Colloquium Brief

U.S. Army War College, 

Queens University, and

 the Canadian Land Forces Doctrine and Training System

DEFENSE, DEVELOPMENT, AND DIPLOMACY (3D):

CANADIAN AND U.S. MILITARY PERSPECTIVES

Compiled by

Dr. Max G. Manwaring

Strategic Studies Institute

Key Points and Recommendations:

•	 War has changed. New organizing principles require a new paradigm that facilitates change from a

singular military approach to a multidimensional, multi-organizational, and multilateral/multinational

whole-of-government and whole-of-alliance/coalition approach to deal more effectively with the

contemporary global security reality.

•	 Based on its 3-D (Defense, Development, and Diplomacy) approach, Canada has made great strides

in developing a new external conflict and internal catastrophe/disaster paradigm in which traditional 

military and police organizations continue to play major roles, but are closely coordinated with all the

other instruments of power under the control of the civil authority.

•	 The 3-D concept is rapidly growing into a broader and more effective strategic whole-of-government

and grand-strategy whole-of-alliance paradigm.

•	 Participants recommended that these models be utilized as the essential organizing principles to

make carefully-staffed supplementary recommendations to the appropriate authority to establish a

comprehensiveNorthAmerican processfor active intergovernmental andmultilateral policy coordination

and cooperation.

•	 In these terms, they further recommended that governments and their security-related institutions

continue to develop appropriate organizational mechanisms that will achieve an effective unity of effort.

The intent is to ensure that the application of the various civil-military instruments of power directly

contributes to a viable and mutually agreed political end-state. Generating a more complete unity of

effort will require conceptual and organizational contributions at the international, as well as the national

level.
2

The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army 

War College (USAWC); Queen’s University in 

Kingston, Ontario, Canada; and the Canadian Land 

Forces Doctrine and Training System cosponsored a 

colloquium at Kingston, Ontario, Canada, on June 21-23, 

2006, entitled, “Defense, Development, and Diplomacy 

(3D): Canadian and U.S. Military Perspectives.” This 

colloquium brought together over 130 Canadian, U.S., 

and other international government and academic 

experts; think tank members; and university faculty 

members. Lieutenant General Andrew Leslie, Chief of 

the Canadian Land Staff; Lieutenant General Michael 

Gauthier, Commander of the Canadian Expeditionary 

Force Command; and (by video-teleconferencing) 

Brigadier General David Fraser, Commander of the 

Canadian Brigade operating under NATO (North 

Atlantic Treaty Organization) auspices in Kandahar, 

Afghanistan, led the Canadian military representation. 

Major General Charles Jacoby, Commander, U.S. 

Army, Alaska, and former Deputy Commander, 

U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, 2004-05; and Brigadier 

General Frederick Rudesheim, Deputy Director for 

Political-Military Affairs, Western Hemisphere at the 

Joint Staff, J5, led the U.S. military representation. 

All the participants, through a robust program of 

panels and question and answer discussions, examined 

the considerable experience of the United States 

and Canada in the use of military, diplomatic, and 

economic instruments to deal with the full spectrum 

of nontraditional and traditional security threats in 

the contemporary global security environment. This 

colloquium was considered to be a very timely and 

important effort, given the likelihood that individual 

national powers—such as the United States and 

Canada—and international organizations—such as the 

United Nations, NATO, and the OAS (Organization 

of American States)— increasingly will be expected 

to provide the leverage to ensure peace, security, and 

stability in an increasing number of post-conflict and 

stabilization situations over the next several years.

The Contemporary Threat Environment—

At Home and Abroad.

The major trend that permeated the colloquium 

dialogue involved a generalized move toward the 

consideration of the role of the military, diplomatic, 

and economic instruments of national power in 

cooperatively helping to provide a secure environment, 

making and keeping the peace, restoring or developing 

economic and social structures, and helping to build 

free and stable political institutions in the parts of the 

world in which stabilization and post-conflict operations 

have been ongoing. Additionally, participants recognized and articulated the need for coordination and 

cooperation in North American homeland defense 

efforts. The September 11, 2001 (9/11), attacks and 

the political, economic, and security repercussions of 

that event provided a disquieting reason for creating a 

policy and structure for national security planning and 

administration in both the United States and Canada. 

The new policies that stemmed from those attacks 

in New York City and Washington, DC, addressed 

directly the need to protect the homeland, while at 

the same time constructing an effective mechanism to 

combat threats to national security interests abroad. 

Clearly, the United States, Canada, Europe, 

and those other parts of the global community most 

integrated into the interdependent world economy are 

embroiled in a security arena in which time-honored 

concepts of national security and the classical military 

means to attain it, while still necessary, are no longer 

sufficient. In addition to traditional regional security 

issues, an array of nontraditional threats challenges the 

global community. These include state and nonstate, 

military and nonmilitary, lethal and nonlethal, direct 

and indirect, and a mixture of some or all of the 

above kinds of threats. Whatever this type of “war” or 

“conflict” is called—Fourth Generation War, Irregular 

War, Insurgency War, Asymmetric War, or PostModern War, contemporary conflict is the product of 

weak or collapsing nation-states and the emergence of 

new organizing principles.

The primary organizing principle is asymmetry—

or the use of disparity between the contending parties 

to gain advantage. Wise competitors will seek to shift 

the playing field away from conventional military 

confrontations, and tend to employ terrorist tactics and 

strategies and other unconventional forms of assault on 

“enemy” nations and “undesirable” global institutions. 

Another defining characteristic of contemporary war 

stems from “ungoverned” or “lawless” territories. 

In this context, a government’s failure to extend an 

effective sovereign presence throughout its national 

territory leaves a vacuum in which gangs, drug cartels, 

leftist and religious insurgents, the political and narco-
3

Right, warlords, and governments may all compete for 

power—and contribute substantially to the processes 

of state failure. In many cases, this unconventional 

type of conflict requires the imposition of law and 

order by the international community to generate 

regional stability, development, peace, and effective 

sovereignty. In this new global security environment, 

war can be everywhere and can involve everybody and 

everything. All this represents a sea-change in warfare, 

and requires nothing less than a paradigm change in 

how conflict is conceived and managed. 

The Canadian Response to the Reality of the “New” 

Global Security Arena.

Another dominant theme within the colloquium 

dialogue stressed the evolution of a new conflict 

paradigm in which traditional state security institutions 

continue to play major roles, but are closely coordinated 

with all the other instruments of power under the 

control of the Canadian civil authority. Since 9/11, 

it has been recognized that fighting global terrorism, 

stabilizing failing or failed states, or confronting a 

national man-made or natural disaster together, but 

separately, is neither efficient nor effective. Dealing 

with these kinds of national and global threats involves 

the entire population of affected countries, as well as 

large numbers of civilian and military national and 

international governmental and nongovernmental 

organizations and agencies—and subnational, indigenous actors. As a result, a viable unity of effort is required 

to coordinate the many multidimensional, multiorganizational, and multilateral/multinational activities 

necessary to play in a given security arena. Thus, all 

means that can be brought to bear on a given threat 

situation must be utilized to achieve strategic clarity 

and the grand strategy objectives of the government. 

In these terms, superior firepower is no panacea, 

and technology may not give one a knowledge or 

information advantage. Likewise, traditional military 

and police power—although helpful—is not wellsuited for generating economic-political development 

or confronting some sort of internal catastrophe. Thus, 

Canada has begun to implement an integrating strategy 

that draws on its diplomatic, development, and defense 

resources to deal with direct threats to that country or 

indirect threats to its interests abroad. This 3D approach 

internationally, and the whole-of-government approach 

at home, demand a fully integrated and unified effort on 

the part of all the instruments of contemporary national 

power. Additionally, the 3D approach requires a unity 

of effort with allies—a whole-of-alliance approach.

The Challenges and Tasks Ahead.

The logic and general flow of the colloquium 

discussion argues that the conscious choices that civilmilitary leadership in the international community and 

individual nation-states make about how to deal with 

the contemporary, nontraditional security environment 

will define the processes of national, regional, and 

global security, stability, and well-being far into the 

future. The continuing challenge for Canada, the 

United States, and the other parts of the hemispheric 

and global communities, then, is to exploit the fact 

that contemporary security—at whatever level—is, at 

base, a holistic political-diplomatic, socio-economic, 

psychological-moral, and military-police effort. The 

corollary is to move from a singular military approach 

to a multidimensional whole-of-government and whole 

of alliance/coalition paradigm. The Canadian wholeof-government approach and the NATO whole-ofalliance model to homeland defense and global security 

requirements do that, and could be very useful as primary 

organizational principles to establish a comprehensive 

North American process for active intergovernment 

and multilateral policy cooperation. That, in turn, 

requires a conceptual framework and an organizational 

structure to promulgate unified civil-military planning 

and implementation of the multidimensional, multiorganizational, and multilateral/multinational security 

concept.

The associated task, as a consequence, is multilevel. 

It is at once conceptual and organizational. Ways and 

means to begin the implementation of this set of tasks 

would include but not be limited to the following 

actions:

• Hemispheric leaders must emphasize the 

interconnectivity among national and global 

political, economic, and security challenges—

and the need for greater multinational 

cooperation.

• Civilian and military leaders at all levels must 

learn the fundamental nature of subversion 

and insurgency with particular reference to the 
4

way in which military and nonmilitary, lethal 

and nonlethal, and direct and indirect force can 

be employed to achieve political ends. Leaders 

must also understand the way in which politicalpsychological considerations affect the use of 

force.

• As a corollary, the debate on aggregate power 

has begun to address how military power can be 

brought to bear on “nonmilitary” issues. That 

debate must now turn the problem around and 

address how “nonmilitary” economic or other 

types of power may be used in a military or law 

enforcement context.

• Operations will achieve strategic clarity and 

maximum effectiveness as a result of integrating 

both horizontal and vertical planning and 

implementations processes from the outset. That 

is, the organizational integration of horizontal 

(i.e., multinational/multilateral) political-military 

planning and operations with vertical national 

(e.g., U.S. interagency) political-military 

planning operations must be implemented to 

achieve synergy toward the achievement of an 

agreed political vision.

• Two fundamental organizational mechanisms are 

necessary—a national executive-level management structure and an international executivelevel coordinating body—to help eliminate 

“ad-hoc-ery” and to help ensure vertical and 

horizontal unity of effort. 

*****

The views expressed in this brief are those of the author 

and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or 

position of the Department of the Army, the Department 

of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This colloquium 

brief is cleared for public release; distribution is 

unlimited.

*****

More information on the Strategic Studies Institute’s 

programs may be found on the Institute’s Homepage at 

www.StrategicStudiesInstitute.army.mil.