National Defence Committee on May 13th, 2014

[LGen Stuart Beare]

No, that kind of collaboration is managed between our maritime component and the coast guard headquartered out of our maritime component headquarters in Halifax. We do have very good understanding of how each of us is manoeuvring and we're making best use of each other's presence for mutual benefit.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

That leads me to my next question relating to “maritime readiness”, I guess is the term that may be used. You talked about how it's important for us to be able to defend the security of our maritime domain, both in terms of domain awareness and responsiveness.

I, along with a number of Canadians I suppose, am wondering whether or not we are up to the game when it comes to maritime activity. According to the latest newspaper reports, 17 of our 33 ships are not in operation and we have ships in other parts of the world. Do we have enough ships available within the Canadian maritime space to be able to do the job that's required in terms of “maritime protection”, I guess is the word, or maritime security, interdiction or presence if necessary, or whatever is required to ensure that we are establishing our presence, sovereignty patrols, and have the ability to respond?

[LGen Stuart Beare]

If you don't mind, I'm just going to back up a little bit and speak to some of your earlier comments to feed back to you a better understanding of where we are in terms of using all the capabilities of the Canadian Armed Forces.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

I only have seven minutes so if you could answer the question that I asked, not with a yes or no, but at least—.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

Sure.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

—give me an idea whether you think we're below the mark.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

The answer is that today I don't feel any inadequacy in our capacity to understand what's going on in our maritime domain.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

You're not concerned about that.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

I'm not concerned about our capacities around that today, because it's a consequence of multiple systems and capabilities space-based.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

So domain awareness is okay.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

Domain awareness is delivering and it's an effort that is civilian and military. It's space-based, airborne and surface. It's also bilateral, binational, with the American NavNorth. So my American partners who execute the maritime defence mission under Northern Command are partnered with the Canadian maritime component partner headquartered in Halifax to share domain awareness. Our response to the requirements for safety and security at sea are delivered by the military, civilians, coast guard and others. It's is working and is delivering. You see it in airborne maritime safety and security efforts routinely.

It's a matter of how many ships we have today and how many ships will be coming online as they come out of the modernization and as new procurements come online. All of those things are to our benefit.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

I'm sure they're all to our benefit. Sir, I know you're leaving at the end of the summer, so maybe you can tell us, are there enough? We have some now. We have lots that are not in service. We've taken our patrols out of service, the 12 patrol boats that were operated by the reserves have been taken out of service.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

I can certainly assure you, sir, that we're not incurring any more risk at home by committing maritime capability abroad. We are delivering on our domain awareness at home and we have adequate capability with partners to continue to deliver on the defence security of the homeland.

Everyone operates with limitations in terms of capability and capacity and the great thing about this new command model that doesn't have three separate commands, one away game, one home game and one support, but all three are integrated into one operational command. That allows me as the operational commander to have a better appreciation of where sequencing or gaps may occur and how to best sequence and manage any gaps that may occur and how to manage those with our operational partners.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

So in your judgment then, having been in this role since it was stood up as a tri-command, I won't call it a tri-command but those three responsibilities, would you give it a good grade for operational effectiveness and being the best way to manage these resources?

[LGen Stuart Beare]

I wish I could always write my own report card.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

I'm giving you a chance.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

The answer is, you bet. I'll explain why very briefly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Norlock]

You have 10 seconds.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

Because the agility to reallocate resources and manage the support to different mission types no longer knows a geographic boundary, it all exists in what's on command. For example, General Loos can call his neighbour, can call the maritime component or the air component or support component because they're all in one command, to help him in his mission.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Norlock]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Leung, go ahead for seven minutes.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you, General Beare, and General Loos.

In the eighties when I was at graduate school, I had the opportunity to participate in a discussion on combat readiness in the north Pacific. This was before the new age of cyberspace and these very high-tech communications links now.

What I'd like to know is, in our ability to defend our sovereignty as well as our geography in the North Pacific, do we have coverage in our cyber capability to maintain a division of the geography and the coastline, as well as the ability to communicate with our assets on the ocean and on the ground?

Let me put some specific samples in place. What happens if there's another Exxon Valdez type of oil spill? How do we respond to it? Are we ready for the next potential rogue state firing a missile from North Korea or are we ready to respond to a zone 3 earthquake off the ocean coast, thereby creating a tsunami through the Pacific north coast? Perhaps you can share your thoughts with us on that.

[LGen Stuart Beare]

Certainly. I'll speak from a global context and ask General Loos to speak specifically to the north.

What I can assure you is that the capabilities of the networks allowing us to see in the maritime, air, land, and the cyber domains, the sensors and the networks belong either to us or to our operational partners; and the protection of those networks is our responsibility or our partners' responsibility because it's their network we're leveraging. We are on top of understanding what's going on inside our networks and assuring the preservation and defence of those networks so that they can be used even when challenged by irregular actors or otherwise, so those networks are ours.

The networks beyond that, of course, as you know, do not belong to Defence, and as they come to the federal or provincial authorities or the private sector, those fall under the domain of Public Safety and others. We're connected with them to understand their read on the capability and the vulnerabilities that may exist in those networks. Day to day, I am provided an understanding of what's going on in our networks and how, if those networks are being affected, that's being detected, attributed, and mitigated by our own network defenders, so we're seeing that absolutely day to day.

I have high confidence that the networks we have today, including the relationships we have today with the partners that would respond to the contingencies described, pre-exist the crisis. We don't have to make them up when the crisis manifests itself: they're pre-existing. Day to day, the liaison exchange and communications keep us connected so that they're resilient if and when a crisis manifests itself.

The north is more of a challenge, of course, because the infrastructure there is more distributed and requires more space than does terrestrial.

Greg, go ahead.

[BGen G.D. Loos]

Thank you, sir.

I'll pull out a couple of those threads. What my commander here expects of me is that I anticipate and be prepared for any eventuality in the north, whether that be on the safety or security or defence-end of the spectrum, to include some of the examples you gave.

We try to tackle that through a couple of ways. Certainly, we do so through operations and exercises. We get out on our own with our own forces—air, land, and sea. We also bring in other partners, because in many scenarios, especially the safety and security side, we're not going to be the lead department. We'll only be participating if we're asked to come and help as a force of last resort. It makes good sense to have those pre-crisis relationships sorted out at higher levels, and also at my level, across the regional, federal, territorial, and municipal organizations that would be implicated and involved. So we get together with them, we practise, and we have the relationships.

We also have one other forum that I co-chair with the regional public safety rep called the Arctic Security Working Group. Biannually, we get together a couple of times. We draw out on different themes, including, for example, coming up at the end of May, we're going to have a look at oil-spill response to find out what we know and what we don't know, and try to identify gaps and ways ahead on how we can share information and how we can get better.

[Chungsen Leung, Conservative, Willowdale, ON]

Then, can you assure us that there's no blackout zone, no dead zone, from the mid-Arctic all the way across to the southern boundaries of Alaska and the northern tip of Vancouver Island?

[BGen G.D. Loos]

I think your question probably has two parts. One part you're talking about is surveillance, and the other part is the ability to communicate for command and control. I can assure you that there are all kinds of blackout areas. We have a network of networks and system of systems that overlap to the greatest extent possible, but the north is still developing in many different flavours of infrastructure, including communications.