National Defence Committee on Nov. 1st, 2011

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Christopherson, you have the floor.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

General, thank you very much for appearing today.

I have a couple of apologies. The first one is for being in and out of the meeting during your presentation. I do apologize for that. I'm sure you can appreciate that with the NDP A-team running for leadership, the B-team gets handed everything, so I'm juggling a lot of things. I do apologize for that. Also, I'm going to ask a question and it may have been asked when I was out of the room, so if that's the case, I apologize in advance.

Having said all that, I'm also going to preamble my question with this. I'm so new to this file that I'm not even sure of the right way to ask this question, so it could be completely discombobulated. I'm just going to put it out there as best I can, General, and please do with it what you will.

In terms of readiness, I want to ask a couple of things. One, I'm just curious; oftentimes we hear references to the American military forces and how many fronts they're able to sustain at one time. So with that kind of concept in mind, I know you always have to start with where you are, but if you were starting with a blank page.... Or actually how do you do it in terms of standing here? How do you calculate how far you can stretch, knowing that you have to keep certain things in reserve for different matters that could happen? How do you approach it from a readiness point of view in terms of how many things you can react to?

My second question is this—and you can see why I preambled about not knowing the right language. How much of a challenge is there to maintaining readiness, when at the same time parallel to that, you're either ramping up or ramping down a significant part of our armed forces—that is, Afghanistan?

Those are my questions, General, and again thank you for being here.

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

Thank you for the question, sir.

In part, we've covered the first one earlier, but I can certainly summarize.

How many things can we react to? It depends how big the thing is, and it depends on how long you want to keep reacting to the thing. I'm not being facetious; this is exactly how I would describe it to you. The U.S., under President Kennedy, had a policy of being able to fight two and a half wars. In that policy definition, a war was described as a front, or of a certain size, a NATO, a South-East Asia, and a little bit of something else. That was de rigueur in those days. It's a little more challenging now to do that, and most governments that I know of, including the United States, don't describe their capacity that way any more.

We have a very similar approach to that of all of our allies in terms of describing what our force structure is designed to do and, given the government policy of the day, what we would put in the shop window to be very quick off the mark; and what would be a little bit slower but, certainly, more deliberate, and how long we will sustain it. The simple fact is that we have short-notice response across Canada for search and rescue. We have short-notice response for disaster assistance around the world. We have short-notice response locally to Canadians suffering crises, floods, and so on. Then we have a slightly longer response, but still quite quick, to do something like evacuate Canadians from a threatened land. Then we have an even longer response, because it takes a bit more preparation and some specific training, to go to a place like Afghanistan.

That's getting out the door. Then there's how long you would wish to stay, and what your endurance is. You don't start your force-structuring work on a blank sheet of paper every year. We have an extant force and this force has largely been built on over the years--and sometimes not--to really achieve a significant contribution somewhere in the world, to answer your question directly. That could involve army, navy, and air force, as we did in Afghanistan—although the naval component was missing. But we could have added a naval component. In fact, it was out there but not joined up in the same area.

So we can do something big and sustained, and something more modestly sized, and a little smaller but not sustained. That's kind of how we think. The example would be our being in Afghanistan, and then Haiti comes along, and then we could still do the Olympics. You prevail upon your troops when your operational tempo--you've heard that term--is so high that you don't get a lot of time at home before you're back out the door again. We manage that very carefully, both for the sake of our families and the sake of the soldiers' ability to function.

The high water mark recently, I would say, was Afghanistan happening; the support to Canadians across the country that's still in place, including search and rescue and disaster response; Haiti; and the Olympics.

Did I answer both your questions with those examples?

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That was very good, General, and I appreciate your indulgence in repeating it.

The only other one was the challenge of maintaining this readiness at the same time you're ramping up and ramping down. But you may have covered that in some way.

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

In ramping up, you're expending forces, but not actually committing those forces that are ready. In ramping down, you're going to fold those forces back into a ready posture, that is, you are getting ready to go somewhere, being prepared as it were or, indeed, reassigning those forces somewhere else.

In this case, because it is a good example, there's the repatriation of equipment from Afghanistan. It's very, very important that we bring it back, reconstitute it and fix it up, since it has been battered over a number of years, and then put it back with the troops ready to go again somewhere, should that happen. That's a several hundred million dollar effort that ensures that we come out, refit, and get ready to go.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Warkentin, you have the floor.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

I will pass on that and turn it back to the parliamentary secretary.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Okay. Mr. Alexander.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks so much to our witnesses.

I'm very glad that Mr. McKay mentioned the honour that you'll be receiving later this year, General. It's very well deserved, but we also want to make sure that the committee understands the extent of NATO's success—now very much led by the U.S.—in mounting a counter-insurgency operation inside Afghanistan, where it has been successful. In that country, much of our success owes to your work in leading our task force twice, and in bringing together in a combined or joint way original thinking, strategic thinking, and a variety of resources. I don't think that is fully recognized yet, either here in this narrower circle or across the country. You have our continuing admiration for having shown that leadership there and for having carried it forward in all the directions you've been describing this morning. Thank you for being with us.

I wanted to ask you a couple of questions to build on some of your answers so far, and the first one is the simplest one. From your perspective in strategic joint staff looking at readiness, looking at this schema of what it takes to achieve readiness—which can obviously be measured in all kinds of different ways—where do we stand today compared with a decade ago in the Canadian Forces? How ready are we?

I know there is not a hard and fast indicator, a website to measure these things where you can go, but what is your professional judgment on that score?

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

Thanks for the question.

I would say that overall, it's pretty clear that we're considerably more ready now than we would have been a decade ago, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which has been the investment in our capacity to deploy. The C-17s have made a marked difference in our perceived and actual state of readiness, because you can be very ready, but it doesn't really count if you can't get there in the first place. So there's a readiness continuum allowing you to actually land on the ground and do something. Again, you can stay academic for only so long; eventually you have to do something.

At the same time, I would say that we have an experiential pillar now that didn't exist 10 years ago. We've been in Afghanistan for 10 years. We understand the nature of war from the perspective of how we function among allies, what we need to bring to the table, what we need to receive from allies to be able to function effectively. As I alluded to in a example before, you can be extremely ready with a cavalry force, but if it's a machine gun war, it doesn't really matter.

We've had 10 years of intellectual growth and experience with our allies, using cutting-edge capacity technologies, with everything from our ability to use intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance assets through to biometrics and everything else. We have a much better understanding, and now some experience in delivering, maintaining, and leading forces into combat. That crucible has increased our overall appreciation of what we need to be ready for. Until you go through those experiences, there are some things that you might miss.

Ten years ago, I dare say, our understanding of what it meant to be ready for casualties, family care, long-term care of wounded.... While these are things that were once perhaps extremely well-known in this country, some things do lapse. Now we have a tremendous understanding of it. So given our experience, investment, and continued education as a result of our work with allies, I'd say that we're in a far better position than we were 10 years ago.

There are many things one can and must do, if one wants to maintain a state of readiness, because there are components to it. High readiness is often identified with those things that are quick off the mark. Major confrontations don't generally happen quickly or off the mark. Usually for things that are going to happen very quickly, we have something in the shop window ready to go. For something like the situation in Haiti, an earthquake, or a disaster somewhere, we have the forces that can contribute to that. Having something that's a bit more substantial for a situation like that in Afghanistan takes a bit more time to evolve—and if we don't have it, we've demonstrated, I think, that we can build it.

When we started in Afghanistan, we didn't have tanks. We needed tanks. We got tanks. We didn't have the operational mentor and liaison teams. We built those. Warfare is its own generator of new thinking and demands for readiness.

I know I'm being a little bit long-winded here, but I just want to put a little bit of a plug in for the concept of whole of government. Before Afghanistan, the Canadian Forces largely, but not exclusively, functioned pretty much in a silo. “Go do your military task” was more or less how UN missions were set up.

Counter insurgencies and the nature of conflict in Afghanistan--and, we believe, the nature of conflict in the future--demand that you have an element of readiness if you will and, certainly, an element of relationship building within government that will allow for a joined-up response from the whole of government. We have developed that in spades over the past 10 years, in that there's a deep appreciation among Foreign Affairs, CIDA, the Department of National Defence, CSE, and everybody else that contributes of what they bring to the table. I think there have been some really good lessons learned about how we would do that again.

[Chris Alexander, Conservative, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thank you.

One of the key roles of your staff is to develop strategic contingencies. These obviously have an impact on the thinking across the armed forces, under the direction of the CDS, in terms of readiness and the kind of readiness we are pursuing.

Give us a sense of how the strategic contingencies you're developing have evolved, without necessarily getting into a laundry list of specifics. We have lessons learned from Libya, Afghanistan, Haiti, and domestic operations. We have new capabilities and new investments that are coming on stream. But we also have new principles and new areas of interest or preoccupation politically, but also in regard to our allies in the world. We have a responsibility to protect. We have a continuing terrorism challenge. We have had momentous events occurring throughout the Middle East. We have a whole series of peacekeeping operations in Africa, some of which are succeeding and some not. We have a lot of instability in broader South Asia.

Tell us what sort of contingencies you're preparing for now and how those have evolved in recent years?

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

Broadly speaking, the contingencies we work on fall under the category of protecting Canadians. Should there need to be an evacuation of Canadians, as we've seen before out of Lebanon, and if Foreign Affairs turned to the Canadian Forces and asked for support, we need to be ready. We need to make certain that we have asset visibility. We need to be ready to adopt a posture that allows for a reasonable response.

I said “reasonable”, but there's a question mark behind that term. We want to achieve strategic effect as quickly as possible. We maintain ready-duty ships so that if we need to go somewhere to help evacuate Canadians, we can go as quickly as possible. The calculus, the decision-making, then goes through a variety of iterations. Do you maintain a ready-duty ship in Canada, or do you maintain a ready-duty ship closer to where you think it might be needed?

These are questions for decision at a variety of levels in government. Nonetheless, my staff goes through the options analysis, always wanting to give the government options. If you are concerned about a nation in the Maghreb or in the MENA region, or if you need to determine how the Canadians on the ground should respond, then we would have some options available to government. Our job is always to provide some options. From a broad contingency perspective, that's really what we do.

We must also be certain that we maintain the capacity—and here it's a bit of a forcing function—to reinvest in the broader training and readiness of the forces. It might not be as high, but it is readiness in some detail. We need to be able to prosecute operations that we think could happen in the future. So there's the vice-chief's side of the house in force development.

Your premise is absolutely correct: we are constantly trying to work through strategic contingencies.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Your time has expired.

We'll go to a third round.

Madame Moore, s'il vous plaît.

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

Thank you, Major-General Vance.

With regard to the operational and strategic levels, I am having a little difficulty understanding what evaluation tools you are using. Are there evaluation tables and grids? How do you determine whether the objectives have been achieved?

For example, if I tell you that the Canadian government is going to give you an additional $10 million to increase the capacity and the readiness of a unit by 15%, how will you be able to tell me in two years whether that goal has been achieved?

I see general criteria, but I am finding it difficult to know what specific assessment methods the Armed Forces are using to define their readiness.

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

Yes, thank you for the question.

We have a variety of tools that we use to determine whether or not we've achieved a readiness objective. They appear inside the service chiefs'....

I think you will be speaking as committee with the commander of the army. If you speak to the navy and the air force, they will be able to describe to you in great detail the link between resources and the production of a ready asset, and the reporting of that to the Canadian Forces—which ultimately rolls up, and which I look at and examine. That is done on an annual, cyclical basis.

Now there are exceptions. When a major fleet modernization is needed, such as with the Halifax-class ships right now, a service commander alerts the Chief of Defence Staff, perhaps through me, that there is some sort of impact on readiness. I'll do my best to answer it, but that's a great question for the service chiefs. They all have slightly different tools, because they are different services, to describe and assess their state of readiness. The air force would use a tool set to describe and assess their readiness versus the army, which would be quite different. But there are tool sets.

On the ultimate arbiter or determination of whether we are ready, it gets rolled up and reported to the CDS, and my staff matches that, as do others, against what we're supposed to be ready for.

You asked, “If we took $10 million or added a percentage into it, how would we know that we were better?” That's a good question. We would first have to accept that money, with an understanding of what it was to be invested in. Is it a one-time amount of money, or is it added to your baseline? What is the policy of the government that you're trying to achieve? It would have to be defined. Once it were defined, we would build a plan that included measures of effectiveness, and would report back on it.

So all of that happens. I know it was a theoretical question: if you put more money in, do you get more readiness? The answer is yes, if readiness were your plan. If you put more money in, would you get better wounded support? You would, if that were your plan. It depends on where you want to put the money. It depends on what the plan is.

We can show on an annual basis that money in equals readiness across the board, and in all of the other things we do. We can show that, and we do annually to Parliament.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

You have time for a brief question.

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

You were asked in how many international operations Canada was able to participate. Conversely, what would be the minimum number of soldiers we would need to keep in Canada to fulfil our mandates? Has that been determined?

Are you able to tell us the threshold below which we would be compromising security in Canada?

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

That is a good question.

The land forces are divided into four regions, each with an immediate response unit within an infantry battalion. We also have our search and rescue capacity and other national support elements. Is that a threshold or a standard? I don't know.

We have the mandate to maintain immediate and rapid response capability, within a battalion in each region of Canada, as well as search and rescue capability. We can also do more during an emergency or a crisis with other individuals available within the Canadian Forces.

We maintain an equilibrium with four groups, one in each region.

There are also watch-keeping facilities on each coast to help the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Fisheries and Oceans Canada fulfil their mandate.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you very much.

Mr. McKay.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you again, General Vance.

General Leslie was pretty critical of the procurement process of the military—ignoring the big end or high end stuff for the time being. As I recollect his report, it was to the effect that too many people had to sign off at too many decision points and, how should we say, with unnecessary delays and unnecessary costs.

Do you have an observation with respect to his observations?

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

I can honestly tell you, Mr. Chair, that this falls well outside of my lane. I would have an observation, but it doesn't count and so probably shouldn't be stated.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

The fact is, from my perspective as the operations guy for the CDS, one of the forces' employers, the forces have been available for what the chief needs to do with them in support of government, and historically have been available to him.

I'm not trying to avoid the question. Quite simply, I've had other jobs where I have been intimately involved. Process is process. I can tell you that the results of that process largely have been responsive enough to achieve what the Canadian Forces needed when it was urgently required.

I really, honestly believe, sir, that the assistant deputy minister of materiel, or the service chiefs, could give you a better view on this.

It is a long process. There is no question about it. I think everybody is interested in making that process more responsive and better, cutting the number of steps that one has to take yet still achieve prudent spending and oversight. There is no question about it that we want that.

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

Thank you for that. Only politicians I thought dodged questions like that. We'll leave it at that.

[MGen Jonathan Vance]

That was not dodging. I was just giving the answer.