Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/139409
C Cyber Operationalizing the cyber domain As the Canadian Armed Forces builds its command and control and communications networks, it will simultaneously have to increase its capacity to defend them while also developing the capability to exploit them. Since 2011, Brigadier-General Greg Loos has led Director General, Cyber, a unit within Chief of Force Development tasked to develop the military's future cyber capabilities. A few days before he began a new assignment as commander of Joint Task Force North, Loos spoke with Vanguard about the units progress. Q When DG Cyber was stood up, you had a broad mandate to develop future cyber capabilities. What have been your areas of priority? A couple of years ago, we started from a position of providing traditional support to the Canadian Armed Forces in the areas of IT/IM support and IT security. And there had been a lot of effort from the ground up inside the organizations that are responsible for those activities to highlight the fact that the environment was changing, that in fact it was evolving into an operating environment that required more attention. That eventually turned into a topdown effort, to turn it into a formal force development effort to look at what we had, what was changing in the world around us and in our use of systems and technology, and what that meant for us in terms of building future cyber forces. My first task was to take that strategic intent and come up with options to operationalize the cyber environment. There was recognition that cyber was a domain, and that we had to take it from being something different and bring it into the sphere of military operations and normalize it like we do for land, maritime, air or space operations. The first focus was to build a team and then look across all the elements of force development to put a plan in place for building what we need. 12 JUNE/JULY 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com