National Defence Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2014

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

I'd like to call to order meeting number 41 of the Standing Committee on National Defence. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are continuing our study on the defence of North America.

I am in the chair today as Mr. Kent is unavoidably absent.

Our witnesses are Mr. Charles Barlow, president of the Zariba Security Corporation, and Mr. Ian Glenn, chairman and chief executive officer of ING Robotic Aviation.

Thank you, gentlemen, for your presence here today and for preparing a presentation for the committee.

I'd like to start with you, sir, Mr. Barlow, for an introduction. I understand you have some slides and video to show us. Thank you very much. You have up to 10 minutes. If you could try to keep within that, it would be very much appreciated.

[Charles Barlow, President, Zariba Security Corporation]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, members, for giving me the honour to appear before you.

My name is Charles Barlow. I'm a former military officer. I ran the Afghanistan intelligence response team, the national level team for Afghanistan at the Department of National Defence. They've sent me to pretty much every place that Canada sent people for the last 20 years.

I'm here to speak a bit about UAVs, so we'll start with a little quick history.

When Great Britain entered the First World War 100 years ago, it had about 100 military aircraft in service. By the end of the war, and that's just four years later, that number had grown to 22,000 aircraft. The same sort of growth happened with unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. On 9/11, the U.S. Army had just 54 UAVs in service. That number grew to over 4,000 by 2010. The U.S. Air Force is now training more UAV pilots than fighter pilots and transport pilots combined. This is a revolution, one that came first to the United States, and also to Israel, but one which the rest of the world is working very hard to enter. Of course, it is not just a military revolution. Amazon and Google want to deliver packages with UAVs, and Facebook and Google are looking at drones capable of bringing Internet to more remote areas on the planet.

Consider that very few nations produce fighter aircraft, but over 60 countries today produce some form of UAVs. While most of these are little more than toys, several nations are developing serious, strategic-level armed systems.

UAVs come in a wide spectrum of sizes and capabilities, and there are several ways of categorizing them. I won’t bore you with all the different categories, instead we'll stick with the old army system of tactical, operational, and strategic.

Tactical UAVs are small. They are operated by one or two people. They're usually carried in a vehicle or even a backpack. They're issued to small units. These tactical systems are generally unarmed, although there are a couple of armed systems. They have a short range and they feed the information directly to the people using them. They're very similar in some ways to the commercially available systems used in industry, agriculture, and just for general hobbyists.

The Aeryon SkyRanger is made in Waterloo, Ontario. It's a world leader in that category of very small UAVs.

Operational UAVs are larger. They are operated by a field headquarters or from a warship, and Mr. Glenn I know is going to be able to speak quite a bit to that. They require a dedicated team of operators and maintenance folks. They are, again, generally unarmed, but they may be used to cross international borders. The information they collect is primarily used locally, and it may be sent to the national command level.

Systems like this were used by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan and in service on our ships. A French UAV is being operated in Kabul, and a ScanEagle off one of our warships

Strategic UAVs are larger still. Here we're talking about systems like the famous Predators and the Reapers. They are generally armed. They're often used to cross international borders. They require significant resources in operations, basing, and maintenance; and they're generally operated at the national level. The United States and Israel retain the lead in fielding strategically armed UAVs with the capability of striking deep inside another country. Several other countries, including Turkey, China, and Iran, are working on comparable systems. The Chinese Blue Shark, for example, which is just a concept at the moment, was pictured at a recent Chinese arms show attacking an Indian aircraft carrier. There are similar displays of this kind of Chinese-made UAVs attacking American aircraft carrier groups off Taiwan.

While still largely aspirational, once fielded, these strategic UAVs will then be sold to a wide variety of countries that don't have access to American or Israeli technology. In other words, the coming decade is very likely to see the proliferation of strategic systems, especially throughout the Middle East.

The first great adopter of UAVs was Israel in the Middle East. They pioneered their use in the late 1970s. They were certainly a very active part of the Israeli presence in south Lebanon when I was there in 1999. Israel has conducted drone strikes over the Palestinian territories, and there are unconfirmed reports of Israeli drone strikes in Somalia and Egyptian Sinai. Other nations too have conducted drone strikes—for example, the United Kingdom—but of course the U.S. currently conducts more drone strikes than everyone else combined.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Afghanistan is the drones' most lethal hunting ground. Roughly a quarter of all NATO air strikes in that country in 2011 were using strategic-level drones. One reason the drones are so popular is that they can watch a target for hours, sometimes even days, before firing. That helps confirm that the target is actually there and minimizes casualties. Another reason for using UAVs over aircraft, of course, is risk. Simply put, if a drone goes down, the pilot simply gets in his truck and goes home.

So in the early stages of a conflict, when we're doing what we call “suppression” of enemy air defence, using drones makes an awful lot of sense. But it's the UAVs' odd ability to travel across borders without arousing too much anger that has made them valuable in some of the world's most denied areas. The Pashtun lands, for example, that straddle both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, are accessible to U.S. and coalition forces only on the Afghan side. On the Pakistan side, the Taliban controls much of the tribal areas.

An odd situation has developed in which the United States targets Pakistani Taliban and Arab fighters using drones. This isn't because the U.S. Air Force isn't capable of conducting strikes inside, but because it's far more acceptable for almost everyone to have unmarked drones flying over Pakistan than it is to have the marked jets of a country. The same holds true for Yemen and Somalia, where other U.S. drone strikes have been widely reported.

I'm afraid this is the first slide with a video in it, so I'll just quickly describe it. It's a gun camera video, very grainy, of a little building in the desert that does blow up. We're used to seeing this sort of drone video—a target in the crosshairs, followed by the inevitable explosion—but this video is different. It was released by the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah. It was released in September and it claims to show them hitting an al-Nusra Front target, a Sunni target, inside Syria using an armed drone. If that were true, it would almost certainly be of Iranian manufacture.

Now, I don't know if the video is real or fake, and certainly Iran has made some wild claims about the progress of its UAV programs. But it doesn’t matter much, in the end; if they’re not quite there yet, they very soon will be.

Dozens of nations already fly some operational UAVs, and they're being used. An Iranian UAV, for example, came down over a U.S. base in Iraq in 2007. Iranian UAVs, marked with Hezbollah livery, have also entered Israeli airspace on at least five occasions—and consider that Hezbollah has no other type of aircraft.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

You have about a minute or so left, Mr. Barlow.

[Charles Barlow]

Yes, sir.

The tactical UAVs are the most numerous in the world. They're used for military reconnaissance, agriculture, and even high-end real estate listings. They're used most often to gather HD video and that sort of thing.

UAVs are being embraced by unfriendly groups. In 2011 the FBI arrested an American physics graduate—this fellow shown here—who was planning to fly those two little aircraft laden with explosives into the Capitol building and the Pentagon in the United States before he was arrested by the FBI.

Finally, ISIS, or the Islamic State—this is a video as well—released this video showing their own drones over both Mosul and Raqqa in Syria. They used the imagery they got from this to plan the attack.

What this means for Canada is that advanced nations such as ours no longer have the exclusive ability to gain battlefield imagery in near real time. Our enemies, even those with very limited resources, will increasingly be capable of looking back at us. Second, the UAVs will allow an increasing number of nations and some non-state actors to conduct drone strikes of their own.

In conclusion, UAVs of all sizes have already begun to be a feature in conflicts around the world, and their presence will expand with time. Manned and unmanned systems are already mixing on the battlefield, and humans will fight beside and against robotic systems, including UAVs. We need to consider our offensive UAV capability as well as our ability to counter the UAVs of other nations and non-nation states.

I appreciate your attention, and I will take any questions, Mr. Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

Thank you, Mr. Barlow, I appreciate the background.

I just want to remind the committee that this is a study of the defence of North America so perhaps the questions will be directed more at that than some of the things you have shown us. Thank you, sir.

Mr. Glenn, would you like to make your presentation as the chairman and chief executive officer of ING Robotic Aviation? I see you have some slides as well.

You have about 10 minutes.

[Ian Glenn, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, ING Robotic Aviation]

Perfect. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

It is a privilege, distinguished committee members, to be here to speak to you today.

ING Robotic Aviation, formerly ING Engineering, has extensive experience operating UAVs with the Canadian army and the Royal Canadian Navy over the last six or seven years. From 2008 onward we flew operationally in Afghanistan with some American technology very successfully. There were some 30,000 hours accumulated and by the end we were putting three aircraft up over our Canadian troops during the day, then bringing them back and putting two up at night, and we did that right through to the end of combat activities.

We were fortunate to be asked to provide the same support off our frigates in the Indian Ocean from 2011 until September.

It's a bit of a unique story. We really are today, as both a service provider and a producer of these technologies, the leader here in Canada. We've got some great recognition as we don't leave defence but pivot into five other sectors: oil and gas, mining, utilities, forestry, and precision agriculture. A lot of these sectors are also important to this committee because they are also critical infrastructure. Our ability to go out today is unparalleled. When you add up the number of hours that we've flown for our country—I added it up and it's about 81 laps around the planet—it is a pretty significant experience here.

We've got some great recognition just of late from both the IEEE here as the leading technology company in Ottawa and from the national association, receiving the organization award just recently in company with NASA and Transport Canada.

What I really wanted to talk about today was my opinion that perhaps the Canadian Armed Forces is going the wrong way.

When you compare what's going on with the rest of the world, and Mr. Barlow did a great job of summarizing the things that are happening in the rest of the world, for a country like ours, this ability to do more with less is something we do every day. We are very inventive and certainly in my company we are very inventive in creating cost-effective solutions.

We have this challenge of geography in Canada, which means we need many systems deployed in many places if we're going to do it and do it well. We've seen the high cost of some of the military-oriented drones, especially made by our brothers to the south or other parts of the world, so maybe those aren't the right answers for good surveillance.

Again, Mr. Barlow highlighted that the U.S. military has, he said 5,000—I would say 7,000—robotic aircraft. The Luftwaffe has said that as a point of policy they are going to get rid of their manned pilots. The Portugese military is employing a drone fleet to monitor its maritime air space which extends all the way out to the Azores. The Kenyan defence force uses some of our equipment along with other pieces of equipment on a daily basis to monitor their troublesome Somali border.

So what are we doing in Canada? Well, I would say the Royal Canadian Air Farce, sorry, excuse me, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and this is on the public record so I do apologize to my friends in the light blue, doesn't really have a credible system or a program to deliver this capability. We've seen the JUSTAS program move forward time and time again. The Royal Canadian Navy has abandoned its capability and is planning to develop something for 2021. The Canadian army has some hand throwable simple systems for close-in work but nothing for persistence.

Of course, our SOF folks have a minimal capability and I've seen in the press where they are looking to purchase manned surveillance platforms.

What I'd like to focus on are two case studies where I think these technologies in robotic aviation could play a role. The first would be Arctic search and rescue.

This slide just shows that we actually do stuff all over Canada both operationally and for exports.

Canada has signed up separately with the Arctic nations to enhance its search and rescue capability in the north. One of the things you can do with a robotic aircraft is fly out and see things without putting anyone in harm's way. That means that you, as the person responsible, can take greater risks without risking others' lives to go and see things. We've seen a number of cases both in the Arctic and across Canada where this makes sense. I know that when you have to fly a search and rescue aircraft 3,000 kilometres just to get to the area before you start to figure out where Bob went off the rails, where his ATV broke down, or where his snowmobile broke down, that's perhaps not the right answer. You can separate search from rescue. That's the first point.

You can provide from a community a fast search response with locally based robotic aircraft. They're persistent and you can exploit local knowledge. You can even do things like drop emergency supplies. That's a pretty cool capability. This is enabled by the fact that we have smart robots that can be flown locally in the community and, in the north, by Rangers. That's the first thing. From a government's perspective, it's something that the government could do now. The technology is there. This is something that is a fraction of the cost of the satellites required to talk to the big drone. Maybe under $25 million a year is within the scale of things for all the communities across the north. The added advantage there is that when you're out looking, by definition, you are exercising sovereignty.

The second thing I'd like to talk about is disaster response. Again, you have this ability to go out with a robot and see things and provide immediate assistance in a scenario. In most disasters the information you have is dated or in fact it's wrong, because there have been mudslides or the roads have changed or the rivers have broken through. A response team needs to be able to understand exactly what they're walking into. This is where robot mapping can actually create great detailed maps rapidly. This is an example of something we did for the community of Kuujjuaq, an Inuit community in northern Quebec. On the left you see 2-D and 3-D models of what we were able to collect from a single 15-minute flight. This ability to go out rapidly and map a disaster and provide detailed information back to those commanders who are trying to respond to that disaster, whether they are civil or military, is critical. In fact, if you want to do large areas, our Serenity aircraft, which flies for over eight hours, can map a 20-centimetre resolution. It's far in excess of what you can get from satellite. It's really useful information. We can map 200 square kilometres in a single eight-hour flight. That's a capability that just didn't exist before. It wasn't cost-effective before. It wasn't environmentally friendly before. Now you can put teams in place.

When we think of Canada, its budgets, and how we deal with things, our robotic aircraft called Responder, the helicopter, costs the same as a fully kitted F-150.

That fixed-wing aircraft there, which packs up into seven boxes that you can throw on an Air Canada air transport cargo plane, move into location, and actually go straight into operations with, costs about the same as a bucket truck. These are cost-effective solutions designed by Canadians here in Canada. Even the logistics trail of both of those systems—the first one being electric, this one being gas.... It uses fuel at less than half a litre an hour as opposed to a helicopter, which is always doing fuel dumps and also has an environmental cost associated with moving things around.

In my opinion, certainly organizations like DART, the disaster assistance response team, need this kind of capability. In fact, that's why we have reservists across our country who are equipped with this type of technology who give us a great ability to deal with natural disasters, sovereignty, and search and rescue, and to be prepared for the defence of North America.

Mr. Chairman.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

I thank you very much, Mr. Glenn and Mr. Barlow, a most interesting topic and technology. I'm sure that members present will have lots of questions for you both.

Some of the PowerPoint images Mr. Barlow had we will make available to members of the committee. We'll find a way afterwards.

Mr. Glenn, if there is a physical copy of these we'll try to distribute them as well.

First of all, I have Mr. Leung from the Conservative Party. Mr. Leung, you have seven minutes.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, witnesses, for providing that useful information.

I should preface by saying that in the eighties I had an opportunity to work at a U.S. defence college in southern California. At that time our best calculation was that for every combat person you put in the field, you needed to have six logistics support people to support that person in the field, in operation. I believe that's the same in Afghanistan.

My question is, given that it's impossible to cost out a combat mission prior to entering the combat mission, perhaps you can comment on what the cost savings are if we use this method, with all unmanned drones to handle what needs to be accomplished. Let's say that Canada now has six F-18s working in the Middle East. If we use an unmanned system, what is our cost savings, and what can we get away with?

Mr. Barlow, would you comment, please?

[Charles Barlow]

Thank you, honourable member.

I don't think I'm qualified to speak to the costing of the relative systems. In Canada we don't use....

The Predator, for example, is a $22-million system. It is very cost-effective as compared with a combat aircraft. But it's not combat aircraft capable. They're not there yet.

The one thing I will say is that whether or not we buy the F-35, whatever fighter plane we do buy will probably be the last fighter plane we ever buy, because 30 years or 25 years later, when it's time to replace that fleet, it will be unmanned. I think there is really no question about that at all.

I don't think we're quite at the stage where UAVs can take over, but as I explained very quickly in the presentation, they can go into places that regular aircraft can't. They can loiter longer, and watch a target much longer than a regular pilot can. They're not ready to fight yet in the same way that a fighter plane is.

But I do appreciate it, sir.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

Mr. Glenn.

[Ian Glenn]

I find myself in the interesting position of having started in defence and then having to survive as an entrepreneur in the commercial world. Very specifically, I compete against helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in the commercial market, doing high-resolution rapid mapping and survey work.

The short answer is, I'm cheaper than a helicopter.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

My next question is this. As we look at our defence of North America as a nation, in your opinion, should we start now to invest in research and development, and production of unmanned aircraft, or should we still maintain a dual stream in which we need to have a combat-ready force as well as unmanned surveillance to take over some of the functions of a previously armed force?

[Ian Glenn]

I had 22 years in the military myself as an armoured officer and as a RCEME officer and then had the opportunity to work alongside our forces in Afghanistan. I replicated the capability we had in Afghanistan at a fraction of the price, in Canada, with Canadians. What happens is that these systems just get incrementally better, smarter, easier to use, more capable.

If the issue is the defence of North America and you want to do surveillance or mapping tasks, we're there now. There's no question about it: we're there and we do it every day. If you're into mid-intensity or high-intensity combat, with the systems that we deployed in Afghanistan you're going to tread a lot, especially at war. One of the ways to succeed is just by having a lot of cheap stuff, inexpensive stuff.

As Mr. Barlow pointed out, the Americans are working on robotic aircraft at a price point that will compete in capability with manned aviation, but at the same price point. I don't know whether that is what we want as a country, but certainly for those tasks in which you just want to be out there seeing as much as you can see to inform your decisions—whether that bridge is out, whether there are folks who need to be rescued off that roof there, or whether that guy is out on that ice floe—those are things that can be done well by robotic aircraft today, at a price point that we can do now.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

I gather from this that we need to direct some of our investment to that area for operability, unless we're on such good terms with the American civilians that we can buy their products.

[Ian Glenn]

You can buy their products, but you're paying a price point.

There are two parts of the world. The reason I was able to export to Kenya was that I have designed my systems for the emerging market and for Canadian commercial consumption. That's a very deliberate choice: not to compete against everyone in the U.S., who can only sell to DOD.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

My last question is this. As you know, in many of the conflict areas that we're in, at the end of the day you need to have boots on the ground; you need to secure the geography. How does the unmanned aircraft do this?

[Ian Glenn]

The unmanned aircraft supports those guys on the ground so that they don't walk around the corner and get a surprise. That's exactly what we did in Afghanistan.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

Thank you, Mr. Leung.

We now have Élaine Michaud from the NDP for seven minutes.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would also like to thank both of our witnesses for their presentations today.

Mr. Barlow, my first question is for you.

I'm having trouble understanding how your remarks today fit into our study on the defence of North America. We've heard a lot about what's being done around the world. So my questions will focus on the North American context, to ensure they are relevant to our study.

I would like to know what the legal and regulatory roadblocks are to the use of UAVs in North American airspace.

[Charles Barlow]

I have to apologize, as I can't answer your question in French.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

That's fine.

[Charles Barlow]

That's an excellent question. I know Mr. Glenn is probably on top of this very closely, but the regulatory environment in Canada has generally been better, making a little more allowance for drones over our own airspace than that of our cousins to the south. The American FAA is supposed to come out with some new regulations and has been supposed to for quite awhile. We Canadians just came out, I think it was a week ago or something, with a reasonable set of rules and regulations.

The odd bit is, it's very hard for government regulators to keep up, because the technology changes; people buy them and they do strange things that nobody ever expected they would do. There is a huge division in Canada between using it for fun, as a hobbyist, and using it for commercial or government use. It is, in my opinion, a false divide.

Generally speaking, the aircraft hobbyists have been more responsible, older folks, and it has never really been a problem. Nobody has ever flown a radio-controlled or RC plane into a problematic area until very recently, so Transport Canada has never tried to regulate hobby aircraft, unless they're big. But as soon as you take that same aircraft and you want to do something with it commercially, or a police force wants to use it, that becomes a commercial use of the thing and is regulated by Transport Canada. While, as I said, their regulations are better than the Americans', it's still a very strange divide, in my opinion.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Mr. Glenn, do you have anything to add?

[Ian Glenn]

Unfortunately, I am going to make the same apology as my colleague.