I hope that everyone is making the most of the summer! Many of you will recall that we had our last speaker before our summer break in June. General (Retired) Wayne Eyre was exceptional, and it was great to see him stay late afterwards at the Fort to answer many more questions. He shared many of his experiences as Chief of Defence Staff and he spoke candidly about how the Canada must transition to a revitalization strategy for our military. Wayne emphasized how our defence and security interest went from strategic apathy to negligence over the past 10 years. We need a sense of urgency to revive our Forces, and he is confident that our current Prime Minister will provide our military with the resources and get our military back on track. He emphasized that we need to take advantage of the situation with the US and make ourselves sovereign and indispensable.
Our new Minister of National Defence is focusing on the words detect, deter and defend (we miss the word destroy) and we all agree that this makes sense, but again so much needs to happen before we can make our Forces capable and prepared to fight in today’s battlespace. General Eyre discussed the significance of defending the north and that this will take a major effort and that we need to be smart about what capabilities to deploy. He continues to support the F35 acquisition as it is the best crewed fighter available and it is much needed. There is no doubt that we still need to remain closely aligned with the US as they have the best capabilities to help us detect, deter and defend. The Ukraine is providing us so many good lessons and the recent defeat of an aggressive Russian offensive by the Ukrainians, supported heavily by the US and their excellent satellite and intelligence equipment, is a prime example. Aligning with the Europeans is entirely sensible; however, Canada needs to acquire the best and most sustainable equipment available.
Our executive remains busy putting together plans for the October 17th RKUSI Defence and Security Forum and I am confident that we will have some incredible speakers for the event. We plan to leverage the Forum to develop recommendations for Ottawa. The Forum will be capped off with a Gala dinner to celebrate our centennial. Please ensure you save the date!
We are extremely fortunate that Cassandra de Bartok has volunteered to become our new Webmaster. Cassandra brings a wealth of experience in working with websites, special event coordination, and leveraging social media. On this note, we are also pleased to announce that Major Alex Buck, a member of the Canadian Army Command and Staff College, has become our Social Media Coordinator. Together the two of them will promote our centennial events as well as reinforcing our primary objective of education related to national defence and security matters.
We will kick off the busy Fall by hosting LGen (Retired) Stu Beare on September 18th who will speak to us about deterrence. General Stu has a wealth of experience, and he remains heavily engaged in our national defence and security discussion. Much as we did in May, we will be joined again by our RCMI Kingston friends.
Finally, we continue to grow and we now have exceeded our goal of a hundred members in good standing which is excellent. Well done to all and keep recruiting!