MLI Senior Fellow Christian Leuprecht’s thought leadership on Canadian defence spending has found popularity in a prominent journal that examines the military’s relationship with society.
Leuprecht’s Armed Forces & Society article, co-authored with Joel J. Sokolsky, has been listed as one of the publication’s top-read articles – a great accomplishment for a publication that usually doesn’t focus on Canada.
The article contrasts Canada’s penny-pinching on defence spending – the “Walmart approach”, as the authors call it – to more grandiose and expensive schemes.
Ultimately, the authors say, this has served Canada well.
“While the Walmart approach can be taken too far, in these times of fiscal austerity when national budgets are difficult to balance without cutting defense spending and when interventionist exhaustion is afflicting many Western governments, including the United States, the lessons from the Canadian experience should resonate with policy makers and analysts well beyond Canada”, the authors write.
The article, which is available to be read for free here for a limited time, originally appeared in the 2015 Vol. 41(3) edition of Armed Forces & Society.
It’s particularly timely now that Canada has started its formal Defence Policy Review.
