While NORAD has maritime warning, maritime domain awareness is still essentially the responsibility of both states.
I am just undergoing the start of a study to look at what would be the implications if NORAD were to include maritime control. NORAD itself is undergoing these looks. It's called EVONORAD. They're not only looking at maritime control, but cyber and possibly other elements.
My comment vis-à-vis 2018 is I'm concerned that this looming date may quicken the minds before we're fully ready to think about all the implications. We are differently structured from the U.S. Whereas they have NORTHCOM, which can command maritime, land, air capabilities, we have a bifurcated system in Canada, where we have CJOC, but we also have 1 Canadian Air Division in Winnipeg, which takes care of all sorts of the air elements, especially vis-à-vis NORAD. CJOC has the maritime and the air expeditionary forces. We don't have that sort of seamless, as they like to say in NORAD, one belly button to push.
We also have, of course, MARLANT and MARPAC. We also have the Arctic. We have MARLANT that takes care of the Arctic, and is the main communication centre for the common operating picture. If we are going to transfer maritime control to NORAD, we have to think about those C2, command and control, structures, to make sure they're not an impediment to being able to react with NORAD.
At the same time NORAD is thinking about things like what should be its role. If NORAD becomes a strategic as opposed to operational role, one thing that could be considered is to make one of the NORAD regions basically the combatant commander, which then has some interesting implications in the relationship of Canada's NORAD region, CANR, to CONR. We also have Alaska NORAD region.
Everybody is starting to think about these implications, and we're still working through them. It's a bit like trying to change the tires of a car that's still running. We don't have the luxury of asking if everybody could just stop so we could just think about this. We have to keep responding to threats at the same time as considering these changes to command and control vis-à-vis capabilities and our relationship with the U.S.