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 — particularly in the debate over whether Canada can or should meet NATO's defence spending benchmark for alliance members of two per cent of national gross domestic product.

At NATO's recent Washington summit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed to meeting the spending target by 2032. He also referred to the two per cent figure as "a crass mathematical calculation" that certain people (he didn't say who) turn to very quickly, and argued it's not a true measure of a nation's defence commitment.

Fair enough.

Last winter, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. wrote an insightful study that concluded the two per cent benchmark "does not adequately capture all the different ways that allies are spending their resources on capabilities and programs that improve transatlantic security writ large."

The report argued the NATO benchmark captures only what states are spending on their military capabilities and defence programs and that restraining a resurgent Russia requires a whole-of-government approach — efforts that don't factor into the calculation.

Trying not to appear too off-side with his boss, Defence Minister Bill Blair quietly noted following the swearing-in of Eyre's successor, Gen. Jennie Carignan, that the two per cent is the figure everyone at NATO agreed on and it's the only measure they have right now.