Vanguard Magazine

Jun/Jul 2015

Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR

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s sPaCe www.vanguardcanada.com JUNE/JULY 2015 11 two or three people who have the skills and tools to merge with that headquarters staff and answer priority questions and requests for information from the commander. They also "reach back" to the CANSpOC for support as required. Q About 18 months ago you received portable Unclassified Remote-Sensing Situational Awareness (URSA) ground stations. Are those part of the JSST setup in theatre? They can be. URSA is one of the tools that we have in the tool- box. We can go very small, very quick, or we can go more robust. URSA provides that direct link to the personnel we would deploy. Q Does the size of the organization make it more flexible and nimble to respond to urgent demands? Let me give you the example of the CP-140 that we have de- ployed with its interim beyond-line-of-sight capability. As we are receiving the first Block 3 aircraft from the contractor, we had an urgent operation. Commanders were aware of the capability and they wanted to know how quickly it could be implemented. All of the partners from DG Space to DGIMO, the J6, and the com- mand subject matter experts all chipped in. We put all these smarts together in a tiger team to resolve the decisions that needed to be made quickly. There were some contractual decisions that needed to be made because this interim capability was through a com- mercial provider, and we had to determine which anchor station we would deploy, whether it had to be modified and if we had the trained people to do it. These questions were resolved in a matter of days, not weeks, not months, and then the work started to en- able the CP-140 to do this work. Q Part of the Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) program includes dedicated and deployable ground stations and terminals. Once the satellite constellation is complete, will this be the primary means for transmitting data and supporting deployed forces? I think it is going to be a mix of multiple systems. Wideband is in greater demand because we have more and more sensors working at all times that are generating a large sum of information. That will continue to be a challenge because I don't see data fusion so- lutions on the near horizon. Data will continue to be large in size and the need to reduce that data and make understanding out of that will be central to any command structure. However, it's not just a matter of passing data. It's also the abil- ity for command and control (C2). Commanders need to be in communication with their assets. That might not necessarily be beyond-line-of-sight, wideband type of satellite communication. The commander might require Protected Military SATCOM, making PMSC the constellation of choice for C2, although the pipe would not offer the size of Mercury Global, our program to leverage the WGS. But if the C2 link is directed to dynamic plat- forms such as vehicles, then the commander would require tacti- cal narrowband satellite communications. We have been doing that for decades through the electro-magnetic spectrum – VHF, UHF, HF – but it is now possible in digital format. space capabilities, and the structure that was developed to achieve that objective was to put in place a Canadian Space Operations Cell (CANSpOC) directly into Canadian Joint Operations Com- mand (CJOC). That construct resolved many of our challenges of making sure that the right information would be available to the right commander in reasonable time, whether it was the com- mander of CJOC, SOFCOM or NORAD. For the domestic mission, CANSpOC's first role is domain awareness. So we have located the key team from CANSpOC on the watch floor – the integrated operations control centre in Ot- tawa. The first team stood up was only able to do a portion of the week, but now we are fully manned and able to sustain 24-7, 365 days as part of the watch. The cell's role is to take data and produce understanding, which answers the first question of every commander: "What is going on?" We are also postured to answer unexpected events. In space, it is understanding what is around, and we spend a lot of time on critical enablers, satellites that we own or have access to through our NORAD, Five Eyes and NATO partners. We also pay a lot of attention to the health and status of satellites of interest, we track them primarily through access to the U.S. Spacetrack catalogue where we are also a contributor of data through our Sapphire satellite program. By monitoring the space environment, we have a greater understanding of any potential threats, whether they be natural, such as space weather effects, or man-made, such as po- tential collisions from space debris. And we use our systems and the expertise of the CANSpOC to support commanders with things like strategic missile warning information or understanding and predicting the accuracy, health and status of the GPS constellation. We are also able to leverage the capabilities of our closest al- lies after the signing of the Combined Space Operations (CSpO) Memorandum of Understanding last September with Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. With our closest partners, we are communicating daily, to assure the strategic ad- vantage of space and provide resources to forces both domesti- cally and in deployed operations. Q Are you now deploying small teams from that cell globally? We do. Our Joint Space Support Team is a small unit that attaches itself to the deployed headquarters, normally to the watch if there is such a construct in the operations centre. The JSST is usually

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