Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/196923
M Maritime between east coast ships and west coast ships in the Mediterranean or in the Arabian Sea. All this is to say, we will come together and form the task group around an international contingency if required using the resources available on both coasts and specifically designated ships maintained at high readiness to form the tactical and operation capabilities of a self-sufficient naval force. A task group is one element of Canadian capability, the task group staff is the other. To this end, we maintain a ready staff to take command around the world if the opportunity serves Canadian interests and has been well thought through with our international and coalition partners. We maintain the readiness to fly that staff and take a leadership role, and you can do that from ashore or from an allied or coalition ship. Staffs are like warships: they are hard to come by and there is a lot of readiness in the skilled staff, and there are always countries and contingencies looking for command staff to share the leadership and planning burden. Q You have talked publicly about an operational submarine fleet. Given the work that is still underway on the Victoria-class, how do you define that? Our goal is to have a readiness and operational cycle of two plus one plus one: two boats operational, one as a swing boat, either going in or coming out of an extended work-up period, and a fourth in the dock and being worked on. It is a pretty hectic cycle, probably as good as anybody can maintain in a small fleet, whether aircraft, submarines or surface ships. Our goal is to achieve that cycle and normalize it within this year and into the next. On the west coast, Victoria has done all the torpedo firings, all the rangings, and has all the capability and crew in place. Windsor, on this coast, is 90 percent there. She has just finished working offshore with alliance submarines to great effect and is going into a scheduled docking, a little to the right to align with the syncrolift dock upgrade project. As far as alliance partners or anybody who works in the maritime domain is concerned, Canada has submarines. We have re-established into our naval arsenal submarine capability and credibility. Q Are they going to have to take on unconventional roles to fill interim gaps in the larger fleet? When the fleets are fully operational, subs depend on secrecy. They are built to be underwater for a good reason, to maintain operational secrecy. To suddenly be on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and not visible to anybody; to be on a counter-drug mission and not visible to the illicit trade on the surface; to be in an international theatre off a coast like Somalia requires secrecy. Right now they are in the limelight because we are focused on getting the operational cycle up and running. You will see us now increasingly move back toward operational secrecy so the boats are less in the public eye and more in the operational game. 14 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com Q We're sitting on the bridge of HMCS Halifax. Talk about some of the capability a modernized frigate now gives you and what it might mean going forward? We have upgraded a whole host of things onboard this ship. First, survivability and control of the engines. Aboard ship, we talk about the priority of effort to float, move and fight: you've got to be able to float to be able to move to be able to fight. In the float domain, the damage control system has been modernized. It is a manpower intensive effort when you are fighting a warship to tend to battle damage and other emergencies and machinery casualties that arise. We have just delivered into this ship a damage control system integrated into the platform, into the engineering and control system, that is going to be the harbinger of future fleet development because, with it, we can relearn the whole damage control enterprise on board our warships. So before we get into the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy and fully design the ships of the future fleet, we are going to have learned the lessons of a system that allows us to say: do we need three section base teams? Do we need all these people plotting and communicating and tied into the warfare operators and the people that drive the engines? Maybe we need different crew structures, a whole new dynamic onboard the ship for managing work? Perhaps we can fundamentally change the crewing and design elements of a warship to free up volume and space for sensors and weapons, increased fuel load and seakeeping. So, first we are going to fight this platform much more effectively and, second, we are going to learn our way into the future classes and prove or change what is essentially a World War II crewing and organizational paradigm. Moving to the fighting side of the ship, the improved sensors, more effective weapons, the integration, the communications, the ability to communicate internally and externally while you are directing your weapons and sensors – at first we thought it was evolutionary, but really it is a quantum leap. Our ability to interact with long range patrol aviation, the maritime helicopter and its replacement, the modern warships of NATO and alliance fleets, is going to be more precise, that much quicker and less human intensive. The interface tools alone are greatly improved. If you remember the clutter of screens that the poor operators had to pull information from and the number of communications circuits, it could overwhelm even the best operators in an intense situation. This ship provides a whole series of tools and sensors to interact with our allies, and to be a command and control platform from a lean frigate-sized hull. Q Are you also using the modernized ships to innovate on the training side, specifically through more virtual and synthetic environment training? The strategic partnership with industry has allowed us to accelerate a very complex modernization with the number of ships moving in and out of refit. Three years ago, there was a dark cloud of com-