Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/155544
Special Forces S theatre, so there are a number of applications for the TAPV (Tactical Armored Patrol Vehicle) in a SOF environment. Q Do you have a new specific vehicle requirement at the moment? We're at the very early options analysis stage for the next SOF vehicle. When we came out of Afghanistan, we had an evaluation but we really didn't find one that was a generational leap ahead of our Humvee – frankly, we like the vehicle; it's robust and performs well – so we ran it through a repair and overhaul line and I don't see us seriously engaging industry until about 2015. Q given both the sophisticated and primitive ways in which adversaries use technology, do you approach it differently than other services? I don't think it is the technology so much as making sure everybody has the right mindset about technology. We were on an exercise with a rapid set up, and we were getting a download on a screen and were trying to figure out how to get that image back to Ottawa. Folks were saying it could not be done and then one bright guy set up a camera in front of the screen, captured the video on video and beamed it back to Ottawa. Problem solved for that circumstance. So for me, the answer to the range of technologies is making sure we have people who can innovate. We select them to be outside-the-box thinkers. Extremist organizations have their share of innovators, too, and they know their vulnerabilities. And they have learned an awful lot from us as a result of operations in Afghanistan. We talk about operational security; these guys live and breathe operational security, and they don't let their guard down because the results can be catastrophic. Q the army in particular has been fighting to preserve the enablers it gained in Afghanistan, especially intelligence: how much of that capability do you own and how much do you rely on others? And is there a danger of losing some of your capability as their budgets decrease? We own everything we need but we don't own a lot of it. It becomes a sustainment issue after a while. Even when we were in the thick of the fight in Afghanistan, we were going out to the general intelligence community to draw some capacity. Our credibility is our most important asset and key to that is the proper early warning, which speaks to those networks and to the intelligence piece. So I have healthy exchanges with other intelligence agencies in town. I agree with General Devlin's concern about losing enablers, and we have been fastidious about making sure that is not the case. We get brilliant support from the defence and intelligence community inside and outside the department. Everything, not just SOF operations, is going to be INT-inspired. So you have to have the capacity. We have all the widgets and people we need, but if we were in a protracted engagement as we were in Afghanistan, then we would have to go back out to wider community to help populate what we call a Special Operations Intelligence Centre. OUR FOUNDATION IS OUR TECHNOLOGIES OUR MISSION IS EXPANDING YOUR CAPABILITIES To develop innovative solutions that provide the comfort, protection and performance you need, we work backwards. First, we consider the requirements of the end user. Then we assess every element of design and apply the latest technology to develop comfortable, low-burden equipment so wearers can focus on the task at hand. Europe: +44 (0) 1695 727171 scott.sales.uk@tycoint.com North America: +1 800.247.7257 sh-sale@tycoint.com © 2011 Scott Safety ®, ScottSafety.com®. All Rights Reserved. © Crown Copyright/MOD. Reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office www.vanguardcanada.com AUGUsT/sePTeMBer 2013 27