Canada brings '6-pack strategy' to air campaign against Islamic State in Iraq

Canadian lawmakers have approved sending up to six CF-18 fighter aircraft to participate in airstrikes in Iraq, along with one CC-150 aerial refueling tanker, two CP-14 Aurora surveillance aircraft and one airlift aircraft, according to the Canadian prime minister’s office.

The motion approved this week by the House of Commons authorizes up to 69 soldiers with the Canadian army to advise and assist Iraqi security forces, but Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper stressed that they will have a “non-combat role.”

“There will however be no ground combat mission which is explicitly ruled out in the resolution,” Harper told the House of Commons on Tuesday. “These contributions are for a period of up to six months.”

Currently, Canadian airstrikes will only take place in Iraq because Canada has “the clear support of the government of that country,” Harper told lawmakers.

“If it were to become the case in Syria, then we will participate in air strikes against ISIL [Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham] in that country also,” he said.

Canada’s participation with airstrikes in Iraq will free up U.S. aircraft for use in Syria, said Canadian military expert Christian Leuprecht. Historically, Canada has deployed six aircraft to support joint operations, said Leuprecht, who has dubbed the approach “Canada’s six-pack strategy.”

“When there’s a party, you’ve always got to bring something, so you bring a six-pack,” said Leuprecht, associate dean in the Faculty of Arts at the Royal Military College of Canada. “This is what we deployed to Libya. This is what we’re deploying over the Baltics to defend and survey the NATO airspace over the Baltic states.”

The U.S. and Canadian militaries have worked well together for years through the North American Aerospace Defense Command, Leuprecht said.

“Because Canada integrates on the interoperability piece — in command and control, logistics, intelligence, common targeting functions — so seamlessly with the U.S., Canada is always a highly desired partner because the transaction costs are so incredibly low compared participating of many other NATO allies,” Leuprecht said.

One issue for any coalition operation is selecting which targets to strike. In the 1999 NATO air campaign in Kosovo, there was significant disagreement among the NATO allies about what to bomb, said James Hasiik, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council.

The U.S. military was under severe restrictions to avoid casualties and collateral damage, so the U.S. strategy was to bomb targets in order to harm Serbia’s economy to pressure then Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to agree to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, Hasik said.

“In other words, they kinda figured out that they weren’t killing anybody on the ground, really, because the Yugoslav army was really good at hiding stuff; the weather was really bad and they a dictum from [President] Bill Clinton that said, ‘I want to try to fight a war without actually getting anyone killed,’ ” Hasik said.

The French and Italians were very uncomfortable with this approach, Hasik said. As a result, the French refused to bomb certain targets and the Italians threatened to stop allowing NATO to use Italian airfields.

But unlike the Kosovo campaign, most of the targets that the U.S.-led coalition are military, not economic, he said.

“Bombing a radio station in Belgrade is a really questionable target — and would be, even if you hadn’t killed anybody in the bombing,” Hasik said. “Bombing a Humvee in the middle of Mosul is not a questionable target, even if you accidentally kill a bunch of civilians in the process — that’s legitimate collateral damage. It’s the way we adjudicate how wars will are fought.”

Canadian officials did not immediately respond to questions about whether the Canadian military would not strike certain types of targets.