National Defence Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2014

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We're talking about all the capabilities, and the one thing that you mentioned earlier, Mr. Barlow, is that right now we are seeing ISIL as well as Hezbollah and other entities having capabilities with drones. They are coming in and taking a look at where Canadian positions could be in theatre, along with our allies. How do we defend against that? What types of countermeasures are capable...? I know that with the situation in eastern Ukraine right now all their UAVs were knocked down by the Russian-backed separatists. Exactly what technologies are out there from a defensive side, and should Canada be employing those countermeasures?

[Charles Barlow]

The world is a long way behind in the defence part as opposed to the offensive part of UAVs.

For example a couple of months ago two UAVs were found crashed in South Korea that had originated from North Korea. They were dinky little things, but they had filmed the presidential palace and a few military installations. They caused cabinet crisis meetings and all sorts of things.

Now the South Koreans are looking to buy a system with advanced radars because that's what you need to find very small machines and some sort of defensive system that they want to build. That's going to be an enormous program. The Americans—DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—are working on all kinds of solutions such as counter drones, but this is a big problem. Guys are dropping drugs into prisons in Canada with little UAVs. They just fly it over, drop the drugs, and fly away.

There isn't a good counter system for that. You can't jam the frequencies because they are using regular frequencies most of the time. A prison, for example, can't blanket-jam all the frequencies around it. This is an issue that hasn't quite been solved yet. We've also seen some video recently of guys flying small UAVs near aircraft in Toronto and Vancouver in the flight path. We need some counter systems and we need a system within the government. As Mr. Barlow said earlier it's tough to procure new stuff. It's really tough to procure new stuff until we have a major incident with a UAV and then everybody is going to be jumping around looking for some sort of good system, to defend.

[Ian Glenn]

That's a pretty comprehensive answer.

There are some things you can do. Like any system, there are vulnerabilities, but the beauty of having a cheap system is you can knock one down one and the other one is there. If they are only buying RC stuff, they would be just throwing more and more stuff at you. It's not a trivial problem.

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

You have shown in some of these slides UAVs, including domestic terrorists wanting to make use of them. We know that we've seen this proliferation of Tomahawk cruise missiles around the world. If somebody came in close enough to our shorelines they could launch a UAV to carry a cruise missile inland and do a pile of damage I suspect. Cruise would be able to fly quite a distance themselves, but even somebody on a fishing vessel could launch a UAV and a dirty bomb, from a terrorist attack capability, and then it goes some place like a port city.

[Ian Glenn]

They are hard to detect. We flew 30,000 hours over the population in Afghanistan at about 2,000 to 3,000 feet and no one ever looked up. We were photographing polar bears and nothing moved. You don't normally notice.

The other thing I remember from my days in the armoured corps was that we used to fly these little RC planes and we would practise our air defence...a squadron of Leopard tanks, 19 guys on machine guns, we never hit them because it's really hard. They are small. They are only carrying a camera and it is a hard problem.

It's not that it isn't soluble, but it's not trivial.

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

Mr. Glenn, you mentioned earlier about the funding that you got from NRC Canada. Can you talk a bit about what you are doing through the industrial research assistance program?

[Ian Glenn]

Absolutely. We are on our fixed-wing and specifically we are improving its Arctic performance and short landing capability, and nets of some kind so we won't require a runway to land on or even a grass strip. We are looking at better engines, enhancing our rapid mapping capability, and there are some other general performance...pushing the performance envelope from 8 to maybe 25 hours.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

Thank you.

That is the end of the second round. We seem to have a fair bit of time left, so I am going to offer a third round to be one from each party for five minutes each. We will start with the New Democratic Party, Mr. Brahmi.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Glenn, I'd like to pick up on the search program you received support for. You said the system's arctic capability and performance had improved.

Does that improvement extend to armed capability?

[Ian Glenn]

No, we're not in the shooting business.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Very well. There is not—

[Ian Glenn]

Commercial surveillance, not in the shooting...I had a career in the military. I know how to do that. That's not what we do.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Very good.

More generally, I'd like to round out the question that was asked earlier and come back to the use of drones for maritime protection.

Will the next generation of drones be equipped with underwater detection systems?

[Ian Glenn]

You mean airborne delivery? Like a helicopter stick?

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Will the next generation of drones have underwater vision or detection capability that relies on infrared imaging? In fact, they would have the same capabilities as submarines.

[Ian Glenn]

Submarines are interesting because you also use them for other things like covertly delivering people to places you want. Airborne delivery...some of the science missions require us to dip transducers into the water in the Arctic. From a technical point of view we can solve that problem. If there's a need that somebody wants to take that approach you can do transducers as you would drop sonar buoys from a Sea King.

With imaging systems under the water that's where satellites work well because weight detection is one of the cool things you can do. Specifically you need to look—it depends on a lot of different conditions—at normal visual. If it's in the Bahamas you can see in the water easily. If it's off the coast of St. John's it might be a little harder to see. Turbidity and all those things do impact your ability to see, which is often why—from our ASW piece in the manned world—we're dropping sonar, listening, and then being able to triangulate, detect that way. If those systems are small enough then you can deliver. It doesn't matter whether there's a pilot on board the delivery system.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

I have another question for you on the counter-measures we were discussing earlier.

Which is the more effective system, in your opinion? Is it the ability to interfere and take control of an enemy UAV or the ability to launch a direct attack via a missile defence system? A missile has no communication capability. It has an automatic guidance system so that it hits its target directly.

Which of those two options is more effective? Is it the interference and takeover capability or the direct attack capability?

[Charles Barlow]

Right at the end of World War II the Germans were firing V-2 rockets at London. The Americans came up with a remotely controlled airplane, a bomber, and they filled it full of bombs. They put a remote radio control inside the aircraft. The guys would take off, they would parachute out of the airplane, another airplane would fly along controlling it, and they would guide it into the missile sites. That happened in 1944. Robots have been used to attack missiles for 60 or 70 years.

In terms of defeating UAVs I mentioned earlier that humans will fight both alongside and against robots. Robots will also fight those things as well. There will be counter-UAV robots, counter-UAV UAVs. If they detect it they'll crash into it.

The Israelis are using a system in their northern border for exactly that same reason, but overall you're going to need to detect them and then jam them.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

You're out of time, sir. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Brahmi and Mr. Barlow.

Next is Mr. Leung for five minutes.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

If we look into the defence of North America and how we're going to prevent an unintended war—because I just heard you mention that these drones could be unmanned, but they're also unmarked whereas regular combat aircraft are marked—what is our assurance, or how do we prevent ourselves from getting into some sort of terrorist war where a third world country will send a drone with U.S. marking or Russian marking and hit a target?

What's our assurance? How do we prevent that from happening? Your comments, please, Mr. Barlow.

[Charles Barlow]

Sir, I think for one thing, it's very likely to happen against our own deployed forces before too long. I know that's not North America, but still, if you're a Canadian warship, wherever you are, you're in Canada—sort of. So that's likely going to happen. We've already had imagery taken against us in a hostile manner. It's very likely that at some point somebody's going to do a terrorist attack using unmanned systems the way I mentioned.

How do we defend ourselves? It's the same way we do against all threats: watch for them, set up some systems, think about it. It's a very, very quickly emerging thing. The one thing that I've learned about a lot of our opposition is, as they say in the military, the enemy is just as smart as you are, but they're coming at it from a different perspective. So I think we're going to get surprised, no matter what we do.

[Ian Glenn]

There's no short answer to that. At least with manned aviation, you have that pilot and you can probably trace back who that was. You go back to that chipset, and it's probably made in China. That's it, at the end of the day. You can pick up some nice decals at the local hobby shop here and make it anything you want it to be.

It's a great question.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

It concerns me not so much how we use these in the democratic role of those who have a moral right to do something, but it concerns me when some of these rogue states are simply going to use them as a method for a terrorist attack, to pit two countries against each other.

[Ian Glenn]

I think it will go back. If you have the technology, you look at it, that's what intelligence guys are meant to do. The technical intelligence guys can go back, look at the code, look at the firmware, make some deductions.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Do we at the current time have the ability to detect an unmanned vehicle by the profile of its engine, the profile of its electronic communication or RC capability, to detect where that product was made, or who manufactures it? Is that type of footprint available?