National Defence committee  Do you mean, in terms of cruise missiles?

National Defence committee  At this stage, my assessment is that you have to have a state actor and that that scenario is quite unlikely.

National Defence committee  No, I don't think so. I think we should be part of the response component of ballistic missile defence. We're already part of the detection component, but I think we should be part of the response part.

National Defence committee  Yes. On the detection side, the space-based system I'm talking about is a satellite system that went up starting in the 1960s or 1970s. We've always received that information. The land-based systems I'm talking about are in Alaska, Greenland, and the northern United Kingdom. They are called ballistic missile early warning system radars.

National Defence committee  Yes. We're not part of any of that.

National Defence committee  A cruise missile requires both detection and interception. The detection side is classified, and I don't have access to the information. I know this because I've asked the question and have not had access to the information. But I believe that around North America the detection of cruise missiles would be done by the airborne warning and control craft, which the United States owns but which Canada helps man.

National Defence committee  Do you mean in terms of the ballistic missile threat?

National Defence committee  Historically there was no ballistic missile defence system. It started in 2004. The Bush administration made that decision premised basically on North Korea's behaviour. In 2004 we decided that NORAD's ballistic missile detection information could go to Northern Command, which holds the mission for ballistic missile defence.

National Defence committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before the House of Commons Standing Committee on National Defence on this important topic. Over the next 10 minutes I'll briefly discuss the emerging threat to North America and NORAD and Canada's aerial readiness in response to these threats.

National Defence committee  The United States Coast Guard is an armed fleet. It is actually one of the largest navies in the world. In wartime it operates under the Pentagon, and in peacetime it's under—I'm not sure—the Department of Energy or something. It is an armed fleet, and that's the main distinction, really, between the Canadian and American coast guards.

National Defence committee  The difficulty in making the translation between MAD during the Cold War and cyber is that it's so difficult.... There are two difficulties, really. You have to be able to assign attribution—a deterrent requires assigning attribution. Secondly, cyber is so difficult to control. The Stuxnet virus, for example, took out the centrifuges in Iran, but also, I believe, took out centrifuges in Germany—in places that the United States and Israel didn't want.

National Defence committee  The Canadian Forces, in respect to all of its operations at home and abroad, needs an aircraft that can conduct air-to-air and air-to-ground operations. The CF-18 was optimized air-to-air and then was modified for air-to-ground later on. The joint strike fighter would have both capabilities from the beginning.

National Defence committee  You're talking about five domains of warfare: army, navy, air, cyber, and space. The cyber aspect, of course, is distinct from what we were talking about before—critical infrastructure, homeland security etc. We're talking about cyberwar as a non-kinetic tool of warfare—taking out enemy platforms or whatever using cyber-capabilities.

National Defence committee  Well, it depends how many we have of course. The issue is that the Trident submarines can travel under the ice far away from where any diesel submarines would be, but if the ice melts, we would have the freedom to manoeuvre. Does that answer your question?

National Defence committee  I would have to say that these are the very issues that need to be studied. There definitely are disjunctures. One of the things I alluded to is that we have more control platforms than the United States, whereas they have more surveillance platforms than we have. There might be some sort of trade-off of surveillance platforms, in terms of submarines.