National Defence Committee on March 1st, 2018

[MGen A. D. Meinzinger]

No, and that is....

[Leona Alleslev, Liberal, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

I'd have to agree. Okay.

[MGen A. D. Meinzinger]

I look at Afghanistan, if I may. Certainly our ability to bring joint Army/Navy/Air Force/soft together with a command and control machine to fuse that and plug it into a coalition, we do that very well.

When Canada gets the call, you can be certain that we will be able to push out the door a joint capacity, well-trained, skilled individuals with the capabilities resident within that formation. I saw it in Afghanistan, I commanded the Air Task Force—

[Leona Alleslev, Liberal, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

If I could ask you to give us a feel for how we do measure capabilities, if you can take that away and give us sort of what the key criteria are for measuring capabilities, that would be fantastic.

Thank you very much.

[MGen A. D. Meinzinger]

Absolutely. Thanks for the question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Right on time. Perfect.

We're going to go to five-minute questions now, and the first one of those is going to MP Spengemann.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. It's nice to have you back, and thank you again for your service.

General Meinzinger, in your brief you mentioned the Warsaw summit in 2016, and I'm pulling out the phrase “new security concerns in...the Middle East”.

Could you elaborate, from a NATO perspective, on what you see as those security concerns and what challenges they will bring in the short term?

[MGen A. D. Meinzinger]

You mean vis-à-vis the Middle East, absolutely.

I'll start that, certainly. I think we've seen NATO contributing to, specifically, the mission in Iraq and Syria. We've seen it in a number of different ways, the use of the NATO AWACS aircraft contributing to the command and control and ISR information requirements for the coalition.

I think as NATO continues to move forward on its project stability line of effort, which is really about capacity-building in countries like Iraq and Syria, we as an example are supporting NATO currently in terms of counter-IED training out of Bismayah, Iraq, just southeast of Baghdad. We've got a small group of Canadian Armed Forces, largely engineers, who under the NATO project stability mission are building partner capacity with indigenous forces, things such as how to deal with an IED, how to do the drills and the tactics techniques and procedures if you encounter a minefield.

As we look to the future, we certainly see NATO building out more of that level of activity in Iraq, as an example.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Okay. If we can stay with the Iraq theme for a moment, the UN just came out a couple of weeks ago with an assessment that the post-conflict, post-Daesh reconstruction agenda would run into the order of magnitude of 88 billion $U.S.—I think that's the number they've put on it—and potentially higher than that.

I wanted to use that example to ask you the question of how much, in your mind, of a security dividend we gain from well-planned post-conflict reconstruction, especially in a theatre like Iraq.

[MGen A. D. Meinzinger]

I know we're here to talk about NATO, but certainly in terms of the contributions we've made I'm very proud of what the Canadian Armed Forces has done and continues to do vis-à-vis the mission in Iraq. I look at our approach and it's very much a regional approach, so doing great work in countries like Jordan and Lebanon. I think the broader coalition community is, obviously, very much contemplating phase 4 , as we call it, post-conflict reconstruction and stabilization efforts in Iraq. I would offer those up as my comments.

Derek, do you want to add something?

[MGen Derek Joyce]

Thank you. I would just add on to General Meinzinger's response. There's no doubt, and it's recognized within NATO, that the post-conflict reconstruction is absolutely a key element of the overall re-establishment of a peaceful international community. We've seen the results when those positive reconstruction steps have not occurred. From NATO's perspective, that is why we're in Iraq in the reconstruction mode that General Meinzinger was talking about.

More specifically to Canada, it's why we're also contributing $400,000 to the counterterrorism and Iraqi bomb disposal school. A key element of working towards a more stable and peaceful environment post-conflict is allowing people to come back home. People can't come back home if there are IEDs, unexploded ordnance, in the areas. So this is really one of the key elements that we're contributing to, to try to recreate a stable environment to get back to some level of normalcy in Iraq.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

I've got 30 seconds left, so maybe you'd give a quick yes or no. Could NATO do more, should NATO do more, in terms of the intersection with the UN apparatus on post-conflict reconstruction, the civ-mil planning component, which is very important and requires expertise both from the civilian and the military side to get on to the same page? Are there opportunities within the organization for improvement?

[MGen Derek Joyce]

I would say that, yes, there are opportunities for improvement. We, of course, have a common objective between the UN and NATO to work towards a peaceful international situation, but I think the UN has a specific role and NATO has taken a specific role as well. The UN works towards improvement of the peaceful situation within Iraq, and certainly NATO has taken the approach of capacity building for the Iraqi forces.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Stephen Fuhr]

Ms. Gallant.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

To General Meinzinger, are the Canadian Armed Forces experiencing any recruitment difficulties when it comes to ensuring we have cyber-defence capabilities within our military?

[MGen A. D. Meinzinger]

Certainly, you would have noted in our latest defence policy a commitment to introduce a new cyber-operator trade within the Canadian Armed Forces. It's very nascent, we've just started to build that pool of individuals. This is a challenge for all organizations, the need to build capacity among those who understand how to put up defensive systems and operate in networks and the like. Banks need individuals like that, corporations need individuals like that. I think it's a great start for us to carve out a niche trade. It will allow us to train these individuals, to bring them into the Canadian Armed Forces and then leverage the skills that they have. I think it's a great start and I think it's an initiative that we've moved out very quickly on.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

So, yes or no? Are we having problems recruiting people for this role?

[MGen A. D. Meinzinger]

It's very early. I would say for that particular trade, I think there's only a handful of folks who have been brought into the trade today.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Okay. Thank you very much.

General Joyce, do you believe the Royal Canadian Air Force is currently unable to meet its NATO commitments and given that we haven't been able to find, in the budget, any allocation for these used fighter jets, I'm wondering if you know at all when the purchase time is going to be? Apparently we have some capability gap, or do we?

[MGen Derek Joyce]

Thank you for the question. To be honest with you, I'm not in a position to comment on the Royal Canadian Air Force's situation right now.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

As it applies to NATO—it's NATO, that's where the capability gap is supposed to be—that we're not able to fulfill our obligations.

[MGen Derek Joyce]

All I can say is that, within our new defence policy, in SSC, we've made the commitment to work towards a fighter replacement to fill all of our security requirements. In the interim, as you're very aware, we're moving toward the purchase of some F-18s from Australia that will fill that gap.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Then for our routine patrols for the countries in the far north, the Arctic, who don't have their own air forces, for anything we need to do in NATO we're still okay: we have the number of jets and personnel to go forward and continue our obligations at this time.

[MGen A. D. Meinzinger]

It's important to recognize we have two requirements. We have the requirements to defend the homeland and North America in the context of NORAD. That's a requirement. Then we have a requirement to support our NATO obligations. The intended purchase of the Australian fighter jets is going to provide us the capacity over the short term to be able to meet those two obligations concurrently.