National Defence committee  Thank you, sir. Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to appear in front of you today. I'm happy to be here to provide you with an update on Canada's military contribution to the relief efforts in the Philippines in the wake of typhoon Haiyan. As you

National Defence committee  Thank you for the question, Ms. Gallant. Certainly, as you point out, various parts of the DART are on a number of levels of readiness to effect that immediate response. This question is probably best answered by my colleague Major-General Noonan from the joint operations comman

National Defence committee  Thank you very much for that question. As many would recognize, when you get calamities around the world at the level of where we would consider deploying the DART, time is of the essence. If you don't have that integral airlift support that we presently have, you are then in co

National Defence committee  Yes, certainly. As I said, there's only a limited pool of the types of aircraft of the size and capacity of the C-17 that are available on the market, and it is a very competitive market. If I were to get into contracting mechanisms and they were available, we would be certainl

National Defence committee  I didn't hear the last part of your question, sir.

National Defence committee  The Chief of the Defence Staff can posture the DART. As Steve mentioned, it's at various notice to move.

National Defence committee  It's required for the government to authorize the deployment of the DART, sir.

National Defence committee  It's the government. I can't answer more specifically than that.

National Defence committee  It was an hour after—

National Defence committee  Sir, I think it's fair to say that when we deploy the DART, we do so on the invitation of the country that's affected. We don't deploy it strictly where we would like to see it sent. The collaboration between, in this case the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs

National Defence committee  With respect to the contingency plan for the deployment of the DART, the first element that would go out would be ISST, which is led by Foreign Affairs, as I pointed out, supported by the leadership team of the DART. They deploy in CF aircraft on the recommendation of the Departm

National Defence committee  The ISST left on the 10th. We can deploy the ISST and do a reconnaissance that would suggest that the capabilities of the DART are not appropriate to the task. It's important to have those first eyes on it to understand that the deployment of the rest of that DART team is posture

National Defence committee  In this case, yes, it's all a time in space equation of how quickly we could get it there as well as the capacity to support that deployment. In some cases, you wouldn't actually have the infrastructure and operating airport so that it would not be able to deploy all of these cap

National Defence committee  That's an excellent question. I think in this case it's important to recognize that we went precisely where the Philippine government asked us to go. I think if you would have seen the path of the storm and the devastation involved in the area that we were operating in, it would

National Defence committee  Thank you for that question. In fact, I'll do a quick description of the military thought on that, and then I'll pass it to colleagues from DFATD. One thing we have done quite well is we have learned from previous deployments of the DART. At each deployment we'll take stock of