Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/155544
iNteGRatiNG Live aND viRtUaL It's hard to appreciate the ambition of JOINTEX 13. Not only did Stage 5 involve a complex web of live and simulated activities, dispersed across a federated network from Victoria to Halifax, it also integrated three large, live annual training exercises conducted by the Army, (Maple Resolve), the Navy (Trident Fury) and the Air Force (Maple Flag). While those three force generation exercises produce the combat capacity the Canadian Armed Forces require for operations, they don't fully replicate all the headquarters connectivity, intelligence requirements and sustainment functions that underpin any operation. However, bolting together those three live training events, which had already been planned months before, with a largely simulationbased environment that emphasized the command and control (C2), intelligence and sustainment aspects of operations was a huge challenge. "It was not the ideal way to do it," acknowledge Colonel Ken Chadder, recently retired as commander of the Canadian Forces Warfare Centre (CFWC) and the exercise director of JOINTEX 13. "Normally you would have done it the other way around. We wanted to be nondisruptive so the intent was to take what the services had in their scenarios, adjust it to fit in ours, and then create the link between the various headquarters. In some cases it went really well, in others ... but I think we showed everybody this is where we need to be going." While organizers made a conscious decision to keep the first JOINTEX largely a Canadian affair, with limited international participation, the event attracted the attention of the U.S Director Joint Force Development (J7), who, impressed by the level of ambition, sent senior people to observe. "He said, 'We don't even do that. Let us know when you do this again because we want to play'," Chadder said. The JOINTEX scenario integrated land, air, maritime and special forces into a coalition operation that included Canadian command of multinational forces in its area of responsibility. The operations in a fictitious failed state included enforcement of a maritime exclusion zone, the establishment of air superiority that was later lost with the intervention of a third country and had to be regained, as well as the movement of three army divisions. The mix of live, virtual and constructive players and equipment all operating in a shared environment created a unique level of reality for both the CJIATF headquarters in Wainwright and the national command in Ottawa. A critical lesson learned during Stage 4 was the number of people required to provide key information between the two headquarters. For Stage 5, the number of personnel in the CJIATF dedicated to satisfying CJOC information requirements increased from 10 to 40. "We realized you can't play that, there are too many activities going back and forth," Chadder explained. "Now that we understand what that looks like, we will exercise that in RIMPAC and we will be much better prepared for 2015." In fact, despite the complexity of Stage 5, the real challenge was Stage 4. "Compared to the problems we had on 4, I didn't lose anywhere near as much sleep," Chadder admitted. Activated in short order, the computer assisted command post exercise, dispersed over numerous locations, tested many of the headquarters communications, intelligence and sustainment systems that would feature prominently in Stage 5. "It was a huge feat because it had never been done before," Chadder said. "It was a credit to all the technical folks in the various organizations." Chadder added that the presence of LGen (retired) Charlie Bouchard in both stages as role-playing commander of coalition forces and actual mentor to MGen John Collin, commander of 1st Cdn Div HQ and the commander of the CJIATF in both exercises, "added a level of realism that I have never seen in any exercise before in my 36 years." The event also highlighted the strength of the warfare centre. Stood up in 2010 as a joint capability development innovation centre and test bed for the CF, it had lacked a vocal supporter. Integrated into CJOC in June, the centre now has a champion to ensure its technical capacity and doctrine, lessons learned and experimentation capability continue to grow. Of note, it took the lead in developing the technical architecture for the CAF's targeting requirement, something it had struggled with during Stage 4. 16 AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com I INTEROPERABILITY Q You have spoken in the past about improving stewardship over CAF joint integrating capabilities. Does JOINTEX address that? JOINTEX is a huge animator of the joint capability agenda. It allows you to take what you have in terms of joint capability, in particular communications, intelligence and sustainment, and exercise it. This is a "don't tell me it works, show me it works" event. Show me the pipes work, the data is interchangeable, that we are able to reach into other intelligence sources and bring a coherent intelligence picture to commanders, that we can deploy the Joint Task Force component and interoperate between forces when it comes to health services and logistics. And by "doing," we find where the gaps and overlaps are so we know what we need to work on. The biggest benefactor of the JOINTEX experience, besides the people who got a hell of a ride doing something they never imagined, was the visualization of what we have and don't have in our command and control system, and in terms of networks and intelligence. Chief of Force Development and the C4ISR world were the biggest observers. JOINTEX informs our needs and allows us to figure out how to satisfy them. And the warfare centre, as a battle lab for that C2 system, means we can keep adapting it between operations and exercises. Q You now have a lengthy list of critical topics: What is your priority? The big takeaway is that we should expect that we may be required to do something like a JOINTEX scenario, and we have just demonstrated we can. And, we can get better at this with investments in service and joint capabilities. In terms of specific capabilities, we need to continue to refine our understanding of coalition C2 and national C2, and continue to advance our national C2 system development so that it is either the backbone for the coalition or it can be easily integrated with a coalition. Q How much is your evolving joint doctrine driving collective training and education? The CAF now has JOINTEX, RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific), Nanook and Determined Dragon (a continental defence exercise with NORAD and US NORTHCOM) as four exercises that form the Forces' joint (multi-environmental) collective training baseline at the joint operational level. We are able now to take joint operations doctrine, work with the Canadian Defence Academy and Forces College on what is instructed, build it into our collective training exercises and take it for a test drive through those four exercises. Then we can take the lessons learned, re-spool the doctrine, adapt our structure, inform new capability requirements