Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/274231
C C4ISR AND BEYOND 18 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com tHe JoiNt ageNda In a future of network-centric operations, C4ISR (command, control, communications and computers, combined with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) will underpin the success of joint and coalition forces. On January 22, Vanguard hosted a one-day forum for the military and defence industry to explore challenges and opportunities in the application of C4ISR technologies. Lieutenant-general stu Beare, Commander of Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC) and the Canadian Armed Forces' (CAF) primary employer of joint C4ISR capabilities, delivered the keynote address. Below is an edited version of his presentation. CONNECTING by LGen Stu Beare i 'll share with you an operational commander's per- spective on what effects and results we need from our C4ISR framework by covering the operational level need, the key challenges, and the opportunities we have to advance the C4ISR agenda – in particular in a period absent a major joint operation to act as a forcing function. The Need CJOC's mission is to anticipate, prepare for and conduct opera- tions. Each and every day, there are thousands of Canadian Armed Forces personnel standing on guard across Canada. These include search and rescue squadrons; troops assisting other government de- partments; Navy ready-duty ships on both coasts; immediate response units in each Army Division; Air Force aircraft ready to assert control of Canadian and North American airspace; and Special Forces postured for a wide range of immediate responses to the national security interest. Even as our high-profi le mission in Afghanistan winds down and our equipment and the last of our people return from the Disaster Assistance Response Team deployment to the Philippines, we still have hundreds de- ployed in 17 missions around the world. The conduct of current operations is key, but so too are the other two verbs in the CJOC mission statement, anticipate and prepare, and the func- tion of situational understanding that underpins all of these. The operational need, then, includes our need to understand what is going on in the world, in regions where Canadian national interests may be affected and where there may be a military nexus. Understanding requires more than traditional intelligence gathering and analysis; we also need to understand the per- spective and possible courses of action of our potential operational-level partners and other stakeholders.