As Parliament returned for the fall session, all eyes were on Canada's military spending.
First, there were revelations that General Walter Natynczyk, chief of defence staff, used the Royal Canadian Air Force fleet of VIP executive jets to attend sporting events and even to catch up to his family on a delayed Caribbean vacation.
It quickly came to light that the General's vacation was delayed because he was honouring fallen soldiers at a repatriation ceremony. And those hockey and football games were military-themed appreciation nights where Natynczyk was representing his troops.
Still, it called into question why the federal government needs a fleet of VIP jets when the Harper cabinet says they've cut their use of the pricey planes by 80 per cent.
However, a bigger battle over military spending is brewing over at National Defence headquarters. The bloated headquarters bureaucracy has grown a staggering 61 per cent since 2004, adding 3,385 civilian employees, 756 regular-force soldiers and 845 full-time reserve soldiers. The headquarters headcount has grown so much that the government paid $208 million for the massive Nortel campus that once housed 10,000 staff in the city's west end, occupying 11 separate buildings on 370 acres.
A scathing new report by former Canadian Army chief Major General Andrew Leslie calls on Ottawa to trim the payroll at HQ by up to 10,000 bodies and slice as much as 30 per cent from the $2.7 billion budget for military consultants, moving anywhere from $1 billion to $3 billion a year to the front lines.
Maj. Gen. Leslie's report portrays national headquarters as a vast and unwieldy bureaucracy where precious resources are being wasted in empire building and committee work.
"It is currently impossible for a casual observer to discern how (the department of national defence) is governed, which accountabilities reside where, how critical high-level decisions are taken," Leslie wrote.
The general is no newcomer to the military or the government. His father, a Korean War commander, changed his name to Leslie as a condition of obtaining an inheritance. If not for the name change, Maj.
Gen. Leslie would have been Maj. Gen. Andrew McNaughton III, a direct descendant of the Vimy hero and army commander some regard as the greatest Canadian soldier of the last century. In fact, both McNaughton's grandfathers fought in the storied First World War battle and both went on to serve as senior federal cabinet ministers.
With more than 18,000 civilian and military staff in Ottawa, headquarters is now larger than the Royal Canadian Navy - its headcount fell by more than 1,000 sailors in the same period that Ottawa operations were burgeoning.
Maj. Gen. Leslie makes it clear that headquarters insiders always had ways of dealing with cost-cutting recommendations, including the 43 suggestions in his report.
"A variety of options existed," wrote Leslie, "from waiting until the team disappeared, to conducting lengthy reviews of the recommendations and, finally to classifying the work to an extent that only a few could see it." The headquarters organizations, he went on "have done their very best to preserve their structures, their internal funding (what they need to take care of themselves) and their process ... which usually result in overhead staying much the same while support to the front-lineis cut far more than originally forecasted."
It's time for the Harper government to act on Leslie's cost-cutting ideas and move more of Canada's military muscle off seat cushions at headquarters and into the field, where it is needed.
