National Defence committee  Exactly. Part of the reason Defence got this is, if you go back to Y2K, that they were the unfortunate guys: no one wanted it, and they got it.

National Defence committee  The first part of my answer is that National Defence—the government—has no choice but to work with the private sector, because most of the key assets are privately owned. But the more important question is this. Outside of the requirement for the forces to be prepared to deal with cyber attacks upon our military capabilities, particularly in the field or at home—and I make a point of saying our military capability—and potentially the need to develop counters and also offensive cyber capabilities ourselves for overseas military operations, such as jamming, computer viruses, and similar things, I don't think in terms of the national issues involved here that cyber threats, particularly to our national critical infrastructure, are a job for the Department of National Defence.

National Defence committee  I really can't answer the question, because I'm not sure exactly where the gaps are, but there are always problems in overlap. There are always problems in information sharing between organizations. This is something, as I suggested, that National Defence really needs to pull away from.

National Defence committee  Now you're into the highly classified world of intelligence sharing, and I would just be guessing. But one thing that is missing—this is a side note to this cyber war thing and the cyber threat, and I'm not trying to downplay the problem here—is that we have numerous examples historically in which nations tacitly agree out of their own self-interest, in the context of potential warfare between them, not to do certain things.

National Defence committee  I always get mystified by the numbers game. I grew up in the nuclear age when how much was enough for nuclear strike capabilities was the obsession of the academic community and the strategic world at large. Now we get to the numbers. I think part of it depends upon this. How much is enough?

National Defence committee  If I remember correctly, the number of F-18s we originally purchased was 140. That number came out of a calculation related to an existing threat to Canada, which was a Soviet bomber air-launched cruise threat. You then had to calculate the number you might need also in terms of our foreign commitment to NATO and what we could deploy and then sustain out there, if we were in a lengthy campaign rotating those forces.

National Defence committee  It certainly is a possibility. Except for the United States, among the allies no small nation today can afford, because of the nature of military technologies, to maintain a capacity to act independently. It's just too expensive for all of us. So it is all about not just us, but about our cooperating with our allies and integrating more fully with them.

National Defence committee  The simple answer is yes. It's an easy answer: we can live without submarines. We may still be playing—and it's one of the important roles in the future, if we're talking about conflicts overseas and forward deployment of forces.... If we take the Chinese naval denial strategy, which most observers think is where China is going in terms of their capabilities, we'll potentially have to deal with submarines.

National Defence committee  Very quickly, having submarines is a capability where we have been trapped by a bad decision made long ago. We've invested millions and millions of dollars with little to zero return, on the basis of a World War II image being repeated, on the basis of, “Well, look, everyone else has submarines, so we need them as well”, on the basis of other factors.

National Defence committee  That's a point I've heard a lot from the military—that they wish they had more policy guidance. The problem is, you can't get any more policy guidance. The fundamental principles of Canadian defence policy have been in place since the end of World War II—the defence of Canada, the defence of North America in conjunction with the United States, and contributions to international peace and security.

National Defence committee  You seem to be asking if the current way we distribute the fleet between the west and the east should remain in place. The question, as you suggest, has to be viewed in light of the rising concerns about the Asia-Pacific as the dominant cockpit of future rivalry and competition and conflict.

National Defence committee  Theoretically, yes. One of the major American concerns in the early 1960s after the launch of Sputnik was that the Soviet Union would deploy nuclear weapons on orbit and the United States would not know, and they would be able to strike at American targets in less than a minute with no advance warning whatsoever.

National Defence committee  I can't answer that question.

National Defence committee  In a terrorist world, it's not so much the damage as the symbolic impact of the event.

National Defence committee  You're getting into the world of “what do we understand policy to be?” By and large, policy, at least public policy—that which is communicated to the public or that which I get to look at—is generally drafted in a relatively vague and ambiguous enough manner to be able to cover all potential contingencies and allow for activities to go on without specifying what they're going to be.