Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/155544
I INTEROPERABILITY JOINTEX Exercising national command and control As the Canadian Armed Forces anticipates future expeditionary operations, it sees a future not dissimilar to its recent past: full spectrum Canadian contributions and leadership to multinational coalitions, with their full range of military capabilities, working in collaboration with other government agencies, NGOs and indigenous forces. While the CAF frequently exercises the interoperability of land, air, maritime and special forces, it has had far less experience training as Joint Task Forces, including operational level and national headquarters. In JOINTEX 2013, which concluded its fifth and final Stage in June, the CAF integrated three live Army, Navy and Air Force exercises with a complex virtual environment to exercise the relationship between a coalition headquarters, a Canadianled Combined Joint Inter-Agency Task Force (CJIATF) – as well as the national command and support elements deployed – connected to the national Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC) in Ottawa. Lieutenant-General Stu Beare, Commander of CJOC, refers to it as "playing it out here before we live it out there." He spoke with editor Chris Thatcher about the exercise and some of the lessons learned. Q What were you replicating and how different was it from other training events? You have three major muscle movements going on in JOINTEX. One is in a coalition context in which we have contributed maritime, air, land and special operations forces (SOF) to a multinational operation. Also, we are commanding forces of other nations. And, notwithstanding how much coalition leadership we put down range, we still need to project our national command and control (C2) systems, intelligence architectures and sustainment forward 14 AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com .com