National Defence Committee on Nov. 1st, 2011

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Good morning, everyone. Sorry for my tardiness. I was in a meeting where there was a heated debate. Anyway, we got her done.

We're going to continue with our study on readiness, and have invited back to the committee Major-General Jonathan Vance.

General, I'll open the floor to you so you can make your opening comments.

[MGen Jonathan Vance, Director of Staff, Strategic Joint Staff, Department of National Defence]

Thank you, sir.

Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you again for this opportunity to appear before you and to provide you with this briefing on the Canadian Forces' readiness.

As you know, I am Major-General Jonathan Vance, Director of Staff, Strategic Joint Staff.

On behalf of the senior leadership at National Defence, let me start by saying that we very much welcome your interest in and study of Canadian Forces Readiness. Although often misunderstood, readiness is an issue of the utmost importance for the Canadian Forces. It is at the very heart of how we design the force and prepare and deploy the men and women of the Canadian Forces.

Before you are eight slides providing a broad view of the Canadian Forces Readiness. I would like to walk you through this quick briefing, after which I would be pleased to answer your questions.

I'll turn to slide 1, an organizational chart of the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces. As you know, the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces are a unique and complex organization. They are controlled and managed by an integrated headquarters, in which the military and civilian personnel work hand in hand to ensure that the men and women who serve Canada do so with the best resources and training available.

Readiness is a cross-cutting issue that implicates all levels of command in the Canadian Forces, as well as many of our civilian counterparts in the Department of National Defence. I am aware that as part of your study you have already expressed an interest in meeting with the Commander Canada Command, Commander of the Expeditionary Forces Command, and the Commander of the Canadian Army. I know on Thursday you will hear from my boss, the Chief of the Defence Staff, who will be able to provide you with his views on Canadian Forces readiness. I am certain that all of these appearances will be very useful to your study.

To complement those appearances and ensure that you are provided with a complete picture of Canadian Forces readiness, we respectfully suggest that you may also wish to consider hearing from the Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the Commander of Canadian Operational Support Command, or their representatives. Finally, the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, Vice-Admiral Bruce Donaldson, is prepared to appear at the end of this process to respond to any lingering questions you may have and to put CF readiness into context against overall resource management and force development.

I'd just make a point on that first slide. The boxes that are highlighted show those who are appearing and who we suggest appear. I don't want to presume all of them will appear.

Turning now to slide 2, in advance of your hearings, I thought it might be helpful to outline how each of the potential witnesses relates to Canadian Forces readiness. You will find the list of their duties and their pictures on slide 2.

First of course is the Chief of the Defence Staff, who is ultimately responsible for the command and control of the Canadian Forces and, therefore, CF readiness overall.

Second, Lieutenant-General Semianiw, Commander Canada Command, is the commander of all domestic operations and those operations that would encompass Canada, the United States, and Mexico. In the context of readiness, he is what we call a force employer. That is an operational level commander who deploys forces to domestic and continental missions.

Likewise, Lieutenant-General Beare, Commander of CEFCOM, Expeditionary Forces Command, is a force employer for global operations such as in Afghanistan and Libya.

Moving on to what we call force generators, those people who actually own the forces, Lieutenant-General Devlin is the Commander of the Canadian Army. It is his job to provide the combat-ready troops and equipment that can then be handed off to an operational commander and deployed on either domestic or international operations by the force employers.

Turning to slide 3, in the same vein, Lieutenant General Andre Deschamps and Vice-Admiral Paul Maddison, commanders of the Royal Canadian Air Force and Royal Canadian Navy respectively, provide the combat-ready sailors, air personnel, ships, and planes that can be effectively deployed and employed by force employers.

I should highlight that an important part of readiness is the ability to sustain operations, the logistics if you will. You may be hearing, if you so wish, from Major-General Mark McQuillan, the Commander of Canadian Operational Support Command, whose organization actually both generates forces and employs them.

Finally, the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, Vice-Admiral Bruce Donaldson, is responsible to the deputy minister and the Chief of the Defence Staff on corporate matters. He is uniquely situated to speak to you about how Canadian Forces readiness is managed in terms of resources, force structure, and force development.

Turning to slide 4, now we really get to crux of the matter: what readiness actually is. I make the point here that readiness covers a very wide waterfront and needs to be explained, because there are many interpretations of what it accounts for. In broad strokes, readiness is the ability of a military force to execute a particular mission or task in a timely fashion and over the time required to accomplish the mission. There's the timely aspect and there's also an endurance aspect.

Of course, this ability is influenced by many factors. We consider readiness to be at the intersection of strategic and policy considerations with intelligence, resources, and training.

Turning to slide 5, you'll see some specific aspects of readiness. First, there is tactical readiness, in preparing individuals with the necessary training and equipment to fulfill the required task, and bringing those individuals together to train collectively within their service, the army, the navy, or the air force.

Second, there is operational-level readiness, where these services or elements thereof are brought together into a joint environment consisting of multiple services and multiple types of operations, and taught to work together to achieve a specific mission.

Of course, these two ultimately come together to produce strategic readiness, that is, the ability of the military as a whole to respond to government direction and priorities.

Slide 6 is a short vignette that describes the road to high readiness. First, the individual must be trained to perform his or her specific role or task. Second, collective training brings individuals together in cohesive units within the services. Third, as just mentioned, these single-service formations, or elements of them, are brought together for joint training. As you can see from the slide, this means bringing together the army, the navy, the air force, and other joint enablers, such as cyber and space task forces, under one command for a singular purpose.

At the end of the collective and joint training at all levels, the commander responsible for any given unit declares it to be operationally ready for employment.

Finally, on slide 7 you will see how the Canadian Forces moves from force generation to force employment in a particular mission, for example, in Operation Mobile in Libya. First there are certain inputs that are the responsibility of the force generators. For example, the chief of military personnel provides trained recruits. The ADM of materiel, on the civilian side of DND, provides the ships. The ADM of information management and communications systems, or ADMIM, provides the technology. And the Royal Canadian Navy puts them all together to train the crew and produce a ship that is ready for duty--and there are, of course, many other aspects to this. Then the force employer, such as CEFCOM, deploys these assets and provides the ship with national command and direction. It should be noted that force generators also produce those enablers, such as communications, cooks, medical, engineers, logistics, and so on, which allow a joint force to conduct operations across the full spectrum of conflict.

With that, Monsieur le président, I'll be happy to take your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you, General. We appreciate those opening comments and the slides.

We're going to start off with our seven-minute round.

Mademoiselle Moore, s'il vous plaît.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

The Canadian Forces can be asked to respond to a multitude of operations. Given how many there are, we cannot be fully prepared.

I would like to know within what time frame, to what level or under what limitations the Canadian Forces are considered ready. What response time is considered satisfactory for these different operations?

If you do not fully understand my question, you may ask me for clarification.

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

I fully understood it, but given its technical nature, I will respond in English.

That is a superb question. It really speaks to the heart of exactly what readiness is. So thank you for the question.

What we do, how much we do of it, and for how long we would do it, and for how many missions we would be prepared to do it at any one point in time are driven by a number of things. First of all, there is broad government policy. What is it that they would have the Canadian Forces be ready to do? What is the broad spectrum that we must be ready to do? Should we be ready quickly, or should there be a period of what we would understand to be a period of development before we launch into something significant?

Therefore, this touches on the very structure of the Canadian Forces. What is it that we are structured to do? From that structure, we determine how quickly some parts of it would be ready to operate and how long it would take other parts of it to be ready to function over a sustained period of time. The best way to do this is to give you an example.

Search and rescue is something that we have a government mandate to accomplish. It is done under very prescribed set of notices to move. We must be able to respond quickly because of the very nature of the task. We have a force structure that allows us to maintain ready search and rescue response capability across the country in partnership with other government departments.

On the other hand, we must be prepared to sustain a major war, and we can take Afghanistan as an example. We maintain the ability to deploy a battle group on fairly short notice—within 60 days—to a place like Afghanistan and go acquit itself well there, with all of the enablers around it. If we wished to maintain that commitment over a period of years, as we did in Afghanistan, we would need a number of battle groups to allow for the appropriate rotation of those battle groups. With the Canadian Forces' policy of trying not to redeploy soldiers within 24 months--and you can do the math here--you would determine the size of force structure that you would want.

At the same time, there is a resource-management equation. We could estimate ourselves into having armed forces that were massive given all the potential calls upon them. Of course, the country is willing to pay for armed forces of a certain size. That size can fluctuate over time, but generally speaking, we are the size that we can be given the resources.

So you put those two together, and through policy input and the reality of the resources available to you and the nature of the task you have before you, across the spectrum of conflict, from war through to domestic response, and you then determine the best possible force posture to be in to accomplish for Canadians what is intended.

At this point in time, I would suggest to you that the Canadian Forces are well balanced to respond across the lines of operation in the Canada First defence strategy. There are six broad mission sets, from domestic operations through to international engagements, such as Afghanistan—which is a more robust conflict. We have forces attributed to all of them at varying degrees of readiness to go to achieve that task. And certainly for those things that we need to be prepared to respond to very quickly, such as domestic crises, we are prepared.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

I would like to know in how many operations it is possible to simultaneously participate without compromising our readiness and ability to respond to needs within Canada.

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

That is also an excellent question.

It depends on the size of the commitment overseas.

Perhaps I can put it to you in terms of something that we've already had an example of. We were in Afghanistan continuously for over five years, in Kandahar, with a small brigade of some 3,200. At the same time, we were able to mount a 2,000-person task force in Haiti. At the same time, we had forces apportioned and preparing for and executing at the Olympics. Again, they numbered over 2,000. Those were challenging times for the forces. They certainly stretched our capabilities.

While all that was going on, we maintained our search and rescue posture and maintained the ability to respond to Canadians in crisis anywhere in the country, from the north all the way across the board.

If I may, the challenge with the question of how many operations we can do overseas with the force structure we have is that we need a definition of what the operation is. What is the context? Is it full-out war fighting? How big do you wish to be there?

We can go almost continuously, as we've seen in Afghanistan, at the size we were. If we were to be bigger in Afghanistan--in other words, if we wanted to deploy a full brigade and additional resources--then the chances are that we would not have the force generation ratio behind that to be able to rotate it continuously without changing some factors. One of those factors is how long you would stay.

You saw the U.S. Army having to go from 12-month deployments at the height of the Iraq and Afghan wars, with an army the size they had, to 15-month deployments. As you do the math and you figure it out--that is, as you bring soldiers home and give them a period of rest, retrain them together, and then send them back over for the rest of the time in theatre--at some point you will see that your armed forces aren't big enough to do that within the factors set. One of these factors is the time you would have any individual soldier stay there.

So it is a great question. It speaks to the force structure what we have to conduct operations, how best to poise ourselves, and where we make our investments.

I would just add one point here that I think is useful. There is a tendency to look specifically at the large pieces of the Canadian Forces: the battalions, the ships, the aircraft. Becoming increasingly important, however, as warfare becomes more complex and more challenging, are the enablers that allow forces to operate effectively.

Take the command and control and communications capacity. You cannot work in an alliance or coalition effort now without having very sophisticated capacity and technical ability for command and control. You cannot manage the kind of firepower that was just employed in Libya without having extremely good access to remote ISR, the ability to see, the ability to use the network of satellites to protect yourself in a cyber domain and to provide yourself with the intelligence you need, and so on.

So it all comes together. In fact, some of those enablers, certainly in the Canadian Forces, are the ones that are of relatively low density and need constant investment to ensure that the larger, brawnier pieces, if you will, are able to function effectively. There's no point in putting a battalion somewhere or a ship somewhere if it doesn't have the intelligence architecture around it so that it can operate smartly, with precision and so on.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you, General.

Ms. Gallant, you have the floor.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Now, our foreign affairs policy and Parliament ultimately decide if and where we deploy, but the military must be monitoring the hot spots across the world. What do you see as potential deployments that we may be faced with participating in?

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

At this time, it would be challenging for me to describe anything that would be a potential deployment. We certainly monitor worldwide where we think we would have to increase our level of interest and start to do planning for our own asset visibility. What happens if this happens or that happens, or this and that happen together? Can we sustain it logistically, and do we have the command-and-control apparatus in place to do it?

I'll give you a real-world example. Here we are in Libya. Suppose our deployment there had gone on to the end of the mandate that we had there until December, and at the same time there was a requirement to evacuate Canadians elsewhere in the region, because of the influence of government forces and revolutionary forces. Would we be poised to prosecute one operation and at the same time assign additional forces to the evacuation of Canadians, or would we have to deploy additional forces to do that? This speaks to the heart of readiness.

We have a ship deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. She was operating under Operation Mobile for Libya. Would we have another ship available back home to deploy to do something else in the region, or would we have had to reassign that ship from one operation to another? I don't have the answer for you, because all of the factors were not complete. That's one of the things my staff and I do. In the joint staff, we ask “what if” continuously. So when the call does come, we have a considered response, not just something off the cuff.

Ships and aircraft are one thing. The logistics—command and control capacity, working with our allies, finding a place to bed down, and so on—and the science of warfare take a great deal of effort. We want to be well poised at all times to be able to respond.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

What capabilities that we may need do we not currently have?

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

We have all the capability sets that we need right now, but some are mature and some are embryonic. Over time our cyber capacity will need to increase, commensurate with the rest of the world's cyber capacity. We need the ability to protect ourselves in cyberspace from malignant actors.

Canada has a good cyber capacity. But this is one area that we will have to continue to develop and invest in to ensure that, as a cyber threat becomes more prevalent—which we assume it will—we will be able to respond appropriately. I wouldn't say we're lacking in this area, but the future doesn't look particularly bright when it comes to cyber threats, and we want to make certain that we stay up with them.

Our capacity to use ISR, or what are referred to as drones, has helped us in Afghanistan. They tremendously aid our ability to reconnoitre and, ultimately, to engage. It's about having another set of eyes in the sky, on a target or on another area of interest. Drones can be used across the spectrum of conflict, or for domestic support purposes. Do you want to go out there and look for a lost hunter? These drones add to the inventory or arsenal of things that can help you.

We are entering into an era where Canada has expressed an interest in purchasing and acquiring this ISR capacity. It adds to our capability set in many different ways. It increases our intelligence-gathering capacity. It increases our ability to direct firepower. It also demands of us that we have networks able to manage that wide band of information that comes at you through satellite linkages. The effect behind the front lines is often as significant or more so than the effect on the front lines, when it comes to these sorts of capabilities.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

From the standpoint of cyber security, how do you differentiate what homeland security or public security people should be doing as opposed to what would be done with respect to cyber security militarily?

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

Clearly, National Defence is not in the lead for almost every aspect of cyber security. We maintain networks, our own secure networks, and we have a stewardship responsibility to ensure that those networks are not permeable or attacked by those who would like to do so. Inside National Defence, we have the ability to protect ourselves against cyber attack.

The broader cyber defence of the nation is largely one that rests with other government departments. We play our part by ensuring that the Canadian Forces remain able to function in a cyber-degraded environment. We do not have the lead in any way, shape, or form in the cyber defence of the nation as a whole. But because we are one of many players in the defence of the nation, we have to protect ourselves in cyberspace so that we can maintain our posture.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Can the linkages between our public security, the people who do have responsibility for frontline defence in cyber security, and National Defence be seamlessly in place?

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

Absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thanks. The time has expired.

Mr. McKay, can you wrap up the seven-minute round?

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Chair, you might be interested in knowing that our witness this morning, Major-General Jonathan Vance, will receive a 2011 Vimy Award from the Conference of Defence Associations for outstanding service to the defence and security of Canada. I wonder whether it would be appropriate, Chair, that you offer our congratulations to our witness on this award.

I think it is a very distinguished award, and I certainly think congratulations would be in order.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Definitely. On behalf of the committee, congratulations on such a prestigious award, for your service to the country and being recognized by your peers for the great work that you're doing.

[Applause]

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

I'll start your time now.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

General Vance, I want to carry on the conversation that we were having privately, if you will, earlier this morning. The military forces are becoming more and more dependent on training and intelligence. They are trying to recruit the best and the brightest. I was on a ship this summer, and the captain of the ship was talking about his need to get trades people, particular in the highly skilled trades, computer people, and people of that nature.

I wanted to get you to talk about the issue of recruitment and retention of the best and brightest in the military colleges, while simultaneously maintaining, if you will, the military culture. I generally characterize the military culture as a pretty straight-line culture. You wear a lot of gold there. It's a pretty command-driven structure. There are organizational charts and all of that sort of stuff. Yet we want to get into the military colleges, at the highest level, the future officers. These would be people who are extraordinarily bright, who think in ways that are not linear, shall we say, and who may see two or three or four solutions to the same problem. Yet you're asking these people to, if you will, wedge themselves into linear command structure.

Looking at the issue in terms of readiness, and also in terms of where we're going for the next five or ten years, how can you expect a lot of these kids who come to RMC in first, second, and third year--the best and the brightest, with the highest grades in their classes--to be jammed into a command structure that at times requires, if you will, repetitive and useless tasks that have no apparent utility?

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

Do you have an example of those...?

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

I have actually, but I'll leave that off.

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

Thank you for the question.

I don't agree with your premise that there is a tension between the best and brightest and the nature of military duty. I would also add in regard to your description of the best and brightest that they are not just those coming from RMC. Our troops from across the nation, who are joining as young soldiers, airmen, and women, are also among the best and the brightest and certainly acquit themselves as such in allied fora. We see that. So we have good raw material.

The fact is that you asked a great question and, of course, it's one of the enduring challenges, how to ensure that someone maintains critical thinking skills while at the same time operating within an environment that by necessity has some doctrinaire aspects to it. The simple answer is that it's an ongoing challenge and that we recognize the importance of having critical thinkers at all levels, while ensuring that critical thinking doesn't allow something to become so chaotic that you don't get the job done.

What caused you to ask the question we see every day when trying to inspire people to think, giving them the confidence and the tools to think, but at the same time constraining their actions appropriately to ensure that the mission is accomplished. It is a hierarchy and as you move up the hierarchy, you don't necessarily become any smarter than anybody else, but you do have experience and have the ability to place in context for your junior leaders the situations that you put them into.

So with the incredible investment in education versus straight training and those sorts of drills, you will see that there's a very good balance in the Canadian Forces between that straight education and straight training. We have a good balance there.

In conducting operations, these are not routine and mundane but demand critical thinking, such as in warfare in general.... In Afghanistan, you just didn't go there and start executing. You had to think. You had to devise strategies and campaigns that took account of an incredibly wide set of factors that all mitigated to success or failure, depending on how you took advantage of them.

In ensuring readiness, we invest in critical thinking at all levels. We encourage a mission command environment where we adequately identify the task and the context that you're in and let you use your imagination and experience to the best effect in that environment. But there are some things that you don't give on, such as the rules of engagement. No matter how much of an outside the box thinker you are, the Chief of the Defence Staff sets the rules of engagement for very clear reasons. Your weapons and equipment can be used in one way for many purposes, but that's how your weapon is to operate. Don't try to think too far outside the box on that, and so on. And caring for people, and on it goes....

There's an appropriate balance, as there is in any profession between critical thinking and abiding by the rules that allow you to be effective.

[John McKay, Liberal, Scarborough—Guildwood, ON]

You reframed the question quite well, I think, and I'm not disagreeing with you.

What concerns me, and it's really a low-level concern, is that the military is a hierarchical organization by definition and its reaction time to trends in thinking is almost constrained by the hierarchical nature of the institution. Yet you're being asked to do tasks, as you rightly point out, in Afghanistan and other places that require some very creative thinking as to how to do them. I don't even argue with your point on the rules of engagement and things of nature. I absolutely agree with you.

When you get to both officer class and enlisted folks, what concerns me is how that thinking, that encouragement to be creative, is working with the attention to routine and almost mindless stuff that seems at times to occupy way too much time.