Good morning. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak before this committee today. I am Commodore Richard Feltham, and I am the director general for cyberspace. In this role, I'm responsible for force development of military cyber capabilities that enable cyber operations, as well as strategic and operational command, control, communications, computing, and information.
Force development identifies the necessary changes to existing capability and articulates new capability requirements for the Canadian Armed Forces. For example, our current cyber force development efforts include scoping what requirements need to be fulfilled to successfully conduct cyber operations, designing the potential solutions to meet those requirements, and then helping to build and validate capability once a solution is chosen and implemented, respectively.
To date, Canada's international cyber-defence engagement has been focused on our Five Eyes partners and NATO's cyber-defence activities. The foundational work for a future concept of overall NATO cyber-defence is being developed by the allies now. As part of this, in 2016 the allies, including Canada, made a cyber-defence pledge to enhance their national cyber-defences as a matter of priority. The cyber-defence pledge reflects our international commitment, spelling out the priorities of developing strong individual cyber-defence through facilitating co-operation in the areas of education, training, exercises, and information exchange.
Further, we have taken an active role in numerous ongoing neighbour cyber-projects and policy bodies. While a final configuration of NATO cyber-defence has not yet been built, Canada has been taking an active role in its formulation to ensure not only its effectiveness but also our ability to contribute and function effectively in its eventual formation.
While the scale of Canada's commitment has not been large, we have selected areas of activity that fit well with our strengths and lead to mutual benefits both for NATO and for our own interests. In particular, one area of Canada's contribution is through the multinational cyber defence capability delivery, or MN CD2 for short. This is a smart defence project whereby allies have co-operated to develop, acquire, and maintain military capabilities to meet current security problems, in accordance with the NATO strategic concept.
Canada has been active since 2013 in contributing representatives and financial support. In addition to the value provided to NATO, our participation directly supports our own goals, furthering the direction and outputs we have pursued under the “Strong, Secure, Engaged” initiative 65, which was referred to earlier by Mr. Bastien.
Examples of mutually beneficial projects under this initiative include the cyber-information and cyber-incident coordination system and the malware information-sharing platform, which were developed for NATO cyber-defence. Both have proven valuable for Canada.
Other areas of Canada's contribution to NATO cyber-defence are through exercises in which Canada has engaged in NATO cyberwarfare exercises primarily as an observer. Thanks to our success in building our cyber-defence personnel, however, we'll be able to send participant teams this year.
In Exercise Locked Shields, for example, we will work with teams from two dozen nations to test our abilities to detect, defend against, and investigate cyber-attacks while exercising decision-making and command-and-control procedures. The Cyber Coalition exercise will see our team challenged not only with cyber-attacks through malware but also with social media and other hybrid challenges. This will test our operational and legal procedures, information exchange, and our work with industry and defence partners.
We have further combined cyber-defence experimentation with our targeting development, using the experience and facilities offered by the NATO cyber centre of excellence cyber range in Estonia. The upcoming NATO coalition warrior interoperability exercise, or CWIX for short, will directly benefit our command and control, as well as NATO interoperability.
Finally, Canada has been actively involved in the NATO cryptographic capability team and allied cryptographic task force since 2005. We have been able to provide leadership and expertise, as well as obtaining valuable insight that has guided our own cryptographic development efforts. We have been able to build communications and networks that address our own needs and are aligned with secure and reliable communication systems operated by our NATO allies in a cost- and time-effective way.
I will conclude by reiterating that Canada's defence policy outlines a new framework for how we will implement the vision of “strong at home, secure in North America, and engaged in the world”. We will continue to be a trusted partner to our allies as we work to develop our own cyber capabilities by anticipating, adapting, and acting.