Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, members, for giving me the honour to appear before you.
My name is Charles Barlow. I'm a former military officer. I ran the Afghanistan intelligence response team, the national level team for Afghanistan at the Department of National Defence. They've sent me to pretty much every place that Canada sent people for the last 20 years.
I'm here to speak a bit about UAVs, so we'll start with a little quick history.
When Great Britain entered the First World War 100 years ago, it had about 100 military aircraft in service. By the end of the war, and that's just four years later, that number had grown to 22,000 aircraft. The same sort of growth happened with unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. On 9/11, the U.S. Army had just 54 UAVs in service. That number grew to over 4,000 by 2010. The U.S. Air Force is now training more UAV pilots than fighter pilots and transport pilots combined. This is a revolution, one that came first to the United States, and also to Israel, but one which the rest of the world is working very hard to enter. Of course, it is not just a military revolution. Amazon and Google want to deliver packages with UAVs, and Facebook and Google are looking at drones capable of bringing Internet to more remote areas on the planet.
Consider that very few nations produce fighter aircraft, but over 60 countries today produce some form of UAVs. While most of these are little more than toys, several nations are developing serious, strategic-level armed systems.
UAVs come in a wide spectrum of sizes and capabilities, and there are several ways of categorizing them. I won’t bore you with all the different categories, instead we'll stick with the old army system of tactical, operational, and strategic.
Tactical UAVs are small. They are operated by one or two people. They're usually carried in a vehicle or even a backpack. They're issued to small units. These tactical systems are generally unarmed, although there are a couple of armed systems. They have a short range and they feed the information directly to the people using them. They're very similar in some ways to the commercially available systems used in industry, agriculture, and just for general hobbyists.
The Aeryon SkyRanger is made in Waterloo, Ontario. It's a world leader in that category of very small UAVs.
Operational UAVs are larger. They are operated by a field headquarters or from a warship, and Mr. Glenn I know is going to be able to speak quite a bit to that. They require a dedicated team of operators and maintenance folks. They are, again, generally unarmed, but they may be used to cross international borders. The information they collect is primarily used locally, and it may be sent to the national command level.
Systems like this were used by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan and in service on our ships. A French UAV is being operated in Kabul, and a ScanEagle off one of our warships
Strategic UAVs are larger still. Here we're talking about systems like the famous Predators and the Reapers. They are generally armed. They're often used to cross international borders. They require significant resources in operations, basing, and maintenance; and they're generally operated at the national level. The United States and Israel retain the lead in fielding strategically armed UAVs with the capability of striking deep inside another country. Several other countries, including Turkey, China, and Iran, are working on comparable systems. The Chinese Blue Shark, for example, which is just a concept at the moment, was pictured at a recent Chinese arms show attacking an Indian aircraft carrier. There are similar displays of this kind of Chinese-made UAVs attacking American aircraft carrier groups off Taiwan.
While still largely aspirational, once fielded, these strategic UAVs will then be sold to a wide variety of countries that don't have access to American or Israeli technology. In other words, the coming decade is very likely to see the proliferation of strategic systems, especially throughout the Middle East.
The first great adopter of UAVs was Israel in the Middle East. They pioneered their use in the late 1970s. They were certainly a very active part of the Israeli presence in south Lebanon when I was there in 1999. Israel has conducted drone strikes over the Palestinian territories, and there are unconfirmed reports of Israeli drone strikes in Somalia and Egyptian Sinai. Other nations too have conducted drone strikes—for example, the United Kingdom—but of course the U.S. currently conducts more drone strikes than everyone else combined.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Afghanistan is the drones' most lethal hunting ground. Roughly a quarter of all NATO air strikes in that country in 2011 were using strategic-level drones. One reason the drones are so popular is that they can watch a target for hours, sometimes even days, before firing. That helps confirm that the target is actually there and minimizes casualties. Another reason for using UAVs over aircraft, of course, is risk. Simply put, if a drone goes down, the pilot simply gets in his truck and goes home.
So in the early stages of a conflict, when we're doing what we call “suppression” of enemy air defence, using drones makes an awful lot of sense. But it's the UAVs' odd ability to travel across borders without arousing too much anger that has made them valuable in some of the world's most denied areas. The Pashtun lands, for example, that straddle both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, are accessible to U.S. and coalition forces only on the Afghan side. On the Pakistan side, the Taliban controls much of the tribal areas.
An odd situation has developed in which the United States targets Pakistani Taliban and Arab fighters using drones. This isn't because the U.S. Air Force isn't capable of conducting strikes inside, but because it's far more acceptable for almost everyone to have unmarked drones flying over Pakistan than it is to have the marked jets of a country. The same holds true for Yemen and Somalia, where other U.S. drone strikes have been widely reported.
I'm afraid this is the first slide with a video in it, so I'll just quickly describe it. It's a gun camera video, very grainy, of a little building in the desert that does blow up. We're used to seeing this sort of drone video—a target in the crosshairs, followed by the inevitable explosion—but this video is different. It was released by the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah. It was released in September and it claims to show them hitting an al-Nusra Front target, a Sunni target, inside Syria using an armed drone. If that were true, it would almost certainly be of Iranian manufacture.
Now, I don't know if the video is real or fake, and certainly Iran has made some wild claims about the progress of its UAV programs. But it doesn’t matter much, in the end; if they’re not quite there yet, they very soon will be.
Dozens of nations already fly some operational UAVs, and they're being used. An Iranian UAV, for example, came down over a U.S. base in Iraq in 2007. Iranian UAVs, marked with Hezbollah livery, have also entered Israeli airspace on at least five occasions—and consider that Hezbollah has no other type of aircraft.