National Defence Committee on March 25th, 2014

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Chair, I want to follow up on Professor Sloan's comments on cyber-security.

You mentioned that along with the disciplines of army, navy, air force, we should stand up a command for cyber-security. I want to explore that further, because all of us are quite concerned about the cyber-security threat. We've seen what Iran was able to do in the United States. We know that Russia has cyber-attack capabilities and has exercised them recently.

I want to find out exactly whether you see CSEC as being the lead on this or see it as an actual, fully stood-up new command structure under the Canadian Forces.

[Dr. Elinor Sloan]

You're talking about five domains of warfare: army, navy, air, cyber, and space. The cyber aspect, of course, is distinct from what we were talking about before—critical infrastructure, homeland security etc. We're talking about cyberwar as a non-kinetic tool of warfare—taking out enemy platforms or whatever using cyber-capabilities. In other words, the offensive information war is open to cyberwarfare, on which I didn't have a chance to answer the other honourable member's question earlier.

I think it makes sense that it be within National Defence, because it's a domain of warfare. Canada then, operating through the Department of National Defence, needs to think about the degree to which it will engage in offensive cyberwar. It's only relatively recently that the United States has admitted to or stated publicly that it's conducting offensive operations in the way Russia did in Georgia in the summer of 2008. Canada needs to think about whether or not we're going to use cyber-attacks as a form of warfare in the way we would use army, navy, and air.

[The Chair, Conservative, Peter Kent]

You have one minute.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

I want to come back to the discussion of having an armed coast guard and how it relates to coast guards in other jurisdictions. As we all know, Alaska, for example, does not have any navy at all; it is strictly coast guard up there. Do they have armaments on their coast guard vessels? How does it relate to coast guard surveillance that the U.S. is running alongside us in the Great Lakes and down the St. Lawrence? How does it compare with coast guard operations in Europe? Do they offer armed coast guards as well, or is it just mainly policing and search and rescue capability?

[Dr. Elinor Sloan]

The United States Coast Guard is an armed fleet. It is actually one of the largest navies in the world. In wartime it operates under the Pentagon, and in peacetime it's under—I'm not sure—the Department of Energy or something. It is an armed fleet, and that's the main distinction, really, between the Canadian and American coast guards.

I believe that the U.S. Coast Guard is responsible for addressing threats out 500 miles, whereas in Canada we have a mixture of agencies involved in maritime regulation. There is the coast guard, but it would be the navy that would be 400 miles or 500 miles offshore. Their way of doing things is conceptually a lot easier to think about, because they have just the coast guard dealing with things close in—within 500 miles of the continent—and then they have U.S. Northern Command and NORAD doing air and the land component.

It would make sense for Canada to go in that direction.

[The Chair, Conservative, Peter Kent]

Thank you very much.

Colleagues, we have come almost to the end of the time. I want to exercise the chair's prerogative to ask one question.

During the Cold War, the concept of mutually assured destruction was a very important concept, some might say a deciding concept in preventing a hot war. As you examine and raise the potential for offensive cyberwarfare, do you believe there is again a consideration of MAD in which at some point both sides could potentially lose command and control of any future situation?

[Dr. Elinor Sloan]

The difficulty in making the translation between MAD during the Cold War and cyber is that it's so difficult.... There are two difficulties, really. You have to be able to assign attribution—a deterrent requires assigning attribution. Secondly, cyber is so difficult to control. The Stuxnet virus, for example, took out the centrifuges in Iran, but also, I believe, took out centrifuges in Germany—in places that the United States and Israel didn't want. So you can't really control it as a domain of warfare.

While I'm saying that Canada needs to think about whether cyber would be a domain of warfare, we also have to keep in mind that there are real downsides to using that tool.

[The Chair, Conservative, Peter Kent]

Yes. Okay. Thank you very much.

Thanks to you both for appearing today. You have informed the committee, and we appreciate very much your attendance. Thank you.

We will now suspend and go in camera for committee business.

[Proceedings continue in camera]