ABSTRACT
In 1995, I was one of four facilitators on a course at the Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Nova Scotia. Of about thirty participants on the course, perhaps one-third were Canadian military, the rest were international military and civilians. One day, in the course of a lecture on coordinating mechanisms in multi-agency operations, the lecturer, a serving Canadian officer, informed us that he had under his command in BosniaHerzegovina ‘a light armoured squadron re-roled as recce’. I was one of less than ten persons in that room who had the slightest idea what all that meant – which was, at any rate, of little importance to the subject at hand. Everyone else – military and civilians – was baffled, alienated, and to some degree angered by the arrogance and the opacity of the jargon.
