National Defence committee  Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today. I would like to extend greetings from your NORAD commander Admiral Bill Gortney. As I begin, I would be remiss if I did not share with you how fortunate and humbled I feel to have the opportunity to serve our great country as a NORAD deputy commander.

National Defence committee  Mr. Norlock, thank you very much for the question. You touched on a very important point in your question, which is the tyranny of the distances in Canada. Speaking of distances, a lot of people don't know that there's more distance between the southern edge of Canada and the northern edge of Canada than there is east to west, because of the way we look at the map.

National Defence committee  Okay, sir. The threats have evolved in terms that it started with long-range aviation and evolved into ICBMs, and then before 9/11 we were looking at outside. After 9/11, we started looking not only outside the approaches to the continent but also inside, since on that day all the attacks came from within the United States.

National Defence committee  Mr. Harris, I thank you for your question, and it's good to see you again, sir. I'm currently comfortable that NORAD has been protected with the highest level of priority to maintain our readiness and our capabilities to become an effective deterrent, and if necessary, to react to any aggression.

National Defence committee  I think the SIGINT stations that you mentioned, from where I sit, are adequate. Where we sit we don't care where the information comes from, it's just that it gets to us and then we are able to the fusion of that information. As far as domain awareness is concerned, we're starting to have a concern about the refurbishment and replacement of the north warning system, which is the line of radars along the Canadian air defence identification zone.

National Defence committee  Thank you, sir. From the NORAD point of view, in our lane we're still concerned about the approaches. I would put air and maritime ahead of cyber, because that's our directed mandate, and to us it's a no-fail mandate. In terms of cyber, in doing our maritime and aerospace mandate we have to operate with cyber systems, and we have to operate in a contested cyber environment.

National Defence committee  In terms of reduced posture—

National Defence committee  This is a great question, which we think about a lot. When you talk about threats, there are two elements in the calculus of threats, and they are capability and intent. We've seen for several years now that in terms of capabilities the Russians are going through a full modernization program.

National Defence committee  Thank you for your question, sir. Russia's long-range aviation command is doing a lot of exercises. The way they exercise their bomber force, which is capable of carrying nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, is to launch from their sovereign territory, head into international waters, and land in the Arctic.

National Defence committee  China is also developing its capabilities in terms of submarines and its fleet, as you've described. They are developing the capability to have ICBMs launched from submarines, to have submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Also, they are moving more towards mobile ICBMs rather than strictly silo-based ICBMs.

National Defence committee  If a long-range bomber gets lost in the Arctic...? I'm not sure that I have your question right.

National Defence committee  Well, we try to—

National Defence committee  The first part, as you just said, is deterrence. The deterrence is to have the all-domain situational awareness to know what's going on. Once you know what's going on, if you detect a launch of an aircraft, for the long-range aviation bomber it would be easier to destroy it rather than wait for it to launch its cruise missiles, as cruise missiles are very hard to detect and very hard to engage as well because of how small they are.

National Defence committee  Yes, ma'am, this requires additional funding. This is not in the present investment plan.

National Defence committee  NORAD needs as a requirement all-domain situational awareness. That basically ends up being a system of systems—air-based, space-based, land-based—and a UAV would be good for persistence observation in the high north.