Thank you very much and good afternoon to one and all, and particularly members of the Committee.
I am Commander of the Canadian Operational Support Command. With me today is Colonel Cousineau, who is my Chief of Plans.
Canadian Operational Support Command is a new command. It started in January, so we are only eight months old. We're kind of new, then, and not yet fully mature, but we are obviously going through this process.
I'd like to offer you a briefing deck, which I've provided in both English and French, so that you can go through the different slides with me. I have some pictures in there that really depict what my command is all about. Because it is such a new command, it's quite a change in the way we do business in the Canadian Forces in regard to supporting operations throughout the world.
I would like to take you through the slides. Please turn to the second slide.
This slide outlines the different aspects I'd like to cover with you--the command and control structure, the mission and the roles, the concept of operations, and what my organization is all about.
In slide three, you get a full view of the Canadian Forces as they are right now. It's a very cumbersome diagram, but I'd like you to focus right in the middle. Where you see purple boxes, all these boxes are new as of January 31 or February 1. They are the operational-level commands that the Chief of the Defence Staff has established.
I'm on the right-hand side, as commander of CANOSCOM. As you can see from this diagram, I do report directly to the Chief of the Defence Staff. However, you should all realize that my real job is to support the other three commands that are on the same line--the Special Operations Forces Command; Expeditionary Force Command, which is very related to Afghanistan; and Canada Command, which is very much on the domestic and continental front.
With this diagram I'd also like to highlight the fact that I'm linked to the associate deputy ministers, who all have functional responsibilities from a governmental perspective. I make sure those functional responsibilities are also well taken care of in operations. We establish a technical net, if you wish, and then I make sure that these aspects--infrastructure, environment, security, and so on--are followed as best we can in operations.
So, there is a connection with Assistant Deputy Ministers. That is a fundamental part of this Command.
Moving to slide four, you can see our mission. It is to provide effective and efficient operational support to Canadian Forces operations, be they domestic, continental, or expeditionary. What you should take from this is that I give de facto support to operations everywhere in the world, to all of them.
I do have primary roles, and the next slide can show you graphically what those roles are all about. But those roles, as such, bring me into shaping the development of new capabilities in terms of support, generating support entities to go and activate the theatre of operations, and obviously helping in the planning and sustaining of our operations throughout the world.
So I'm in all aspects of force development, force generation, and force employment--all aspects.
I would now like to draw your attention to the next slide, which provides a graph detailing the operations of this Command.
I think that's the most important slide. We will probably refer to it during the question period.
Let's assume the government is asking us to do an operation overseas or in Canada. We have to establish a theatre of operation, so we have to project a force. I help to project that force through movement control, so we can look at what we have in the Canadian Forces in terms of maritime ships, airplanes, strategic lift, and if that--