Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/274231
c c4iSr 26 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2014 www.vanguardcanada.com A SYSTEM-oF-SYSTEMS CHALLENGE C4iSr deveLopment By 2016 we will have a fairly robust system, ... setting the conditions for where we want to go with those future modernization projects. — Major Michael Moulton C4ISR represents an area of signifi cant growth for the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), but it comes with a raft of chal- lenges around technical and procedural integration for joint and coalition forces. Concepts, doctrine and common standards must be synchronized to ensure interoper- ability across land, sea and air forces, and with allies. That is especially true for the Canadian Army as it strives to support a future oper- ating concept of adaptive dispersed opera- tions (ADO). As Major Michael Moulton, the proj- ect director for Army Electronic Warfare and Signals Intelligence projects, told del- egates at Vanguard's C4ISR and Beyond conference in January, the land force has invested signifi cantly in C4ISR-related ca- pabilities – approximately $3 billion over the past two decades – integrating ISTAR (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisi- tion and reconnaissance) sensors, upgrad- ing radios, and developing a deployable command and control (C2) network to support commanders. And over the next 10 to 15 years, it an- ticipates a capital project budget of $1.7 billion for the introduction of new com- mand, control, communications, comput- ers, intelligence, surveillance and recon- naissance systems. Although that has made Canada a leader at times – "we were the fi rst nation to fi eld a fully digitized C2 system at the tactical level," Moulton said – it nonetheless faces a major challenge integrating both legacy and new capabilities into a true system of systems, what he called a fully network-en- abled capability to deliver "into that CAF C4ISR context and deliver effects for the commander in the land battle space." That means looking at C4ISR devel- opment as a whole program rather than individual projects. It also means taking a different perspective and considering by chris thatcher