The Chief of the Defence Staff and subordinate commanders are responsible and accountable for the operational readiness of the Canadian Forces. This responsibility is particularly important whenever units or elements of the CF are about to be committed to operations that are potentially dangerous, unusual, or of special importance to the national interest. Therefore, it is incumbent on officers in the chain of command to maintain an accurate picture of the state of the armed forces at all times and to assess the operational readiness of CF units and elements for employment in assigned missions, before allowing them to be deployed on active service or international security missions.

Clearly, it was unlikely that the CDS and his commanders at Land Force Command and Land Force Central Area could know the state of any unit without some reliable method for checking operational readiness. Yet the extant system, the Operational Readiness and Effectiveness Reporting System (ORES) was unreliable, and little effort was made to install a dependable process before the assessments for deployment to Somalia commenced. Therefore, because the CDS and his commanders could not and did not know the 'start-state' of any unit in 1992, they could not reliably determine what training or other activities, including resupply of defective equipment, would be necessary to bring any unit to an operationally ready 'end-state' without a detailed inspection at unit level. Moreover, because the specific mission for Operation Deliverance was not known in detail until after Canadian Joint Force Somalia arrived in theatre, no specific assessment of mission operational readiness and no assessment of operational effectiveness could be made before the force deployed.

These critical flaws in the planning process suggest that the staff assessments and estimates that were completed at all levels of command, and especially those prepared for the CDS at NDHQ, which he used to advise the government on whether to commit the Canadian Forces to Somalia, were essentially subjective and unreliable. Furthermore, these flaws, combined with the lack of command and staff effort to verify the exact condition of units, suggest strongly that subsequent planning and the decisions and actions of senior officers and officials were likewise arbitrary and unreliable.

We found that there is fundamental confusion within NDHQ and the CF officer corps about the important distinction between a unit that is ready to be deployed and one that is ready to be employed on a military mission. The question that seems not to have been asked by any commander assessing unit readiness was, "ready for what?" The failure to make specific findings of mission readiness and the confusion of readiness to deploy with readiness for operations are major problems.

There was no agreement or common understanding on the part of officers as to the meaning of the term 'operational readiness'. Therefore, because the term had no precise meaning in doctrine or policy, the words came to mean whatever officers and commanders wanted them to mean at the time. In other words, any officer could declare a unit to be operationally ready without fear of contradiction, because there were no standards against which to measure the declaration.

Another contributing factor was the notion held by officers in the chain of command that operational readiness is simply a subjective measurement and solely the responsibility of the commander on the spot. Commanders at all levels seemed content to accept on faith alone subordinates' declarations that the CAR and the CARBC were ready without any concrete evidence that they had tested the readiness in a realistic scenario. MGen MacKenzie testified before us that "funny enough [readiness is] not a term we use... within the Army; historically, it is a commander's responsibility to evaluate readiness" according to his or her own standards.

Commanders were satisfied to attribute all failures of readiness to LCol Morneault's "poor leadership", even though other serious problems in the unit and in its preparations were evident. While such a sequence might be possible when, for example a commanding officer is found to be unfit and no other readiness problems exist, this was not the case in the CAR. Clearly, leaders failed to assess rigorously in the field all aspects of mission readiness of the CAR after they issued orders to the unit.

Immediately prior to the deployment, commanders at all levels of the SSF LFCA, LFC, and NDHQ had ample reason to check the operational readiness of the newly formed CARBG for its new mission and few reasons to assume that it was operationally ready for the mission in Somalia. However, no effective actions were taken by any commander in the chain of command to make such an assessment or to respond properly to orders to do so.

The lack of objective standards and evaluations, an unquestioning and unprofessional 'can-do' attitude among senior officers, combined with other pressures - such as a perception that superiors wanted to hurry the deployment - can bring significant pressure on commanders to make a readiness declaration that might not be made otherwise. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that this occurred during preparations for Operation Deliverance.

The problems evident in CARBG during its tour in Somalia occurred in conditions far more peaceful than were anticipated before departure. If our soldiers had encountered heavy armed resistance in Somalia, CARBG's lack of operational readiness might well have resulted in large-scale tragedy rather than in a series of isolated disasters and mishaps, damaging as these were.