:
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will start by introducing the team that is with me today. I have my Regimental Sergeant Major, Chief Warrant Officer Wayne Ford, and my personal assistant, Captain Mike Duggan, who have travelled with me from Kingston to join me here today.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am truly pleased to speak with you this afternoon on the subject of preparing our forces for success in land operations, be they missions at home or missions abroad, and today in particular in Afghanistan.
My duties as Commander, Land Force Doctrine and Training, as well as experience over the last decade-plus, permit me to provide you with some insights into the philosophy as well as the reality of our training design and our training delivery. In the end, I hope to leave you with the view that we Canadians continue to produce world-class results with a world-class team of military professionals, alongside valued and dedicated civilian and international partners. We achieve these results through a lifetime of investment in the quality of each military professional, regular and reserve force, and through a progressive and regulated journey of team building, from teams of two to teams of over 2,000, to produce the confidence and competence that allow our people to succeed.
[Translation]
The mission of the Canadian Forces is to defend Canada and Canadians and to promote peace and security abroad. Our land forces, as an entity of the Canadian Forces, must generate and support multi-faceted combat-ready land forces capable of delivering results on the ground in both peace and wartime, here and abroad, today or tomorrow.
Every day, the Canadian Forces soldiers who are not deployed in operations are involved in four main activities: maintaining a strong foundation for the generation of forces; producing forces that are ready to be deployed; transformation and growth. I would now like to focus on the preparatory work we do for our forces that are ready to participate in operations.
[English]
The Government of Canada has tasked the Canadian Forces to maintain, amongst other commitments, the capability to provide, one, high-readiness brigade headquarters, and, two, land task forces for expeditionary operations on an enduring basis. The two task-force-level lines of operation represent the main output of the force's management readiness plan for land operations.
The chart behind me illustrates how we have, in the army, earmarked lead units for each of these land task forces from now to 2010.
Allow me to walk you briefly through the chart. In terms of a brigade lead, on the top you will see the three brigade group headquarters of the Canadian Army earmarked for high readiness or mission deployment in any particular 12-month to 18-month period. Below them, we have earmarked the land task forces based on an elite army unit that will deploy in operations or be earmarked for high readiness if they have no mission assigned.
Line of Ops 1, as we call it, is committed until 2009 to Afghanistan, and Line of Ops 2 is a reserve capability available to the Government of Canada for other missions and tasks. Given the level of our effort in Afghanistan, the Line of Ops 2 task forces are smaller, by necessity, than those in Line of Ops 1.
[Translation]
Let us now talk about what we need to do in order to prepare for our operations. Many months or, in some cases, a few years before being operationally ready, our soldiers receive individual instruction and professional training in order to develop general personal skills, skills specific to their area of expertise or combat readiness.
This applies to all ranks, whether we are talking about officers or junior officers. We maintain a very high calibre professional training program. This program is required in order to train our professional leaders and soldiers throughout their career.
[English]
Courses and professional development activities lead to advancement in rank, new skills and knowledge, and new responsibilities and authorities for our men and women. Armed with these, we form our teams at the most basic levels and progressively upwards, to the point that we achieve competence in trade in such areas as logistics and signals. That then allows us to group our all-arms team together; that is, our infantry, armour, artillery, engineers, signals, and our service support, such as supply, transport, maintenance, medical, military police, and the like.
These all-arms teams, which constitute the main element of our task forces, participate in steadily increasing levels of collective training, both computer-based and field. Their months of collective training culminate now in an army-directed exercise in our new collective training centre, the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre in Wainwright, Alberta, where they join the final additions of the Canadian Forces' team, such as air forces, special forces, and intelligence forces, as well as our whole-of-government partners and, where possible, multinational partners. Here in Wainwright, they experience over a period of four weeks the full replication of the environment they will live in operations before they are declared ready to deploy.
[Translation]
The Canadian Forces presently in Afghanistan include much more than the manoeuvre forces that perform the operations on a daily basis. This diagram provides the details on all of the components of our team currently in Afghanistan.
In Kabul, we have a strategic advisory team as well as an Afghan national training team. In Canada, we have a National Command Element and a National Support Element. There is also the HQ Command, the Multi-National Brigade in charge of the south regional command and the designated tactical group in the province of Kandahar. This group is based on 1 PPCLI. The provincial construction team as well as other officers are located in the city of Kandahar.
In preparation for the replacement of most of these groups occurring this summer and autumn, we have provided the required training and developed some esprit de corps in the group that will replace them.
[English]
In the end we guarantee our people that they deploy well-equipped, well-trained, and well-led. This is demonstrated and confirmed through our whole range of training activities, including chain-of-command-led confirmation exercises.
[Translation]
In closing, I should clarify where our staff come from.
This diagram illustrates only the major bases where we generate the land force units and support elements. However, it does not include the bases and the navy and air force executives who make up the rest of the team and who are truly crucial to our success.
In order to illustrate the level of complexity involved in developing a well-trained team, I would like to show you where we are getting the troops who will be participating in the next three operational forces designated for Afghanistan.
[English]
In the summer of 2006, the 1 PPCLI Battle Group will be replaced by 1 RCR Battle Group, originating from Petawawa, Ontario. They will be supported by an infantry company from Shilo, Manitoba, with the balance of their forces, service support, and specialists from across the Canadian Forces. Their unmanned aerial vehicle unit will come from 408 Squadron based in Edmonton, Alberta, and soldiers will be provided by 5 Brigade in Valcartier.
Most of their training has taken place in Petawawa and Gagetown, New Brunswick, and was completed in May of this year in Wainwright, Alberta.
They'll be succeeded in February of 2007 by the 2 RCR Battle Group, originating from Gagetown, New Brunswick, and an infantry company will join them from Edmonton, Alberta, and their artillery engineer and service support will come from Petawawa, Ontario. They will train mostly in Gagetown, New Brunswick, and their last training event will be at the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre in Wainwright, Alberta.
[Translation]
Finally, the 3rd Battalion of the 22nd Regiment will be deployed in the fall of 2007 and will be originating from Valcartier. The Company of the 3rd Battalion is based in Valcartier, as well as most of the mission elements provided by the Valcartier brigade.
[English]
Here, other mission neighbours will originate from across the CF. Training will take place for them in Valcartier and in Gagetown and will culminate again at the Manoeuvre Training Centre in Wainwright.
So in the end, we strive to ensure that our men and women, soldiers all, have the training and conditioning to enable them to perform the mission that Canada has presented them, effectively as a team, with the best possible chances for success, and in a way that allows their experiences and lessons to be passed to those who follow behind. We work to regulate the load on the balance of our army and the Canadian Forces to ensure that we can do missions like Afghanistan, or wherever else conditions require us to go, well into the future.
[Translation]
Thank you. I will now entertain any questions you may have.
:
Absolutely. There are multiple dimensions to the delivery of the mission, and, as I pointed out, the mission elements are more than only the fighting battle group that is there. There is a national capacity-building effort, the national training effort, the PRT effort, and the battle group.
To live in a counter-insurgency environment and to perform those operations—if I may regress a bit, I was in Bosnia. We were applying our effort to capacity building in Bosnia, but in a different environment. And because it's a counter-insurgency environment with the nature of the threat, we have adapted our baseline, as well as the specific mission training, to be able to ensure that our people have experienced that before they deploy, experienced it in their training before they see it in operations.
What that implies, in specific terms, is that when our soldiers and our leaders are engaged in their individual training, they're not being presented a training scenario that is the old “Warsaw Pact coming across the East German border” scenario. They're being presented a failed-state scenario, within which you find paramilitary forces, former military forces, terrorist extremist forces, crime and corruption, as well as the non-combatants living in the battle spaces, as well as all the international actors who would be there. So we are now treating that as normal; that's no longer abnormal.
What is complicating is the methods that are being used by the opponents. So what we do in that particular case is to introduce their methods in our baseline training, so we are accustomed to seeing that in our military training. Then for specific threats in a specific theatre, we ensure that we deliver that to our soldiers well on the journey, before they get there, and they see it in practice before they get there—like the IED threat, for example. Our soldiers now treat as normal, failed and failing state scenarios. We treat as normal multiple threats, be it a counter-insurgency, be it an insurgency, be it failed military, be it across-the-border threats, and we adapt them to the specific mission. The Warsaw Pact-type scenarios are no longer our baseline.
:
You're absolutely right. Essentially, they have all terrains. They have high plateaus, deserts, mountains, greenery, and sand.
In terms of our capacity to live in those environments, in the mountains and in the deserts, basically on our own, without support, our baseline training provides that. If we need specialist skills for mountain operations, we train individuals in those skills. They get that and take that with them. Mountain operations have those individuals on the team.
The most important thing to replicate in Wainwright isn't necessarily the terrain. It's what I call the “human environment” or the “conflict environment”. Our folks aren't trying to overcome mountains, fields, and deserts. That's only where they're living. They're actually challenged to overcome the human conditions where they're operating.
In the case of an Afghanistan mission, they're presented with a replication of the Afghani environment. They see civilians, farmers, and commercial trade. They're presented with confrontational scenarios as represented by corrupt officials, the dispossessed, terrorist extremists, and the Taliban. That's what Wainwright allows us to do.
As a matter of fact, this year we've actually awarded a contract to a company in the United States to role-play specific actors on the battle space. We want it to be very professionally done, and they'll be starting to do that this fall in Wainwright. This is a method the U.S. military has been using for quite some time.
That's the replication we're really focusing on.
:
I'd like to call the meeting back to order, please.
Well, that was quick. Thank you very much.
First of all, committee, I'd like to thank you all for giving me this opportunity. I talked to all the parties about giving me a few minutes to address a situation that arose out of a previous meeting. If you give me a few minutes, I'd like to recap what happened and then see if the resolution I have developed is acceptable to you. I'd like to address the events of June 8, first of all, and then the June 13 committee meetings.
First I want to assure Mr. Bachand and all members that my vacating the chair at the June 8 meeting was not part of a prearranged scheme to adjourn the meeting early. I have not played, I am not playing, and I will not play those kinds of games with this committee; however, the motion to adjourn early was presented, it was handled properly by Mr. Bachand and the clerk, and it was passed.
From that early adjournment motion, there were two motions presented by Ms. Black at the June 13 meeting. One motion dealt with potential future dilatory motions; it was eventually withdrawn. The motion in question in my mind is the one in which Ms. Black asked for an apology to be sent to the witnesses.
After reviewing the motion, I sought advice, researched the acceptability of that motion, and received some varying options and opinions. The clerk had ruled the motion acceptable, based on his research and advice he had received, and rightly so. I have been told by some that the motion was admissible and by others that it was not. What I should have done, the more so because of the conflicting views of the committee members, was left these arguments to the committee.
First of all, Mr. Bachand, I want to assure you that exposing you to that original situation was not my intent.
To Ms. Black, I'd like to circulate to the committee a letter that I have prepared for your perusal and for input. The letter is being passed out; I'll wait until it's handed out to everybody.
What I would do is this: we'd have the list of witnesses who were here, and under the heading there, the witness's name would be entered.
I would like to apologize for the early adjournment of the June 8th meeting of the Standing Committee on National Defence.
I appreciate the fact that, at the Committee's request, you took time out of your busy schedule to appear at the meeting to offer your perspective on the issue we are studying. In many cases, witnesses use the question and answer portion of these meetings to make points they did not have time to make during their ten-minute presentation.
Any information you would have presented in the remaining scheduled time of the meeting and that you were unable to present because of the early adjournment, I invite you to submit to the committee as written evidence to be used in the preparation of our final report.
Once again, please accept my apology and I thank you for taking the time to appear at our committee and presenting your views.
That will be over my signature.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's the path I would like to pursue. I would suppose, Ms. Black, that because it was your motion, you may wish to comment.
:
I am not as complaisant as my colleague.
Mr. Chairman, with all due respect, you were not here when these things occurred. The resolution and Ms. Black's motion clearly states that the committee, and not the chair, apologizes. The committee is apologizing for the poor conduct of the Conservative members. They were the ones who voted in favour of the motion to adjourn. No one on this side of the table did that. As a result of the way that the matter was then resolved, there was even talk about the opposition demanding the resignation of the chair because, in my opinion, we cannot treat witnesses in that manner, and try to then hide the fact and say that we did not know what happened. That is not tolerable. Given the entire procedure, we will set the resolution aside and accept your letter of apology.
I would have liked to adopt the motion today, because the conduct of the Conservative members of the committee is really at issue. You had to be here to have seen it. It was done abruptly. I feel that the witnesses were not treated properly.
If we do not want to politicize the committee too much, we have to get off on the right foot. I am prepared to accept your apology, I know that you were not involved in that. You will agree with me, however, that it is curious that you came to see me in the lobby on Monday in order to tell me that you had nothing to do with it and then, the following day, you stated that the resolution being discussed was not in order.
If my friends from the Liberal Party want to be complacent, so be it, but I think that we will be heading towards other problems. It is good of you, Mr. Chairman, to accept this responsibility and to say that it was your fault, when you in fact were not there. For that matter, perhaps I should be the one writing a letter of apology, because I was chairing the meeting.
I would have preferred the motion to have been left as is. If it is not to be, we will be voting in favour of the motion on the table. You have a letter of apology and a motion. I do not know what is on the table, but if it is the motion, I will vote for it. If it is the other motion, I will vote against it because it seems to me that another very important factor is involved. Apologizing to the committee members and witnesses does not amount to very much, but it would have been polite to have called these witnesses back and asked them to complete their testimony.
That is not what is said in the chairman's letter today. It states that because of the meeting ending so quickly, we were inviting them to forward their information to the committee in the form of a brief. That means that the Conservative members, once they have a majority and don't want to hear certain testimony, will put an end to the meeting and ask the witnesses to send the remainder of their presentation to us in writing. That is not how I'm hoping to treat witnesses.
Personally, I would prefer the first motion to remain on the table, but I will see how things unfold before I decide how I will vote.