Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/196923
Maritime M approach are the main routes of access to the Canadian North. So for cruise liners, oil tankers, resource exploitation vessels, any kind of illicit activity, foreign countries and their interest in the North, the gateway to the Canadian archipelago is through the Labrador Sea, Davis Strait and Baffin Bay. To create the land-sea integration necessary to operate and intervene in this huge Canadian estate requires that the Canadian Rangers, elements of 5 Division and its support group in Gagetown, including the resources available in Newfoundland and the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, learn to inter-operate with naval planners and naval forces arrayed on the east coast. Hurricane Igor was a case in point where these forces deployed to the island. It is too late during the hurricane itself or in the middle of whatever humanitarian emergencies that follow to create that military effect on the fly, so we want to learn from these lessons and evolve our readiness. And we have an interface with Commander Joint Task Force North based in Yellowknife. As we create a greater capability in the Atlantic area of operations, we can say to him, this is the land-sea effect for the eastern end of the country, how would you like to employ and interface with it? Q A large part of Joint Task Force Atlantic is the interagency relationships. Given that operations in the Arctic and the Caribbean are largely constabulary, are you learning lessons from one you can apply to the other? Of all the countries in the world, Canada's military probably has one of the longest histories of working with other departments and jurisdictions in domestic circumstances. We have been a supporting agency to the RCMP, Border Services, Coast Guard, Fisheries and Oceans. We have developed mandated levels of activity in support of, for example, fishery patrols, RCMP sovereignty patrols, counter-drug operations. We have nursed and developed those relationships so that when 9/11 occurred and there was this sudden intense focus on homeland security, all of those activities and relationships were very effective in the security of the country. The navy had been part of Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF South) before it became Operation Caribbe, a national mission of Joint Operations Command (CJOC). In the United States, it was a coast guard-navy relationship, but it was a very tender relationship. To us, it was a very natural relationship. I think we find our ability to work with all the partners in JIATF South easy because of what we have been doing with our federal partners in Canada. Q When Canada Command expanded its area of responsibility to include the entire western hemisphere, one of the objectives was to improve partnerships in the Americas. How are you leveraging that? There is a concerted and coordinated effort at the Strategic Joint Staff and CJOC, and within the army, navy and air force, to work with key partners in the Americas. JIATF South is fundamentally at the core of that initiative, and the international and interagency collaboration is recognized by the government as a mission just as Op Attention or Artemis are missions. One thing you learn working with interagency partners is liaison requirements, the exercise requirements, the visits, the personal relationships with your fellow coast guard and naval commanders, the requirement for staff talks, and understanding the pressures that each nation faces and the capabilities each brings to the table. When the earthquake in Haiti struck and Canada sent a small task group with a tonne of supplies, specialists and medical, one of the things we lacked was the bridge between the ships and the shore. Working with all these interagency partners who were flowing toward Haiti, and because of the personal relationships that Canadian naval leaders had established through our interagency work, we were able to simply pick up the phone and call fellow senior officers and talk about the bridge requirement and the priority of this matter to enabling Canadian relief efforts. It was done at that level, and what could have been a complex staff discussion was, in fact, an easy command prioritization of equipment equally important to the U.S. effort being shared with our Canadian ships. The whole Americas strategy – working in Jamaica, Guatemala, Colombia, Chile – is a nationally-led initiative and we have picked out a series of key nodes. The navy has worked closely with Chile, a Spanish-speaking navy with a culture built on the Royal Navy model and with a lot of English-speaking officers. They have been training our junior officers, six at a time for six months, on small warships in archipelagic waters of Patagonia. The boats are like our Kingston Class, and they also have former but still modern British and Dutch warships, and they are sailing constantly doing search and rescue, community support, ice navigation, intense sovereignty and surveillance and specialized seamanship tending the buoys and lights of the far south. This collaboration has allowed us to move our recent recruiting success through the specialist training pipeline at a time when our own fleet is in shipyards and alongside involved in the intense Halifax-class modernization project. With the Armada de Chile, it's been a quid pro quo. They give us something and we are providing them training on the NATO systems of their modern major warships. Q Are you going to reach a point, though, where you are limited in what you can deploy in the way of task groups and so forth because of either the work-ups or age of your ships? My commander in Ottawa has mapped his way through the task group commitment to the government of Canada. Our obligation is to maintain a national task group. From a very parochial perspective, the ships of Maritime Forces Atlantic can reach anywhere on the planet and they often meet their Pacific consorts in operational circumstances in very distant waters – we routinely do handovers www.vanguardcanada.com OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013 13