Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/103039
L Leadership "The requirement to maintain or introduce capabilities does not change simply because we will be facing a tighter budget. What will change is how we look at the business we are doing, and then determine how we can do it better." citement of the missions, etc. But swallowing that number of new personnel was a massive challenge; we always had an enormous Basic Training List and Advanced Training List and the training effects were frustratingly long. We are now at the numbers we want with our intake at about 4500 per year with about an 8 to 1 ratio between those applying for those positions to those who we bring in, which is a pretty good ratio. Now, our challenge is to keep those people in and speaks to the army's recognition that they need to "train to excite." We have young men and women who have come back with combat skills, who have seen the excitement of being deployed. At the same time, we have some who have been heavily stressed. Some are saying, I love the career; I love the chance to practice what I've been taught; but now give me a bit of a rest. So we'll look to consolidate what we've got in the next while. Q What about the impact on the reserve component? Through the combat phase we almost extended our regular force on the back of our reservists but we now need to hold on to some of those great men and women as we cut the number of class Bs. This will provide us an opportunity to get back to the classic class A reservist and a better balance between the regular force and reserves. I think there's some frustration but I think we are going to have to adjust to that a little bit. Q Talking about the class B cuts brings us to the subject of Canadian Forces transformation and the Leslie report. As we move forward and presumably implement parts of the Leslie report, what would be your top priority right now in terms of Canadian Forces transformation? There were a lot of excellent recommendations in the Leslie report and many of them have already been implemented, such 14 DECEMBER 2012/JANUARY 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com as the CJOC [Canadian Joint Operations Command] which brought three commands together and their associated savings; we've talked about the reserves, rebalancing in terms of class B to class A, and we've seen some decrease in the numbers of our public service partners. We are now moving ahead with an initiative which is truly co-owned by the department and the CF, called the Defence Renewal Team, and it is looking at doing things differently across the entire force. Typically through your and my career we saw silos between the army, navy and air forces for the production of capabilities. Our bases have been pretty much silos. There's a belief that if we changed the business to look for horizontal efficiencies across those silos we might be able to find savings that can be pulled out and put back into our capabilities. This requires another look at the entire partnership within Defence. Q I would finish with a question on a personal level and that is, what are your feelings now, after going through the maelstrom of being the Chief of Defence Staff non-stop for the last three weeks (including your wife Kelly) where there is no day off? Well, I'm proud of the integrity of our armed forces. The CF operational trade mark is strong. In the CDS's office, we are all new and heavily engaged in the role of both leadership and stewardship of Defence. We are not surprised that there are lengthy days, but every file that comes onto my desk is one that deserves CDS attention, so it is normal. The quality of the work that I see is consistently extremely high, and when I go out I get refreshed from seeing our men and women. I had a chance to head out to Halifax and step onboard HMCS Windsor before its first submerge. She is going to be the second submarine on the march to higher readiness, and to see those young men and women working on their equipment, you are able to steal their energy. As far as Kelly, I'll let her speak for herself but I think she's pretty pleased with these first few weeks. R F st a g p D