Evidence of meeting #40 for National Defence in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was surveillance.
A recording is available from Parliament.
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
Rick Norlock Conservative Northumberland—Quinte West, ON
I can tell you from personal knowledge that there is not only a military but a commercial usage for UAVs when it comes to moving people around. I know of an inventor who's just had $400 million invested in his company to move people around cities in UAVs. Of course, he's very worried about, I think you mentioned, some of the international law and national law. Could you elaborate on international law and national law when it comes to unmanned vehicles?
5:05 p.m.
As an Individual
The international law, I think, is that we try to use by analog what we've always understood about law of armed conflict with people directly in control of the weapons. In domestic space there are interesting challenges in trying to de-conflict users of the airspace. In my paper I tried to talk a bit about that. In Canada, Transport Canada issues what they call special flight operations certificates for specific flights or specific flight regimes. Those flights have to be programmed. They have to be described. In separating flight, when there are pilots aboard, it's all see and be seen, or we have air traffic controllers who ensure that we don't get too close to one another and that there is no conflict.
Among the UAV crowd, that air traffic control could apply. But if it's uncontrolled airspace, and a lot of Canada is uncontrolled, there really isn't a good way of managing that. So we just carve off regimes of airspace and say, “You can go and fly in that place and no one else can.”
5:05 p.m.
Conservative
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
Thank you, sir, for your testimony.
When General Bouchard was here, I think maybe more than a year ago, he described a rather elaborate protocol for bombing runs, from identification of target right through to the dropping of the bomb. I was thinking about that as far as a UAV is concerned. What would be, if any, the substantive difference between protocols for bombing runs by a drone and a piloted airplane?
5:05 p.m.
As an Individual
I think in approving the target and figuring out what.... I'm not sure if that's the protocol you're talking about, which verifies that what you're aiming at really is a legitimate target.
5:05 p.m.
Liberal
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
Well, presumably the front end of the target can be pretty similar. You know what you want to hit, how far you have to fly, how much gas you have to have, and all that sort of stuff.
5:05 p.m.
As an Individual
If you're just going to do one run on a predetermined target, I don't think there is any difference. If you're trying to establish a pattern of activity in a particular timeframe when a particular body of people is in the open or something, then the surveillance or the loitering and waiting for that opening to happen, I think, is more easily handled on UAVs. It's not impossible, but they're all endurance limited and that depends on fuel and things like that. Typically manned aircraft don't have as much endurance, I think, and would need to be refuelled. They do come to a human endurance limit.
November 27th, 2014 / 5:05 p.m.
Liberal
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
It's interesting when applied to the Libyan conflict where the launch point of the airplanes was quite close relatively speaking, just on the other side of the Mediterranean, to bombing runs to Libya where there was going to be no ground resistance to the bombing run. Given that an F/A-18 flies at $22,000 an hour, it seems to me a very attractive alternative to certain kinds of limited missions.
Is that a fair observation?
5:10 p.m.
As an Individual
I think it's a fair observation. I regret that I don't have a figure to compare the F/A-18 hourly costs to say a Predator, that might be the alternative. We think they run more cheaply. There's less complexity. There is no human aboard to sustain. I'm not sure whether that translates into cheaper flights yet or cheaper time loitering.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
That's interesting because I would have....
Certainly the vehicle itself is a heck of a lot cheaper than an F/A-18, or F-35, or whatever the heck we're going to buy. Where would you run up your costs other than the radar and the communications infrastructure, which presumably would be very similar to the radar and communications structure of an airplane?
5:10 p.m.
As an Individual
You're probably spot on, I just don't know.
The Predator is a lot cheaper in my expectation than an F/A-18 and that ought to limit some of the cost, but if you're going for a longer loiter then you are going through more of the consumables than you might do.
If it's a single run, if it's the defined target that you described with no particular defences or complexity, then it's probably a cheaper solution.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
We're always into cheap and cheerful.
If you extrapolate that over to the Middle East conflict and what's going on right now, why wouldn't the Americans in particular be using drones to participate in that conflict? They do have the capacity.
5:10 p.m.
As an Individual
I don't think I can comment usefully on that. I don't know. They have cruise missiles that they often use, Harpoons particularly and Tomahawks, which achieve a similar effect.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
5:10 p.m.
As an Individual
They do seem to use those, but I don't have the inside view of what the patterns of usage really are. I see them launching smart bombs, or at least I see pictures that portray that. That's probably adequate. Where there is little risk to the carrier platform, then the drone may not be quite as attractive. There aren't enough of them yet.
5:10 p.m.
Liberal
John McKay Liberal Scarborough—Guildwood, ON
My final question is about the Arctic. The Russians seem to have lots of fun these days coming up to the airspace and then backing off and we scramble and all the rest of that stuff. How would you see the deployment of drones up in our Arctic airspace? Would you have them stationed up there and then on constant monitor, or would you have them flying in and out of Trenton or wherever? Greenwood? I don't really know.
5:10 p.m.
As an Individual
My inclination if it's to serve the north is that it ought to probably be based in a central part of the north. But these would be systems studies that would be achieved. Yellowknife or Churchill or somewhere like that might look like an adequately centralized sort of spot to cover the Arctic.
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
5:10 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and through you, first of all, we know that a polar class cargo ship can use drones to scope the ice, but does the capability of an armed drone, be it a missile payload or a dirty bomb, to be launched from a commercial ship exist?
5:15 p.m.
As an Individual
You're asking whether a UAV carrying a weapon could launch from a ship. Certainly.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
If they were to be able to launch far enough, but close enough to shore, nap of the earth, then once it got to land, would it be detected by some type of radar?
5:15 p.m.
As an Individual
That's the problem we have with cruise missiles. I think what you're describing is more likely a cruise missile than a UAV. Off of a ship, it's hard to get some of those back on board. You might be able to launch them, but if they're reusable, they're likely to have to be rotary-wing helicopter sort of surrogates, and that is a very difficult problem. I think it's a NORAD problem.
Those bombers that do the runs along our coasts could very well be armed with air-launched cruise missiles—that was exactly the problem we worried about in the 1990s—that are very small and very difficult to detect and that fly at low altitudes.
We have very limited radar coverage around our northern warning system, so in order for us to have any confidence that we could pick them up, we had airborne radars, AWACs, airborne warning and control systems, with the down look of the radar those give, which has coverage out to larger distances. All of that applies to UAVs as well. I think that while you could launch one from a ship, if you're calling it a UAV, it's because you think you're going to get it back, and getting it back on a ship is not going to be an easy problem.
5:15 p.m.
Conservative
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
No, I wasn't thinking of getting it back. What I'm thinking of is asymmetric warfare and terrorists who just plan the launch, and it wouldn't be a cruise missile per se. It would involve just using a UAV as a delivery mechanism for whatever payload they choose to use, be it a bomb or a biological type—
