National Defence Committee on Oct. 28th, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Mr. Bachand, you have 15 seconds remaining.

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

We are the ones authorizing the expenditures, general. So we are entitled to ask for details. This is going to cost $15 billion.

[LGen J.P.A. Deschamps]

Mr. Bachand, if I provide you with the simulation, do you have the computers to run it on? What we are doing is complex and technical. We are giving the government an opinion based on our expertise. Whether the government accepts it or not is up to the government. However, don't tell me that we don't know what we are doing when we are watching the simulation.

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

I never said that, General. I never said that.

[LGen J.P.A. Deschamps]

Well, you implied it, Mr. Bachand.

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

We'll come back to this in the next round.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you.

I will now give the floor to Mr. Harris

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, General Deschamps and Colonel Burt, for joining us and helping us with our deliberations.

There's no doubt in my mind that the F-35 is a capable airplane, and you've outlined some of the details of that today. Of course, what bothers me a little bit is what I heard the other day from the Auditor General, and this was a quote on the Chinook. In paragraph 6.53 of the Auditor General's report, she says:

By June 2006, based on meetings and discussions with Boeing and the market analysis, National Defence had formally concluded that Boeing's Chinook was the only existing Western certified helicopter in production capable of meeting its needs.

In another paragraph, she says that you kind of informally decided the same thing six months before. She also says that the actual statement of requirements wasn't developed until a couple of years later, but the decision had been made and approval was received in June 2006 to buy the Chinook. I have to say that bothers me. Maybe the Chinook was the best plane, but I understand there were others, and the Auditor General said that the others weren't given a chance to compete on the statement of requirements. The former director or ADM for materiel told us that there's a problem to some extent with in-house analysis reflecting in-house bias.

Those two things together beg the question of whether or not we're actually getting what we should be getting.

I say this in the context of the minister's response in the House of Commons in May, where the minister talked about there being:

...an open, competitive, transparent process that will see us receive the best capability, to provide that capability to the best pilots in the world.

He reiterated the fact that this JSF project was not interfering with that.

Given those concerns here, is the statement of requirements that was surely developed for the JSF project back when they started in 2000, or thereabouts...is the existence of that and Canada's work on this joint strike fighter project leading your organization to draft the statement of requirements around that F-35?

[LGen J.P.A. Deschamps]

Thank you for the question.

I'm not exactly sure what the core of your question is.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Let me try to make it clear. We were told, first of all, that it was going to be an open competition, and then we were told a few months later that this was the only aircraft that would do the job. Either something happened in the meantime...and we're being told the competition actually took place 10 years ago and all of that. So the question really is this. The statement of requirements is supposed to be the starting point. That's what the Auditor General told us; that's what Alan Williams told us: you make your statement of requirements and decide what your needs are, and then you go looking for something to fill them.

That's apparently not what happened with the Chinook, for example. There's been some suggestion that it is not what happened with the search and rescue aircraft, that the statement of requirements was actually drafted to conform to an airplane. That's the suggestion.

The question then becomes, do we have a pattern here that causes us to question whether the cart was put before the horse here? We're involved with the joint strike fighter development program, and therefore it's an easy step to decide that this is the only plane we need and we'll draft our statement of requirements around it. That, to me, would be putting the cart before the horse.

[LGen J.P.A. Deschamps]

I'll try to answer your question as best I can.

Our participation in the joint strike fighter program, which dates back to the late nineties--

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

It's a development program; that's right.

[LGen J.P.A. Deschamps]

Initially, as has been pointed out, we were not committed to buying the airplane. That focus changed in 2008, when the government released the Canada First defence strategy, within which it identified the need to replace the CF-18s with a next-generation fighter. At that point, clearly we had the imperatives to now review our fighter programs and determine what the future needs were, since we had to replace our F-18. It was at that point, 2008 and onwards, that we went to the statement of requirement analysis to determine what the needs of the next-generation fighter were and therefore whether the JSF was the right aircraft for us as we looked at replacing the F-18.

That process started after the government announced its intention to replace the fleet in 2008. It is not something that was pre-ordained from 1998. The fact that we were interested in the technology that was being developed by the joint strike fighter...it was a national desire to make sure that we had opportunities in the future, should the government decide that this was the way it was going to go. For us it was a question, now that we had confirmation that we could replace the fleet, of looking ahead and saying fine, what are the threats, what are the missions for the next 30 or 40 years, and therefore what are the requirements we need to identify to government?

That is the process we followed, which culminated this year in a recommendation to government to procure the JSF.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

What I hear in that, though, is that using the term “next-generation fighter” in the Canada First defence strategy.... For some reason, it was decided somewhere that the word “next-generation” had a meaning and that therefore the only plane we could acquire was a next-generation one, as opposed to a current one. That's what I hear in what you're saying.

That would obviously limit it. If there is only one next-generation fighter, then you'll have to buy this one. Is that the conclusion you reached?

[LGen J.P.A. Deschamps]

No, sir. The terminology “next-generation fighter” just represents the need to look ahead, given the longevity and duration that we will expect from this fighter fleet. I don't think it was linked to any particular aircraft at that time. The focus, though, was on future capabilities and agility. That is the underlying theme of “next-generation”.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

In terms of future capabilities, of course, we were part of the MOU when we signed on. We signed on again in a 2006 MOU. That's a 45-year program. As you know, that MOU lasts 45 years, and Canada can participate in that MOU for as long as it wants.

Something you said in your statement today and the last time you appeared, when you made another statement in September on this, talking about the aircraft being sustained, is:

We will be able to replace lost aircraft—or acquire additional aircraft if the future global situation demands it—because the production line will operate until at least 2035.

That is for the next 25 years that these planes will be in production.

In terms of flexibility and capability, we have the ability to acquire either more of these planes or potentially some of these planes over the next 35 years. I say that because when we needed Chinooks for Afghanistan, we didn't get them by making them; we got them by acquiring them. We've used them and we're acquiring some now, but we won't have them until we're back from Afghanistan.

Could the same thing happen with these fighter jets? Could we acquire them if we actually need them and get the jets that we need now?

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Be brief, please.

[LGen J.P.A. Deschamps]

The only reason we had an opportunity to get the Chinooks for Afghanistan is that our close ally and partner, the U.S. military, was generous enough to sell us some of their highly needed airplanes so that we could meet a critical need for Canada's Afghan mission. It doesn't mean that this kind of capability will always be there, because they have their own needs to meet. Fighters are not something that can be built overnight. Nobody buys surplus fighters; therefore, the expectation that we could at some future date decide that we would look to buy an airplane on short notice would probably be fraught with risk. We probably would not get what we want, when we want, and at the cost we want.

I believe the program we're in right now gives us the absolute best balance of flexibility for governments present and future to make decisions as things change around them. It's very tough to predict future environments. What we know is that it will be dangerous. Therefore, this program gives future governments the option of changing the ratio of fighters they want Canada to have to do its missions both at home and abroad.

Also, there's attrition. Typically when you buy fleets of aircraft you have to allow for loss of aircraft due to training, mechanical failures, and so on. In other programs you have to have almost prescient knowledge of how much you're going to lose over the life of a program. Traditionally, when you bought fighter fleets you would buy more or buy sufficiently that you could absorb losses and be able to continue to operate. As things get more and more expensive, it's difficult to buy more airplanes just in case we lose airplanes, whereas with this program we don't have to buy more airplanes than we actually need because the program allows us the flexibility to make that decision later, should we see attrition become an issue.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you, Lieutenant-General.

I will now give the floor to Mr. Hawn.

You have seven minutes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for coming.

Colonel Burt, I want to pick up on the simulation thing. Of course, we'd expect any company to have a simulation that shows that their equipment is the best. My question to you is, with regard to the classification level of the capabilities of the F-35, when people are making comparisons with other airplanes than the F-35, how would they know, given the classification level, what they're comparing it to?

[Col Dave Burt]

Mr. Chairman, that's an excellent question, and it's one of the things that perplexes us when we see a lot of things in the media or hear a lot of statements made publicly about the nature of their different capabilities against the F-35. All of the very advanced capabilities of the F-35 are at a very highly classified level. There are only a very small number of people in the world who are cleared to that level of classification and have the privilege of working with that kind of detail.

So indeed, how would they know?

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

Talking about the F-35 operational capabilities and the advanced capabilities that it has, and obviously within the bounds of classification, “stealth” is a word that we throw around, but it doesn't seem to be well understood. Can you talk a little bit, briefly, about what that F-35 capability brings to us?

[Col Dave Burt]

With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to use a visual aid. These visual aids that I will use are available for public distribution. I will be able to leave them with you and give you other versions of them if you need them.

Stealth is one of those elements of the description of this capability that has been very difficult to describe. The details of it are at the very highly classified level. But at an unclassified level I can provide a characterization.

On the lower portion of the chart I am showing you, we have three bars. On the left side is the level of capability used as the baseline, and it's a first- to third-generation capability. What it describes is the vulnerability to lethal surface-to-air missile shots. If you have a fourth-generation with the kind of low observable enhancements that are currently available on the market, you are able to decrease the vulnerability to lethal surface-to-air missile shots by 15%. That is quite significant. However, the 95% reduction that is available from the fifth generation, from the F-35, is truly a game changer.

Across the top, the slide shows how the game actually changes. The red blob on the slide is the area of vulnerability. You can see that when you change by 15%, that blob decreases somewhat, but the 95% reduction that is available from the fifth-generation F-35 changes the game such that the flexibility and the chance of mission success and the chance of survival—being able to bring the aircraft home to fight another day—are hugely increased. That is the value of stealth.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

We've talked about system sensors and system fusion and all that kind of stuff. Some of the individual systems on the F-35 make me think about data link and the problems we had getting data link to work on the F-18. Could you talk about the data link on the F-35 and how that might be different?

[Col Dave Burt]

Thank you for that question.

Data link is indeed an interesting character. When I flew the F-18, one of the challenges we had was collating all the information, integrating it all together, and building what we called situational awareness in our mind in order to understand the tactical situation. The value of the data link system that we put on the F-18 is that all this information is integrated for us, and we're able to see the depiction of it.

The challenge we have with the data link on our current aircraft and other aircraft of that nature comes from the type of data link that it is. It's called omnidirectional. It transmits in all directions and it transmits with a constant power. In the case of certain threats against which we would fly, we would actually have to turn off the data link in exactly the timeframe when we would need it most: when we are trying to do the final attack on the target.

When you move into fifth generation and the nature of data link available there, the fifth-generation aircraft has sufficient knowledge in the aircraft to know exactly where the next aircraft in the chain is, and it directs the information and the data link only to that aircraft and only with sufficient power to transmit it to that next aircraft. In this way, the data link in a fifth-generation F-35 is considered high capability, high capacity, and secure, and that is unique to fifth generation. That allows the use of data link for all scenarios.