National Defence Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2014

[Charles Barlow]

You don't have a pilot stranded 2,000 miles from the middle of nowhere, right? This is what happens if an aircraft is flying on the northern patrol and it goes down. Even if you know exactly where the guy is, just the rescue bit is not going to happen. It's just not going to happen in time, right? Whereas if you lose one of these unmanned vehicles, first of all, they're not very expensive. Second, there's nobody on board. That's the other major consideration.

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

When we look at the Arctic, at the defence of North America, at search and rescue and surveillance, especially in the Northwest Passage and who is going up and down through the passage as soft ice conditions continue to advance, where should we be basing drones? How many locations are we talking about? I guess it comes down again to what platform you use.

I like the idea. I hadn't even thought about using the Rangers as the operators. That actually expands the whole capability. You don't need big, extravagant runways, like we have at Churchill or Iqaluit, but maybe there are other locations where we can be stationing UAVs.

[Ian Glenn]

The short answer is you put it in every community. I mean, if you think about the whole contract we have with the Rangers, they're our eyes on the ground. Well, now they have to get some little mechanized thing to go out and look. When we, as a country, condensed everybody into these communities—quite deliberately—what robotic aircraft actually will allow them to do is to expand back out again safely. Every Ranger patrol should have their own aircraft overtop of them. It helps them plot routes safely through the ice conditions. If something goes wrong, it actually can give them better communications back to the community. You can run these from every community today. It's just that simple. That's where you want to be. I need to go into the bush. I need to operate, right? If I'm doing a pipeline, I need to go from place to place to place. I need 300 feet or so and I'm good to go.

[Charles Barlow]

I should just say something quickly. Remember earlier I showed you the small ones, the medium ones, and the big ones. The big ones are not better than the small ones, and vice versa. For example, you have the Mexico border with the United States and they have, let's say, one $22-million Predator flying alone. Or you could put a small one in every patrol vehicle and cover hundreds of points along the border for the same money. I'm not saying that's necessarily the way you want to go either, but the military uses pistols, rifles, and artillery, big to small. It's the same thing with robots. The Predators are not better than the little guys; the little guys aren't better than the big ones.

For example, you can put a little one over a city or a population a lot more safely than a big one. It can loiter and just sit there if it's some sort of helicopter, so you can get persistent surveillance. The big ones go further and longer and they get a bigger swath, but they're not very close and you can't fly them over Toronto, for example. If you're looking at the vast open spaces of the north, you're looking at a big system, obviously. If you're talking about urban areas, the Thousand Islands, that kind of thing, you're going to want to look at a much smaller system—a bunch of much smaller systems.

When you say they have to be operated, there's not that much operation left. You kind of tell it what to do and then go have coffee, right? The machine will fly the GPS route that you've told it to fly and the video will come in. It's not a labour-intensive process at all.

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

Correct. For coastal it can be put on flights or coastal vessels or frigates and do the same job and expand the eyes out—

[Ian Glenn]

Absolutely.

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

You're talking hundreds of kilometres farther than where the ship is actually located.

[Ian Glenn]

We are under contract to build a bigger version of our helicopter in the defence industry research program. We call it Horizon, and it will go off the ship and go out. We are working with a Halifax company that makes transponders to put on icebergs. Do you know how they do it now? You can't put people out there. You have to drive out with the ship. The guy out with the biggest arm takes this big ball and throws it onto the iceberg. That's where we're at. Its a case of occupational safety. We are working with them to pick up those transponders and go place them and come back. Back and forth....

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

Thank you, Mr. Glenn. Your time is up, Mr. Bezan, thank you.

The next questioner is Madam Murray for the Liberal Party.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Thank you.

This is fascinating. Thank you for your presentation to the committee.

I am trying to understand why Canada is so far behind in its own JUSTAS program, the joint unmanned surveillance and target acquisition system. It was announced in the 2005 election campaign by the Conservative Party that, if elected, it would be using these UAVs in Goose Bay, Comox, and so on for Arctic air surveillance. As we know, that has been a failed procurement, and there has not been anything delivered past the options analysis stage. You're providing a lot of information about how this can be used in surveillance as well as.... We also know that it could be used in a place like Iraq, where we don't have ground information and where these kinds of unmanned vehicles can carry precision optics and radar, intercept cellphone networks, and find out what people on the ground are saying to whom, where their weapons dumps are, and what their plans are. Do you think that the Canadian government should accelerate its...? Well, they can't go more slowly, but do you think this is an important program for the country, both for the overseas military operations and for the Arctic surveillance and defence, or do you think it should be focused more on the local Canadian needs?

[Charles Barlow]

When you jump into new technology, there is always a temptation to wait just a little bit longer, because there is always the next great thing just about to come out. We're used to that with computers and cellphones and things like that. I think that part of the reason there has been a reluctance to jump in is that the next systems are always going to be so great. However, at a certain point you have to jump in and start getting into the process, because it's not just the physical piece of equipment that you're using; it's the regulatory environment and the command system that gets put into place to run these things. It's the commanders and troops on the ground who start to learn how to use UAVs as part of their battle procedure, for example. The physical machine that you are using doesn't particularly matter at the end of the day. When I was an intelligence officer, I didn't care where the imagery came from—a satellite, an aircraft, a guy on the ground with a camera. I needed the image. I think the defence department has been a little bit slow. The Israelis have been using these things since the 1970s.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Excuse me. That is a whole legitimate but longer conversation, and since I have only a few minutes.... I think your answer would be yes, we should be moving forward both for deployment abroad and for local domestic use. I'm seeing a nod over here.

[Charles Barlow]

Oh, absolutely. For robotics it's time to jump in.

[Ian Glenn]

Remember that Defence, in particular, and Public Works who buy things.... There's always a mismatch between the evolution of technology and the ability of the system to buy stuff. Why were we successful in Afghanistan? We walked in with a service-based model where the technology was allowed to evolve rapidly. They bought services, and we were integrated directly into the combat operation. The soldiers flew the systems—not pilots, but soldiers. We took care of the flight critical pieces. That will always be the case.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Are you prepared? Do you have enough background in this with what's happened in the past to judge whether it is simply decision paralysis through inexperience that's happening now? Or have the cost savings instructions, with the planned clawbacks and the budget cuts, put this on the back burner because there are greater priorities for the government?

[Ian Glenn]

As someone outside of the government, I can only speculate.

It's systemically not meant to succeed. What drives that, I don't know.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

It has succeeded in other places, times, and countries.

This is just to help me understand. The Boeing ScanEagle, which is a 50-pound, 24-hour piece of equipment, how is that similar or different? Is it more capable? Less capable?

[Ian Glenn]

It's the same as what we built with Serenity.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

There were U.S. commentators who suggested that because Canada has good competence in intelligence analysis, good technicians, and companies such as those you're representing, Canada's best contribution in Iraq would have been these Boeing ScanEagle sized—

[Ian Glenn]

Or a Canadian made one with the same capability....

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Yes, that size of UAV with imaging capability and with signals intelligence capability would have provided a huge benefit at a time where we had an absence of that intelligence, instead of sending essentially bombs on aerial trucks to join a much larger, more capable fleet doing that less pinpointed damage. Would you say this would have been a good deployment of Canadian resources to Iraq?

[Ian Glenn]

Of course I'm biased, but I would say yes.

[Charles Barlow]

If I may jump in really quickly, I showed you earlier that very small Canadian one. If you were to supply something like that to the guys defending the town of Kobane, for example, it doesn't go very far. It only goes a few kilometres but it can fly out over the town, see exactly where the enemy is, give you a latitude and longitude, and you can call NATO now on your cellphone and tell them, I can actually see the bad guys three blocks away. That's the sort of thing we could be thinking about doing as well.

This is a revolution. You're seeing the kids.... They were flying UAVs over the Hong Kong protests. It's a revolution that's happening faster outside of government than within.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

But we could have been doing it now—

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Jack Harris]

Thank you.

Your time is exceeded at this point. Thank you very much.