Too important to be left to the generals.

In the Somalia scandal, Ottawa is reaping the harvest of decades of failing to provide proper political supervision over the Department of National Defence. For far too long, Canadian defence ministers have acted more as champions of their department than masters of it. They and their Cabinet colleagues have been content to leave most important policy matters - aside from the vital issue of DND's contribution to regional economic and industrial development - in the hands of the "experts" at the department.

Parliament's National Defence Committee has been equally ineffectual. All committees of parliament, dominated as they are by MPs from the governing party, are loath to criticize government policy, but the Defence Committee has an especially supine record. Far from leading the charge in the early days of the Somalia scandal, for example, the committee heaped scorn on those who suggested there were problems in the Airborne Regiment. No wonder DND demanded that defence policy be addressed by this committee, and not by a combined foreign and defence policy committee, during the recent foreign and defence policy reviews.

Just as damaging has been the decision of successive governments to permit DND to play the news management game, practicing "spin control" and dispensing propaganda - undermining instead of supporting public debate on defence policy issues. "The Star Wars program is simply a prudent response to Soviet developments." "We have no plans to test the stealth cruise missile." "We've given the Inquiry all the documents we have."

The result of this record of neglect is a rogue department - out of touch with the priorities of its own government, dedicated first and foremost to defending its bureaucratic interests, contemptuous of the public right to a voice in policy-making, and routinely manipulating or withholding the information needed for balanced public debate. If it wants to avoid future "Somalia scandals," the government is going to have to reassert political control over DND, drag the department into the post-Cold War world, and open the defence policy process to true public oversight and participation.