selected Works
