National Defence Committee on May 3rd, 2012

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and, through you to the witness, thank you for appearing today.

Being that it's a five-minute round it's going to be difficult for you perhaps to respond to everything I'm going to ask.

There are those from the opposition, not only in our country but also in others, who would have the Canadian Forces rid itself of its expeditionary capabilities and focus on niche capabilities. Would this approach be desirable to NATO, or does NATO rely on Canada to carry out a larger share of its proven expeditionary capabilities? And I did note in some of your responses, General, that you said NATO would never say no to that.

Having been chief of the air force of France and responsible in part for providing the best equipment available, you did say that technology is very important as we move into the future, and that if you're going to be able to provide, in our case our Canadian men and women in our air force, the best equipment available, you would want to make sure that it was the best technological equipment available. You also said that we don't know where the next attack or next threat is going to come from. Given that the threat may come from a nation that has the best technology and that this committee heard witnesses say that stealth kills non-stealth 100% of the time, I wonder if you could comment on the type of aircraft you would foresee as the best type of air defence and offence a nation could have.

[Gen Stéphane Abrial]

On expeditionary issue, there has been a debate in the past between the means for collective defence and the means for expeditionary. For me, it's the wrong debate. If you look at the geographical extent of NATO, when we have any kind of collective defence situation we may have to move forces long distances. Forces have to go from Portugal to Norway, from Canada to Turkey. The distances are expeditionary, so in my mind, beyond a very few assets, there is no opposition between collective defence and expeditionary capabilities.

Do we need to go to niche activities? I would say that as long as we, as a nation, can and decide to maintain a full spectrum and decide not to come down to niches only, NATO would be more than happy, of course. The more we can make sure the alliance globally can address the full spectrum, the better.

When the time comes that a nation has no other choice, then it's good if we have a dialogue among members and with us as the facilitators, or coordinators, to see what are the best ways to specialize. I say so because it comes down to the specialization prong of the modern defence initiative, and also boils down to a topic that is very much discussed, which is burden sharing between the two rims of the Atlantic or between specific nations. It is an important part of the solidarity to prove that everybody is carrying the burden they can carry, so there is no opposition to that.

Technology is important. The effectiveness of a force, in my mind, is the right mix between technology and people. You can have the best technology but if you don't have the right people, or if you have the right people but not well-trained, then the technology will not be very useful.

It is our duty to make sure that we are able to provide to our forces, the men and women we will send into harm's way, the best possible technology we can imagine, not the 120% technology, I would say, but the best technology we can afford to make sure that when we look these people in the eyes, we can say that we have made every effort we could to make sure that we have given them the abilities they need to put into a mission that we, the nation, will give you.

What is the best aircraft? If you ask a French airman, you know the answer.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

You have about 30 seconds.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you.

I realize the need to be neutral, but one of the debates we're having is about making sure we provide the best equipment available and do the things this country has traditionally been able to do. It is within that context that I asked the question about expeditionary capabilities.

From a mechanical perspective, wouldn't it cause NATO a great amount of stress if a nation with expeditionary capabilities decided to no longer provide them? You would have a vacuum, so how would you approach that vacuum?

[Gen Stéphane Abrial]

I would argue that most capabilities today are dual use. We can use them again for collective defence and expeditionary.... We don't buy capability; we target it, which would be expeditionary only.

I would argue that some capabilities we develop with collective defence in mind are not very moveable or deployable. But everything we buy with an expeditionary mindset can also be used for collective defence. So I don't think there's a real issue in this domain.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Ms. Moore, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you very much.

It is a pleasure to have you with us today.

I would like to turn to the concept of “smart defence”. With that concept, how can we get European members of NATO and North American members of NATO working together? How is the concept understood on the two continents?

[Gen Stéphane Abrial]

Thank you very much.

I use the term “smart defence” a lot even when I am speaking in French, because an exact translation like “défense astucieuse” seems quite superficial and “défense intelligente” is a little too literal. I have my reservations, but we will try to do better if we can.

The secretary general appointed me as one of his two special envoys for smart defence. So as part of my responsibilities, I work very closely with the European Union, and more specifically with the European Defence Agency, which is in charge of the European Union's initiative called “pooling and sharing” and whose spirit and philosophy are exactly the same as ours. So we are indeed trying to determine how we can share resources and develop things together with a view to addressing a critical financial situation.

What does that mean specifically? It means that, whatever topic we deal with, we start by communicating with our European Union partners to make sure that we are not working on the same thing. Or, if we are working on the same thing, that we work on two different aspects or two different phases of the development of a project. It works very well, but we have to work at it constantly.

I am sure that you understand that the European Union asks its members for ideas and we ask NATO members for ideas. The ideas are the same. Once countries have given two organizations the same ideas, they turn around and ask us why there is duplication. That is why we have started sharing: to avoid duplication. We are getting such a high degree of mutual understanding and sharing of knowledge that we are able to demonstrate how the two institutions complement each other. So projects developed by the European Union and by NATO are really useful in providing better security in defence not only for each member country, but also, of course, for each of the two institutions.

A good example is in the medical area, more specifically, operational medical support. We have two projects at the moment, one led by Italy and one by France. They complement each other perfectly, thereby allowing us to improve medical coverage, by which I mean the medical support provided to people who might be injured during our operations.

Another example is in-flight refuelling. This was a hot topic during the crisis in Libya. At the time, it was said that there was a clear lack of capability. In NATO, we looked into the situation and, as we analyzed it, NATO seemed to have no lack of tanker aircraft. But European members of NATO did. The overall number is fine, but the problem is that almost all of them are on this side of the Atlantic. So the European side is a little out of balance. After discussing it with our friends in the European Union, the decision was that the European Union will, right now, begin a capacity building project in in-flight refuelling, just for European countries. But the project will strengthen the overall NATO capability too, since 21 of the 28 countries are the same.

That is how we work on concepts, and also on individual projects. We will continue to work towards complementing each other's efforts.

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

For a deployment or a mission, is an economic study done to see whether fighters, or warships, or whatever else, are needed, to see which countries' resources can be used so that NATO incurs the lowest possible costs? If things from Canada, the United States, or a North African country are deployed, costs are higher than if they were from Europe. Are those studies done before materiel or resources are deployed?

[Gen Stéphane Abrial]

As a general rule, we always try to find the most economic approach in all our activities. However, when we are dealing with a real operation, such as the one in Libya, it is up to every nation to propose its own contribution. We also need to bear in mind the basic principle of solidarity under NATO: every nation assumes the costs of its contribution. So NATO incurs no additional costs. NATO does not have a fund per se that pays for an operation and that will pay differently, depending on whether the troops come from Canada or Italy, for example.

Each country has to first decide on the merits of the operation; that is what happened in Libya. Twenty-eight countries said that we had to intervene. As sovereign nations, every country then has to decide how it will contribute to the activity. So once again, that is why there were only eight NATO member states that physically contributed to the operation in Libya. But all the member states contributed through the command structure and through some common financial resources that were made available. As to how forces are assigned to an operation, each nation decides what its contribution will be in terms of equipment and the number of people, and it decides on who will bear the costs.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Chisu.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, General, for being here today with us.

I have a question regarding the transformation. It could include transforming the way we work with each other in NATO and with other nations that are not members of the alliance.

How is NATO working with new member nations in the alliance and, obviously, also with the non-member nations that are the partners?

I am putting this question because I had an experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina when I was working with the British and Hungarian troops. Their communication systems were not working together. I was the only one who spoke Hungarian and English, and that was a problem there. I don't know if it's the same thing on the communications side in Afghanistan, that the British system is not communicating with the Canadian system, the Canadian system is not communicating with the French one, and so on.

[Gen Stéphane Abrial]

Transformation is a nice word, but there are many definitions. It's difficult. I'll try to simplify this, but basically my work is twofold. One part of it is support to current operations, how to do short-cycle adaptation to evolving situations; and the other part is long-term transformation, how to make sure that the forces we are going to generate for the long-term will be adapted to what we envisage as being the potential future environment.

As in the past, we will always be surprised in the future. I mentioned with respect to the Arab Spring that the Libya operation was a strategic surprise. If you look back at military history through the centuries, it's just a string of strategic surprises. If you analyze the history, the string of surprises, you see that those who have been able to fend off the first blow and who have survived the first attack, the first surprise, generally take the upper hand in the long term. Our goal is not to say that we will not be surprised any more, but that we will adapt, that we will be able to react and then to win at the end of the day.

When we have a new member nation in NATO, we work very hard with the nation to make sure it comes up to NATO standards. This is part of my job as the allied commander of transformation. We help the nations on all aspects of transformation, from their own national strategic documents, down to how to train a new non-commissioned officer corps, for example. Some nations do not have one. It is about showing them what we do and how we do it, and how we bring them to the standard that is expected in NATO. This is part of what we call the integration phase. We have just concluded this phase for the two nations that most recently joined the alliance.

With our partners, we have another mechanism where we have as many exchanges as we can with them, making sure that at least when we engage with them the next time, we will be interoperable and will not face difficulties such as the ones you mentioned. I will use an example from the Libya campaign. One of the partner nations, a very strong European nation, contributed heavily to the campaign. It also contributed fighter aircraft, but we discovered that we could not refuel its aircraft because we had a non-compatible fuel system. That was fixed within days. This is something that we should have observed before. It's part of the learning process, how to make sure that we will be fully interoperable from the beginning.

The issue you mentioned on exchanging information, communicating together or not, is crucial. It links with a question that was asked previously on how we share information. We need to change our mindset. We need to make sure that we go from the previous need to know to an obligation to share, because in that way we will save lives and increase our effectiveness. But our systems also need to be able to communicate. This is why my command has developed for Afghanistan what we call an Afghan mission network. This is a basic network into which each nation, when she decides to do so, can plug in even her secret systems to share sensitive information, which can save lives and improve the effectiveness of operations. It was a very specific network built for Afghanistan. Now we're going to the next step where we'll try to develop a more generic type of network, which can be used in the future for any type of operation.

That is the kind of work we do in transformation.

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

Do you have—

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Chisu, your time is just expiring, and we have to keep on rolling.

Mr. Kellway, it's your turn.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and through you to our witnesses, thank you very much for being here today. It's been a very interesting discussion so far, and very helpful.

With your patience, understanding, and tolerance, I'd like to explore a little further some of the definitions and concepts that you've been talking about. I hope this doesn't sound repetitive to you, but it seems to me that in some sense the way we're using some of these terms around this table and the way you use some of these terms are a bit different.

One of the critical terms is interoperability. What I thought I heard you say, and I'd appreciate your clarification on this, is that interoperability isn't about everybody using the same equipment, but that interoperability has to be understood through the lens of specialization by design. In other words, it's not part of smart defence and the concept of specialization by design, that everybody have the same piece of equipment. Interoperability doesn't mean that you can put a military person from one country into the equipment of another country, or that everybody's driving the same vehicles or flying the same planes. Is that correct?

[Gen Stéphane Abrial]

I don't see the link you make with specialization. But on the interoperability itself, yes, it's exactly that. We do not advocate a single type of battle tank, a single type of aircraft, a single type of ship, a single type of rifle. We advocate that when two units, two soldiers, are fighting side by side, they can work together. They can exchange information they need, they can talk to each other, they can know what to expect from the guy next door. There's a similar type of training, a similar level of training, so that the commanders know what they can expect from their troops, and so on.

With interoperability you are different, but you work together. It starts with the mindset, with the brain, of course, through education and training.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

So to push that a bit further, the notion of everybody having the same piece of equipment almost seems contrary to the concept of interoperability as understood through the lens of specialization by design. In other words, these forces within NATO aren't really interoperable and specialized by design if everybody's flying the same plane, in a sense.

The notion of interoperability, where everybody's using the same equipment, seems to me—and I'd appreciate your comment on this—contrary to the concept of specialization by design.

[Gen Stéphane Abrial]

Specialization by design would not mean that we go down to the type of equipment, that is, whether the nation decides to specialize and to share with others given expertise in a given domain. This does not imply that everybody is using the same equipment.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you.

You mentioned earlier doing your planning and readiness around the concept of missions. When you're thinking through potential missions for the future, is there a kind of planning that goes on to identify who's going to be doing what out into the future? Is there that kind of readiness, that if this is the mission that you're anticipating, then Canada will have that role, France will have this role, or something like that?

When we look back to Libya, it doesn't seem that specialization was part of that, in light of the Canadian contribution, both at sea and in the air.

[Gen Stéphane Abrial]

No, there is no intent to pre-assign missions to a nation or a group of nations. The intention is to ensure all the aspects of smart defence. But globally in the future, the alliance will have the capabilities needed to fulfill the missions that our heads of sitting government will decide upon. Right now we don't know what these operations will be, so what we concentrate on is making sure that the alliance—again, the 28 members—will have the capabilities needed to meet the level of ambition. As you know, that means that we need to be able to perform two major joint operations, as we call them, and six small joint operations, as we call them, which can be in one domain—air or maritime or land only, but on a small-scale. We do not designate a specific potential adversary. We have a definition from a political level of what a major operation or a small operation means, and then we work on this to defend the capabilities needed.

It's up to the nations to decide what they want their own defence institution to look like. We try to bring the global coherence. This is why it's very important that we coordinate and that we exchange views among the member nations on possible, I would say, important evolutions in the defence institutions, so that we can then coordinate and make sure that we keep the global coherence of the alliance.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Ms. Gallant, you have the floor.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

In circumstances where nations are looking at the same piece of equipment and have the same requirements for it, what are the potential benefits when the member countries work together to procure the equipment?

[Gen Stéphane Abrial]

The first and most visible potential benefit is cost saving. If two, three, or four nations decide to procure some kind of equipment together and if they can avoid having national specifications that add to the common foundation of the procurement program, then they will save money and time. Knowing that defence budgets are very restricted, it will enable the same nations to continue maintaining capabilities in other fields or develop new ones if they think they have to face new missions and new challenges.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

In terms of interoperability then, are they then naturally interoperable?