National Defence Committee on Feb. 25th, 2015

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Rear-Admiral Newton, could you tell me what the consequences are on North-American defence of the changes in the initial training of the officers under your command, either as the commander of Maritime Forces Atlantic or as part of the Joint Task Force. The initial training was completely overhauled in 1995. In fact, the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean closed and so did the college that was focused more specifically on training naval officers in British Columbia.

What challenges did you have to face at that time?

Furthermore, you were in charge in 2013 when the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean reviewed the training needs of officers in Saint-Jean compared to those in Kingston.

What impact did that have on the training of naval officers specifically?

[RAdm John Newton]

I have no details about the issue you are describing.

The initial training of officers occurs at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,

for the navy.

The detailed training of a mariner as soon as he comes out of the basic training at Saint-Jean is undertaken in Esquimalt. That's a very specific marine-based training using boats at sea, the patrol craft of our training system. It occurs in ocean waters so you can learn all the marine trades.

The reserves of the Royal Canadian Navy utilize a basic training system at Valcartier and the base at Quebec City. We don't use Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu for the reserve officers.

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

As commander of the Maritime Forces Atlantic, were you asked to share your views on the review that started in 2013 and whose report had to be submitted in the spring of 2014? In that instance, the goal was to assess the training needs in Saint-Jean compared to Kingston.

[RAdm John Newton]

I wasn't consulted. In the navy, one of the pieces that allows us to stay very competitive, very operationally focused is I was given the operational elements, the readiness elements of the navy, as a point of functional leadership. My colleague on the west coast, Admiral Truelove, was given the personnel and training domain. He would be the one reviewing the officer professional development study that's coming out of the chief of military personnel, all the elements of basic training that we receive at Saint-Jean, and how those might evolve with time.

As far as I'm concerned, having run the naval training system for three years, we're very happy with the product that comes out of Saint-Jean. Where we turn our attention is when we get the young officer, and we put him into the maritime environment in Esquimalt. We have given him the absolutely necessary elements of being a sailor, which you will get nowhere else in the country. We have retooled our training system to make it very streamlined and get those kids to the ships as quickly as possible.

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

This committee has visited that naval officers training school before, so we know what you are talking about.

[RAdm John Newton]

At Esquimalt?

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

Yes.

[RAdm John Newton]

The Venture, the naval training school for officers, is a very historic and—

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

Absolutely, we have visited that base.

Let's talk about the second hat that you wear as commander of the Joint Task Force Atlantic. I have the same question about the officers who are not specifically in the navy and who therefore don't need this specific training that is provided at the Naval Officers Training Centre Venture, in Esquimalt.

Are the needs being reviewed right now?

[RAdm John Newton]

No, not at all, because the Joint Task Force Atlantic only has 15 middle-ranking or higher-ranking officers doing the work.

It's a latent force. It doesn't exist until a crisis occurs. Then the army, the air force, and the navy put in their operational elements to the force and they're directed by the commander. I have very senior officers and I get the product of excellent training up to that point in their career.

[The Chair, Conservative, Peter Kent]

That's time, thank you.

Mr. Opitz, please, you have five minutes.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and Admiral, thank you very much.

I can say something about the training system, having once been involved in it. Our sailors are trained not only to specific boat-driving skills and MARS officers and so forth, but they're jointly trained exceptionally well. I've seen a lot of silver and bronze anchors on a lot of reserve officers among the gold anchors they wear as well, which means they're getting a significant amount of sea time. That is a huge indicator of how well we're doing and how well both reserve and regular sides of the navy are going. So we're very proud of you guys for doing that.

Admiral, there's a difference right now in some of the new capabilities, the Halifax-class ships versus the last Iroquois-class destroyer. Can you describe some of the new capabilities aboard the Halifax-class ships right now?

[RAdm John Newton]

The ships were delivered starting in 2000 and they therefore had the technology of the 1990 to 2000 timeframe incorporated into the original build. It was a wonderfully capable technology in that era. You can imagine, though, the computers were fairly big and they ate up a lot of room and demanded a lot of air conditioning. That's just one piece that changes with modernization. There's a considerable amount of miniaturization and with it space and volume liberation in the ship. That volume liberation in a fairly large ship can go to other uses.

I'll give you three pieces of modernization that came with this technology change. One is liberation of space and so the four lead ships of the modernization can be made into flagships for the force so that we can bridge across the period where we don't have a Canadian surface combatant, where we don't have the Iroquois-class which gave us our task force command capabilities. So we've got volume and we added that volume to the operations room of the ship. We put in the command and control consoles and now we have a bridging capacity to the future.

Another element of modernization is in the old ship damage control. Keeping the ship afloat and fighting fire and flood was a separate capacity from running the engines, the auxiliary equipment, and the air conditioning. The fact is, in a warship that floats on the sea the two of them are actually one and the same. You want to fight against fire and flood at the same time that you operate your machinery. In fact, a lot of the machinery we operate contributes to the fighting of damage. We've incorporated in the modernization those two inherently related systems into one integrated platform management system. It is a wonderful interactive system where people stand in front of major computer screens that demand lots of electricity, but they can intuitively direct the battle against the debilitating damage of battle. Our job is to fight, survive the damage, and win the exchange.

The third element is we increased the sensor, radars, and weapons system functioning and capacities of the ship, especially in the above-water domain. We've upgraded a missile system, added a three-dimensional radar, have much more precise fire control radars, and modernized elements of the gun and electronic warfare system so that the ship can actually confront, survive, and win in an exchange with, let's say, fifth-generation missiles of potential adversaries. We're in the full-up development of this new combat suite right now.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

In your overall readiness, how flexible is the fleet overall? We talked about submarines briefly and the capability of diesel submarines versus nuclear submarines. We've had previous testimony that diesel submarines, in particular in training with our allies that have nukes, are hugely important in that exercise because it allows the merging of both capabilities. Of course, the quietness of our submarines and the stealth capabilities, quite frankly, underwater are important, but so are some of the elements that you deal with in terms of the whole-of-government approach when you're working with DOM ops and when you're working with, of course, other elements in land and air capabilities.

I only have probably a minute to go. Can you just briefly describe the overall flexibility of the fleet and being able to deal with all of those elements at once?

[RAdm John Newton]

I admit that we are a general purpose navy. We don't want to be pigeonholed in any particular niche, so we are trying to develop an agile, responsive, multi-purpose, retoolable navy, depending on the mission scenario.

Our submarine, sir, introduces a very small submarine. It doesn't have the big underwater signature of a nuclear boat. It can get into shallow waters and it can survey coasts, bays, inlets, and the shelf waters that are prevalent around the world. It takes advantage of the way sound propagates in the ocean, and it can hide using sound channels and sea bottom features where a nuclear submarine would just not be the right tool to use. It's an adjunct or a complementary element to the big nuclear submarines of the blue water. It can be used in the blue water. In fact the submarine was made by the British for the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap, which is a very turbulent and a very cold and difficult body of water to hunt submarines in.

We know we have a good submarine. It's proving itself daily when it operates against the best submariners in the world, and they have a heck of a time dealing with it. I imagine our guys have a heck of a time dealing with those submarines too, but there's a mutual respect of two fundamentally different classes of ships.

On the second part of your question, we practise and we look for scenarios with foreign navies and countries to develop this broadly useful navy. We will go into major exercises, creating scenarios that make sure we're not pigeonholed into just anti-submarine warfare and that we are actually able to do escort, maritime interdiction operations, or counter-drug boardings.

At this time we're building a third generation of our naval boarding party capacity, which is like a SWAT team at sea. We're coming up to a level just underneath counterterrorist special operations forces, so we can be their support for maritime counterterrorism. We're continually looking for these areas to broaden the utility of our navy.

[The Chair, Conservative, Peter Kent]

Thank you, Admiral.

That's your time. Thank you, Mr. Opitz.

Ms. Gallant, go ahead please, for five minutes.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Would the admiral please advise this committee on what you've experienced, seen, or observed in terms of non-state actors in the maritime sector? For example, narcotics—what is involved there? Have you seen any evidence of terrorist activity in your sector?

[RAdm John Newton]

That's always a tough question, but I think I have a very recent example to illuminate what you're getting at, ma'am.

In the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, there are many states and many regional conflict centres. There are many competing issues, and none more so than the flow of massive amounts of energy to the world markets. But in that body of water we also have the Horn of Africa, and there was a piracy issue, which has been driven down to a fairly low level.

Fairly unknown to most people is the flow of drugs from Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan across the waterways in ships that are smuggling them. They're in Arab dhows, which is a fishing-style boat. Often the crews don't know they're carrying the drugs. They're smuggled into the hull and hidden in the woodwork of the boats. The drug shipments are occurring in east Africa, in Tanzania and Kenya, where they then make their way into a land bridge and into southern Europe. Some of those drugs actually reach North America.

But that's not the issue. We're in that mission by government mandate for counterterrorism and maritime security reasons. The linkage between those drugs and terrorism is that the funding of the drug shipments—the buys, the middlemen, the licensing to transport it out of Afghanistan or whatever—pays terrorist organizations their revenue. It's one of their key revenue-generation streams. By interdicting the drugs, we're denying a terrorist the financial backing he requires to hire and train his people, buy the ordnance and explosives, and to do his business.

That's a key element. That's what HMCS Toronto was recognized for by the chief of naval operations last week. They did eight major boardings involving more drugs than any police force in the world would take off the streets in a year. The amount of drugs that were taken out of the maritime seaways just dominates that by a hundredfold. That does hit at somebody's pocketbook and it does go back to terrorism.

That is a non-state linkage in which the navy has been participating. It's also the same one that's active in the Caribbean. The drug money in the Caribbean is destabilizing states like Mexico and other countries. It corrupts co-ops, and it's not just about the drugs making it to our streets.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Okay.

I read a bit in the news that the Cyclones are currently being tested out. Can you tell us whether you have actually received any Cyclone helicopters, and if so, how are they working out?

[RAdm John Newton]

The Royal Canadian Navy has committed itself to being ready and available to deliver the Cyclone helicopter as fast as the Royal Canadian Air Force and the government elements of the program can deliver them to 12 Wing Shearwater.

Right now, HMCS Halifax is working with the Royal Canadian Air Force and the contractor, Sikorsky, to go through the tests of the flight deck and the helicopter performance—the wind that comes off the ship and how it responds in rough weather. That's my level of interaction with that helicopter. This is a Royal Canadian Air Force project.

It seems to be moving very quickly in the right direction. It's a big helicopter. If it's anything like its predecessor, the helicopter we've operated for 50 years, my statement would be this: if we get the statement of requirements correct now, we will have another fine helicopter for 50 years. I think we're in that initial stage of a relationship with an excellent company.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you.

Could you tell us the role of reservists in the ships of the navy?

[RAdm John Newton]

The reservists augment the regular force crew. There is no reserve navy or regular force navy. We have moved to a “one navy” model and a “one navy” motto. We used to have the Kingston class completely crewed by reservists. We're moving away from that model, because it's unsustainable. It worked beautifully, but we burned ourselves out doing it. So we're going to a one navy model of reserves augmenting the regular force.

On those ships, 60% of the crews are reservists and 40% are going to be regular force. By this means we have gone from having three Kingston-class available on each coast to having five available. We're in the position of having four right now and are moving toward five.

This was one of our bridging techniques to get us by this capacity or readiness mull we're in as we modernize the main fleet. We're giving more tasks and more of the duty of the old reserve ship—but it's actually a one navy ship—in patrols in the Arctic. They were the ones that participated in the Franklin search, and four of them are in the counter-drug mission in the Caribbean right now. So we're putting more on the back of what used to be a reserve ship, but we're pairing the reservists with the regular force.

[The Chair, Conservative, Peter Kent]

Thank you, Ms. Gallant. The time is up.

We'll now go into the third and final round of questions, of five minutes, beginning with Mr. Harris, please.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Chair.

Just to follow up on the last question with Ms. Gallant, does this mean that you're actually cutting back the number of reservists in the naval reserve?

[RAdm John Newton]

No, sir, we're actually trying to increase them. The reserves are managed in three different blocks: Class A, Class B, and Class C reserves. Class A reserves are the foundational element of the reserves; they are the majority of our reservists. These are the citizen-soldiers who parade once a week in their units; then they come to training events periodically throughout the year and they often gain summer employment as Class B reservists during the summer.

Sir, we are trying to increase the Class As and diminish the Class Bs.