The Chiefs of Staff Committee and Continental Air Defence, 1954–60: How Not to Manage Defence Policy

The place of the military in the development of defence policy has long been a problem to Canada’s central organization for defence. While the primacy of civilian politicians has never been in doubt, the organization of military input to decision-making has been revised several times and remains in question. In 1947, Defence Minister Brooke Claxton reorganized the Canadian central organization for defence by creating the Chiefs of Staff Committee (csc), appointing a permanent chairman, Lieutenant-General Charles Foulkes, in 1951. While some historians have considered the csc’s “Command Age” to have been a golden one, recent analyses have been more critical but have not assessed the csc as an institution. This article looks in depth at the csc’s management of continental air defence during the 1950s and 1960s – Canada’s single most important defence project. It argues that the csc failed to provide objective advice to ministers. Under Foulkes, it carefully edited analyses submitted to Cabinet, manipulated reviews, and suppressed dissent in order to support its preferred manned interceptor option. As a result, the ministers and the senior public service lost confidence in the armed services, setting the stage for a massive reorganization in the 1960s that was aimed at strengthening the role of civilians in defence policy.