Mr. Chairman and members of the Standing Committee on National Defence, I'm pleased to have the opportunity to appear before you today, although I must say it's a bit of a shock coming from sunny and mild Victoria, British Columbia.
As a vice-admiral my last three appointments have all had something to do with readiness in a time of resource constraint, so I do have some experience in the field of readiness. I was the admiral of the east coast navy, then the commander of the navy, and finally the vice-chief of the defence staff, where my primary occupation was resource management and squeezing every last penny to obtain the biggest bang for the buck.
Since retirement I've been involved in the private sector and with several institutions. I appear before you today as a research fellow with the Centre of Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie University. Any views or opinions I express are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies.
Readiness is a complicated and somewhat confusing topic. It varies considerably for each of the services, however, the principles are similar—how ready do you wish to have your capability to take on any given task? That simply means how quickly Canada can meaningfully react with military forces to meet an emerging situation or threat.
Studies need to be done and updated to keep current the threat analysis, security environment, and the likelihood of force deployments to deal with these situations. Some contingencies require unit response, and some require a larger grouping with supporting forces. Some units are relatively self-contained, and others require support from a variety of sources for their deployment. Some have a degree of freedom in their operations—mostly maritime—while most others require bases, or sea or air support, to deploy and be maintained.
Readiness includes people and their level of training, as well as the state of their equipment and leadership. It includes the platforms—weapons, vehicles, and equipment—that they deploy with, and the availability of support, including lift capability. It also includes what their level of notice to move is, which is of course affected by their unit deployability. For example, a ship can up and sail, while other capabilities require a platform, or more than one, to move them. So, is that integral support, or do they have to be supplied by contract? Others require arrangements for landing and support en route to a mission area.
You normally want to keep the minimum number of forces at the higher states of readiness, as it costs more in terms of resources and limits the freedom of the unit or group personnel. Thus, in your force structure you need to have multiples of the same capability—many similar small units, multiples of two, three, or even more, large groupings of capabilities that can respond to larger and more likely warfare-like tasks.
An example of these large groupings would be two naval task groups. One is ready to deploy within a given timeframe, and the other could be brought to that agreed readiness state in time to take the place of the first, if necessary to sustain the operation. This is an example of the first task group being at high readiness, and the second likely at normal readiness. However, if significant elements of the second task group were in long maintenance, then that would be an example of extended readiness.
Government needs to understand the overall readiness state of the forces, and be comfortable with the fact that they can only demand action in predetermined timeframes based on the agreed readiness posture. The military, on the other hand, must keep the government apprised of the range of options for both domestic and international operations in response to potential government interests and needs.
The timing of some events, like Y2K or the 2010 Olympics, are known, and the necessary force structure to support these events can be task-tailored and trained in advance. But the vast majority of events are not known in advance, and must be handled by the force structure within the overall readiness posture.
There was a belief that being trained to the highest levels would provide the capability to respond equally well to lower level tasks. I think this sort of thinking has somewhat changed, as even the lower level of domestic response tasks have become more challenging, as has the overall range of potential force requirements, ranging from humanitarian support to all-out war and counter-insurgency.
Training has several aspects that start at the individual and the team level, progress to the unit level, and then progress to larger groupings, such as a task group or task force, brigade, or squadron. There is the joint level beyond the services, whereby units of the various services are brought together to train and operate, thus providing an overall resulting capability that is often greater than the sum of the individual participants and that provides the government with a highly visible national capability.
Canada often deploys and joins a coalition for combined operations, thus adding an additional training requirement beyond that of the national joint level.
Of course, if you're already embarked on a mission that is enduring, then mission-specific training is also required, so that as the mission progresses in time, lessons are learned from the operations and fed back into the training cycle. Thus, in this case, the first deployment to the mission would have to be conducted within the readiness state of the responding force structure, and then after that the readiness cycle would be aligned with the rotation of forces on that mission, à la Afghanistan.
As I said before, readiness is costly and needs to be carefully funded so as not to jeopardize the members of the forces or limit the government's desired ability to respond to contingencies in an acceptable timeframe. This needs to be carefully studied and briefed to government.
There will always be trade-offs, particularly when resources become constrained. There is a degree of judgment required. Putting too much of your limited resources into readiness is not an answer either, as one of the other pillars—personnel, equipment, or infrastructure—will suffer and become distorted.
All of the above being stated, there is, however, a need to have a defined set and scope of capabilities at sufficient readiness to deploy. Otherwise, any government's options would be severely constrained in responding in a meaningful way when reacting to domestic situations, or internationally.
Mr. Chairman, that's the limit of my opening remarks. I'm sure we'll explore some of these concepts and issues during the question and answer period.