Vanguard Magazine

to come from a real, honest risk-based as- sessment of what that future potential con- flict or conflicts will look like and then allow that to guide us. That said, I don't think it makes any sense whatsoever to maintain the subma- rines away from Canada. Third line main- tenance is something I suggest that abso- lutely has to be in Canada. And I would never see a future, as a CO of the FMF, where there'll be any erosion of the FMF's current strategic support to the RCN. So, to your question more directly, what does it mean and what elements do we keep close to Canada? I would start by looking at we're doing really well. I think that our in-service support first to third- line approach is actually pretty good. Hav- ing worked in NATO in other countries, I think it's pretty admired by other navies. Maybe not working for the submarines, but in general that's a pretty good model. And it was validated by the naval engineer- ing and maintenance strategic initiative back in 2017. It described how industry should play an important role in specific types of maintenance, dockings, major re- fits, and asserted that the FMFs really have this strategic role. They need to be agile; they need to be operationally focused and there needs to be this balance of coopera- tion between industry, the shipyards and the FMFs. They can't compete with one another. So, I would say that as a back- drop, that first to third-line maintenance approach assures resilience and operational availability while being cost effective. The second point I'd suggest is supply chains. It must be Canadian. We need ac- cess to those critical pieces of equipment. We need to minimize the impact of being held to somebody else's repair and over- haul pipelines. I saw this on the east coast when I was part of fleet readiness, waiting for things to come out of that R&O pipe- line as they're sent far away. We want to minimize that impact. We don't want to be paying $200 for screws either, especially if they can just be found at Home Depot. And more importantly than in those ex- amples is making sure that we have the supporting policies, process materials and trade to support Canadian tradespeople to execute the work in Canada. Probably the biggest lesson we learned through the upholder experience is that we Canadianized the submarine, but we didn't Canadianize all those other pieces. The policies, the process, the qualifica- tions. We didn't allow the Canadians to do work here in Canada. So, I think that cer- tainly needs improvement. In short, I would say that from a domes- tic sovereignty perspective, you need to in- vest in those things that would take a lot of time to build. And if access to them in the lead up to, or in times of conflict, would inhibit the Navy's ability to force generate and sustain submarine forces that's where you really got to focus your attention. You just can't forget that submarines, by their very nature, are strategic assets to ev- ery Navy of the world. And because of that we must keep them close. Cdr HUNT: Q: Peter, how can Canada better engage and utilize the resident skills that we have across the country to grow the workforce and support the submarine industrial base? How do we recruit, train and retain an engaged and productive submarine workforce? PETER KAROUNOS: I would start off by saying every industry out there whether it's the submarine com- munity or the auto, is competing for the same group of resources. I would say you start off with the need to cultivate, invest and maintain the workforce you have. An in-service submarine logistics expert is to me like a crown jewel. And in-service, they work on supply, training, maintenance, provisioning, tech insertion, upgrades and improvements that are coming into the systems on submarines. And they're be- ing recruited by everyone. I lost one of my crown jewels to Amazon. I couldn't www.vanguardcanada.com FEBRUARY/MARCH 2025 13 I N T E R V I E W Ian Krepps Vice President of Growth, Thales Canada Gordon Szczepski, Director & Acting Head of Engineering & Technology, Babcock Canada "Probably the biggest lesson we learned through the upholder experience is that we Canadianized the submarine, but we didn't Canadianize all those other pieces. The policies, the process, the qualifications. We didn't allow the Canadians to do work here in Canada. So, I think that certainly needs improvement." — Captain(N) Martin Drews (Ret'd)

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