Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/337874
M MARITIME www.vanguardcanada.com JUNE/JULY 2014 15 deliver complex programs will become self-perpetuating. There is a lot risk, and it is a matter of balancing the risk to Canadians in terms of cost, etc, with the risk of not actually delivering. Q You've spoken about having to accept tradeoffs. At the recent Navy Outlook, you asked for industry input into these tradeoffs. What are you looking for from industry in that respect? We want this to be a shared, developmental process. We don't pre- tend for a minute to have the solutions to all the questions we are asking. We are describing what we'd like the ship to be able to do: in our professional judgement, we believe the ship should be able to do X, Y and Z. We're not trying to be prescriptive in terms of how we deliver X, Y and Z. And we want to hear industry's ideas on first, does X, Y and Z make sense? Can you have all three at the same time? And how do you deliver them? There are lots of really good ideas out there, so it's a matter of trying to figure out how to put it all together. But you start by having the conversation. Q Given that most allies face a similar challenge, are you hav- ing conversations about sharing the impact of tradeoffs? About balancing or sharing capability? There are two layers to that. There's a layer in terms of developing capability amongst key allies and there is the actual, what do we want to lean into ourselves. There are some high value, productive structures and organizations amongst the key allies that allow us to make small contributions into a larger pot, not just in money but in people and time, and from that extract enormous benefit. Those cross a whole series of traditional and emerging warfare areas. What you're asking, though, is can we and are we developing the capability to share responsibility, operationally and tactically, for something. And share responsibility for the development. The short answer is yes and it is happening every day to varying de- grees in different domains. At the tactical level, it happens more seamlessly because folks are used to it. You bring a bag of tools, somebody else brings a bag of tools, some are the same, some are different, you figure it out and it works. But in terms of develop- ment and design, there are some interesting national sovereignty issues that military planners are scratching on that are sort of out- side our lane. You are talking about national capability. What are you prepared not to do? It's a complicated question because it spans the spectrum from literally plugging in kit at the unit level, right up to the grand strategic level of government decision mak- ing with respect to what capabilities we should or shouldn't be able to field as a nation. As it relates to a specific ship and whether you want to have a platform that can do a little bit of most things or some things better than others, those are the very conversations we are having around the surface combatant. Q The plan calls for a requirement to respond to contingencies. How difficult is that going to be for the next few years given the number of frigates going through the Halifax-class moderniza- tion program and recent events with the AORs and Tribal-class destroyer? It's tough. Some of it we were well aware of. We knew the degree to which the Halifax-class were going to be taken out of service to be modernized and that program is going exactly as planned. The issue is right now we have more ships out of service than we have in service, so the next 12 months or so will be the toughest period. But we're seeing great progress and positive indicators in terms of getting lead ships of that program back into the op- erational fleet. They are undergoing trials and all the things you would expect with the introduction of new systems. However, to say we can employ them operationally, that is another level. Now, that was the plan. On the other side of the coin are the re- alities of keeping the legacy fleet going. And we've had some chal- lenges. We had planned to lean on legacy platforms while we are going through this period. But when you are dealing with older systems, things happen and, in some cases, the ships are starting to talk to us. The Tribal-class and AORs are getting to a point where we need to make sensible decisions about what we do with them. The key is that we are sticking to the principles of our priorities, which are to put our effort into those capabilities which will get us to the future fleet. From a platform perspective, the modernized Halifax-class, Victoria-class submarines and coastal defence ves- sels are the bridge to the future. We are going to run the coastal defence vessels very hard over the next while, so we have brought a bunch of them back up to operational status this year and that will give us some flexibility in the continental sense. And we are maintaining just enough flexibility to continue delivering on the international requirement. You saw that with the NATO reassur- ance decision by government, which is a positive indication of the flexibility of the platform. Q You are about to enter a period where you will have modern- ized submarines, frigates and maritime patrol aircra, with unprecedented Canadian ISR and networked capability. What options do these provide? It's the ability to provide a far more sophisticated and integrated picture. The individual capabilities in some cases are absolutely staggering. And the net effect will be, if you had those three plat- forms in a particular circumstance, they will be able to deliver an effect that is so much greater than the sum of the parts. The Aurora, for example, will be able to see things that it couldn't before, to process and analyze the information to a degree that it never could before, to make independent, real time assessments that were unimaginable with earlier technology. You can make the same kind of observations about the frigates. And it's not just the kit, it's the ability to bring those bits of kit together. We're excited about RIMPAC because it is the first time on the schedule where we can put a Victoria-class and a modernized Aurora and