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 Back to "consumable," right. When I compare the amount of data I experienced as a young platoon commander with what my boy will see when he becomes one in a year and a half or so, how do you do the analysis? We are now past the point where it is reasonable to expect the human to individually read and consider every piece of information and intelligence that comes their way. You need these systems like CCIRs, commanders critical information requirements, that use protocols to provide the information you want, to automatically narrowed down those terabits of data. We then need systems to prioritize that: there is no point wasting your time looking at the 14th piece of information if time only allows you to look at five. We have come light years, but there is no end-state where we can say we have arrived – the technology keeps evolving at such a pace; if we can keep pace with technology we're doing well. So my end-state is to have a system that constantly evolves, learns, adapts, and converges to allow commanders to have consumable, prioritized, shareable information and intelligence. cifically look like, it's to be accurate about what capabilities we'll need to be able to answer that. Maybe what is surprising is that all of the security threats are still in play – none have been disproved to date. In 20 years, we'll have five or six of these documents and if you could look vertically through them, I would expect the commonality would be exceptionally high and the disparity, though low, would be in areas that we cannot yet anticipate. Q Presumably you are able to test some of this in exercises Q What's the role of the warfare centre in that context? like JOINTEX? Are there lessons about capability gaps emerging as you look to Horizon 2 and beyond? JOINTEX is led by CJOC, so my play in that is mostly centred around the Canadian Force Warfare Centre, which provides some of the simulation support to JOINTEX and does some experimentation on our behalf. I'm not sure it is fair to say that JOINTEX has informed us about long-term horizons. It has certainly informed about gaps and needs that might inform future capability requirements. I think for the most part it lets us know where the gaps currently are and where the opportunities are. It allows us to express the capabilities more accurately. As with Afghanistan, though, we have to be careful that we don't project out 30 years with today's experimentation and simulation. I always counsel myself and others to say, if you think you'll need a physical thing in 30 years' time, you're missing the point – you're really into a capability statement. And how we answer that capability is a different issue. Q What then is shaping the 20-year picture? Is the Future Security Analysis document of 2009 being refreshed? We have done a couple of things based on some lessons learned. We are now working on a future security environment document. Previously, we did one in each of the environments. We learned that can lead to some divergence through drift – no malice, no different agendas, just different interpretation. So we now have a central document; all the voices are involved and represented, but as we continue to evolve our view of the future, it will be a singular view. The second thing is that we are much better at seeing it as a living, breathing document as opposed to something that gets fixed in time. How well did we predict the future? I have read the previous ones – Army 2040, Air Force 2035, Leadmark – and there is some divergence, but I don't think we'll know for at least 10 years. Our job is not to be accurate about what it will spe14 DECEMBER 2013/JANUARY 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com They bring a whole bunch of tools that are adaptable to a variety of different circumstances. And they also play a pretty central role in terms of a community of warfare centres. Every year the centres sit down on a very deliberate schedule for 3-4 days and work through the deliverables of CFD to make sure everybody is aligned. Much like joint enablers in an operational theatre, the warfare centre is the joint enabler in the warfare centre theatre, because it glues them all together to make sure they are not off doing work in a stovepipe. It is now a community of practice that harvests that. It allows us to avoid duplication and see opportunities that we might not have noticed before. Q As you look beyond the next five years, to that Horizon 2 timeframe, what is your top priority? When I look at priorities, I don't think about a specific capability, platform or concept. For CFD to be successful, and where I focus a lot of my attention, is to have a development system that has three characteristics: it's got to be transparent and traceable, you've got to be able to see every individual step; it's got to be repeatable – if I walk through my system 10 times I had better be able to produce the same result; and it's got to be defendable – I've got to have a rigour of analysis behind it to allow me to explain why something is. Why is that my top priority? The worst thing that can be inflicted on a military, or it can inflict on itself, is uncertainty and unpredictability. If you think of our capital programs and how long they can take to produce, you want whatever comes out of the end of the sausage machine to be exactly what you need. So my top priority is to ensure that no matter what gets fed in, we've got a consistency of approach. If you assume the future security environment is an evolving one, then you can assume that the output of a capabilitybased planning process is also an evolutionary one. As an institution, we can withstand a one-degree change every year, what we can't do is that Crazy Ivan piece of wild course corrections. My job is to try to put some constraints on this, discipline the system, by the challenge function if I can, but more important try to give them