National Defence Committee on Dec. 13th, 2011

[LGen André Deschamps]

Other than the fact that Chris Hadfield is one of our former test pilots and a great supporter of the RCAF.... We also have a pilot who was just selected to go to the space agency to train. So we remain one of the providers, as part of the greater Canadian gene pool, to provide folks.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

So our involvement with the space station is limited to that? We have no involvement through our air force at all?

[LGen André Deschamps]

The air force is not involved in the space station, other than providing the gene pool.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I realize it's not your forte, but still, at half a billion dollars, I suspect you'd have some idea about a new satellite system that's currently under way. It's close to half a billion dollars and it may or may not have something to do with the ability of the F-35s to communicate in the north. Could you expand on that a bit for us, please?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Again, it's not really my domain, and I don't have great knowledge on this. But what I can say is that the Mercury Global project is intended to create that network, much like the C-17 did, with Canadian solutions and autonomy. This is part of that process of creating more flexibility for Canada when it comes time to act, whether domestically or internationally, where this gives you certainty of access to those space channels where you need to communicate and pass information on. It is critical to future success. So other than where it fits into that constellation of capabilities we need to develop over time, it will play an important role in giving us that autonomy that we've always strived for.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

I have another question in the same area and, again, I respect that you're limited in how you can respond. Given our close allied relationship with the U.S., what is our involvement with the U.S. space initiative, which is vast and leads the world by leaps and bounds?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Again, from a military and air force perspective, we don't have a big investment, if you will, in space itself other than what I mentioned before. We are closely linked with the U.S. Air Force, clearly, through our NORAD and other links with them, understanding where they're going with space development and maintaining a keen interest in it. As for what Canada's industry does in space, we have strong connections that I'm aware of, where our industry is very competitive and very active in the space domain. We have examples out in B.C. where MDA is a very strong player in the space domain.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Great.

Thank you, General.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Hawn, you have the floor.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Chair. It's good to be here.

General, it's good to see you again.

I'd rather talk about the F-35s, but let's bring it down to earth a little bit and talk about the stressed trades and the things that make the air force and everything work, meaning its people. Do we have trades under stress in the air force right now, and how are we dealing with that and the whole issue of recruiting and sustainment going forward?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Thank you for the question.

We talked about it a little bit earlier on pilot production. The air force currently is responsible for 26 trades inside the bigger Canadian Forces package. Of the 26 trades, we have seven that are still under stress. We define “under stress” as being the trades that are 10% short of the preferred manning level.

That's better than last year. Last year, we had nine trades in stress. We're down to seven, and that trend is improving fairly rapidly. My sense right now, assuming conditions don't dramatically change around us, is that we will see the air force by and large being in the green as far as trades are concerned within the next three to five years. The pilot trade will probably remain a stressed trade because we have to make up for the gaps that we've had over the decades, and also to make sure that we can still produce and adjust for any sort of attrition that may be driven by the economy.

I'm fairly confident that we will close the gap on those remaining trades. In the pilot trade, we're okay. We're going to produce as fast as we can. Right now, I don't have any undue concerns about our being able to hold the line on our current production. We've improved a lot of our processes, which allows us to produce folks faster, and have had great success certainly in the trades. Our aircraft technicians used to take three to four years after coming off the street before being able to fix airplanes and sign for the work they did. We got that down to two and a half years, which is a tremendous improvement. We did this through technology. The use of the virtual world has helped us move things along a lot faster. We're very satisfied with where that's going. We're going to keep looking for those increased efficiencies, but by and large, we're doing okay.

The biggest issue we will have is a bit of a demographic issue, which a lot of the services and departments face. We have a fairly young demographic. Over 40% of the air force has less than nine years of service, and we have a fairly large proportion of folks in the older demographic, let's say with 20-plus years of service. We have a bit of a shortage of folks in that 12 to 20 years of service bracket. That was due to major adjustments that were done in the mid-1990s as part of that decade's worth of economic adjustments that we had to make. We're feeling that demographic pressure coming through right now. Part of our challenge is that we're training a lot of new, keen, and smart folks, but the mentorship piece is a bit of a challenge, as we have to keep distributing the experience that we have in that middle crew to those eager young folks who need to be mentored and developed so they become solid air force members.

You know what? We've deployed on operations, as they say, across the world with those young folks, and they've done tremendously well. The training we provide them has certainly served them. Again, we call them our pipeliner veterans, because they've been out there doing the business and have done it extremely well.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you for that.

Another challenge is going to be operating in the north, specifically search and rescue in the north. There has been a lot of emphasis on that with a couple of aircraft accidents and so on. Can you talk about the challenge and how you envision doing that?

People want us to base aircraft all across the north. Of course, there are some obvious practical limitations to that. Could you talk about that a little bit? And just with respect to the stressed trades, where do you sit specifically with SAR techs, which I know is a bit of a challenge at the moment?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Thank you for that question.

I'll answer the last question first. The SAR trade is actually healthy. It's slightly over establishment, in fact. We have no problem recruiting our SAR techs. We're slightly ahead in numbers, which is good, because it is a trade that's prone to injury, as I think we're well aware. But the trade itself is healthy, which is good news.

SAR, writ large, is clearly an important mandate that we have on behalf of Canada to provide the ability to respond across our vastness both in land and ocean. We are the biggest SAR region in the world because of our ocean approaches on three fronts, plus our land mass. We have 18-million square kilometres to be able to react inside of. Over the last 64 years, we've been mandated to do SAR, since just after World War II. Our system of search and rescue has evolved. We've learned as we've done it, as we've expanded the mandate and our capabilities. We've become a lot better at doing SAR over those decades.

I think what we find right now is a system that's in balance. We have highly skilled individuals with good platforms—although we definitely want to refresh those platforms so they're viable into the decades ahead. But the system works: It's a good system, and world class. I have no doubt I can put up our SAR crews against anybody in the world and they will do extremely well.

So the question becomes our responsiveness. I believe we have the agility right now to respond in a way that meets the general demand. Clearly the Arctic is a challenging area. As we saw recently, only a few weeks ago we had to do probably one of the toughest SAR missions I've ever seen and, of course, it cost us the loss of one of our SAR technicians, but we saved those who were at risk. The Arctic is an unforgiving place. Therefore, we are looking at our training and equipment to make sure that when we're called upon to operate in the Arctic, we will do it to the best of our ability and so that we can ensure success when we go out the door.

All in all, I think we are in balance. We are where we need to be, writ large, to be able to deliver SAR across the full spectrum of the demands in Canada, and in a way that is both resource-sensible and, in the end, that's able to actually save lives.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Alexander, you're batting cleanup on the second round.

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

Thank you very much, Chair.

And thank you, General.

You mentioned that the workforce is not ready yet and you described its components: the equipment, people, training, doctrine. How those components interact sometimes evolves very quickly. As you mentioned, the Kandahar environment was a petri dish from which innovation can arise. We certainly saw innovation in the Libyan theatre as well. You and I both had the pleasure of welcoming some pilots home, who described what they had learned in the air and on the ground about dynamic targeting and so forth.

I think all of us are very much aware that success in a combat mission in the air involves not just having the right aircraft and pilots but also working against and suppressing air defences. These are capabilities that we've always expected to be provided jointly among allies within NATO. Could you talk a little bit about that challenge going forward and what we're doing to continue to be ready to deal with it when we put our men and women in aircraft over a territory where the opposing forces have some of these capabilities?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Thank you for the question.

It goes back to readiness. Why have we been able to achieve what we have this year as far as the speed of response and the quality of response are concerned? It's because we've maintained a significant investment in the training part of maintaining fully combat-capable forces. That's really the crux of how much investment needs to be made.

To maintain those robust skills across a reasonably benign spectrum to a very complex and dangerous spectrum requires a fair amount of investment in time and energy to expose our folks to the environments in the right kind of training setting--safe but demanding--and to build that confidence and skill set so they can go out the door on 12 or 24 hours' notice, do the business, and do it successfully. For us, it's really about finding the balance in how we do that.

We have great domestic exercises that we participate in. Maple Flag is the air force flagship of high readiness training, in which we integrate individual skill sets into collective training that is very demanding, where we play out those complex and very demanding scenarios where there are threats, both in the air and on the ground. Therefore, strategies to overcome them need to be worked out, and then you also get a chance to exploit your technology and see how it works under demanding circumstances.

But we've also expanded our operations with our allies in big coalition exercises and work very closely with the army in Wainwright at their big training centre. We have a rapprochement between us right now, where several times a year we have big exercises when we deliver the same sorts of air effects that we did in Afghanistan with the army. That is one of the lessons we've learned, that we need to make sure we maintain those skills with our joint partners so we don't have to relearn them on operations in a live setting. Also, of course, it's great training for both the army and us.

We're also working with the navy to expand again and recreate a strong skill set with it as we go out to RIMPAC, which is a massive exercise out in the western Pacific that exercises all the elements of sea and air power--and some land, in fact--in a joint setting.

We are investing in those kinds of great training opportunities to make sure our people are at the leading edge of skills and are also aware of the technology they will face out there.

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

My final question is about drones, for lack of a better term, and in particular the joint unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance target acquisition project that is being pursued within the Canadian armed forces. What is the potential, as you see it, for drones, unpiloted aerial vehicles, to contribute to readiness on the part of the RCAF in the Arctic and in the NORAD mission, but also in an expeditionary context?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Thank you for that question.

On unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, we've seen over the last few years how critical they can be in any battlefield setting. They have fulfilled the initial mandate given to them to do the dangerous, dirty, and dull jobs where you don't have to put a person at risk. They've done that well.

I think we've seen the technology come forward very quickly. It's exploding in many sectors. We've seen micro drones through to the big drones. There's an absolute plethora of airplanes out there right now and they cover a wide spectrum of different kinds of capabilities. So this is certainly a tool in the tool box; it's a capability that we need to have, because it does provide us with the ability to have persistent surveillance over either land, or, as we see right now, the maritime domain, where we're experimenting with small tactical drones to extend the view of ships.

I think they play an important role in having capabilities to collect information and provide the commanders on the ground with the best information possible, either to avoid risks, whether it's IEDs or other threats, or to take action as part of that intelligence-gathering process. They're very valuable. As we move toward our procurement of long-term capability in the CF, I think you can expect to spend a lot of time making sure that it's the right capability for both domestic operations and international offshore operations.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Before we start the third round, I have a couple of questions, General.

You mentioned Wainwright. The committee had a chance to visit Wainwright and witness the interoperability between the Canadian army and the Royal Canadian Air Force. Some of us were in both the Chinooks and the Sea Kings. When I was out in Wainwright earlier this summer, I was up in a Griffon. Can you talk about how the addition of the new Chinooks is going to enhance the overall readiness of the Canadian armed forces?

[LGen André Deschamps]

The Chinooks are of course a tremendous platform. As we saw in Afghanistan, the arrival of that airplane opened up options that we didn't have before, as far as mobility and a far more secure way of travel are concerned. There is also their tactical effectiveness. You can surprise folks because you can arrive in their backyard at a moment's notice. It has great tactical advantages that are significant in any sort of conflict area, whether in full spectrum operations or peacekeeping and peacemaking.

On the humanitarian side, it carries a huge amount of stores that can either be hoisted or landed. It provides the versatility we lack. It can certainly play a big role in any of our domestic security or humanitarian emergencies. It can respond almost instantly to any of our needs. Because of its range it can cover great expanses by itself, without a lot of support. It is capable of operating in the Arctic. It's like the C-17; it's a game-changer in the tool set we have available to plan around and execute missions at home and abroad. It will be tremendous.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

You were talking about stressed trades and pilot training being big concerns, and about trying to address that shortfall. It's my understanding that to become a helicopter pilot, you require extra hours in the air on fixed wing aircraft before you can ever move to helicopters, plus you require advanced education versus the other pilots. I believe there's a high attrition rate, because helicopter pilots are in such demand in the private sector that a lot of our air force pilots who fly helicopters are getting poached away by private trades.

Is there any way to adapt some of the criteria so that we can have an expedited process to bring in helicopter pilots in a more robust way than we're doing right now?

[LGen André Deschamps]

As to way our training system works, there is a basic selection that occurs, where all pilot candidates have to go through a filter to ensure they can learn at the speed required by the air force so they can go on to the other phases of pilot training. Everybody goes through that phase. Then there's a streamed process where they go to propeller airplanes—turboprops—and are trained in the most advanced flying and started on the road to competency. Then they are streamed off to either multi-engine aircraft, helicopters, or fighters. So there's a streaming effect that occurs shortly after that primary flight selection, and then they specialize in flying helicopters.

We don't see a bigger drain on the helicopter pilots than on the fixed-wing pilots, and their becoming commercial pilots. We've always had attrition based on the commercial draw, because we provide very highly-skilled folks. They have to give service to Canada first. They owe us several years of service before they can be released. Clearly , we want to retain those folks, because at that point they have a lot of experience that we need to leverage.

We're always looking at our system to see if we can optimize it. Our training modalities right now have proven to be very good and of high quality. As we get more demand to produce more pilots, we're looking at creating different streams to accelerate some of that training, but we're not there yet. We're satisfied that what we have right now is top-notch, but it depends on production. We may have to look at other models in the future to see if we can accelerate some production.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

It's my understanding that because we didn't have a large enough pool of helicopter pilots in theatre in Afghanistan, the pilots were going back into theatre every third rotation. They never had a chance to have a real rest, because as soon as they got back, they were in training to prepare to go back in the next rotation. Anything we can do to expedite the process would be advantageous.

When we had the Secretary of State of the Ministry of Defence from Norway here, he talked about the requirement for F-35s. We talk about fifth-generation fighters, and it's my understanding that the only fifth-generation fighter on the market to consider is the F-35. Everybody talks about the F-18, but it's still a 4.5.

He raised concerns about the capabilities of Russia, and their investment in their military in the upcoming years. With the complexities of Arctic sovereignty in the past, particularly with Russia, is that one of the reasons we're going to an F-35, that is, from the standpoint of surveillance in the north?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Thank you for that question, Mr. Chair.

Without trying to target specific countries, I think that every country out there, any modern and sophisticated country, is still looking at manned fighters as a deliberate tool of national policy. Therefore, they're making investments in significant quantities to develop capabilities. It's certainly to our advantage to maintain our own autonomy to be able to understand and deal with that technology. The challenge of technology is that as it gets developed, it tends to proliferate. It tends to go where you didn't intend it to go, as we've seen in the past where some of these technologies produced by certain nations have found their way elsewhere, which challenge us as we go around the world trying to do our business.

We certainly need to have the ability to operate in the changing technology space that's being created through national initiatives, but also we need to have the flexibility in the future. We just don't know what the future holds, as we've discovered several times over the last several years as far as predictability is concerned. So unpredictability is probably in the nature of what we're going to face. So flexibility and agility are what we need in our force. We may not be big but we need to be very agile. And to have deterrence, you must have credible tools. The numbers matter at some point, but credibility of what the capability can do is what matters when you get into these scenarios where tensions rise, or national sovereignty issues become serious.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

We're going to go to the third and final round of five minutes each, starting with Mr. Kellway.