It is inappropriate, at this point, to speak in terms of a conclusion to the Somalia debacle. Our investigation has been curtailed, and important questions remain unanswered. Somalia, unfortunately, will continue to be a painful and sensitive topic for Canada's military for years to come. There can be no closure to this subject until the myriad problems that beset the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence are addressed comprehensively and effectively.

We began this report by expressing our sincere hope that the Somalia operation represented the nadir of the fortunes of Canada's contemporary military, since there seemed to us to be little room for further descent. Regardless of whether the Somalia mission represents, in historical terms, the lowest ebb, the mission certainly revealed much about the military's current low estate.

The stigma of failure must be attached to the Somalia deployment because the mission failed in so many important ways. While it makes for dispiriting reading, a review of our findings on fundamental matters shows the extent of the morass into which our military has fallen.

Leadership was central to our Inquiry, because at issue was the extent to which the mission failed because of leadership shortcomings. Throughout this report, we ask repeatedly whether what ought to have been done was in fact done. Too often, our answer is "no".

Accountability was ever before us, since the whole purpose of an investigative inquiry is to provide a full accounting of what has transpired. What the Government of the day and the Canadian people were seeking from our Inquiry were our findings on the accountability of senior CF officers and DND officials for the failures of the Somalia mission. We provide principles of accountability to be used as the yardsticks by which we assess the actions and decisions of senior leaders. Again, too often, we find that those actions and decisions were scandalously deficient.

Chain of command, if not effective, consigns the military enterprise to failure. In our Inquiry, where the task is to examine and analyze the sufficiency of the actions and decisions taken by leaders and the effectiveness of the operation as a whole, the importance of an effective chain of command is very clear. Regrettably, our conclusion is that the chain of command, whether in theatre or in Ottawa at NDHQ, failed utterly at crucial points throughout the mission and its aftermath.

Discipline, whose chief purpose is to harness of the capacity of the individual to the needs of the group, is initially imposed through the rigours of training. The ultimate goal of military discipline is to lead individual soldiers to the stage where they control their own conduct and actions. The probability of success for a particular mission will vary in proportion to the extent to which there is good discipline among soldiers. In the lead-up to the deployment, as well as in Somalia itself, that state of discipline among the troops was alarmingly substandard - a condition that persisted without correction.

Mission planning entails proper planning and preparation. Where inadequacies occur in these areas, the conditions for mission failure are created. Substantial planning failures and inadequacies were manifest in such things as last-minute changes to the mission, its location, the tasks involved, the rules governing the use of force, the organization, composition and structure of the force, as well as in shortfalls in logistical support, weapons and materiel, and force training.

Suitability focuses on the qualities of the unit selected for service in Somalia. With the selection of the CAR to serve in Somalia came the need for us to evaluate the adequacy of that choice by senior leadership, given such realities as recognized deficiencies in the organization and leadership of the Regiment, the restructuring and downsizing of the Regiment, the failure to remedy known disciplinary problems, and the substantial turnover in personnel just prior to deployment. Our examination of this question leads us to conclude that the CAR was clearly unsuited, in the mission-specific sense, to serve in Somalia.

Training is the bedrock of discipline and the foundation for the professional image of the armed forces. Fundamental to the operational readiness of a unit is the question of whether troops are well trained to perform all aspects of the specific mission for which the unit is being deployed. In this report, we have striven to answer the question of whether the soldiers who were deployed to Somalia were properly trained for their mission. This involved an assessment of the nature and adequacy of the actual training received and the policies underlying that training, together with an examination of whether the performance of our soldiers could have been improved or enhanced if they had been exposed to additional, more focused and sophisticated training. Our conclusion regarding mission-specific training is that on almost every count the Somalia mission must rate as a significant failure.

Rules of engagement refer to the operational directions that guide the application of armed force by soldiers within a theatre of operations and define the degree, manner, circumstances, and limitations surrounding the application of that force. Our task was to evaluate the extent to which the rules of engagement were effectively interpreted, understood and applied at all levels of the Canadian Forces' chain of command. We find that the ROE were poorly drafted, slow to be transmitted, never the subject of proper training, and inconsistently interpreted and applied. Moreover, we found serious deficiencies in the Canadian policy and procedures for the development, formulation, and transmission of ROE.

Operational readiness entails a rigorous and comprehensive assessment of whether an assigned unit is ready to mount its mission in an operational theatre. In some sense, the concept embraces all the matters described to this point. If a unit is led by competent and accountable leaders who respect and adhere to the imperatives of the chain of command system; if the soldiers serving under these leaders are properly recruited and screened, cohesive, well trained and disciplined; if they have a clear understanding of adequately conceived and transmitted rules of engagement, then one can have confidence that this is a unit that is operationally ready to deploy and to be employed. To our deep regret, we came to negative conclusions about each of these elements and found that the Canadian Airborne Regiment, in a fundamental sense, was not operationally ready to deploy and be employed for its mission.

Cover-up has been used in this report to describe a deliberate course of conduct that aims to frustrate broader moral, legal, or public claims to information and involves a purposeful attempt at concealment. In the military, laws and regulations impose specific duties in relation to reporting, retaining, or divulging information. In our inquiry, the reporting of significant incidents in theatre and the adequacy of the investigations prompted by such reports revealed the existence of one kind of cover-up, while the alteration and falsification of documents and the manipulation of access to information processes led to another. Also, a third variety emerged, as many of the documents to which we were entitled and that were pledged publicly to us by leaders, both governmental and military, reached us with deliberate tardiness, or in incomplete form, or not at all. We found deep moral and legal failings in this area when we unearthed the origins of cover-up in both the incident of March 4, 1993, and in our examination of the public affairs directorate of DND.

It gives us no satisfaction to have employed the vocabulary of shame in describing what has transpired. We believe that there is no less direct yet honest way to describe what we have found. Little honour is to be found in this failure.

The failure was profoundly one of leadership. Although in this report we have identified some individual failings - primarily in relation to the pre-deployment phase of the mission - the failings that we have recounted in the greatest detail have been those that concern organizational or group responsibility for institutional or systemic shortcomings. The CF and DND leaders to whom this applies are those who occupied the upper tier of their organizations during the relevant periods. The cadre of senior leaders who were responsible for the Somalia mission and its aftermath must bear responsibility for shortcomings in the organization they oversaw.

The senior leadership about which we have been concerned are an elite group. Until now, theirs have been lives of achievement, commendation, and reward. We are sensitive to the fact that implication in an inquiry such as ours, with its processes for the microscopic examination of past events and issues, can be a deeply distressing experience. Some who were members of this select group at the relevant time may even complain of having been tarred with the Somalia brush. We have little sympathy for such complaints. With leadership comes responsibility.

Many of the senior leaders about whom we have spoken in this report have retired or moved on to other things. In our view, this can only be to the good of the armed forces. It is time for a new leadership to emerge in the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces, and it is time for that new leadership to move the forces in a new direction. Our dedicated and long-suffering soldiers deserve at least this much.

In our report, we make hundreds of findings, both large and small, and offer 160 recommendations. While what we propose is not a blueprint for rectifying all that ails the military, if the reforms we suggest are conscientiously considered and acted on with dispatch, we believe that the healing process can begin.