National Defence Committee on Feb. 9th, 2012

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

In the context of CDS saying what we need is 2% to 3% to keep going, the senior defence people saying 5% to 6% to do something, and the RAND folks saying that really just to keep up you need 9% to 12%, and you put that against the government's stated goal of a reduction of 5% to 10% across the board, it creates an extraordinary mix of numbers, which seems to lead you to a conclusion that the path on which the government has been thus far is not a sustainable path.

[Col Brian MacDonald]

You have to look at some other numbers that are coming into view. The process for the last several years has been for increased transparency in the financial numbers, if you know where to look.

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

Yes, that's a big—

[Col Brian MacDonald]

If you look, for example, at the new quarterly statements for this fiscal year, when you look at the individual program activities you'll see a spending ceiling, and then where you are in relation to that ceiling. You're looking at about a 20% gap between the actual spending and what was proposed originally at this point.

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

Doesn't that just lead to the whole question about the March madness that goes on around here, where they spend 60% of the budget over the course of the year, and then in the last month they spend 40%?

[Col Brian MacDonald]

In fact the minister announced that it would not be looked upon with favour this year.

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

I saw that, but the Treasury Board was saying they really don't like it. Well, that plus a loonie gets you a coffee at Tim Hortons.

[Col Brian MacDonald]

Of course.

I don't know what the answer to that is. I don't know whether we will see significant things come up in the supplementary (C) that would allow the third-quarter financials and the fourth-quarter financials to show that the gap between availability and actual is going to continue. My suspicion is that we'll see slippages.

On the capital account, as well, many of the projects are running behind their planned expenditures. In part, this could be issues of simply the slippage. In part it can be the question of whether or not we are buying military equipment off the shelf, like the C-17, which requires no modification, or whether we're buying something that is still in development, and then that development cycle is more and more iffy as you get into it.

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

General Leslie commented on that, particularly with respect to the lapsed spending. His commentary was that this whole procurement stuff is sometimes confused and sometimes incoherent, and frustratingly delayed at times. The consequence of that is that the military doesn't actually spend the money that it's been given, which begs the initial question of why you needed it in the supplementary estimates in the first place.

You keep going around in this crazy circle where what you will see in Mr. Flaherty's budget in March is just a remote approximation of what will actually be spent.

[Col Brian MacDonald]

There is, of course, the response that has been made, which is accurate. Some of the lapsed funds in fact are not lost to the department; they are re-profiled into a future year. That money in fact still stays available, but you don't get it now.

Of course that means you're running into inflation in the general economy, in that a dollar now is worth more than a dollar five years from now.

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

Which can work.

[Col Brian MacDonald]

It can work. There have been the allowable budgetary carry-forwards, but certainly there is still what is permanently lapsed in this past period, and that was a clear $1 billion that went down the tubes.

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

It begs the larger question Mr. Kellway was kind of edging around. Some of the strategic decisions, particularly with respect to the F-35, are coming into question. You, like us, are into this realm of “Is this a $75 million plane, or is it a $150 million plane?” Nobody seems to really be able to come to ground on this.

The core reason for stealth is that you want to be the first into a conflict. If it's a Libyan conflict, you're the first one there. However, the Americans didn't deploy their F-22s. They used missiles and other stuff to be there first. When you see all of this movement in the funding and trying to protect the core goals, the core missions of the military, it brings into question why in heaven's name we want to be the first into any conflict, because that is the point of a stealth fighter.

[Col Brian MacDonald]

Well, I would disagree.

Again, if you look at the American concept of a high-low mix of an air superiority fighter, on the low side is primarily an attack fighter but with a dogfighting capability. For example, in the U.S. Navy you had the F-14, the Tomcat, which was the heavy air superiority fighter with a targeting radar. That can pick up something way out there and fire a missile at it and remain dominant in the air. The F-18 was the smaller aircraft that did the general purpose things.

In the situation now, the American concept was that the F-22 would be the air superiority fighter. Certainly the evidence from the exercises I've looked at in Elmendorf Air Force Base--and in fact I spent a couple of days there talking to the F-22 pilots--was that at the end of it the F-15 pilots said they really didn't want to play any more because they couldn't find the F-22s.

If you have a requirement for an air superiority struggle, an air superiority phase, then you have to have that big heavyweight fighter that has the stealth capability. If you don't have stealth capability and you're going to be facing a Russian T-50 or a Chinese J-20, you're sending your pilots up to die.

In that sense, I think the decision to go for the F-35 was a case of there being no other alternative. There is the F-22, whose line is closed, and the Americans won't sell it outside the United States anyway. There is the 50 PAK FA, which is Russian, and I don't see that we've ever bought Russian equipment before, and the J-20, which is the Chinese one, which again has not been a normal supplier of technology.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

The time is up. Thank you very much.

We're going to go to the five-minute round.

Mr. Chisu, you have the floor.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, General, and thank you very much, Colonel, for your great presentations.

I know a little bit about the Conference of Defence Associations, as I have been following it in the last years. I am former military, with service in peacekeeping operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and also in Afghanistan, in 2007, and I understand very well your concerns and your promotion of the new equipment and so on.

The Canada First defence strategy was released in 2008 as a comprehensive plan for the Canadian Forces. How does a document like the Canada First defence strategy advance Canada's global interest?

I will focus more on the training of the personnel. It is very important. We can have all the equipment in the world, but if you don't have the properly trained personnel, we have a problem.

You probably recall our history in the Second World War. We sent pilots to England to fight for England in the war against Germany. We provided the human resources.

We could have the best equipment in the world, but if we don't have the personnel who are able to manage that, we have a problem. Could you explain how you see the training of personnel in this context of fast-evolving technological warfare?

[Col Brian MacDonald]

There is no question that training is a critical part of readiness—no question whatsoever. But when we look at training, we have to look at the division of that training, starting with the recruiting and basic level training and then the splitting off in the various streams to the three services and the sub-components within that.

What is often of concern to us is whether or not adequate phasing of training is able to take place in order to keep the young soldier busy and growing and achieving new successes. As you know, the worst thing you can possibly have is doing nothing and waiting for the next course to start. That is an element that gives us concern.

The other element that gives us concern is the area of collective training: building teams, building platoons, building batteries, building regiments, and ultimately building brigades. That collective training is absolutely critical. That is where you build the teams, where you give the direct exercise in leadership.

A problem the military has is that if you suddenly require a trained battery commander, you can't go out on civvy street and find a trained battery commander who could be taken in directly. Essentially you're taking your people in at the bottom and training them up. It takes 12 years to create a battery commander, and you can't do that in a matter of weeks.

This then really comes back to this part of readiness. Again, if you look at the tables I've provided for you, which come from the RPP, they are divided into program activities so you can see various categories of that. You will see that readiness as a funding area is in the order of roughly $10 billion. If you look at the changes in that, you can see the pattern of where the training is going and where it's not going.

This is a complex area. It accounts for something in the order of half of the defence budget, and it probably should have a bit more than that in it if it had a larger defence budget.

[LGen Richard Evraire]

I would simply add that a good example of the difficulty they're in is given by the period in Afghanistan, where so many of our obviously well-trained personnel were deployed, when there was a dearth of available personnel to carry out the training of recent recruits and other personnel at various other levels requiring additional training.

This is why in my comments originally this morning I indicated that you don't turn off recruiting, as was done in the early 1990s; you don't ask people with experience to leave prematurely when they could serve for a longer period, because that creates a rather strange demography in the personnel in the forces. As my colleague has just mentioned, you take 10, 15, or 20 years to train a warrant officer, for instance, or certainly an officer at the rank of colonel; therefore the budget must be adequate to provide sufficient funding for all of those activities.

If reductions must be made, then they must be made in a way that will preserve the maximum amount of experience in the total force. Otherwise, you will end up with serious gaps, such as I've just indicated existed during the Afghanistan deployment.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Your time has expired.

Ms. Moore, you have five minutes.

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

Could you please provide some clarification about what you said to Mr. McKay? Do you anticipate that we will have to face China or Russia in combat? Do you think it's possible or rather unlikely?

[Col Brian MacDonald]

In my experience studying the work of the People's Republic of China, including the development of the joint research agreement between the Beijing Institute of International Strategic Studies and the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies while I was its director, I have gained the view that Chinese strategic policy is extremely cautious. The works of the great General Hsu basically said it is best to avoid battle and achieve your victories in other ways. He suggested that if you're out looking for a general to hire and you have the choice of one who has won a hundred battles, then stay away from him, because he is a person who will take you into battle, which is going to be very costly.

Having said that, the People's Republic of China has been devoting an enormous amount of money to the acquisition of new, modern equipment. Some of it is very impressive.

I think you will find that there will continue to be a maneuvering—an arms race, shall we say—between the technology-driven sides of both the Americans and the Chinese, as well as a drive for new capital acquisitions by the local countries in the southeastern and east Asian area.

I am not prepared to predict whether or not we will ever be in conflict directly with the Chinese. That simply is something to which producing a credible response becomes too speculative. But what we must be able to do is match the technology that is developing around the world to ensure that if the time comes in which action takes place, our troops are equipped to the best possible level in order to survive and achieve the objectives we have for them.

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

China and Russia are currently working hard on building aircraft that are explicitly designed to counter the F-35. To date, it would seem that their aircraft are effective enough to be able to do that and that the strategic advantage, if you can call it that, would then be lost.

With this in mind, should we not just set this project aside and make a choice that seems more logical to us economically, among other things? When you come right down to it, most places we go don't have fifth-generation combat aircraft or extremely advanced military aircraft technologies.

The Webb and Byers report that came out yesterday stated that we could buy two Super Hornets for the price of one F-35. In his 2011 report, the Auditor General said that the distribution of the funds available to the Department of National Defence was one of the decisive factors in the operational readiness of the Canadian Forces. To maintain our operational readiness, wouldn't it be wiser to choose less costly aircraft that have done well in trials and have demonstrated their qualities, rather than invest in the F-35, which has not yet had its effectiveness proven? We also know that military forces are currently building aircraft specifically to counter this aircraft. Wouldn't it be wiser to make a less expensive choice in order to maintain a global operational readiness?

[Col Brian MacDonald]

I think there's an assumption in your statement that we are not going to have a situation in which Canadian aircraft are coming into combat with stealth aircraft of other nations. I suggest that is an extremely risky assumption. The evidence is quite clear from the exercises the Americans have undertaken that stealth against non-stealth results in the defeat of the non-stealth and its being shot down.

The exercise I've cited in my text was one in which F-22s—now, those are not F-35s, but they are a superior fighter—against F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s resulted in a score of 144 to zero. It seems to me the conclusion that I draw from this is that if you're going to put a stealth aircraft against a non-stealth aircraft, the non-stealth aircraft dies.

The question here is are we going to invest in an aircraft for the past environment, in which there were no stealth aircraft, or are we going to invest in an environment that contains stealth aircraft? It seems to me that, from a standpoint of risk—combat risk and risk to the lives of our aviators—we have no choice but to acquire an aircraft that is a stealth-capable aircraft.

My preference would be for an F-22, but they won't sell that to us, and the line has been closed.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you. Time has expired.

Mr. Opitz, it's your turn.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

General, Colonel, it's good to see you again. I know the colonel and I worked together before on the Atlantic Council of Canada. Back when he was the brigade commander, I was but a young lieutenant.

Sir, taking off that line of questioning on the F-35, you had said the F-35 is superior to the F-22 in some senses of capability. What would you comment on why an F-35, besides just the stealth capability, is important for a readiness for Canada and the survivability of our pilots in particular?