Thank you.
I will be brief and focus my remarks on the assessment of the threat to North America. The first thing to recognize is that the threat assessment really hasn't changed despite the ongoing war in Ukraine. The issues confronting North American defence have been known for some time now. You can go back a decade to the development of long-range cruise missiles, which basically made the North Warning System obsolete. Since about five years ago or so, the development and deployment of hypersonic vehicles by the Russians has posed another significant challenge to North American defence.
In simple terms, North American defence faces significant and severe capability gaps and command seams. With respect to capability gaps in particular, you confront the problem of long-range cruise missiles that will be able to launch well over the high Arctic, if not, depending on Russian developments, from Russia itself—long-range, ground-launch cruise missiles—which the North Warning System simply cannot deal with. It can pick them up very briefly as they sort of fly over, but there's no capacity to really detect them, track them and vector interceptors to them.
Hypersonics pose another very distinct challenge. The North Warning System is not calibrated to, nor does it have the power to be able to look up and find these weapons. The American ballistic missile warning network, which feeds into the NORAD ballistic early warning mission, is calibrated to deal with ballistic missiles, which fly much higher and much faster than hypersonics do. Therefore, we have two significant gaps in defence.
Second, in terms of command seams, in the past North America has always been limited to Canada and the U.S. when we have talked about NORAD and North American defence. There are significant problems in that structure, particularly in terms of Greenland. Greenland is North America. The U.S. has closer links than we do. We have none, actually. Greenland has always been made out as looking east. In the U.S. unified command plan, it is attached to U.S. European Command, when in fact it should be attached to U.S. Northern Command and NORAD. This extends also to Iceland.
There are command seam problems; there are capability gap problems, and it becomes a very complicated air defence or aerospace defence environment, not least because hypersonics blur the distinction between air and space for ballistic missile defence.
These are big issues that the Government of Canada, along with our ally to the south, the United States, faces with respect to coming up with an effective defence capability and command structure to ensure that we can actually detect, deter, defeat and defend against potential and future threats.
[Technical difficulty—Editor] here. There are a lot of cost implications involved here, but I think I'll leave it there as a basic overview. In the question period, I'll happily provide more details about the problems we face.