Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/235053
F Force Development by Chris Thatcher Consumable, sharable, predictable: Developing the protocols for standardized data Photo: MCpl Marc-Andre Gaudreault. DND The services of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) may have their distinctive colours and historic insignia, but increasingly their data is the colour purple. Each service has specific systems requirements, but the standards for the data that moves across an emerging joint network must be universal to all. The challenge of ensuring that common protocols are part of the future force falls to the Chief of Force Development, Major-General Mike Day. He spoke with editor Chris Thatcher about consumable data and predictability in force development for the future security environment. Q Although Afghanistan is just one type of contingency the CAF might have to tackle in the future, you were involved in the mission from its earliest days with Special Operations Forces through to the final Canadian phase of the NATO training mission. How has that campaign shaped your thinking about future force development? That really goes to the nub of the challenge of being within CFD. I wear many hats in this job – the space/cyber hat, the challenge function hat, and the future hat – and Afghanistan was one of 12 DECEMBER 2013/JANUARY 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com those real-time experiences that cannot but help shape what you found to be important, unimportant, useful or not very useful, often contrary to what you thought going into a theatre. You carry baggage from previous theatres, but you find that what was true in one is not necessarily true in another. That is very much a microcosm of the challenge Afghanistan provides with regard to the future, of getting caught in the trap of superimposing the lessons of Afghanistan on the next 30 years. I have a challenge function for Horizon 1, the next one to five years, on behalf of the Vice Chief, for ensuring that projects that