Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/507045
in Ottawa to provide the linkage between Stavanger and Meaford. Seven days after the CPX begins, approximately 1,500 CAF per- sonnel will deploy to the Iberian Peninsula for the live exercise phase of Trident Juncture. The deployment will include a land task force, a maritime task group, an air task force, and a special operations task unit. For the CAF, it will mean a multinational brigade into Santa Mar- garida, Portugal, led by 5 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group commanding an Italian infantry battalion, a Portuguese battalion, a German bridging company and U.S. and Polish civil-military co- operation offi cers and military police forces. The Maritime Task Group, under NATO command, will operate off the east and west coasts of Portugal and include Danish ships under its command. The Air Task Force will support the Canadian multinational task force, including dropping paratroopers into the Santa Margarida training area, fl ying resupply fl ights, and refuelling NATO aircraft in Italy. In total, about 25,000 allied troops are expected to partici- pate from training centres in Portugal, Spain and Italy. "The training opportunity is huge," McPherson says. "We will deploy a large force into Portugal, we will execute at the tacti- cal level with our NATO allies – land, air and sea; and then we will conduct joint operations for the last seven days within these respective organizations as part of a larger NATO force under a NATO headquarters. During the live exercise, we will practice our national level theatre sustainment as well, which is one of the ob- jectives that the CDS and Commander CJOC have given to us." He notes that MGen Milner and the air, land and maritime com- ponent commanders will all have access to the C4ISR capabilities and other requisite elements they would expect in theatre, includ- ing feeds from live and simulated ISR platforms and reach-back to Canadian national command and intelligence support. "It is an op- portunity that has not been offered to a Canadian training audience to operate in a joint environment with the proper C2 arrangements." For LGen Vance and CJOC, aligning the objectives of JOIN- TEX with a large NATO exercise has proven to be an invaluable way to manage limited resources. While it might be a large com- mitment of personnel and equipment, the exercise provides a rare opportunity to prepare the divisional headquarters for a variety of roles while building and testing its command and control capabil- ity for the long-term. "Although our bread and butter is the provision of expert tacti- cal forces, we need to be able to function at a higher [operational and strategic] level for things like targeting and theatre support," Vance says. JOINTEX exercises all of that. J JOINTEX 14 aPRIL/May 2015 www.vanguardcanada.com a Canadian headquarters with a C2 secret system to work collab- oratively with a NATO headquarters. That is an impressive feat." No less so given McPherson's people problem. With large con- tingents currently deployed in both Kuwait and the Ukraine – and the next rotation always in preparation – as well as soldiers, sailors and air personnel deployed under Operation Reassurance, force generating the personnel to support the CPX and live exercises is no mean feat. Equally diffi cult is accessing the technical expertise to build the C2 information systems (C2IS) capabilities. "That takes a lot of expertise and that expertise is being shared because those experts are also supporting operations in Iraq right now," McPherson acknowledges. Despite being stretched thin, the CAF has been able to develop most of its C2IS in-house. NATO Communications and Informa- tion Agency, the organization's version of Shared Services Cana- da, has played a supporting role, but McPherson says experience from JOINTEX 13 and regular engagement with NATO, espe- cially by the Navy, has provided a critical foundation. "We are pretty self suffi cient within DND. We have the institu- tional knowledge on how to build these systems. That integration with NATO in terms of C2 is there, and we have leveraged that as we have built the initial systems for the crisis response planning exercise and we're leveraging that as we build for the CPX." The objective, McPherson adds, is to ensure that C2 integrating capability is resident within 1st Canadian Div. "We have built this to be able to provide the capability to the division so that if we ever need to operate with NATO for any reason...this will be one of the tools in the tool box. It's a pretty exciting opportunity that will provide a return on investment to the CAF that has not been there before." A new training opportunity The overarching scenario for JOINTEX is set around a peer-to- peer confl ict involving full spectrum operations between a NATO coalition and another power following an incident in the fi ctitious African country of Titan. Chief among other assets, Canada re- sponds to NATO's call for assistance by offering a multinational inter-agency task force headquarters. For the crisis response planning phase of JOINTEX, which was conducted between January and March, Canadian Forces Intel- ligence Command and 1st Canadian Div headquarters worked collaboratively with NATO's Joint Force Command Brunssum to assist in developing the coalition's response. Phase two, a command post exercise (CPX), will begin in early October to practice the deployment of a multinational joint task force. Coinciding with Trident Juncture in southern Europe, it will see approximately 1,200 personnel from across the CAF de- ploy to Meaford, Ontario, where they will operate for 14 days on European time. Meant to simulate deployment to Titan, the CPX will involve the 1st Canadian Div headquarters as well as person- nel such as NATO planners and liaison offi cers from the various component commands. (It will also include evaluators, lessons learned cells, defence scientists and a training team composed of NATO, CAF and U.S. trainers to support the division). At the same time, McPherson will send about 50 personnel to the Joint Warfare Centre in Stavanger to integrate with NATO's exercise control and beef up the Canadian Forces Warfare Centre Photo: MCpl Patrick Blanchard