:
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today.
I would like to extend greetings from your NORAD commander Admiral Bill Gortney.
As I begin, I would be remiss if I did not share with you how fortunate and humbled I feel to have the opportunity to serve our great country as a NORAD deputy commander. As such, I would like to begin by reminding the committee that, by agreement, NORAD has three missions: aerospace warning, aerospace control, and maritime warning. Since it's the newest, I'd like to begin with maritime warning.
Maritime warning consists of processing, assessing, and disseminating intelligence and information related to the respective maritime areas and internal waterways and approaches to the U.S. and Canada. It was added as a mission in 2006, and NORAD issued its first maritime advisory in 2010. Since then, it has grown to provide 14 advisories in 2013, 21 in 2014, and 1 so far in 2015. While maritime threats may develop over a longer time period, it's important to know that a seaborne threat can become an aerospace warning and defence issue with little warning. While barriers still exist, especially with regard to information sharing, maritime warning is a tremendous example of how the two nations came to an understanding of the mission gap and agreed that it could be resolved utilizing the proven cooperative mechanism established under NORAD.
Aerospace warning consists of processing, assessing, and disseminating intelligence and information related to manmade objects in the aerospace domain and the detection, validation, and warning of attack against North America whether by aircraft, missiles, or space vehicles. Ultimately providing continuous, timely, and unambiguous warning of threats and maintaining the reliable means to communicate this warning are the hallmarks of NORAD, and we must continue to ensure that our systems remain relevant and capable.
Rounding out our mission set is aerospace control, which consists of providing surveillance and exercising operational control of the airspace of the U.S. and Canada. Critical to this mission is our continued effort to sustain the readiness of our forces.
Our current defence capabilities absolutely rely on well-trained crews and equally well-equipped and maintained aircraft. Additionally, as our understanding of the capabilities of potential adversaries comes into focus, we will require aerospace defence systems capable of tracking and engaging long-range aircraft, low observable cruise missiles, and even UAVs. We will not be able to outpace emerging threats without evolving and adapting to meet these challenges.
Over the past two years, NORAD has been tracking a variety of changes from both state and non-state actors that could challenge the concept and constructs of defence that were put in place, for the most part, in the last century.
I must be absolutely clear on this point. I am not trying to sound the alarm; however, the 9/11 commission chastised NORAD when it reported:
We recognize that a costly change in NORAD's defense posture to deal with the danger of suicide hijackers, before such a threat had ever actually been realized, would have been a tough sell. But NORAD did not canvass available intelligence and try to make the case.
In light of the changes that are occurring, we are now working to make a case for how NORAD should evolve to meet the requirements of the 21st century. Threats to our national security are becoming more diffuse and less attributable, and North America is increasingly vulnerable to an array of evolving threats, state or non-state, traditional or asymmetric, across all the domains of air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.
Furthermore, regional conflicts can rapidly expand to have global implications and even impact the homeland. For example, as conditions in Syria worsened, we were concerned about the possibility of cyberattacks on North America.
I will now take a moment to highlight some of the significant changes that are under way.
Since the fall of 2011, we have seen a transformation in Russian military doctrine, operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures. It is fielding more precise and capable air and sea launch cruise missiles and is participating in longer sea deployments and more complex exercises, especially in the far north. It has undertaken broad modernization programs in all major weapons systems to include submarine launched ballistic missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles. It has increased the frequency of strategic force exercises, and annexed Crimea. While some elements of the old Soviet model apply, it's clear that Russia is working to make a break from the past regarding its military capabilities. We believe Russia is pursuing a new doctrine which draws on the strategic use of precise weapons to achieve strategic effects.
Both North Korea and Iran continue to invest in ballistic missile, nuclear, cyber, and other advanced weapons technologies. The advent of North Korea's successful space launch and previous nuclear tests have led us to consider North Korea's ballistic missiles as a practical and no longer theoretical threat, one that must be defended against.
Additionally, threats from terrorist organizations, while diminished, have by no means evaporated. Of special concern, with the growing likelihood of collusion, willing or not, between transnational crime organizations and terrorists based on the desire to traffic in weapons, drugs, people, etc., there is a growing opportunity for terrorists to use modern weapons such as cruise or even short-range ballistic missiles launched from shipping containers or the delivery of weapons of mass destruction from unmanned aerial vehicles or general aviation aircraft.
Adding to the complexity of these threats is the continuing retreat of sea ice in the north, which is turning the Arctic into an approach to the continent, one that could be exploited in an opportunistic way.
There is another area of growing concern: attacks launched by homegrown violent extremists. Whether or not they are inspired by international terrorist organizations, there is usually little intelligence or warning that could be used to put a stop to their attacks before they are carried out.
However, in the attack on Ottawa, NORAD quickly provided overhead combat air patrols and diverted aircraft to Trenton to maintain a high alert status to ensure any attempt to take advantage of the situation through the air would be foiled.
Despite the challenges, the NORAD Agreement, which came into being 56 years ago, is still the big idea for the defence of North America. The best way to defend and evolve the defence of the continent is cooperatively through the long-established experience of NORAD.
Ensuring the continued success of these missions and the ability to stay ahead of the threats to North America are a clear objective of the command. In December, our previous NORAD commander, General Jacoby, signed a completed NORAD strategic review and sent it to the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The review noted that improved sensors, communications systems, and infrastructure may be required in the high north for NORAD to continue to be relevant and effective as we move deeper into the 21st century. The review also included an examination of current and potential future roles, missions, and command relationships. Beyond the review, NORAD is also running a number of exercises and tests in search of ways to mitigate and overcome the evolving challenges we face.
Finally, I can't tell you how proud I am to serve and have the watch with the soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen of Canada and the United States who selflessly serve our two great countries. Based on their extraordinary drive, professionalism and ingenuity, I'm confident our future is in good hands.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.
:
Mr. Norlock, thank you very much for the question.
You touched on a very important point in your question, which is the tyranny of the distances in Canada. Speaking of distances, a lot of people don't know that there's more distance between the southern edge of Canada and the northern edge of Canada than there is east to west, because of the way we look at the map. Normally people think about Canada in terms of east to west, but going to the north is our biggest challenge in terms of distance.
Partnering with the U.S. has served us extremely well. A concrete example is that we don't have enough tanker aircraft to protect our north by ourselves. However, the U.S., through the NORAD Agreement, has placed on alert two U.S. tanker aircraft, which are aircraft that deliver fuel airborne. One is on the east coast in Bangor, Maine, and one is in Fairchild, Washington. When our fighters take off from either Bagotville or Cold Lake and they have to head up north, these tankers will also launch, and that allows us to extend our reach as far north as we can.
Distance also poses a challenge in terms of the forward operating locations up north, where they are still relatively south with respect to the extreme northern edge of Canada.
The other area where we benefit from the NORAD Agreement is in the use of airborne early warning aircraft, commonly known as AWACS, where they extend the reach of the radar.
It's a vast area both for the asymmetric threat, which is commercial airlines like those used in 9/11, and the symmetric threat from long-range munitions from Russia. NORAD definitely profits from the partnership with the U.S. to make sure we have the right capabilities.
I think I forgot about the maritime warning mission.
Binationally we do the maritime warning, which is fusing all the information from all the maritime stakeholders. Giving NORAD the maritime warning mission has allowed a conduit to fuse the information and intelligence of everybody interested in the maritime domain awareness. Bilaterally we have the Canadian Joint Operations Command and NORTHCOM, the navigation north command, that work together and are able to put the mechanisms in place to do the maritime control.
NORAD's role is to transmit simultaneously to the governments of both Canada and the United States a maritime advisory message or maritime warning message. Bilaterally NORTHCOM and the Canadian Joint Operations Command, with law enforcement partners, decide how to prosecute those warning or advisory messages.
Okay, sir. The threats have evolved in terms that it started with long-range aviation and evolved into ICBMs, and then before 9/11 we were looking at outside. After 9/11, we started looking not only outside the approaches to the continent but also inside, since on that day all the attacks came from within the United States.
In terms of the measures we can take, NORAD is assigned the mission by the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States. What we can do is provide a combined joint assessment of the threats and explain the capabilities and requirements to mitigate those threats. Once we give our ideas, then it's not really up to NORAD itself to decide how to deal with these threats, or to accept or not accept the risks of these threats.
In terms of terrorism, for maritime we have vessels of interest for which, based on the information we collect, we will do an advisory message or a warning message. Then these vessels will be inspected, visited mainly by a law enforcement agency, most of the time, and civilian authorities.
From the air, we are still concerned about the commercial aviation threat. The bin Laden papers, when he was killed, still mentioned a high interest by al Qaeda to use aviation against North America, particularly general aviation as well. The business jet type of aviation could be used as a missile. Since 9/11 we have measures in place where we exercise regularly detecting a potential track of interest, doing an interception, and having conferences where, if required, we would take down those tracks of interest.
:
I thank you for pointing that out. I had made note of that. Thank you for the specificity in what you think is the priority.
In an article in March, a deputy commander of Canadian Joint Operations Command, in a general quote, stated that of the challenges facing the tri-command, NORAD, CJOC, and NORTHCOM in the U.S., the major challenges are cybersecurity, defence against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear agents, and security and defence in the north.
I think we've talked about security and defence in the north, but I want to ask you how NORAD would be prepared for dealing with cybersecurity as one category, and the other is the defence against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear agents as a separate category. Perhaps you could briefly deal with those issues separately, with cyberdefence and the others, because it seems to me that some of those threats might be part of this aviation issue you talked about, the general aviation. Is that the focus of your concern about these issues? Could you elaborate?
From the NORAD point of view, in our lane we're still concerned about the approaches. I would put air and maritime ahead of cyber, because that's our directed mandate, and to us it's a no-fail mandate.
In terms of cyber, in doing our maritime and aerospace mandate we have to operate with cyber systems, and we have to operate in a contested cyber environment. In those terms, we have to stay ahead of the threats in trying to outpace the threats so that our systems are not vulnerable to cyberattacks.
In terms of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear agents, those are agents that could be transported by air or in maritime approaches towards North America. We try to gather as much intelligence as we can on these potential agents, but for us it's about the approaches by air or by sea, whereas for CJOC it's by land.
In terms of the defence of the north, we think of the north in three sectors: safety, security, and defence. Safety is mainly the realm of maritime safety, of course, and air safety, and then there is the realm of the civilian agency and the search and rescue system. For security, it's more in the law enforcement agency realm that we're there in support, given the capabilities we have. Finally, on defence, when we talk of defence from the NORAD point of view, it's aerospace defence and maritime warning.
:
Thank you for your question, sir. It's good to see you again as well.
There are various stages in a ballistic missile engagement. The first stage is the intelligence and warning, or the indicators and warning. When a cycle of provocation is initiated, at the onset I may or may not be in the room for those discussions if it will involve ballistic missile defence. It's very much dependent on how the theatre in charge of North Korea, the Pacific command, decides to disseminate the information as releasable to its allies or as U.S.-only information.
Once a missile is launched, the missile warning mission is done by NORAD. The missile is launched and we have infrared signature from that missile. NORAD processes that missile. I'm fully involved and the NORAD personnel are fully involved. Once it gets into outer space and the object is cold and can be engaged by ballistic missile defence, we will not leave the room. We will still be involved by virtue of doing the missile warning, but we have no voice in the deliberations, the tactics, or on the decision cycle to engage or not engage that missile. USNORTHCOM does that engagement.
Once the engagement is done, if it passes.... The only way to figure out if it's a success or a failure is in the detection. If there is no re-entry of these objects detected, then it's probably a success. If there's a re-entry, it's for NORAD to characterize all re-entries back into the atmosphere, and then the NORAD chain of command is involved again. If it's armed with a nuclear weapon, NORAD again is in charge of disseminating and processing nuclear detonation worldwide. There is a change in the chain, in what we call the kill chain of that ballistic missile, between NORAD, USNORTHCOM, and back to NORAD.