National Defence Committee on June 20th, 2006

[MGen Stuart Beare]

The force is much smaller than what we have in Kandahar. If there were another deployment, that obviously would put additional pressure on training...

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Stress.

[MGen Stuart Beare]

...because we would have to replace our soldiers in, let us say, six or twelve months.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

Ms. Black.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for your presentation. We all appreciate your taking the time to come to share your expertise with us.

When you were responding to Mr. Dosanjh you talked about this being a counter-insurgency mission. From my understanding that's not something the Canadian Forces have had a lot of experience with. The kinds of things we're intervening in internationally are different now. You talked about the baseline training and then the training to deal with the changing circumstances around IEDs and suicide bombers and terrorists, so I wanted to ask you, specifically at a tactical level, how do you do that? It seems to me it's a very dangerous situation, very hard to determine, and I'd really appreciate some information on that.

[MGen Stuart Beare]

If I described the mission as counter-insurgency, I'm not describing it accurately. The mission is a capacity-building mission to get Afghanistan to a point in its being--

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

No, I understand all that. But now you're really dealing with counter-insurgency.

[MGen Stuart Beare]

Absolutely. There are multiple dimensions to the delivery of the mission, and, as I pointed out, the mission elements are more than only the fighting battle group that is there. There is a national capacity-building effort, the national training effort, the PRT effort, and the battle group.

To live in a counter-insurgency environment and to perform those operations—if I may regress a bit, I was in Bosnia. We were applying our effort to capacity building in Bosnia, but in a different environment. And because it's a counter-insurgency environment with the nature of the threat, we have adapted our baseline, as well as the specific mission training, to be able to ensure that our people have experienced that before they deploy, experienced it in their training before they see it in operations.

What that implies, in specific terms, is that when our soldiers and our leaders are engaged in their individual training, they're not being presented a training scenario that is the old “Warsaw Pact coming across the East German border” scenario. They're being presented a failed-state scenario, within which you find paramilitary forces, former military forces, terrorist extremist forces, crime and corruption, as well as the non-combatants living in the battle spaces, as well as all the international actors who would be there. So we are now treating that as normal; that's no longer abnormal.

What is complicating is the methods that are being used by the opponents. So what we do in that particular case is to introduce their methods in our baseline training, so we are accustomed to seeing that in our military training. Then for specific threats in a specific theatre, we ensure that we deliver that to our soldiers well on the journey, before they get there, and they see it in practice before they get there—like the IED threat, for example. Our soldiers now treat as normal, failed and failing state scenarios. We treat as normal multiple threats, be it a counter-insurgency, be it an insurgency, be it failed military, be it across-the-border threats, and we adapt them to the specific mission. The Warsaw Pact-type scenarios are no longer our baseline.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

It must be very difficult.

[MGen Stuart Beare]

But we're an army of veterans, in the sense that since 1989-90, when the wall came down and we started experiencing the world for what it really was, our leaders are wearing their CVs on their chests in terms of the ribbons or the places they've been in and the environments they've been exposed to. The young master corporal of 1992 is now the chief warrant officer of 2006 and has had these different experiences. So, fortunately, we're finding our own investment in our leaders is bringing that back to our institution, and then when our young men or women join our military—

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

They benefit from that.

[MGen Stuart Beare]

They certainly do, as does the whole institution.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

In terms of when this mission stops being under Operation Enduring Freedom and transfers over to the ISAF NATO-led mission, what do you perceive to be the changes, particularly in terms of the rules of engagement?

[MGen Stuart Beare]

I can't speak to the specific rules of engagement. I would expect there would be no difference in terms of what Canada has authorized as the rules of engagement for its forces and those with which we've trained.

I'm not sure what the differences will be in terms of the day-to-day operational activity of the force on the ground. That's really a national command issue between the battle group commander, the brigade commander, the multinational command we're working with, and also the Canada Command here back at Expeditionary Forces Command in Canada. So I wouldn't expect to see a lot of change. What I would hope to see, because it's a much more multinational force, is that we'll have a much more multinational engagement in the mission.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

My final question. I'm sure you understand that we hope to do a report from everything we are told by all the witnesses who are appearing and our study on what's happening in Afghanistan. I wonder if you have any specific recommendations for this committee.

[MGen Stuart Beare]

I believe it's public record that such interventions aren't a matter of any one force—military, civilian, governmental, NGO, IO. It's an all-of-government and in many ways it's an all-of-country engagement in something as complicated as an Afghanistan-like scenario. So ensuring, as we plan to intervene in failed and failing state-type scenarios, that we apply to the best of our capacity and ability a whole-of-government, whole-of-Canada approach within the international community to get into a realigned state, which suits the people on the ground as opposed to an end state that satisfies our perception, is really our business. Again, the 1990s and the turn of this century have taught us that this is what's required to get done. Bosnia is still going on, as an example. It's not done yet.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

Mr. Hawn.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, General Beare, for being here. It's good to see you again. I'd like to get back to your role in Land Force Doctrine and Training. With the reduction in the size of the force over many, many years--a couple of decades--it has been more difficult to put together cohesive units that live together all the time, and you highlighted that, outlining some of the patchwork. That's not a derogatory term, but there's a bit of patchworking going on for each of these deployments.

What extra challenge does that present to you? Do you see a day when, hopefully, in my view, we might have regiments that are in fact complete and robust enough to just be in that state of readiness more or less continuously?

[MGen Stuart Beare]

In the first instance, we need to fix the “hollow army”. I believe that's a term that has been used in many fora. The hollow army is one where you have battalions in which you may have three companies, but if you ever try to deploy, you could maybe get two out of the three to deploy, because of people who are injured or who are absent on training and other duties. So we need to fix the hollow army by making the building blocks of that army bigger. That's job one.

Secondly, we want to build more building blocks--companies, squadrons, batteries, and the like--such that when you want to commit one to operations, it only takes one to commit to operations.

Finally, we need to continue to expand the capacity around those things that prepare them, train them, and sustain them: our training centres, our schoolhouses, and the like.

So growth is definitely in our best interests to allow us to be sustainable just at the rate we're performing now and to take away some of the frictions of actually having what has been described by some as a hollow army in terms of one equals one.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

So it's a matter of people, equipment, time, and ultimately money--or initially money.

The reserve component is important to what we're doing operationally, obviously. What are the challenges to maintaining this?

There are about 300 reservists over there right now. Reservists, of course, have a special challenge; they have a civilian life, too. Do you see any real difficulty or potentially insurmountable challenges to keep that reserve component up on a continuous rotational basis?

[MGen Stuart Beare]

At this rate, it's sustainable, but again, if you want to push out--let's say you want to go from 300 to 400--the number of reserve soldiers behind that has to be exponentially larger, because of course it's not a one-for-one proposition anymore.

I don't have the official numbers. It may take 10 part-time soldiers to create one volunteer for a six-month or year-long engagement, as an example. It's not a one-for-one ratio, so we do need to grow the capacity of our reserve force in its numbers if we want to grow more reservists who can participate in sustained operations overseas.

At the same time, the duration of their engagement is a challenge. With the complexity of the environment we're operating in, the gap or the journey from a baseline to a deployable status is that much more demanding. So we're requiring our people to sign up earlier and for a bit longer before we deploy them, if they're going from the reserve force to the regular force to something as complicated as Afghanistan.

In Bosnia, however, our reserve force carried the load for that mission for the majority of its final years, because, again, its complexity was down and the level of time required to get from a volunteer baseline to a deployment level was less.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Getting back to Wainwright specifically for a second, I was in Cold Lake a couple of weeks ago and flying the advanced F-18 simulator. We were talking about the ability to link Cold Lake with Wainwright, with navy units, with allied units, whether it's U.S., British, or whatever, to fight the battle, that kind of thing. How far away are we from that? What distribution between these emulators--we don't call them simulators anymore, I guess--and live training are you experiencing in Wainwright right now?

[MGen Stuart Beare]

When we put our next task force into training in Wainwright this fall, it will be fully instrumented, which means every soldier, every vehicle, and every communication system will be connected to the weapon effects simulation system that allows us to track where they are, what they're doing, how they're doing, their engagements, their communications, their decision-making, and record that and play it back to them so they can observe on their own how well they're performing.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Who lives, who dies.