Mr. Chair, thank you very much.
Good morning to everybody. I'd like to begin by saying thank you for providing me with this opportunity to appear before you, my first such opportunity since the opening of the current Parliament.
I'm really pleased to have a couple of hours to spend with you, especially as there are some new members on the committee.
Let me tell you, I look forward to your questions, and I am more than happy to make my team of senior officers available to you as well. I will always be ready and willing to provide this committee with whatever information and support that it requires to do its important work.
Let me also say how pleased I am that you've decided to focus an in-depth study on readiness. It's an ambitious decision, I know, on your part, but I know it will lead to some very valuable discussions and recommendations.
From my point of view, readiness is definitely the most complex, and probably the least well understood, pillar of the four supporting pillars described in the Canada First defence strategy, the other three pillars being personnel, equipment, and infrastructure.
I can't stress enough how important it is to maintain a balance across these four pillars. Invest too little or too much in any of them and the result will be a military that is out of balance and unable to conduct the missions the government expects of it.
Of the four, readiness can often seem the least tangible, the hardest to quantify. It's the hardest to measure, but it's where the rubber hits the road for the Canadian Forces in terms of preparing our people to achieve the missions the government asks of them. It's what lets us take our investments in personnel, equipment, and infrastructure, and turn them into results where and when they're needed.
As General Jon Vance laid out for you on Tuesday, we believe you would benefit from hearing from the three groups within the defence team over the course of your study: the force generators, those being the commanders of the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the Canadian Army; the force employers, including the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command and Canada Command; and the senior leaders of the Defence team.
The generators are those who recruit, build, train, and maintain our forces. The force employers are the commanders who actually lead our sailors, soldiers, and airmen and airwomen to success in operations at home and abroad. The senior members of our integrated defence team represent the civilians and military personnel who work side by side to analyze the various options to find the right resource balance across the four pillars.
Each of these groups will approach the concept of readiness from their own perspective and with their own challenges.
No one player is more important or necessary than any other. Each plays an important role in getting the right person, with the right training, experience, equipment, team and support to the right location on time.
As for my own role here today, I aim to give you my perspective before you dive into each one of those respective areas of readiness. I want to talk about what readiness means to me as the person who actually delivers the effect on behalf of the Government of Canada, and how I think the Canadian Forces are doing in terms of overall readiness, particularly as we transition from a period of high operational tempo to a steadier state following the conclusion of our combat mission in Afghanistan this past summer.
Now, it's helpful to describe readiness using some of our recent operational experiences. Let me just reflect back over a year ago to January 2010. It was the January 12. I was flying back from Edmonton, where I was visiting soldiers who had been wounded in Afghanistan. I received a phone call indicating that an earthquake had just struck Haiti. The key infrastructure in Port-au-Prince was wiped out. The hospitals were destroyed or completely overrun with patients, and basic services such as electricity and clean water were offline. I spent the next few hours aboard the Challenger, but working with senior members of my staff and coordinating with the Minister of National Defence, our policy team, and other government departments, such that by early the next morning, at dawn, aircraft were up in the air at Trenton, after being loaded with emergency equipment and supplies, as well as highly trained personnel.
Canadians were among the first nations to arrive. Less than 24 hours after the earthquake had hit, we had search and rescue technicians, medics and firefighters on the ground in Haiti pulling people out of the rubble.
Within a few weeks we had deployed a 2,000 person disaster assistance joint task force.
Eventually, Operation HESTIA would comprise two ships, seven helicopters, infantry and logistics battalions, an engineers' squadron, a field hospital, and a 200-person disaster assistance response team.
Mr. Chair, the speed and scale of this response was a direct reflection of our investment in operational readiness. Our personnel, our leadership, and our equipment were up to the challenge. But it was our attention to readiness that put them in a posture to respond as quickly and effectively as they did, and allowed them to sustain these operations for two months until they returned to Canada.
It wasn't just the performance of our people in the operation itself but our focus beforehand on training, on the right equipment, on all the supply required, on maintenance of that equipment, and the regular cycling of our personnel through periods of high readiness to normal readiness and low readiness, in that cycle.
There's another example here at home. When Hurricane Igor struck eastern Newfoundland in September of last year, it washed out key roads and bridges, knocked out power across the province, and left residents isolated.
Once again, we were able to respond immediately, working in partnership with other federal departments and with the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador.
In all, we deployed over a thousand personnel from the army, navy and air force to help evacuate the injured; deliver food, water, fuel and medical supplies; re-establish power and transportation routes; and even rebuild a bridge in the community of Trouty.
What's particularly noteworthy on this one is that many of the folks on this operation were in the Primary Reserve Force. The reserve was front and centre—a reserve, where citizen soldiers who, with one phone call, dropped everything they were doing and were called into action. Their selflessness and dedication deserves admiration, both at home and abroad. But the fact that they had received their individual and collective training and that they could assemble and deploy immediately to deliver tangible and strategic effects in this kind of emergency was testament to their readiness.
Of course, we all remember this past spring how just a day after the UN Security Council authorized an arms embargo and a no-fly zone over Libya, we deployed six CF-18 fighter aircraft to the Mediterranean. Within days, those aircraft, pilots, and crew were able to join HMCSCharlottetown, which had itself deployed on exceptionally short notice earlier that month. But when the Charlottetown deployed, its crew thought it was going on a humanitarian mission to evacuate people. Indeed, we were putting it into a war zone. But that ship was ready because of the extraordinary training and preparation, indeed readiness, of that asset.
In the weeks and months that have followed, those assets, along with strategic airlift such as C-17s and C-130Js, and refuelling and surveillance aircraft such as the Aurora, conducted over 1,500 flight sorties and played a major role in an international effort to protect civilians, to enforce UN sanctions, and to ensure access of humanitarian assistance.
Mr. Chair, each of these examples demonstrates in a concrete way the value and meaning of readiness. The bottom line, Mr. Chair, is that readiness is the degree of preparedness and responsiveness of our forces that allows me to deploy them with little notice in response to government direction. It's the ability to get the right people, with the right skills and the right equipment, into the right place at the right time and to sustain that for as long as government requires.
That's certainly not something that just happens on its own.
You don't just achieve readiness by making good investments in personnel, equipment and infrastructure, although I can't overemphasize how important that is.
If you take the example of a soldier getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan, we have to ensure that we have the right person for the job, that we provide him or her with the best possible equipment, and that we base the person out of solid infrastructure. It takes literally thousands of hours of dedicated training, both by the soldiers and their leadership and instructors, to get them ready. It takes multiple phased exercises to build a team within their unit and to rehearse what they'll be doing. It takes a deliberate progression, through escalating levels of readiness, before they are prepared to head out the door and deliver real effects for Canada. All the while, it takes a specific, dedicated effort to evaluate and protect the physical and mental preparedness of each soldier, sailor, airman and airwoman, and their families, before and after the operation.
The individual's tour of stay in Afghanistan may last six to nine months, but the entire process of preparing them, supporting them, and bringing them to a state where they can begin the whole process again can take up to two years.
Mr. Chair, if you ask me how we're doing in maintaining our readiness, I'd say that we're doing the best we can with all the resources we have.
It's worth noting that of the six core missions set out for us by the government, we successfully carried out five simultaneously between January and March 2010. We conducted combat operations in Afghanistan. We supported the whole-of-government effort to provide security for the Vancouver Olympics. We responded, with 2,000 folks, to the earthquake in Haiti. We remained on guard and ready in the event of a terrorist event anywhere in Canada. And we conducted the regular patrols and search and rescue operations necessary to protect our national sovereignty. That's a level of performance we all take a lot of pride in.
Looking forward, however, we shouldn't expect that same level of operational readiness to simply be there whenever we need it. Readiness doesn't maintain itself: It is a perishable commodity, and it's expensive.
Maintaining the level of readiness required and expected of us by government will require a significant and sustained investment. It means repairing, refitting, and replacing some of our equipment, particularly the equipment that has experienced heavy wear and tear, such as all the kit coming back from Afghanistan.
It means rebuilding the health and strength of the units and personnel that were involved in these operations and investing in the necessary training to help our newer recruits fill gaps in key trades.
All the while, it means dealing with the rising cost of fuel, utilities, and other key inputs needed to maintain our readiness.
When I talk about readiness and where you start on readiness, we start with the missions that the Government of Canada has assigned us through the Canada First defence strategy, which lays out three key roles. First is excellence at home, with the defence of Canada and the sovereignty of Canada the priority. Second is being a strong, reliable partner with our United States allies, whether in terms of NORAD or other activities. Third is projecting leadership abroad. Those are the key levels of ambition as laid out in the Canada First defence strategy.
We then look at what forces are required for those tasks the government has given us. At home, in each of the major regions, we have a battalion--an immediate response unit--that's on eight hours' notice to move. It's a light battalion, so that they're ready to move out at any time, whether it's to put sandbags in Saint-Jean or Portage La Prairie—or, indeed, to be the first folks on the ground in an ice storm.
We also have people who are ready on high notice for search and rescue. On any given day, we have about three missions a day. This past weekend we were reminded of how dangerous it is, and our thoughts and prayers are with the family of Sergeant Janick Gilbert.
We also have ready-duty ships on each coast, which are ready, in eight hours, from notice to power-up, to move out. We have surveillance aircraft at high readiness, as well as fighter aircraft at high readiness, in support of NATO.
Offshore we also maintain a battalion at high readiness for any mission the Government of Canada gives us. We also have a company group to support the evacuation of Canadians in situations such as what we saw a few years ago in Lebanon.
Our investment in the Canadian Forces' readiness really focuses on those operations.
Mr. Chair, let me conclude by re-emphasizing the value of this committee's study in helping the civilian and military leaders of the defence team find the right balance across the four pillars to ensure that we remain ready to respond to the needs of government and the needs of Canadians in the months and years to come.
As I said earlier, I'm more than happy to appear before you and have members of my team appear before you, as well, to help inform your study.
Thank you very much.
I'm happy to take your questions.