I did not intend to come today to make a comment, but I've been listening to the discussion today and it has been enlightening and interesting.
I would suggest, as a former member of CSE and director general military SIGINT, that before any concrete decisions are taken in terms of the cyber-security piece, there is an understanding that the Government of Canada needs cyber-security, and it needs a single cyber-security, because what we've had to this point is that everyone has been trying to protect their own infrastructure. One of the things that's critical here is that it's not just protecting the infrastructure, but the information that's in it. And the desire, in some instances and at critical times, is to take down the infrastructure. That's what needs to be protected.
CSE is a bolt-on to National Defence, but it's a bolt-on that has its own legislation, its own reporting authorities, and its own methodology. You can't look only at CSE and say okay, it's the Canadian Forces that are responsible for cyber-security. It is an entity that—to look at Dr. Skillicorn's point—is both social scientists and engineers. It has a broad spectrum of capability in there, which I would strongly suggest you might want to have a look at before we make any decisions about where we are in this space.
As heavily involved as I was in the Afghanistan mission, I would say that the Canadian Forces, during the period of Afghanistan, have demonstrated that, one, we did a major transformation, mainly in our command and control structures and the way we do business inside the National Defence Headquarters, and also that the Canada defence policy works and an all-of-government approach for that mission was successful.
Things like the defence intelligence review were validated during that mission. We built up some very, very critical niche capabilities that our allies want when we go offshore. We built up general-purpose capability and experience in war-fighting that is critical.
Some of those capabilities are very easy to dismember. They need to be looked at to make sure of what it is that the Government of Canada wants in that space, because we don't want to be sent on missions where there's no hope of success. That's the key.
As one of the richest nations in the world, I think it's unconscionable that we would at any point look at this and say, as a member of the United Nations, a member of NATO, and a member of the various alliances, that we're not going to be involved in incidents around the world, since we're signatories to the UN, we're signatories to responsibility to protect, and we champion human rights around the world. We are going to be involved in international operations, so the capability of the Canadian Forces to meet those operations is essential, whatever size the government decides it is to be.
Thank you, sir.