National Defence committee  I agree with the comments about what we have, as Canada. I think we lost something when.... David Mulroney was a super DM. We got that. I thought when that capability came in, what I was seeing and feeling in Afghanistan got 100% better. It was good. It got 100% better. I think

National Defence committee  In short, no. It's piecemeal. There is no coherence to it. There is no Team Canada approach that gives mass concentration to meet the aspiration that our Prime Minister stated. I think the pieces are there, but it's not packaged properly.

National Defence committee  I agree. What's missing from Mali is a governance structure that actually pulls all those pieces together. We had a similar structure in Afghanistan, and you could argue about it, but it was State Department-led. The United States military ran most of it, but there was a counter

National Defence committee  This actually goes into your realm. You're the politicians. I would say that Osama bin Laden was a bona fide threat that attacked us on 9/11. We went into Afghanistan to go after that threat that attacked us on our home territory and killed Canadians. At some stage somebody made

National Defence committee  I agree with the ambassador. We need a whole-of-government college. We already have a pseudo-college. It's the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, which is whole of government. There's a Canadian securities studies program going on for the next two weeks. There are civilians. The

National Defence committee  We actually have a high-readiness deployable headquarters. It's called the 1st Canadian Division Headquarters. I commanded it. I stood it up for the very reason of creating, from the lessons learned from Afghanistan.... It is defence-centric but it has ties in to Foreign Affairs,

National Defence committee  Still. Some of the comments here were about why nations are putting their troops in separate camps. It's because of risk-mitigating their troops from the threat. Also, in term of why they're not going to go into other camps, it's that they don't have the trust in the other camps

National Defence committee  I would say that we actually got the paradigm backwards. When I first went there, we should have had NATO in there because when I was there with the UN, we were dropping bombs from NATO airplanes. To talk about the ambassador's convoluted chain of command.... The UN didn't have i

National Defence committee  I am confident in the Canadian Forces and in what the Canadian package that goes over there will have: a clear chain of command, clear rules of engagement that come from the chief of the defence staff, and the support of our government. I'm confident of that. What they are going

National Defence committee  What was and what is today are totally different. I don't think you can make a qualitative or quantitative comparison. They are completely different. When I first went into Cyprus with a blue beret, when I went to Bosnia with a blue beret.... When I saw what I saw in Afghanistan

National Defence committee  You're always concerned about any weapon system, but as soon as you hear about MANPADS, it becomes a new level of concern. We had this threat in Afghanistan and we always—going back to the question about intelligence—tried to gain an understanding of how many of these systems wer

National Defence committee  It's a direct threat and everyone should be concerned about it. As soon you leave the ground and you're starting to fly around in either a rotary wing or fixed-wing aircraft, you have a MANPADS threat, and you have to take that into consideration.

National Defence committee  We should address it through diplomatic means and relationship building. Going out and having military operations and killing them is easy but that's not going to resolve anything. Every time you kill somebody, you create 10 new insurgents. You've disenfranchised a whole bunch of

National Defence committee  We have great intelligence capabilities to mitigate the threat when the aircraft go up. Our aircraft are there for a specific task. Our task is not to negotiate. Our task is medevac transportation, etc. That's the mission we were given. You'll have to ask somebody else what the o

National Defence committee  Let me use a different term, which is “human geography”. People who understand the human geography are far more effective in communicating and establishing relationships. To give an example of human geography, in Afghanistan we were using the wrong maps, because we were using map