Retired Canadian Armed Forces General Wayne Eyre says traditional UN-style peacekeeping is effectively over and Canada’s “persistent myth” should end.
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Retired Canadian Armed Forces general Wayne Eyre says Canada’s “persistent myth” of being a nation of peacekeepers has not kept up with a changing world and “needs to fade away.”
In his new memoir, Into the Breach: A Soldier’s Journey, Eyre argues that traditional, UN-style peacekeeping is “not only dead,” but “a ghost for decades.” He points to Medak Pocket in 1993 as the moment he says traditional UN peacekeeping died.
Eyre writes about his experiences in peacekeeping in Croatia, Bosnia and Cyprus, along with later roles in Afghanistan and his eventual rise to the top of the Canadian Armed Forces.
In Medak Pocket, he describes being deployed as a captain in the 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and recounts how Canadian Forces operating in the neutral zone faced artillery and heavy machine-gun fire before driving back Croatian forces.
According to Eyre’s account in the book, his battalion pushed past a roadblock into the village of Lički Čitluk and found evidence of ethnic cleansing among burning buildings.
Eyre describes traditional peacekeeping as the deployment of a minimally armed force intended to separate combatants and act as a buffer, but he says multiple sides in the former Yugoslavia treated under-resourced peacekeepers as targets and that the mission failed to prevent violence from escalating.
He also said in an interview that “The only thing that the belligerents respected was force,” and that the wider United Nations Protection Force mission could not provide enough of it.
Eyre says peacekeeping was “an era for the Canadian military” that lasted decades and ended in the early 1990s, adding that modern missions are set against a different geopolitical backdrop.
He said many present-day peacekeeping operations are in Africa, where there is “an extreme local reluctance to have large Western forces on the ground,” and he questioned the utility of many of those missions.
Eyre, whose memoir runs just over 400 pages, also writes about major turning points in his career, from the end of the Cold War through 9/11 and the start of the Afghanistan war.
He commanded Canada’s largest combat advisory mission up to that point in Afghanistan, and he later became chief of the defence staff about five years before 2026 after Admiral Art McDonald stepped aside following a sexual misconduct allegation that did not lead to charges.
Eyre said he initially expected to be acting chief only for weeks and that he considered resigning, and he described frustration with the pace of government peacetime processes.
He said that while he empathizes with elected officials, he worried in one instance that he had overstepped his authority by committing Canada to training Ukrainians in Latvia when Ottawa was not providing decisions “at the speed of war.”
Into the Breach: A Soldier’s Journey is scheduled to come out on Oct. 6.
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