Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/103039
Maritime awareness M Integrated Command, Control and Communications) fill part of that information-sharing requirement? It is one tool but I don't see it as the bridge to other systems that are the primary requirement at this point. We have a common backbone system which we use to build the recognized maritime picture. We have a fair amount of information that is fused into that automatically from various sources like ships, ports, and some agencies. But we have some that is air gapped – from one machine, human interface, and plug into the other – and that's the last piece that we need to fix. miles. Through chat or Inmarsat or web-based tools, we can challenge any ship anywhere in the world and ask, what is that beside you, we can't see what it is, and then feed that into our picture. On the air side, I use Provincial Aerospace, Auroras, Sea Kings, King Air, whatever is out there that we can tap into. And that is a huge change. In the past, Fisheries would go out and do fisheries, Environment would do environment monitoring, the RCMP would do its thing. Now they are all pulled into the MSOC picture. If it's flying, it's feeding. If it's on the water, it's feeding. Q Is this solely a defence requirement or do you need other departments to develop their systems? The biggest issue, and this is across Canada, is that when we do force development work we need to do it collaboratively so things talk. In the past each department has had their own perfect solution, which was incapable of linking or talking with another. The Olympics taught us a lot of lessons about how we actually needed to build systems and subsystems to talk. I'm hoping the lessons identified become lessons learned, and we change our joint and interagency doctrine to ensure that one of the first requirements in force development is interoperability with our partners. Because of the size of our country and the fact that no one department can afford to go it alone, we need this to happen. In the U.S., the Coast Guard would address all of this; we, however, need this "strange" relationship where we have three or four departments all working together on law enforcement, drug enforcement, immigration – we just have too much coast line to manage. Q How complete is the common operating picture? Is every ship and every aircraft a potential sensor? It is automatic data transfer now, and it's not just the navy and the coast guard, it's every ship that is out there. On the Grand Banks, for example, there are a lot of fishing vessels and it is not uncommon to have them all clustered together and then break apart, and when they break apart you can get a picture which is confusing. If you've got a fishing vessel you know, you can ask who is off your starboard bow at three www.vanguardcanada.com DECEMBER 2012/JANUARY 2013 27