There's a price to pay for being unready for war. Will Canada have to pay it again?

A little more than 18 years ago, amid the dust and hard heat of Kandahar Airfield, the weary look on Col. Ian Hope's face spoke more loudly than his words.

It was the spring of 2006 and the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan had just been through several brutal weeks. More than half a dozen Canadian soldiers had been killed in roadside bombings. As it turned out, it was the beginning of a bloody, unrelenting wave of casualties that would rend the heart of a nation and seize the political agenda in ways the Conservative government of the day never expected.

Hope, the keen and well-read battlegroup commander at the time, quietly implored a journalist who was returning to Ottawa to bring him helicopters because «guys are dying on the roads here for the lack of them.»

The army got those helicopters — two years and almost 100 dead soldiers later — after a tedious political and institutional debate that saw an independent panel basically tell the federal government to either equip the military properly or get out of Kandahar.

That's the sort of visceral lived experience the country's now-former top military commander politely channeled in his farewell speech this week.

«Our military history is one of unpreparedness at the outset of war… 1914, 1939, 1950, 2001 are all stark examples. Let's not let that happen again,» said the soon-to-be-retired Gen. Wayne Eyre. «Urgency is required.»

Whether his appeal is understood — or falls on deaf ears again — remains to be seen.

It's almost a cliche to say that important policy debates in Ottawa are held in a vacuum of the abstract, with little sense of urgency, let alone realism.

But there's a price to pay for being ill-prepared for war, a human cost that rarely gets acknowledged in Ottawa —