Thank you, Chair, for the opportunity to discuss fleet readiness. It's an honour to be appearing before you this morning, just as it is my incredible honour to lead and serve the men and women—regular force, reservist, and civilian members—of Canada's Pacific maritime force: my shipmates.
If I may be so bold, your inquiry into what the commander RCN calls the core currency of the RCN could not be better timed given what recent Vimy Award winner Dr. James Boutilier so brilliantly articulated:
...we are in the midst of a new oceanic era. Not since the great age of exploration in the 16th century have oceans played such an important role in global affairs. Unprecedented levels of commerce move across the world’s oceans, great power politics are being played out at sea, and oceans are central to the health of the global organism in an age of dramatic climate change. Moreover, we are in the process, for the first time in human history, of acquiring a new Ocean—the Arctic.
Indeed, as the 52nd admiral to command Pacific naval forces from Victoria, I remain as seized with this measure of our mettle as any of my predecessors.
While today's RCN is a navy characterized as much by progress as it once was by tradition, despite significant and enduring transformation, we remain steadfastly committed to affording maximum optionality to government: what we call naval readiness. How? By being a rapidly deployable, combat-capable “force of first resort” capable of producing technology-enabled, people-delivered naval outcomes from the sea, in home waters with other government departments, and on far-distant shores in the world with friends and allies.
In consideration of our current readiness, this week's front pages and the Twitterverse are replete with demonstrations of the strength of our naval currency.
As you will be aware, HMCS Vancouver has just completed a humanitarian assistance and disaster relief mission with allies on New Zealand's south island. What's not appreciated, however, is that Vancouver re-rolled within hours of the New Zealand request for assistance by transitioning rapidly from a force generation mission—that is to say, a preparing mission while deployed overseas, what we call a “generate forward” deployment—to a force employment, a “doing” mission. This is representative of the readiness of our ships at sea.
In Vancouver's case, this readiness was developed and sustained through an in-year sailing tempo of around 270 days away from home port, operating first in the eastern Pacific off the south and central American coasts, and then, following Exercise Rim of the Pacific exercises in the central Pacific, now in Southeast Asian and Oceania neighbourhoods, where she has visited and exercised with Vietnam, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. She has crossed the equator eight times in a year.
Having visited HMCS Vancouver only days before her disaster relief mission, I can assure you that she is a capable ship with an engaged, enthusiastic ship's company, adeptly led by a solid, experienced command team. Her success in New Zealand is presupposed.
Meanwhile, Her Majesty's Canadian ships Edmonton, Kingston, and Brandon are one month into a two-month regional security capability, capacity-building, and counter-narcotics deployment off the central American coast while participating in Operation CARIBBE. Here the ships have proven RCN readiness once again, with Brandon, operating in concert with the U.S. coast guard, seizing 1.3 tonnes of cocaine with a street value of $500 million in international waters off the Pacific coast of Central America. This has contributed to the haul of more than 5,000 kilograms of illegal drugs seized by the RCN already this year alone.
Beyond this past week's headlines, this has been a typically busy year for the Pacific fleet.
It includes the conclusion of HMCS Winnipeg's 250-day Operation Reassurance deployment, Canada's support to NATO assurance measures in eastern Europe; and four-ship participation and key leadership positions in Exercise Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, the world's largest international maritime exercise.
Moreover, work is now ongoing in Esquimalt to prepare ships and crews for the coming year's program, which will include the dispatch of a two-frigate “generate forward” six-month Indo-Asia Pacific presence mission, as well as seeing HMCS Chicoutimi relieving the 200-days-at-sea HMCS Windsor as the workhorse of the Canadian submarine force. Here I can only say that I anticipate Chicoutimi will have a Windsor-like sea-day count and program next year.
Closer to home, meanwhile, the navy, in concert with our colleagues from other government departments, systematically surveils our coast and tracks about 2,000 ships daily via a system of systems coordinated through our maritime security operations centre, a navy-hosted, multi-department enterprise that ensures our waters are being used lawfully or initiates federal fleet response when they aren't.
Having considered the current outputs of naval readiness, I would suggest that additional functional elements of naval readiness also warrant consideration. To do so, one need consider that whereas Rear-Admiral Newton has specific pan-navy responsibilities for readiness and force employment, I have, as assistant chief of naval staff personnel and training, specific responsibilities for individual training, personnel policy, and the naval reserve. Given these functional responsibilities, it's not only the tangible or current readiness outputs I've described that have the attention of my team but also the sustainability and efficacy of our future readiness.
Considering our force is approximately 14,000 regular and reserve force, and has approximately 10% undergoing individual training packages on any given day, clearly the efficacy and effectiveness of our individual training system is key to our readiness capacity. This is the responsibility of my naval training system.
The naval training system was recently reviewed and is currently undergoing its largest revitalization in more than 25 years. That revitalization will lead to significant changes in scope and structure to meet both future navy requirements and the expectations of a new generation of sailors.
The future naval training system strategy recognizes that the expectations of learning today are vastly different from what they were 20 years ago and that the tools available to conduct learning are increasingly a mixture of residential and virtual. Using the best practices of civilian training education institutions and industry partners, the future training strategy provides a plan to modernize, retrofit, and sustain the naval training system. It advocates the increased use of technology-enabled learning to reduce the time it takes to achieve competency. It calls for the alignment of regular and reserve force training and it implements a refreshed training delivery strategy that leverages the Defence Learning Network and self-paced learning to deliver training at the point of need.
These activities will allow technical and operational training to be completed in less time via a more interactive and immersive approach, negate the need for extended time away from home to learn, and reduce the long apprenticeships at sea that otherwise bleed resources away from the overall mission. The results are training times already seeing reductions by as much as 30%, enabling us to get sailors readied and employed faster, with a commensurate boost in enthusiasm and morale.
Additionally, I need note that the navy's commitment to ensuring sailors serve as ambassadors is being reinforced with the development and delivery of a “leadership, respect, and honour” program, an initiative that responds to the concerns expressed in the Deschamps report, that carries out the orders of the chief of the defence staff for Operation Honour, that ensures all sailors understand and model the behaviours expected of them by the new RCN code of conduct, and that reinforces the values and advantages of the naval divisional system. Addressing these aspects of deportment and behaviour addresses what are known to be significant impediments to readiness while boosting unit morale and lending credibility to the Canadian and Canadian Armed Forces brands. Effective training is a key enabler of operational readiness. It's indeed a force multiplier.
Moving finally to the consideration of our naval reserves, I need note that naval readiness, like that of our sister services, is well bolstered and made more sustainable through effective integration of strategic reserve augmentation. Conversely, as the past two decades of RCN employment of a permanent full-time reserve in a dedicated class with a dedicated mission has revealed, such an arrangement is simply unsustainable. For these reasons, the RCN has now embraced the “one navy” concept, by which no standing missions are uniquely allocated to the naval reserve, and nor are naval reserves employed uniquely in a single class. Instead, embracing the concept of augmentation, citizen sailors are being employed across the fleet, in all classes, with a target of 5% of the crew, which is approximately 10 sailors in a frigate, exactly the number of naval reservists in Vancouver conducting operations in New Zealand last week.
Moreover, our naval reserves are now energized with a new, non-standing force protection and maritime capacity-building capability that is well suited to the strategic reserve construct.
Ladies and gentlemen, having considered the functional elements of my mandate as they relate to the generation of readiness, I'm reminded that our people are, as they've always been, our centre of gravity. For this reason the admiralty has seized upon a common philosophy of “people first, mission always”, which challenges us to do more than ever to champion, celebrate, and enable our sailors as a means of attracting, empowering, and retaining them.
In this context, I'm particularly proud that the west coast has always been at the forefront of the social and institutional issues that matter to Canadians—from listening to and working with our first nations, to celebrating the first same-sex kiss on a deployer's return to port, to tackling conduct issues head-on, and to dealing with substance dependencies with both the firm hand and compassion appropriate to what I consider to be one of the nation's best employers.
In conclusion, readiness, as both an outcome and a process, remains as important and complex as ever. It has the complete attention of the admiralty as well as our potential adversaries and our friends and allies. In a new oceanic age, our readiness may never have been more important. Certainly it will be critical to our success in the large Indo-Asia Pacific estate where presence is the price of relevance.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the opportunity to make remarks. I look forward to your questions.