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Speech
CMS REMARKS FOR SCONDVA
VAdm G.R. Maddison, Chief of the Maritime Staff
May 31, 2001
INTRODUCTIONMr. Chairman, distinguished members of the Committee: Good afternoon. I am particularly pleased and honoured to be able to address you today on the subject of the operational readiness of your Navy. Joining me today are Commodore Jacques Gauvin, Director General of Maritime Personnel and Readiness, and Chief Petty Officer First Class Richard Lupien, the Command Chief Petty Officer, the navy's senior non-commissioned member.
COMBAT CAPABLE
Permit me to start by saying that your navy is more combat-capable today than it was in 1990 when we sent a Task Group of three ships to the Persian Gulf. It may not be the largest fleet ever, nor does it include the widest array of warship types and equipment; nonetheless, Canadians enjoy a fleet that is balanced in overall capability and well poised to undertake its many domestic and international tasks.
Our shore-based infrastructure is first-rate, thanks to considerable investments made over the past decade. Our training establishment, in particular, is among the most advanced anywhere. At sea, Canada's fleet has been virtually rebuilt over the past decade. The steam-powered destroyer escorts built during the 1950s have all been retired and replaced by the twelve Halifax Class frigates, considered amongst the finest of their kind. The four larger Iroquois Class destroyers have been thoroughly modernized and provide a task group commander with a potent air defence and command & control capability. Twelve Kingston Class Maritime Coastal Defence Vessels, manned almost exclusively by naval reservists, have proven to be both highly effective and cost-efficient in their coastal defence and mine warfare roles. With the introduction over the next couple years of the four Victoria Class submarines, together with the acquisition of a replacement for the Sea King helicopters and the planned update of the Aurora long-range patrol aircraft, the balance of Canada's maritime forces - air, surface and sub-surface - is well on its way to being restored.
As a result of these investments, Canada has a fleet with robust combat capabilities and renewed international status, the most visible expression of which is the presence today of two Canadian ships in the Arabian Gulf - HMC ships Charlottetown and Winnipeg - as fully integrated members of American Carrier Battle Groups, working together in support of the United Nations sanctions against Iraq. While Winnipeg and Charlottetown remain under clear Canadian command and follow Canadian approved Rules of Engagement, working alongside the United States Navy enables us to keep at the forefront of allied tactical, doctrinal and technical developments: in other words, at the forefront of interoperability and the forefront of the Revolution of Military Affairs.
There are areas, however, where we fall short in comparing ourselves to the Fleet of 1990. Today, Canada has no operational submarines whereas three were operating in 1990. Fortunately, this situation will be addressed soon when the very capable Victoria class enters operational service.
A second shortfall concerns fleet replenishment. In the early 1960s and 70s, Canada pioneered the concept of multi-purpose, underway replenishment vessels to fuel and provision warships at sea. These vessels increased six-fold the length of time the fleet could remain at sea for operations. Ten years ago, those three vessels - Provider and two Protecteur class - were twenty to twenty-five years old. Today, only the two thirty-year old Protecteur class remain. While they remain very effective in performing their replenishment roles, as seen most recently in East Timor, they are beginning to show their age.
The replacement of the Protecteur class is being proposed through development of the Afloat Logistics and Sealift Capability. This project, were it to be approved, would not only replace the at-sea logistics support of the Protecteur Class, but would also be capable of delivering the lead elements of a Canadian contingency force anywhere in the world accessible by sea: fully 85 percent of the world's population will be accessible to the CF from the sea as a result of the capabilities proposed for this vessel. Other roles, including aviation support, logistics over the shoreline, humanitarian crisis response and a joint force headquarters capability are also under consideration for this vessel, which I hope to see by 2007.
Certainly no discussion of maritime force capability is complete without including mention of the significant part that our maritime patrol and helicopter communities play. The Sea Kings are old and their sensor capabilities and some avionics are now largely obsolete. When they are serviceable, however, they still make a difference. Nonetheless, they do need to be replaced. The other major contributor to maritime operations is the Aurora aircraft, which, as I mentioned earlier, are being upgraded in the near future.
In essence, Canada's fleet is becoming more balanced in capability, and it is significantly more combat capable now than it has been for decades.
READY FOR WHAT?
These points, I believe, are becoming better understood by Canadians, and the proof is in the fact that our ships have deployed to virtually every navigable corner of the globe in the past few years. Your navy has been involved in nearly every major multilateral peace support operation that Canada has participated in since the end of the Cold War - including Cambodia, the Persian Gulf War, Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, East Timor and the Arabian Gulf - in maritime peacekeeping operations as diverse as the delivery of humanitarian assistance to local populations and the enforcement of UN Sanctions through maritime interdiction and embargo operations.
Our ships are potent symbols of our national competence. The unique combination of long mission endurance, extensive communications and hitting power makes them a respected messenger of government policy. At home, your navy has contributed to a number of major domestic operations, including response to the Swiss Air 111 disaster and the Red River Floods, in addition to protecting resources and enforcing sovereignty in our maritime approaches. In this latter category falls much of the effort in support of other government departments, including the RCMP, Customs and Immigration Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
In short, your navy has been busier recently than any time since the Korean Conflict. Today, for example, I have just over 2000 men and women at sea going about their business. That's nearly 50 percent of the sea-going establishment of 4,400. Just one week ago, 3497 people, or nearly three-quarters of the sea-going establishment, were deployed.
And this is unlikely to change: the unique conditions that created the Cold War are unlikely to be replicated in today's broadened security environment - at once both global in outlook and more independent of traditional allegiances and national boundaries. In fact, the type of work your navy is doing today is a better reflection of the full range of military, diplomatic and constabulary tasks that navies have been called upon to perform by the leading maritime powers of the day. Accordingly, my cardinal objective is that the navy will continue to possess a broad range of capabilities to provide our Government the widest range of responses as possible to the security issues of the day.
These responses, of course, must be ready when needed.
READINESS
Readiness, in the naval context, is an assessment of the preparedness of a naval platform and its crew to successfully conduct an assigned task, role or mission. Some operations require merely the presence of a ship at sea, performing work safely and in observance of good seamanship. This, for example, would include routine surveillance work in domestic waters. Other operations would require all sensors and weapons to be manned and available for immediate use. These kinds of operations would be conducted in the presence, or potential presence, of an adversary. Winnipeg and Charlottetown, both of whom I mentioned are in the Arabian Gulf today, have been prepared for precisely these kinds of contingencies.
Given the multitude of potential missions to which naval units can be assigned, readiness is benchmarked against an ability to operate in a conflict of mid-intensity like the Persian Gulf War. However, in today's environment, it is not necessary nor even desired that all units be maintained uniformly at the levels of readiness required for combat operations. The challenge, of course, is in matching resources to operational commitments.
To this end, a tiered approach to readiness is being adopted. Winnipeg and Charlottetown are examples of High Readiness frigates, available in a short time frame for combat type operations. Other ships are maintained at a lower level of readiness called Standard Readiness. These are capable of performing the vast majority of domestic operations and training. Indeed, both HMCS Athabaskan and Montreal, the two ships that conducted the successful boarding of the GTS KATIE off the coast of Newfoundland last August, were Standard Readiness ships. Ships placed at Extended Readiness range from those placed in extended maintenance periods to those placed in a care and custody status, such as HMCS Huron on the West Coast. The resources that would otherwise be required to keep her at sea have been allocated to better advantage into other ships of the fleet.
MEASURING READINESS
The complexity of modern operations and the technical sophistication of our ships dictate a rigorous approach to readiness and its measurement. As a ship progresses from extended readiness to high readiness, she undergoes a progressively more demanding series of trials, evaluations, work-ups and weapons systems certifications to validate her preparedness - in terms of technical performance and crew competence - for combat operations.
In this regard, much was learned in the 1990s, in the midst of the transition to the current fleet. The operational capability analysis, or OCA, was born of a desire to measure weapons performance at the overall systems level through exercise firings to determine and correct the root cause of any deficiencies discovered, whether technical or training related. The result has been a significant improvement in overall combat effectiveness and success in tactically realistic and highly demanding exercise scenarios that would have been considered too ambitious just a few years ago. First applied to our anti-air warfare capabilities, the OCA methodology is now being used to improve our capabilities in other warfare disciplines.
CHALLENGES
Nevertheless, a fleet is not a static thing. It continually must be renewed, and at significant cost. Yet the challenge of building our future fleet may well be eclipsed by the challenges of preparing our people for the demands of future operations.
Without a doubt, the profession of arms is becoming increasingly complex. Indeed, warfare itself is changing in response to forces at work in virtually every field of human endeavour: that is to say, the information revolution. Industrial age warfare, as typified by the Second World War, is giving way to a new pattern of conflict, the outlines of which began to emerge in the Persian Gulf War and more recently in Kosovo. What we are talking about here, of course, is the ongoing Revolution in Military Affairs, in which three major trends are beginning to dominate:
· First is the emergence of long-range weapons of unprecedented accuracy and increasing "smartness", coupled to a system of increasingly powerful and discriminating sensors, command systems, and precise intelligence. Integrated precision engagement will play more of a prominent role in operations at all levels, including those at sea, in my view.
· Second is the emergence of information technologies. Information is critical to every aspect of military and naval operations. Information technologies have dramatically improved our ability to gather, process, store, and disseminate information in real time. Protecting the effective operation of one's own information systems, and exploiting, degrading, destroying, or disrupting those of an opponent will become an important focus of operations at all levels throughout the entire spectrum of conflict.
· Third is the increased use and application of space systems to virtually all aspects of military and naval operations, with the most immediate applications in communications and near-real time wide area surveillance and warning systems to enhance battlespace awareness. The ability to locate and identify, with a high degree of confidence, high-value fixed and mobile targets on earth and at sea from space-based systems fundamentally will change how we conduct operations.
These challenges are very real indeed, with profound implications not only for technological re-investment, but also for professional education and training, and for rapid adaptation of naval doctrine, procedure and, indeed, organization.
A further challenge arises from the capital-intensive nature of modern naval forces: they are not only expensive to own; they are also expensive to replace. Accordingly, striking an appropriate balance between sustaining the current fleet and building the next one is not easy. In fact, it never has been. However, if the cost of building and sustaining a navy is high, even higher is the price of getting it wrong.
Finally, I would identify one last major challenge that ultimately impacts on the readiness of the navy and the Canadian Forces, and that relates to the awareness Canadians have of our role as a national institution. I am confident that there exists a great deal of good will towards the Canadian Forces. Nonetheless, defence and national security are not high in most people's minds. In the long run, however, a Canadian public that is better informed of defence issues in general, and naval issues in particular, is truly in the national interest. And in this regard, the efforts of this committee are most welcome.
Thank you.
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