National Defence Committee on April 10th, 2008

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Is there more than one kandak operating together, or is it still a single kandak?

[BGen P. Atkinson]

In the Zhari they have the ability to move their kandaks around. As you know, we basically have a brigade of 2,500, which is three full kandaks and the combat service support and operational support.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

So they have been operating together.

[BGen P. Atkinson]

Yes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Okay.

You may or may not be able to tell us this, but there's always the question of territory and how much we control and how much the Taliban controls. Can you give us an estimate of how much territory we control in Kandahar, either directly ourselves or through the ANA or ANP, with some confidence? That would be as a percentage...or a WAG.

[BGen P. Atkinson]

Let me think about that for a second.

Rather than give you an off-the-top answer, I know that we operate where 90% of the Afghans live, in Kandahar province. I'd rather give you a more fulsome answer, so I'll take that on notice and I'll provide that.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I'd like to ask you a question to clarify the concept of command and who commands whom over there. People keep asking if these people are under Canadian command and so on. Could you clarify? RC South is currently commanded by a Canadian, therefore all forces in RC South are under the command of a Canadian.

[BGen P. Atkinson]

That's true.

[BGen P. Atkinson]

General Marc Lessard is a NATO commander.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

But they're not under Canadian command, they're under NATO command, and that commander could be British, American, or Dutch.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Exactly.

[BGen P. Atkinson]

He responds to General Dan McNeill, the commander of ISAF, who takes his instructions from Brunssum, which is NATO headquarters in Holland.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

So it's not Canadian command, it's NATO command.

[BGen P. Atkinson]

He happens to be a Canadian. As you know, it is a rotated command. It was a Brit before that, and it was Dutch before that. The first Canadian commander of RC South was General David Fraser.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Obviously the French have stepped up with a commitment to allow American forces to come into Kandahar. Can you talk just a little bit about working with the U.S. forces, and not just about the philosophical things we share but about some of the equipment they would bring that will benefit the operation?

[BGen P. Atkinson]

Marines are kind of like a self-contained organization when they show up. They bring all their toys with them--guns, armoured vehicles, helicopters, UAVs, everything. So when they come to a place to work, they really are a self-contained, all-encompassing piece.

We work so well with the Americans. Our doctrine is very similar. They have officers who train in our war college in Toronto, and we have officers who train in their war colleges in the U.S. Our ability to conduct, plan, and execute operations together goes back to our history of working together as partners but also to working within NATO. So whether working with them, with the Brits, with the Dutch, with the Germans, or others inside ISAF, we have a shared history of working together over the last number of years. And our time working together in Afghanistan has just further cemented that.

Working with them is easy because we think so alike in the way we operate on the ground, in the way we plan, and in the way we execute. And it's been very helpful to have them show up with the amount of capability they've had. It is a real enabler.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

That's about it, sir. I hate to do that, but we have more work to do.

Thank you, General, once again, for your update. We look forward to the next time. You've had some questions that you've indicated you will supply some answers to.

[BGen P. Atkinson]

I will.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

We will suspend while we change to our next panel.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Everybody is in their places. We'll get started. Time is of the essence, as usual.

We'd like to welcome today Colonel Milner, Commander 2nd Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group; Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Barrett, Commanding Officer Third Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment; Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen M. Cadden, Commanding Officer Royal Canadian Dragoons; and Lieutenant-Colonel Craig Dalton, Commanding Officer 2nd Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery.

I want to welcome you all. We've been looking forward to this panel. I apologize for being tight on time here today.

I understand, Colonel Milner, you have an opening statement. Then we can get right into the questions. The floor is yours.

[Colonel Dean J. Milner, Commander, 2nd Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, Department of National Defence]

Mr. Chair, members of the committee, first of all I would like to thank you for the opportunity to address you here today.

As you're aware, I command the 2 Brigade. I and my three commanding officers, who are here with me today, are just down the road about an hour and a half. We have a lot of experience with respect to training soldiers and preparing them for missions over in Afghanistan, and we have a whole bunch of other experience from other missions that we've been a part of since we joined the Canadian Forces.

Right off the bat, I'd just like to emphasize the fact that we've been extremely busy in 2 Brigade. We've recently redeployed a couple of rotations from Afghanistan, and we're in the process of preparing another task force that will depart in September for Afghanistan. My brigade has sustained a number of casualties, both killed and wounded in Afghanistan, so we have a fair bit of experience with respect to taking care of our wounded soldiers.

Colonel Roger Barrett is the commander of the next task force that's going over to Afghanistan. He's about midway through his training, preparing his soldiers to go over to Afghanistan.

Colonel Craig Dalton is responsible for the guns. He's just had two artillery batteries that have recently redeployed from Afghanistan, and he has a battery that's getting ready to deploy over to Afghanistan. So he's heavily engaged in the deployment and redeployment of troops.

Lieutenant-Colonel Steve Cadden, who commands the Dragoons, has also been extremely busy. He's had a number of reconnaissance, or “recce”, squadrons that have recently redeployed. He's preparing another recce squadron to go to theatre. Of note, he just had a tank troop, 25, that just returned. That small troop sustained about 25% casualties. On one of their last days of operations, that particular squadron they worked in hit four IEDs in one day. So you can imagine the experiences they've had, the events they've experienced during their deployment in Afghanistan.

I'd just like to state right off the bat that our absolute priority is to take care of the soldiers. Care of the wounded, care of our soldiers and families is the absolute priority, and we've very good at it. We've learned a lot. I would say that we're one of the best learning institutions.

As a matter of fact, I can even brag a little bit that when I was director of army training, I was part of the key organization that learned the lessons from theatre, brought those lessons back, and translated them into our training that we conduct.

One of those key components was how to care for the soldiers, how to prepare ourselves for casualties, like operational stress casualties. We've come a long way. We're an institution that has really formalized and institutionalized our training for being prepared to deal with soldiers who have operational stress injuries.

We have identified a number of shortfalls. I've been in command about eight months now, and I can say that there are shortfalls. We don't have all the psychiatrists, we don't have all the resources we'd like to have, but we have identified those, and we're in the process with the whole Canadian Forces chain of command to fix those. I can say that we've actually moved quite a long way in respect to improvement. We haven't improved them all, and we'd still like to see more resources, and that's absolutely clear. But again, we've moved a long, long way.

I'd like to emphasize the fact, too, that we're a warrior culture. We have to train the soldiers for combat. It's our absolute priority to make sure that all of the soldiers in our team are prepared to fight a difficult enemy. So that is 100% our focus. They have to be ready at all times to do their job, so that fire team is ready to support each other in combat.

Having said that, and I mentioned it earlier, our care of our soldiers is absolutely critical. Those two are not mutually exclusive. They work together. We prepare the soldiers and we 100% make sure that at the same time we take care of the soldiers and families within our units within our brigade.

We continue to educate with respect to operational stress injuries. It's a difficult subject. It's a difficult thing for us to work through, but I'll tell you, we've learned a lot and we do continue to educate and improve our means of, again, making sure that we do take care of our soldiers.

I think that the culture in the army from that perspective is evolving extremely well. It is our absolute focus. If we find a soldier who does have an operational stress injury, we make sure that they have the right options available, that we can move them to the mental health agencies we have available, and we make sure 100% that we take care of those soldiers.

I've been in the forces 28 years and I've watched our training improve. When soldiers join the forces as recruits, we make sure their training is rigorous, intense. We simulate difficult conditions throughout their training. We make sure they go through live-fire exercises that really do put the stress and the pressure on the soldiers, so when they actually get in theatre, they're 100% prepared for those different difficult circumstances that they could be faced with there. That happens starting, as I mentioned, from the time they're recruits.

My soldiers now are about halfway through their training and we've done a number of exercises where they're faced with simulated casualties. They have to conduct casualty evacuation. They have to conduct first aid. They've gone through rigorous first aid training, operational stress injury training--all of that--to prepare them for theatre.

So with that really as a lead message, I can say that we're well prepared. We still have work to do. We always look to improve our capabilities for taking care of our soldiers. But with that as a lead for you, I think we're doing extremely well.

I really do look forward to the questions that you may have for this group of experienced officers who are in front of you today. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you very much.

We'll open up with a seven-minute round, and we'll start with the official opposition.

Mr. Rota.

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Thank you. I'll split my time, if there's some left over, with Mr. McGuire.

Thank you for coming out today. I appreciate it.

I'll just go to the end of your statement, with regard to some of the education and the training that goes on for some of the leaders and the soldiers within the group. With the operational stress injuries, what we're seeing is that most people don't realize they have it at the time. I guess that's where I'm going to go with my question. How do you train someone, whether he's a leader in a group or a soldier, to identify operational stress injuries? How do you go about bringing it to their attention? What do you do to train the leaders so they can identify that there is an illness starting, or there's a bud even or a starting of operational stress disorder?

[Col Dean J. Milner]

To begin with, that's a great question.

This is something on which our training has evolved over the years. We make sure that they understand and learn to anticipate what exactly operational stress injuries are and what the indications are. For example, if you have a soldier within your platoon and he's starting to act differently, we talk about it, we discuss it with the leadership. If we identify something like that, then we automatically make sure that we debrief that soldier so that we can then put him into the right options, into the mental health chain of command, so we can then debrief him.

As well, we also have soldiers...they have buddies, and these buddies constantly talk to those soldiers. If they identify something that's different--if they've gone through a very stressful operation, for example--we will later debrief those soldiers so that we can then identify anything that is not natural or something that we identified. Then we can do further debriefing afterwards so that we can then point them in the right direction.

We also do enhanced debriefings once we come home as well. These are done through the whole medical chain of command so that we identify things quickly right off the bat, so that again we can make sure we're taking care of these wounded soldiers.

Just to summarize, we train and prepare ourselves to identify and then we conduct debriefings afterwards to make sure that we identify.

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Is this ongoing training? Does updating go on? Because I would imagine that you get comfortable with someone; if something happens, and all of a sudden he starts acting differently, after a time you just kind of get used to it.

Do you bring them up to a new level every so often? Does an updating happen, and at what periods does it happen for the individual?