Vanguard Magazine

Vanguard December 2024/January 2025

Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR

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I N T E R V I E W www.vanguardcanada.com DECEMBER 2024/JANUARY 2025 19 the space of JADC2...we want to develop capabilities rapidly, because we want to try to deter a major fight from happening in the future. When we thought about the different spaces that we could be in, how we could develop out capability, we tried to actively seek out the areas where we could gain the most initiative as quickly as possible. And where are the areas that if we leverage speed and willingly take some risk by going fast, it could actually help us to generate initiative that it could allow us, even though we're doing a department- level effort, to operate inside the decision cycle of the Department of Defense, so that they really can't slow us down. So, for us, risk of going fast was an opportunity to seize initiative. DAVE ANDERSON: Q: We have a real talent and skills chal- lenge, and you could argue that we're in a talent race right now and we continue to be so. How do we get that skill and that talent? Do we outsource it? Do we create the talent in-house or do we do both? Or do you outsource it to create the talent in-house? What's the right answer? Is it all the above? And what's your percep- tion on it? BGen HORNER: My initial position is it's all the above. But you can't do all of the above all at the same time. I mean, you have got to increase the digital literacy....You can't just show up and say, "This is the new system of record, everybody uses it" if no one's ever used it, and no one's ever been trained on it. That's a very traditional military way to do things. The challenge in that space is one of agil- ity and finding the right talent at the right time and not locking yourself into the same type of talent for 10 years. Where we have an aversion to contractual relationships, sometimes we don't have enough capacity to hire more public servants. If you haven't noticed, we don't have enough uniforms, and are the uniforms the right people? When you build that team, you need to bring in certain people at certain times to do certain things. That increases the digital literacy of your team that works there all of the time. There are a lot of really smart in- fantry officers that work for me that don't really, or didn't really, understand what digital transformation meant, but are now talking about CJAD, C2 and interoper- ability and how to move from DCS and zero trust and elements of shifting from network-centric security to cloud, or data- centric security in the cloud....After hav- ing sat in the room as an operator with the experts who know all of those things and speaking to them in a language that in- creases their digital literacy, well, now the team functions better. So, for me, it's all of the above. That's not super eloquent, but you have to get to that point of recognizing the team you may have been given isn't the right team for the task in that moment. So how do you adapt it and augment it from different elements of the outside to achieve success? WENDY HADWEN: This shouldn't be so hard, right? Every- body went from not knowing how to use an iPhone to using an iPhone. I think we are complexifying this problem just a bit. I think there's room for learning at all levels. If you look at some StatsCan data about our demographics, the wealthiest part of the population is of course the boomers. They're wealthy, they're educated, and they're retired. This is a vast cohort of peo- ple who could be contributing to Canada's digital future in one way or another. So, it's not just young people needing skills, it's everybody needing skills. I think the armed forces is truly gifted at force de- velopment, at hiring young people out of high school from all over the country and offering them jobs, in the course of which, they have to learn things. I think you guys should be able to mobilize here better than anyone else in government. I also think though, there is a vast net- work of not just secondary schools, but academic institutions left and right. And what's the opportunity for government there? I do believe there's something The war for talent is very real. So, continuing to attract people either from CAF or from Canadian society into the defense sphere, whether that's in uniform, whether that's as a civilian, or whether that's as an industry partner, is very real.

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