Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation.
I wish to raise two issues concerning Canada's involvement in NATO. The first is a neglected area of strategic significance—namely, the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap, which is the very busy sea-line of communication in the North Atlantic that was notorious during the Cold War for enemy sub activity. The other is NATO's potential participation in Canada's Arctic, which I suggest should be discouraged.
The North Atlantic and the sea-lines of communication to NATO Europe are returning to prominence. This is largely driven by Russian naval developments and, to a much lesser degree, Chinese. NATO maritime defence co-operation therefore needs to be reconsidered. The end of the Cold War has removed the North Atlantic from the defence and security agenda. Supreme Allied Command Atlantic, or SACLANT, was the primary structure for allied North Atlantic defence, but it was stood down and was replaced by the generic Allied Command Transformation. Allied naval co-operation moved to the periphery, concentrating on missions in the Persian Gulf and off the Horn of Africa related to the series of conflicts that captured allied attention at the time.
More recently, allied naval attention has concentrated on the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea in response to Russian activities attended by the two standing NATO maritime groups under the command of Allied Maritime Command, MARCOM, located in Northwood, England.
With the North Atlantic returning to the defence agenda, several priorities emerged that naturally raised issues for the Canada-U.S. relationship and Canada-NATO relationship. The Royal Canadian Navy and the United States Navy have a long history of co-operation dating back to World War II and through the Cold War. Since then, the RCN has remained actively engaged with the USN, particularly evident in the ability of Canadian vessels to integrate and thus replace American vessels in the U.S. carrier task force.
This also extends to select NATO nations, especially the United Kingdom, and to the Royal Navy. However, this capability has been largely limited to the tactical level of co-operation. Command-and-control arrangements like those under SACLANT during the Cold War as well as related exercises among the allied navies, formal divisions of areas of responsibility, and protection of the sea-lines of communication are largely absent.
At the same time, antisubmarine warfare, especially related to the North Atlantic and former Soviet threat, are also absent as a training priority. The RCN in particular, once the allied exemplar, has largely lost its ASW expertise. Post-Cold War tasks naturally obtained priority over ASW, reflecting the threat environment of the last two-plus decades even though submarines have proliferated within the developing world. Nor was there any pressing need to exercise the reinforcement of NATO's northern flank. Limited and shrinking naval resources on both sides of the Atlantic relative to the political and operational demand required choices to be made, and the obvious choice was to neglect the North Atlantic. Moreover, Russian naval activity in the North Atlantic largely disappeared as a function at the end of the Cold War and with the lack of resources in the context of the political, social, and economic upheavals that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Even with the emergence of the post-9/11 terrorist threat and its maritime dimension, there was no need to resurrect these arrangements. The maritime terrorist threat to the east coast of North America in particular was primarily an area for intelligence co-operation. However, over roughly the last decade, political relations between NATO and Russia have deteriorated. New generations of Russian naval capabilities, including longer-range surface and subsurface cruise missiles, now pose a growing maritime threat. As a result, NATO's northern flank has re-emerged as a security concern. Maritime defence cannot be ignored, and this issue, especially over the Atlantic, brings the coastal European allies and thus NATO into play.
There are two distinct albeit interrelated perspectives on this. One is that of NATO Europe, with an emphasis on the members bordering the North Atlantic, and the other is that of USNORTHCOM/NORAD. To cut to the chase, the issue involves the seams and gaps between EUCOM and NATO, between NORAD and USNORTHCOM, between USNORTHCOM and EUCOM, and ultimately Canada's assistance to all of these organizations.
The other issue I want to touch on is the suggestion, at least by my reading of “Strong, Secure, Engaged”, that NATO exercises in Canada's Arctic may be a possibility in the future, reversing a long-standing practice of inviting individual NATO members but not NATO as a whole. This, I think, needs to be discouraged.
Of course, this sounds very contradictory. If Russia and the sea-lines of communication are potentially at risk in the North Atlantic, why say yes to more attention for the GIUK gap, for example, and not Canada's Arctic? My answer to this is that Russia is attempting to upset European security, of which the GIUK gap is one conduit and an essential transatlantic link.
To date, however, Russian participation and activity in the Arctic has been fairly productive. This is largely a function, I think, of the Arctic Council and its mandate and the importance of the Arctic for Russia.
I'm not suggesting that Canada cease to surveil the Arctic, which it does principally via NORAD and its air and aerospace warning air control and maritime warning missions. Instead, I am suggesting that Canada needs to re-investigate with its allies the surveillance responsibilities of the North Atlantic, which will necessitate a conversation with NATO, NORAD, and USNORTHCOM and its U.S. fleet forces, as well as EUCOM.
Thank you very much.