National Defence committee  The sailor side of me says that here are some measures the captain takes to identify a threat or non-threatening aircraft, and based on the flight pattern and everything else that the captain was seeing, there was no threat to the ship. If it is a buzz or an overflight, depending

National Defence committee  Absolutely. The importance of having a NATO group is not only to show the ships, but show the capability of the ships to work together. That's creating an opportunity for us to display that skill through all the training that's ongoing, while we're deploying in their region. I th

National Defence committee  Just from a naval perspective, while the ship was in the Black Sea program, for example, we did some port visits. Doing that creates two messages: one is the closeness we're displaying with the country we are visiting; the other is to show some Canadian resolve in the region. We

National Defence committee  At this stage we're quite pleased to see the investment and be able to share some of our own experience in that field. But that's pretty well the main area. There is no other element associated to the work that we're doing.

National Defence committee  Neither do I; I have to admit that we don't have that opportunity regularly.

National Defence committee  If I may, I will say that there is also a naval presence in addition to the air presence. We have gone to the Black Sea for the first time since 1992 and have worked with countries such as Turkey. In addition, we have entrusted the Canadian vessel with the responsibility for the

National Defence committee  Trust is also being built between sailors, pilots and ground crews. The opportunity to work together and to discuss what in technical terms we call tactics, techniques and procedures, makes the groups more cohesive when the time for operations comes, whether for exercises or huma

National Defence committee  The Russia fleet has some ships that are capable. We've seen them in operation and we've watched them from the result of their various missile shoot exercises. They are used to operating on their own, so if you compare that to what we're doing in NATO...and that's again one of th

National Defence committee  Each service has a warfare centre and each unit that is being deployed is sending their information, their lessons learned, back there. We roll that back up so the next unit deploying has an opportunity to get some of those lessons and some recommendations on how to fix some of t

National Defence committee  The military training and cooperation program has been running since 1993, and we have about 1,100 Ukranian officers go through our system. A lot of it is associated with language training. You understand that is certainly an important part, but we do have some courses we run wit

National Defence committee  The opportunity is there. The NATO standard is well recognized by countries in the region. That gives us a basis for communication. It might not be at the same classification level as when there is only one NATO group, but we have the opportunity to exchange information with thos

National Defence committee  One of the basic principles of smart defence is that the integration level of participating countries is quite high. Sometimes, new countries working with us or joining our operations do not have the same level of expertise. Therefore, we have not been able to really test the con

National Defence committee  Some of these young soldiers have not experienced Afghanistan for example. For them it's a very good opportunity to test those skills and increase their level of readiness operating with other countries. So they are very enthusiastic about what they are doing right now.

National Defence committee  The other thing I would add to that, if I may, is that the coalition puts a lot of emphasis on trying to locate, from an intelligence perspective, any indication that those kinds of capabilities are falling into those hands. Yes, it's a great concern for us in Canada, but it's

National Defence committee  It also speaks to the interoperability that we have as we go through all of the exercises that we do all year long. The fact that we can now operate together in a kind of operational setting speaks volumes about the training we've been doing.