Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/507045
www.vanguardcanada.com aPRIL/May 2015 7 S SIT REP Libyan military mission met its objective: commander velop something similar in the cyber environment would require both nations to agree on "founda- tional" principles internally "before we try to put all this together." Back in 2009, Ridge said that given the impor- tance of the interconnectedness of infrastructure to the flow of goods, people and energy, "as you go about protecting that, a bi-national group, in- cluding the private sector, focused on cyber secu- rity as it relates to common assets and common needs seems to me to be a very sound, respon- sible approach to take." Four years later, Hayden argued the need has only increased. "Our cyber space is more integrat- ed than our air space. Therefore, it is absolutely clear to me that this requires close coordination between our two countries. That also means broad agreement on what constitutes a threat, what constitutes an appropriate response, what con- stitutes suitable privacy, and so on. We have two democracies that have figured out how to do that when you are controlling air space; now we are challenged with how do we do that in this entirely new domain." As refugees continue to flee Libya and the coun- try disintegrates further into anarchy, many have condemned NATO's 2011 Operation Unified Protector to protect the civilian population from threat of attack. LGen (Ret'd) Charles Bouchard says that what is happening in the country today "breaks my heart," but the commander of NATO's Combined Joint Task Force argues that the mission itself was a success. Speaking at a luncheon during the Navy League of Canada's annual general meeting in April, he said "our job was to protect the population and we did exactly that. The problem was that the rest of the world thought the mission was over. We should have learned from Bosnia, from Kosovo, from Afghanistan, from Iraq...[t]hat the military is not an end in itself, the military is just the first part to create an environment where the rest can take place." The ensuing vacuum that was created when the military mission ended was the result of not preparing for that next civilian phase. It's a lesson we should heed as we engage in Syria, he added. Bouchard emphasized that far from just an air campaign, Unified Protector was a joint operation in which the Royal Canadian Navy played a critical role, keeping open the Port of Misrata and allowing humanitarian assistance to flow in. "We didn't give enough credit to the navy," he said, noting that the mission marked the first time an RCN ship had been fired upon since the Korean war. Rather than a failure, the actual mission was "a perfect example of what you can do without put- ting 150,000 troops on the ground," he said. "It showed you can actually project power from the air and the sea to accomplish national objectives." Photo: Richard Lawrence