National Defence Committee on Feb. 18th, 2015

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Yes, you triangulate.

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

Yes, to triangulate means three, right?

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

So Masset has the same kind of equipment and they also are no longer doing the analysis there. It's happening centrally here—

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

That's correct.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

—but they still have a small group that maintains the facility, and so on.

What's happened with your budget since the deficit reductions and budget freezes and so on? I know that the CSE's has gone up. Has yours gone down, or remained the same, or gone up since 2010, when these freezes and cuts started to affect the Canadian Armed Forces?

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

The budget allocated towards my part of the operation of signals intelligence, to my knowledge—I've only been in command of this organization for a year—has not significantly varied, because our tasks have not significantly varied.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

So your task, then, includes the analysis group? They're just somewhere else.

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

That's correct.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Okay, but theirs hasn't gone up significantly either, as far as you know?

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

No, but the fact that we've taken them out of Alert, out of Masset, and out of Gander and centralized them in Ottawa means that we don't have to pay them extra money to be in those isolated places. There's a whole bunch of savings that we can turn into operational—

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

So you have more capacity because of those savings, from a logistical perspective.

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

Yes.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Okay.

You were saying in answer to Mr. Harris' question that you do foreign military intelligence and the CSE does foreign intelligence. Does the CSE have these same collection facilities, or does your collection then send signals to them for their analysis of the foreign intelligence and your analysis group does the military? Or do you do all of the analysis and then pass over to the CSE the kinds of information they need and keep for the central command the information you need?

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

That's a difficult question to answer. I'd say that when the raw information comes in, it's not really of much use to anybody. It requires the analysis. It's only the people who are analyzing who are able to determine what they need to get the full picture that they're trying to develop of whatever it is. In a perfect world, we would share the raw information and let the analysts draw out the parts they need. Two people might look at the same thing and draw different conclusions because they're going after different problems.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Okay. So it goes to the CSE as raw data, but you have the devices that collect the signals in the first place.

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

That's right. We have the people in Alert and those places, and the equipment.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

That's the source of the signals for the CSE as well.

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

I wouldn't presume to know what the CSE has. I would certainly hope that they have a lot more than just that, but yes, that would be part of their sources.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

That's part of their sources.

One thing that's been in the news concerning Canadians is the tracking of the free downloading of web apps now. Is that the kind of thing that can be tracked by the equipment in Alert and Masset, for example, in terms of who's doing what with what websites?

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

No. If you think of where Alert and Masset are, the only people out there are us, so it's very much focused more on the type of signals that come through the air, such as radio signals, radio frequency signals. Tracking what's happening on the Internet is not at all a function of those three locations.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Are there special human resources support requirements that you have in place for people who live as far away as Alert? Is it working? Do you have different levels of stress and so on from people who are up there compared to somewhere else?

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

Being posted to Alert is considered a deployment conceptually the same—obviously not exactly the same—as being deployed to Afghanistan, Kuwait, or wherever. We rotate people in and out of there not on three-year terms but on three-month or six-month terms, depending on what their job is. While they're there, we try to give them the same type of communications to back home that they would get if they were deployed overseas somewhere. It's deployment, but within our own country, because they're as far away there as they are in Europe, or farther, actually.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Are there risks with a deployment to Alert that you have to manage for that wouldn't exist with a deployment somewhere or, say, living in Ottawa?

[Col S.M. Moritsugu]

I think the biggest risks are the fact that any support beyond what's right there is really far away both in time and distance. If there's a first aid emergency here in Ottawa, I can call 911 and somebody would be there in minutes. If you call the equivalent of 911 in Alert, it's hours to potentially half a day before the closest person is going to get there, just because of how far it is. It's 4,000 kilometres from here to fly there. With the station, then, even though I only have fewer than 10 people, the whole conglomeration of them provides all that support. It's a mini self-contained village with all the functions that you would have, which is what the air force provides for us.

[Joyce Murray, Liberal, Vancouver Quadra, BC]

Can you tell us the total force number that you're responsible for as a commander of information operations groups?