Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/274231
14 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com D DEFENCE fi elding plans for projects in delivery phase to the operations and training cycle of the Army and averted some potentially costly mistakes such as units that were scheduled for LAV III upgrade actually being deployed at the same time. The system was also designed to manage the production of op- erational capability from the very basic individual level to full op- erational capability at the joint level. This ensures that component commanders have the same situational awareness of their force generation status as they do about their deployed forces, includ- ing ammunition consumption, fl ying hours, fuel, fi eld days, both actual to date and forecast, to a high degree of accuracy. This not only means they can re-balance priorities with full appreciation of the consequences in near-real time, but they can synchronize the introduction of new capabilities easily and understand the re- source implications on any course of action they might choose. The risk mitigation DIME offers is to vastly increase institutional agility and help the "CAF know what the CAF knows." Q If operational training is the most vulnerable piece to this, can you build resilience into it? There is an apt quote by Josephus that addresses this. He said, "The Romans are assured of success; their exercises are bloodless wars and their wars are bloody exercises." At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is no substitute for structured, progressive and realistic training that builds the trust, confi dence and capability teams need when it counts. Remember, the bad guys don't give you a re-test. But training can be expensive, so some mitigation to that cost can be found in constructive simulation and part-task trainers such as gunnery simulators, fl ight simulators and bridge simulators. They all have a role to play, but it is a supportive one and they are not a training replacement. There are also a few facts at play here that are not dependant on post operational draw-down. Some skills just have a very short life and have to be practiced and confi rmed frequently in order to remain valid, while others can survive quite a long time as long as the teams that perform them remain stable. The moment the team changes the skill set is lost entirely. There is a residual capability that resides as experience within the organiza- tion, but it is not reliable and could not be deployed if needed. So the operational force. In this way the "CAF could know what the CAF knows, and both productivity and agility would drastically increase." The technology exists within the CAF to do this now and an initial attempt was made under the Defence Integrated Management Environment (DIME) project several years ago. Sadly, it was not carried forward to completion. Q But given the pace at which technology is changing, how do you develop that agility to make those decisions quickly enough? The rate at which the CAF can incorporate new capa- bility now would suggest that is going to be di cult. Ironically the question of introducing new operational capability to the operational force was the genesis of DIME. Early in 1997, while I was writing CFP 300-8 (Training Canada's Army) I real- ized that the production of operational capability was almost ac- cidental. If government called on the Army to fi eld a brigade sized force for operations longer than a year, it would rapidly have be- come unsustainable. So it seemed to me that we needed a predict- able system that would produce a predictable volume and quality of Army operational capability over sustained periods. That idea became what is known today as the operations and training cycle. As most readers know the cycle has three phases: operations, refi t and training. The idea is that training phase is focused on build- ing and testing teams up to full operational capability; operational phase is where this capability is deployed and used: and refi t phase is where new skills, equipment and personnel are introduced to the unit, command is changed and it prepares to re-enter the cy- cle again. Synchronizing the introduction of new capability in the Army is now quite simple, and the Army commander can main- tain confi guration control over the fi eld force because capability upgrades (apart from IORs) are introduced on a predictable cycle. This idea was carried over in varying degrees to the Maritime and Air components during CF transformation. So I think it is fair to say that the mechanisms to incorporate new capabilities into the operational force without disrupting the production of opera- tional capability exist within the CAF now. The risk is that they may fall into disuse because people don't know what they don't know – the Hewlett Packard curse. Obviously this ties back to the previous question and the mitigations to that risk lie in the effec- tive use of the technologies we have already and the preservation of the human capacity at the tail so the teeth can profi t from them. Q From a risk mitigation standpoint, how do you understand the cascading e ects across your tail if you start pulling out pieces? Is it through DIME? Well, that was certainly the intent of DIME. Force development is a very complex system-of-systems. Instead of trying to blueprint it, which would simply have made a static picture that would not have been especially useful, we used directed path graph tech- niques to build a dynamic model of it. We used data from the Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements System (DOORS) to cross connect capability requirements to projects in train in order to understand what would happen if certain projects were delayed or cancelled. We discovered a lot. In a similar way we linked the Photo: MCpl Frieda Van Putten Photo: 2nd Lt Isabelle Provost