James Sutherland Brown - Director of Military Operations and Intelligence

Director of Military Operations and Intelligence

After the war, as a Lieutenant-Colonel, Brown remained a professional officer in the greatly shrunken Canadian Army. In 1920 he was appointed Director of Military Operations and Intelligence in Ottawa. In this capacity he was responsible for developing a series of contingency war plans for a variety of possible scenarios. One of those scenarios was the possibility that hostilities might break out between the United States and the British Empire. It was as part of this work that Defence Scheme No. 1 was developed. The plan adopted the strategy that, even in a position of much smaller size versus an adversary, it was best to seize the initiative in order to buy time. A number of armed thrusts across the border to seize strategic cities, followed by a staged withdrawal were envisaged. In the Canadian context it was assumed that the British Empire would rally to the defense of its North American dominion, but that this mobilization would likely require some time to become effective. It then followed that the Canadian Army must do its best to buy time. Defence Scheme No. 1 is actually very close to an earlier plan that Brown developed as part of a planning exercise in 1913.

Defence Scheme No. 1 was abandoned in 1928 by Chief of the General Staff General Andrew McNaughton and most records of it were destroyed. When the existence of the plan was disclosed publicly in the early 1960s, the plan and its author were the subject of considerable ridicule. It is the function of all military planners to consider all possible contingencies, and that the planning process itself serves a useful training function for those involved. Also, the plan was developed at a time when a group of officers, including Sutherland Brown, were lobbying the government for a much larger Permanent Force. The plan may have assumed much larger available forces. However, the political realities in Canada in the early 1920s dashed any possibility of a Canadian army that would be sufficiently large and well equipped to have any realistic hope of succeeding in any surprise pre-emptive assault across the border, no matter how well planned and executed. Brown, as a strong supporter of both Canada and British Empire and as somebody who mistrusted the intentions of the United States, evidently took the plan quite seriously, to the point where he and several of his subordinates risked a diplomatic incident by carrying out reconnaissance trips across the border into New York State and Vermont wearing civilian clothing. Two years after the Canadian plan was rejected, the United States developed War Plan Red, which described an invasion of Canada.