Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 22 - Evidence, May 30, 2005
OTTAWA, Monday, May 30, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 9:40 p.m. to examine and report on the national security policy for Canada.
Senator Colin Kenny (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. My name is Colin Kenny, and I chair the committee. Today, the committee will hear testimony relating to the review of Canadian defence policy, but first I would like to introduce the members of the committee.
Senator Atkins is from Ontario. He came to the Senate with 27 years of experience in the field of communications. He served as a senior adviser to former federal Conservative leader Robert Stanfield, also to Premier William Davis of Ontario and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. He is a member of our Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
Senator Tommy Banks is from Alberta. He is Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources. His committee recently released a report entitled ``The One-Tonne Challenge.'' He is well known to Canadians as a versatile musician and entertainer. He provided musical direction for the ceremonies of the 1988 Olympic Winter Games. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and he has received a Juno Award.
Senator Jim Munson is also from Ontario. He was a trusted journalist and former director of communications for Jean Chrétien before being called to the Senate in 2003. He was twice nominated for Gemini awards in recognition of excellence in journalism.
I will briefly discuss the mandate of the committee. Our committee has been ordered by the Senate to examine the need for a national security policy for Canada. We have produced the following reports since 2002: Canadian Security and Military Preparedness; The Defence of North America: A Canadian Responsibility; An Update on Canada's Military Crisis: A View From the Bottom Up; The Myth of Security at Canada's Airports; Canada's Coastlines: The Longest Under-Defended Borders in the World; National Emergencies: Canada's Fragile Front Lines; and most recently, The Canadian Security Guide Book, 2005 Edition.
We are in the midst of a detailed review of Canadian defence policy. We have been holding hearings in every province and engaging Canadians to determine their national interest, what they see as Canada's principal threats, and how they would like the government to respond to those threats. Canadians have been forthright in expressing their views on national security in Canada. We will continue working on this review throughout the summer in order to give a consensus on the type of military Canadians envision in the future.
Our witness this afternoon is Gen. Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defence Staff. Throughout his career, he has commanded troops from the platoon to the multi-national formation level within Canada, Asia and the United States. In 1998, Gen. Hillier was appointed as the first Canadian Deputy Commanding General of III Corps United States Army in Fort Hood, Texas. In 2000, he took command of NATO's Stabilization Force's Multinational Division in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In May 2003, he was appointed Commander of the Army and, subsequently, in October 2003, he was selected as Commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Once again, Gen. Hillier, welcome to the committee. Please proceed with your opening statement, after which we will have some questions for you.
General Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defence Staff, Department of National Defence: Senator, I am prepared to make some opening comments or to go directly to focussed questions. I am flexible.
The Chairman: We are happy to move directly to questions.
Gen. Hillier: I would be delighted. I feel like one of those persons indicted for war crimes whom we would to chase down in the former Yugoslavia when I was division commander there, particularly when the young lady asked me to sign the guest book. We always did that immediately before we took a person's picture and used it for a wanted poster. We then abducted them on the way out the door. All that remains to be done here today, is the last part.
The Chairman: We could probably get fifty cents or a buck for the autograph. From here you look pretty good with all the flags around you and not at all like a war criminal to us. We are glad you are here and we look forward to having a chance to talk with you. We have admonished committee members to be concise with their questions because we have many. I would extend that same encouragement to you so that we can have a good dialogue today.
Senator Atkins: Gen. Hillier, congratulations on your appointment.
Gen. Hillier: Senator, thank you.
Senator Atkins: You have been handed a great challenge. Regardless of the category, whether it be funding, replacing equipment or recruiting, I do not know how you will manage those, but hopefully we will be a little smarter after our discussions here today.
There appears to be insufficient funding available to the Canadian Forces either to catch up for the shortfalls of recent years or to implement the new policies in the near term. Would you comment on that?
Gen. Hillier: Senator, I certainly will. First, let me return to your introductory remarks. We have been handed a huge challenge. I am not in this alone. Approximately 62,000 regular force men and woman work with me. We rely on them. No one person does this by himself or herself. Second, we have some 24,000-plus reservists who are as committed to their country and the service of their country as any man or woman in our country. As well, around 20,000 civilians are also part of this defence team.
I have learned that you never eat an elephant in one bite. We did not get into the situation that the Canadian Forces are in six months, one year, five years or even a decade. It will take us a while to get to where we want to be. Without question ,that is the truth. We must bite these things off one at a time and make sure we have the bites the right size so that we do not choke on them and deal with what is most important first.
Funding has been a challenge throughout the past decade. We have been stressed on operations and spending a significant amount of money on operations. Funding over the past decade, in real terms, has been shrinking. At the same time, the demands for maintenance and replacement of vehicles and aircraft and the maintenance of infrastructure has increased. We have had a challenge, and we have found ourselves in a deficit.
We are now on the cusp of growing. Increased funding has been given to us this year. It is not enough, but given what we have done to ourselves in the last eight years, it is as much as we would want to bite off at this time.
In the past five to eight years, we have downsized every part of our system, including our recruiting system. We essentially stopped recruiting or reduced recruiting to such a minor level that we did not need a large recruiting system. People were taken out of it. We also reduced our capital acquisitions enormously. We reduced the number of people who actually go out and acquire things for us.
To begin with, we needed increased funding to start rebuilding the recruiting, acquisition and training systems that we let run down. We must also put some money into the infrastructure, the plant and the area of training. We have made a start this year. However, there is not enough money in the budget.
We have a commitment over five years that will allow us to start turning the corner. As we sort out the direction of the Canadian Forces that is articulated in the defence policy statement, and as we do the detailed planning, that will allow us to determine whether we have enough money to complete the entire job. I would suggest that we have enough to start.
This is a big problem. I do not make light of it. As the commander of the navy said to me a couple of weeks ago, this is a big challenge, but this is a far better challenge than trying to figure out how to cut down our systems, how to stop buying things and how to get along on a little less each month and each year.
We will ramp up slowly. As we do that, we will lay out the detailed plan and then tell you how much money we will need to be able to complete the transformation as articulated in the defence policy statement. I view what was laid out as a five-year program as the basis to start turning the corner.
Senator Atkins: Over the last three years, our committee's main concern has been how we can catch up. The budget of $1.1 billion is over two years — $500 million this year and $700 million next year. However, you are faced with a clawback. Does that frustrate you? You are given a specific sum of money only to be told that it is not the amount you truly have.
Gen. Hillier: We had not doubt about the amount of money we were getting this year and the amount of money that we have in addition to what we had last year, free and clear. We knew exactly what we were dealing with. We had that articulated down to exactly what we wanted to do with it. Our first priority was to put that into the sustainment piece that we have robbing for all these years. That is what we did.
To maintain some of the infrastructure and training areas that we had rundown, we will put a chunk into O and M this year and the rest into the national procurement system.
The Chairman: General, this is your first time appearing before the committee. We tell people about our fines of 25 cents for every acronym. Could you explain O and M to the audience?
Gen. Hillier: O and M is the operations and maintenance fund. That is money to do the normal jobs that you have to do in the course of a year. Most of what we got this year we put into that category of spending. In other words, we put more money into the maintenance of the infrastructure and the maintenance of our training areas. We will start to get those back up to speed after years of neglect. The rest of the money we put into national procurement, that is, the maintenance of our fleets, buying spare parts, ordering and buying more parts for our air fleets, particularly the C-130, et cetera.
We knew what money we had. Our first priority was sustainment. That is what we had run down most. Before we start spending significant monies on any changes in the Canadian Forces, we had to ensure that we would survive and be able to conduct operations. That is what we are doing. We knew what money we had.
Senator Atkins: I am sure you know that this committee in one of its reports recommended that the government increase its budget by $4 billion and that they increase military personnel by 75,000.
Gen. Hillier: Do you mean ``by'' or ``to'' 75,000?
Senator Atkins: I mean to 75,000. The government is short on the amount of money that it is giving the military to deal with the kinds of challenges you must face over the next five years. I hope that you can do it with the amount that you are receiving.
To move on, in your professional opinion, what is the greatest military threat to the national security of Canada?
Gen. Hillier: In one word, instability, both direct and indirect. The threat will come indirectly from around the rest of the world, unless we are a part of bringing stability to places that are unstable, places that have become the fertile breeding grounds for organized crime, for terrorism, for militia forces that beat up on their own populations and cause refugee flows outwards. Unless we are part of bringing stability to those kinds of places, that instability will come home to Canada, directly and indirectly — indirectly in a variety of ways through globalization, et cetera, but directly with the importation of organized crime, criminals, drugs, terrorists and of course large numbers of refugees. Therefore, I see instability as the main threat. How to best counter it is, of course, the big question. I do not see one specific threat, as a direct action, as being a main threat to Canada. It is the general wrap-up of all of them, and I would characterize it as instability.
Senator Atkins: With the number of military personnel you have today, do you feel that we are too thin on the ground for the services that we are expected to provide?
Gen. Hillier: Absolutely, senator, and we of course have made the case for at least a 5,000-person increase in the regular force and 3,000 in the reserves, which I liken to an increase of 8,000. That means that both the regulars and the reserves will be put through one training system. Despite the fact that 3,000 will go into the reserve component, they will be fully trained and will have met exactly the same standards as any soldier, sailor, airman or airwoman in the Canadian Armed Forces, and are therefore usable by us on operations, with certain limitations of course.
Yes, we had too few folks, and yes, many units were becoming significantly undermanned. I would not call them ghost units, but they were significantly undermanned, and, yes, that was having a knock-on effect on the operational tempo on the men and women who do the work for us. In other words, we have companies of infantry so significantly undermanned that, if we wanted to send one company offshore, we had to take two and knock them together. For one battalion offshore, we had to take two battalions to build one. The aim of this next increase is to bring those units up to strength so we do not have to do that. That will help significantly, amazingly, in reducing the up tempo of men and women. Are we too thin on the ground? Yes, absolutely.
The Chairman: Just so I am clear on this, they are coming in at a rate of 1,000 a year.
Gen. Hillier: No, senator, they are not.
The Chairman: Admiral Buck told us that was the plan. Our understanding is that this is his responsibility. Have things changed?
Gen. Hillier: I am not sure when he was here. I cannot remember if it was before or after the budget process.
The Chairman: It was before.
Gen. Hillier: The budgeting lines may not have been clear at that point in time. They are coming in as soon as we get the money for them. That means, on a five-year program, they come in during years three, four and five, and a few in year one and two, primarily aimed at the high demand, low-density specialities. It is those technical trades that we have been trying to bring up to strength and in fact grow a little bit. That is what we focused on during this first two years, plus fixing the recruiting system. Most of that 5,000 will come in during years three, four and five of the budget allocation.
The Chairman: Are you telling the committee that it will be 2011 before you have the additional 8,000 folks?
Gen. Hillier: Five years, plus this year, 2010. Back it off a year when we recruit them at the front part of the year, so 2009. Yes, that is correct.
The Chairman: How do you plan to get from here to there?
Gen. Hillier: In which respect, in operations that we are conducting right now or in growing that number?
The Chairman: In carrying on your operations, will you be stuck with the same problems as you have been facing over the last five years?
Gen. Hillier: In fact, no. We have come back with a clear appetite suppressant on what we can do, if you will. We are saying: Here is what we can put outside of the country in the interim, with our present figures, and there is what we can ustain outside of the country. Once the 5,000 plus the 3,000 is implemented, then we can enlarge the footprint that we can put outside of the country and be able to sustain it. We have laid out a managed system — ``managed readiness'' is what the army is calling it — on the ground, different terms across the Canadian Forces, to actually manage what we bring to operational readiness and declare ready to use on operations either in Canada or around the world and then declare what we can put out and sustain outside of the country. That is how we ensure that we do not end up back into something which is an over-commitment and something that we cannot sustain.
The Chairman: Perhaps you can describe for us what the situation would be like in the army that you used to command. How many people do you expect the army in the year 2006 to be able to sustain indefinitely overseas?
Gen. Hillier: Just bear in mind that, as part of the changes in the Canadian Forces, we do not want to be putting out solely an army footprint, we want to be putting out a Canadian Forces operational entity that increases the footprint and the profile and therefore the credibility. From the land component we are talking about two battalion task forces, with the potential of a brigade headquarters on top of that. The battalion task force would be 750 plus about 250 in the national command and the national support elements that go with it.
The Chairman: Would that be 1,500 then?
Gen. Hillier: Add another 500 because of those 250 in national command and national support elements — 1,000 plus 1,000.
The Chairman: That is 2,000.
Gen. Hillier: Correct. A third task force can be put out every year, but it is a one-shot effort. If you want to do a mission of six months you have a one-surge task force that goes off for six months and then after that you leave it.
The Chairman: Therefore every year you can surge to an additional 1,000.
Gen. Hillier: That is correct.
The Chairman: In terms of the army you will be able to sustain indefinitely 2,000 people for 12 months of the year looking forward forever, and that for six months out of every year you can bring that up to 3,000.
Gen. Hillier: The answer is yes, but on the last part, the six months, we are choosing. If it is something critical to Canada's interests, the number of months that we deploy men and women to protect our interests of course is a decision that we make at the time, but, yes, in general terms.
The Chairman: In that scenario, how many months do you see the individual soldier spending at home over any given period of time — say over a 36-month period of time, how long would an individual soldier be away and in harm's way, if you will, and how long would he or she be at home but away training, and how long would he or she be at home in his or her own bed?
Gen. Hillier: It is hard to say in those specific terms. They would do a mission of six to nine months. They would be back home for 12 to 18 months. Of that 12 to 18 months, the first six months are spent primarily around the home station. The second six months would be home stationed but some would be on training, and in the last six months out of that 18 months, two months or so, they would be distinctly away in the combined manoeuvre training centre out in Wainwright, Alberta, which the land component is building. They would then be ready to go back on another mission. If we were already on a mission or had a need for them, they would deploy at that time. One mission, either back on by the end of a 36-month period or ready to go back on a second mission at that point in time.
The Chairman: This is different from what the commander of the army described to this committee just a couple of months ago. He talked about a 36-month cycle where a soldier could expect to be away for six months, then home, and during his period at home, over the 36 months, be away from home for four months, and the rest of the time he would actually be in his own bed.
Gen. Hillier: Senator, it depends on what training you do in your own training area and what training you do away from your own training area. Our focus is to get as much as we can done in our own training area so our people have time back in their own homes, their home beds. If you are in your own training area still deployed for two weeks out of the month in the back 40, as we would call it, clearly you are not sleeping in your own bed although you might think that at some point in time. It depends on how you do your training of course. There is no difference between what the commander of the army, General Caron, and I see for what soldiers will have either on operational commitment or back at home during the middle of it.
Senator Atkins: On the subject of recruitment, so I understand it, we talk about 5,000 and 3,000 over the next five years, but there is an attrition factor to take into account, so we are talking about recruiting many more military personnel than that, are we not?
Gen. Hillier: Yes, and in fact we will carry on with the standard recruiting that we do to ensure that the attrition factor does not take the Canadian Forces downwards. I do not have the exact figure, but we recruit into the Canadian Forces over 4,000 people a year. We will continue to do that. The 5,000 plus the 3,000 is a bubble.
To handle it, I talk to ADM HR MIL, which has responsibility to attract, recruit and train those individuals, and to carry on with the routine 4,000 each year to keep the Canadian Forces stable at the level it is. For the bubble that we are bringing in, the 5,000 plus 3,000, the vast majority of whom will go into the land force, mission tasks the army commander to prepare a plan to bring civilians right from the recruiting centre to the location where they will be employed, and to take them from being a civilian to being a trained soldier in large groups at a time.
If you are to be employed as part of the brigade and as part of fleshing out the units in Petawawa, you will go from your recruiting centre to Petawawa. When the large group is there, the aim is to get it all in one focus. He will then take one of the units, which is in operational preparation as opposed to operational readiness, and start the training of those individuals from civilian right through to trained soldier. We have done that before. Some of you may remember or have read about the program back in the late 1980s involving 5,000 men and women. It worked very successfully and we anticipate that is the best way to do it now.
The Chairman: General, if you could, please, rather than say ``ADM HR MIL,'' say ``Assistant Deputy Minister, Human Relations Military.'' Many people watching may not keep up with the vernacular common in the military. If we can make sure that everybody understands, including the committee, it will work better.
Gen. Hillier: I have tasked Vice-Admiral Jarvis to do what he has to do normally, and then Lieutenant-General Caron, Commander of the Army, to do the bubble.
Senator Atkins: Are you satisfied with the recruitment process or does it need reform?
Gen. Hillier: I am not satisfied at all. First, we are a bit out of practice. This is not pejorative. This is not demeaning to any of the men and women working in that system, trying to do their best for us. We have stripped out that system. We have cleaned it out. We have not made the Canadian Forces recruiting group the place to go to seek a posting. In fact, many of our good NCOs and officers actually would see a posting there as a dead end, as a killing blow for their aspirations and their desire to have greater challenges in their lives.
We need to change many aspects of that. We have not marketed ourselves well to Canadians, so that we now have to rework many things. When I said we are doing some low-level additional recruiting and starting to rebuild our system here, that is what I mean. I have asked ADM HR MIL to come back to me and lay out how we will do that in detail and what we need to do in the way of selection and the numbers of people, and how we need to market ourselves and communicate, and come back and let us walk through the plan to do that. Let me know where I have to be involved. For example, if we are to get the right kind of people in that recruiting system, to attract young Canadians rather than recruiting them, we will have to go out and individually select people across our country to make sure we get the right people to represent us as the first impression of Canadians. We have a great deal of work to do. We have just begun that process.
A great number of leaders in the recruiting group have been working in preparation for this. Now is when we get down to implementation.
No, I am not satisfied right now. We broke the system from 1994 through to about 1999-2000. We did our best to break that recruiting system and recruiting group and we almost succeeded. Now we need them again and we have to rebuild in a significant way.
Senator Atkins: Are you telling me that you are taking a personal interest this area?
Gen. Hillier: That would be an understatement, Senator Atkins. I am taking a personal interest. This is success. Everything we do depends on people. If we do not have people with the characteristics, the value sets and skill sets that we need, we simply will not succeed in doing anything for Canada. That is not an option we have.
Senator Atkins: Moving to another question, what other threats to the national security of Canada do you see that may require in whole or in part a military response?
Gen. Hillier: It comes back to that first question: What are the threats to Canada? I would say instability, both indirectly — global instability hurts us because it impacts on many things — and directly, because global instability directly causes threats to be manifested inside of Canada. All of that requires, either in whole or in part, a military response.
From Canada's perspective, our credibility as a responsible citizen of the world and as a member of the G8 is constantly being assessed by the rest of the world. We need to be able to play both in Canada and around the world, and a part of that, of course, is the military commitment of men and women in uniform.
When we go to address what I call instability, it is my belief that it is in failed and failing states where we get the biggest bang for our bucks at affecting all those threats and reducing instability. That does require some military commitment.
Senator Atkins: The defence policy requires the Canadian Forces to be capable of combat operations. Do you see the Canadian Forces as being capable of combat operations across the entire spectrum of conflict?
Gen. Hillier: No, I do not, senator. We have never been capable across the entire spectrum. The aspirations to do so would be misplaced.
I will tell you what I do believe. I believe that we do not always have to be writing about it and talking about it because that denotes a level of insecurity and confidence in ourselves that is not true.
I believe that if you are not combat-capable, if you are not recognized as a professional fighting force the minute you get off the bus, those with whom you are trying to work with to neutralize and to mitigate threats will realize that and your job will become exceedingly more difficult. In short, you must be able to conduct combat operations, first, simply to survive. We go out in some pretty tough places around the world where people are natural born killers who have been trained as soldiers and armed to the teeth with the most modern weaponry one could possibly want.
I give you the example of the city of Prijedor in Bosnia, where we conducted a significant number of operations. In that town there were a large number of young men who were well trained as soldiers, who had clearly been involved in significant killing with the ethnic cleansing that occurred in that terrible part of the world, and who were armed to the teeth with the finest kind of weapons that you would want. Their chief of police was equivalent to Paul Bernardo. Their chief of public security was the equivalent of Karla Homolka. Their mayor was the equivalent of Clifford Olson. You cannot deal with people like that unless you are prepared to do the violent end of business in the peace and security operations, and that means combat. You have to be combat-ready and be able to conduct operations to survive. If you want to deter people from threatening your mission, you have to be seen as capable and seen as too big a bully to take on. If all those things fail and you cannot deter violence, you have to be able to fight and win. That is fundamental to everything we do.
You cannot isolate it. We are not the people who decide, when we are on the ground in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia or anywhere else, whether it goes by them. If we are not ready, we will be doing our soldiers and our nation a disservice.
Senator Atkins: Are you telling me that you are amending your training manual to address these new challenges?
Gen. Hillier: Completely. We are trying to pick through the capabilities required at that focus in those failed and failing states, at the air, land and sea interface, where the majority of the populations live, which is larger towns and cities, where we will be needed and therefore used in the next year, decade, or two or three decades out, and making sure that we have the capabilities as part of a multinational, multilateral operation. We do not see that we will be conducting those operations uniquely and exclusively as Canadian operations. Therefore, we want to be able to clearly articulate what comes with the coalition or a multinational force and what part we absolutely have to bring, and then concentrate on those capabilities to make sure we are good at them. That is what we need to do. That is what we are picking through right now.
Senator Atkins: Are we training in the three-block concept?
Gen. Hillier: Yes, every hour of every day; if we are not, I will have something to say about it, because we need to be.
Senator Banks: Thank you for being with us.
Gen. Hillier: Senator Banks, it is my pleasure.
Senator Banks: Further to what Senator Atkins asked, we used to say about the Canadian Forces that it was our objective for them to be able to fight alongside the best against the best, and that our objective was to have in the field a dominant force that would be able, as you said a few minutes ago, to fight and win. Is that still the case? Are those words still applicable? Is that still the intent of what you are saying?
Gen. Hillier: The last part is absolutely right. If we are going to get into a brawl, we have to be able to fight and win. Coming second in a brawl is not an option that we want to consider. We must be able to fight with the best and, no matter what the fight, we have to be part of a winning side and ensure that we apply our appropriate role in that.
The threat has changed, though, and that is why I come at it this way. Fighting against the best right now and with the kinds of threats that we will face, that are conceivable, except for one or two which are very improbable, we are fighting against a very different threat. We are dealing with organized crime, terrorists, and militia forces who have earned their battle honours by beating up on their own populations, and that is a very different fight. However, the same view remains. We have to be able to fight and when we fight, winning is the only course of action.
Senator Banks: We will train our people so they can fight against those kinds of opponents.
Gen. Hillier: That is what the defence policy has articulated, in part, and the Canadian forces vision is starting to lay out in more detail exactly what we are working towards. The threat against which we have to be successful is so very different from what it has been this last 50 years that it requires a fundamental shift in the way we do business in the Canadian Forces: Command, train, equip, structure and deploy.
Senator Banks: In the past you have said that you hoped we would be able to put out the kind of forces that you described when you were answering Senator Atkins' question, by 2006.
Gen. Hillier: By February 2006.
Senator Banks: As I understand it, you would be able to do that with existing personnel and resources. You have reinforced this by giving us the timeline on the new people. Have I got that right?
Gen. Hillier: Yes, at the reduced level that I mentioned to you. In short, in February 2006 we will be able to put two land task forces out. Each will have 750 soldiers, plus the support element that I mentioned. That is without the 5,000 regular force and 3,000 reservists.
Senator Banks: Will they be able to stay there?
Gen. Hillier: We will be able to sustain those, that is correct.
Senator Banks: I am asking that question because I think we were all embarrassed by the fact that we could not rotate the first 850 people that we sent to Afghanistan. When we pulled them out, they were not replaced by the same number of bodies doing the same number of things, if I recall correctly.
Gen. Hillier: That is correct, senator. We pulled them out and we did not rotate them there at that point in time. There were many reasons for that, but we were into significant operations in many other places around the world with larger numbers than what those 750 plus 750 will now give us. As a result, we were overextended.
We added to that the domestic operations which were compounding the issue back here in Canada, security for the G8 Summit. There were complex things such as significant forest firefighting, which tended to take troops out of their own beds again, away from home. We had been overextended for about five to seven years, which culminated. The wear and tear was sufficient that we were at a point where we had to have a reduction in operations. We had to look after the minimum that we had. We had to get back to something that was manageable and sustainable. That is now what we are doing.
Senator Banks: When you are sustaining these forces, you described them as being forces which are interdenominational. They involve not just soldiers but also air personnel and sea personnel.
Gen. Hillier: Yes.
Senator Banks: As I am sure you know, this committee, in one form or another, has seen every significant military base in the country and several that are outside the country. With respect to the navy, will they be able to be up to that level of operation by that date?
We have not been on a ship in the last few years that has not been deficient in some way. That is not a knock on any of the people. They are operating at 150 per cent, as you know. The platforms are short in one way or another. They are short of sailing time and the shortfall, according to the admiral that we heard from, was about $250 million in the current year.
Gen. Hillier: The navy will be up and running in one form. It is part of the challenge that we have had and which we are now trying to address. We are starting to do that as part of the defence policy and the Canadian Forces vision. Up until now, and even to February 2006, the army has set its own managed readiness and says when its units will be available for operations. The navy has done likewise with its managed readiness and says when its ship or ships become operationally ready and, therefore, ready to deploy. The air force does it in a variety of ways, depending on the fleets. We have never orchestrated that from the Canadian Forces perspective.
Senator Banks: You will do that now; you will have a force commander that will command all three elements.
Gen. Hillier: That is correct. We will have a managed readiness system for Canadian Forces that says by, let us pick a date, June 1, 2006 or June 1, 2007, we will bring to readiness a light task force from the army, a task group from the navy of three to five ships complete, an aviation squadron, plus some Auroras, plus a six pack of F18s from the air force and combine that for the next 12 to 18 months as our first responders internationally or nationally.
We will start to manage it on Canadian Forces bases so that when we put something offshore or in Canada it has all the characteristics it needs to be successful, and it has enough of those characteristics that it has a visible profile, gives us the opportunity to gain more credibility because of the size of that profile and its efficiency, and that credibility gives us the opportunity to get some leadership appointments and leadership in various regions and areas. That gives us the chance to shape things in accordance with any interest that we want to articulate or our values.
Senator Banks: The naval component will be able to be in place by February 2006?
Gen. Hillier: No. We are still working through that. February 2006 will be the army task forces coming available under that very old system that we have in place. We are working through the managed readiness system for the Canadian Forces as part of the Canadian Forces vision, but we are not there yet.
Senator Banks: What is the approximate timeline for the readiness of a one-command, three services group going out and doing its job?
Gen. Hillier: There is a variety of timelines. The standing contingency task force, which is the air, land and sea elements under one commander, we would like to bring together during the early fall of 2006 for the first joint experimentation concept and work up. We have not held an exercise of this type or magnitude combining all the various pieces of the Canadian Forces since 1998. We need to learn many lessons, and build on those. In the fall of 2006, we would like to run the first exercise, and then see how it goes from there.
Senator Banks: You have had some experimentation groups, for example, Shirley's Bay. Have they been working along that line?
Gen. Hillier: Completely. We are trying to learn what we can about amphibious operations and more, and seeing what lessons have been learned by other military forces, what lessons we have learned and how the change in threat now allows us to apply those lessons. We have learned many lessons, but we need to go out and do it, learn from making mistakes when training. We need to learn the best and most effective way for us, not based on lessons from, for example, the United States Marine Corps, who say that they have made every mistake in the book, and if we would like to learn from them, they can give us the whole dictionary. We need to learn how to do it for us, with our characteristics.
Senator Banks: Some of our priorities are different.
Gen. Hillier: Very much so. That is entirely natural, and we like that.
Senator Banks: You have spoken in the past about the dangers of a hollow army. You referred to it a minute ago when you said that we do not have any ghost units. The fact of the matter is that we are all human, including people in the forces, and sometimes the paper complement of a group of forces is not available to go out and do the job. Sometimes a significant number of people are, as you would describe them, LOB, left out of battle.
Members of this committee have just returned from Afghanistan, where there were about 140 folks who have already signed waivers allowing them to come back to that field of operations earlier than otherwise would be the case if they did not sign the waiver.
In answer to Senator Atkins' questions, you have talked about other recruitment problems such as the number of people who are about to retire and the 10,000 that you will have to bring in to make that number up. You also talked about 8,000 reservists as a unit, which I am happy to hear because the reserves are fundamentally important.
Gen. Hillier: We cannot do anything we are doing now or going to do in the future without the reserve being a full part of the Canadian Forces.
Senator Banks: How will you do it with respect to getting the number of people that you need to do these jobs by the timeline that you are talking about? It seems a daunting task.
Gen. Hillier: I do not describe it as daunting because if I described it as that, I would probably quit, go home, and enjoy retirement starting now. I do not want to do that.
It is a big task. However, we have the entire leadership, from corporal to myself, in the Canadian Forces ready to pile on and do this, and indeed we have been doing that already.
Let me cite as an example of the number of people left out of battle, referred to as LOB. For a variety of reasons, one thing we did discover is that if you wear people out, many will not be available for action the next time around. That was a key factor that drove us to articulating the need for a reduction in the operational tempo two years ago. It was myself who did that with Minister McCallum at the time. We discovered what happens when you work these men and women too hard.
We need a managed readiness system that gives a reasonable amount of time at home in your own bed, your own town, and your own country compared to the time that you are away, and make that predictable. That is one of the areas where we have been failing.
As an example, I worked with the British Army. They were able to tell their squadrons and companies two and a half to three years ahead of time exactly where they would be and what they would be doing. Sometimes we could not tell our companies and squadrons and gun batteries where they would be training next week or the week after that. That might be a bit extreme.
When you do all of those things, you reduce the number of folks who have difficulties that cause them not to be operationally deployable. That is one of the things we are getting into with the managed readiness system. Reducing the number of people who will be outside of the country allows you to manage more of those folks and therefore gives you the opportunity to provide that balance between work and family, deployment and being at home.
Senator Banks: I want to talk about the end of the operational pause. There is an old gag in the music business that begins: They laughed when I sat down to play. This committee recommended at one point that there had to be an operational pause across the border, and everybody laughed when we said that. It came to pass, as you have pointed out.
Given the personnel situation that we have been talking about, is the army now ready to end its operational pause in the time that you say, February of 2006?
Gen. Hillier: Yes, sir, it is. The work has been proceeding to bring it to operational readiness starting with some folks in August so we can build a provincial reconstruction team inside Afghanistan. We would bring two operational units with a command structure on top of it and two readiness units in the late fall or early winter so that their deployments could continue in early 2006. That is why we selected February 2006. Again, that is at the reduced size that I talked about earlier on.
In the 1990s and even in early 2000 inside of Bosnia, we were putting battle groups of 1,500 soldiers onto the ground, times two, and a third one somewhere else. We were overextending ourselves.
The immediate future is the reduced task force footprint starting in February 2006 that we will be ready to do.
Senator Banks: The sustainability is the good part.
Gen. Hillier: We cannot take on something we are not prepared to stick with. You lose credibility if you go in and then come back out. We want to ensure that whatever options we offer to the people of Canada through the Government of Canada are options we can sustain.
The Chairman: The committee is having difficulty with this because everywhere we have gone, we have bumped into folks that were both short of money and short of people. I will come back to the money later. Let us just continue on Senator Banks' line regarding people.
When we went to Gagetown, we were told that they did not have enough personnel there to run the courses. When we went to Borden, they had the same problem. The same problem applied to Petawawa. Every group we talked to said, ``I will call a parade today and I will muster 55 per cent or 60 per cent, but I am simply short.''
The Canadian Forces have an authorized strength of 62,000 or 63,000. You will gradually work that up by another 5,000. The effective strength is 50,000. Even with the reserves, you will not get it above 60,000, and that is five years away.
We do not understand how you get there from here if every unit does not have enough personnel, and the new folks you are bringing in are not coming in for a couple of years. How will you make all of this happen?
Gen. Hillier: We are not using every single unit every single day or month on an operation. Some of those units will be under stress. Do not forget, we are bringing in about 4,000 recruits on a routine basis per year right now.
The Chairman: The 4,000 are just to handle the personnel who are leaving.
Gen. Hillier: How you handle attrition is what gives you flexibility. Your priority is to man the positions in the units that are going into the training cycle and getting operationally ready. You keep that flow going so you always have a fresh infusion of young men and women coming into the units before they start their training cycle, bringing them up to strength or just above strength, because there is always some wastage during the training cycle. For various reasons, people leave. As they get into the operational window, they are manned to meet the demands they have, and they have the recruits there.
You can only do that when you take the appetite suppressant on those task forces that we will produce in the short term. That is what General Caron has done. Seven hundred fifty soldier units to go out the door is what he can do by using the recruits coming in to bring the units up to strength as they come into the operational window. They have done the training, so they stay there. Then the next year, they follow along with the next set of units. It would be managed in great detail.
The Chairman: The recruits coming in sound terrific, but we are talking here about the macro picture.
When you talk about the micro picture, you know that you have limiting steps in certain trades and you have some trades that are really stressed. Again, you cannot get there from here. It takes a long time, far longer than recruit training, to get some of these people up to the level of skill that you need.
It seems to us as a committee that you have to be focussing on those specific areas that you are short of now, and it requires a long time to develop the skills required to do certain jobs. How will you address that?
Gen. Hillier: As I mentioned earlier, we have already have started that process. I use the royal ``we'' here loosely. We have a team that has been at this for a while. We have made some progress, but we are not there yet.
In the first two years of those 5,000 and 3,000, in addition to augmenting our recruiting system and getting it right, we are also concentrating on the recruitment and commencement of training and the training of those high demand skill sets.
The Chairman: What years are you talking about?
Gen. Hillier: This year and next year.
The Chairman: I thought that the 5,000 and 3,000 were coming in year four and year five.
Gen. Hillier: The bulk of them are. The ones going into the combat arms are years three, four, and five. This year and next year, we have a particular focus on the low-density and high-demand specialties that we need.
We are building on the work that has been done all along here to try to bring all of those specialties up to strength. We want to do that before we get into recruiting the bulk of the numbers for the combat arms.
The Chairman: How long does it take to train, say, an aircraft technician?
Gen. Hillier: Quite a while. It takes a while to train them before they have the authority to sign off that repairs have been made to an aircraft.
When I was in Trenton and Winnipeg, I walked through with them in great detail exactly what they are doing, how they are doing it, and where they need support to resolve the issues of aircraft technicians.
There is no simple solution, or else it already would have been found. There is no short solution, or else it already would have been implemented. They have started doing a variety of things to facilitate and accelerate the training and to make it more efficient; for example, taking one aircraft and making it the one to train on as opposed to waiting for an aircraft to become available. That is a simple example of a multitude of things that they have gone through and put into place to resolve the challenges that we face.
There must be an overarching view of things, and one of those is how we approach our business and technical trades, how much we do ourselves, what do we demand, how we can balance that against contracting and a variety of other things. There is not one single solution. None of them is easy. We have been at some for a while, we are at others right now, and we will have some more to resolve.
We have heard a number of commanders say that the biggest drawback of contracting out is that they do not have the same flexibility with the individuals as they would have if they were in uniform.
Gen. Hillier: That is certainly true, but how much of that can you absorb while still being flexible enough to do everything that a commander needs to do? If you do not have the support or the technicians to start with, is contracting out an option that allows you to do certain things and get some flexibility in the other areas? Those commanders are probably right that you do not have the same flexibility.
The Chairman: Why are you satisfied with an effective force of less than 60,000?
Gen. Hillier: In fact, I am not, but with 62,500 as our authorized strength, getting past 54,000 as trained effectives will be a significant challenge. We will work hard at it, but there will always be a large number of people in the training system doing basic recruit training, technical training, advanced training as an NCO or middle ranking officer, or more senior training as a senior officer or a senior NCO. There will always be people in the training system who are not immediately available to deploy with a unit on operations and therefore not in an operational unit.
The Chairman: As you look forward, what is an acceptable figure of effective forces?
Gen. Hillier: It depends on the demand. I do not have that number in my head right now. I would like to get the 8,000 brought in and see how much more effective we can be in our training system to have the number of trained, effective people in units as high as possible and then assess it from there.
The Chairman: Do you have any reason to believe that the government will be less demanding on the Canadian Forces in the next 10 years than it has been in the last 10 years?
Gen. Hillier: No, I do not.
The Chairman: Looking back over the last 10 years and using that as your guide for the future, how many effective do you need?
Gen. Hillier: Simply having demands placed upon us does not mean that we will be able to meet them all, and that will be an important part of the package going forward. We need to implement the increase and see how effectively we can bring the trained effective strength up, and at the end of that assess where we are. I cannot give you a figure right now for what I need for a trained effective strength.
The Chairman: I understand that, but I also hear you saying that you are going to be prepared to say no from time to time, and that makes sense to us. However, we have seen that the Canadian Forces has been like the girl who cannot say no. They have always said yes and figured out a way to do it, then, at the end of day, we find ourselves eating our seed corn with a rapidly deteriorating entity.
Gen. Hillier: We see that from the most junior soldier to the Chief of the Defence Staff. For example, several years ago, during a normal, routine administrative preparatory exercise where you run every soldier through a gamut of personal verifications, 30 per cent of the unit was declared not ready for operations. That unit was warned off two months later to go on an operation. That was an exciting event, and suddenly more than 98 per cent of the unit was ready to go on operations. It was not only the chain of command that was saying yes to demands placed upon it; the entire body of the Canadian Forces wanted to do what Canada needed it to do.
The Chairman: We can understand young men and women who like the excitement. In fact, every time we meet a young person in the Canadian Forces, they say they are not getting out and doing enough. If they had their druthers, they would not be taking their time off at home. However, you and I know that they cannot do that forever and, if there are not pauses built in, they will not be able to continue to function.
Gen. Hillier: We do not want pauses. We want a sustainable operational tempo. Going down and trying to come back up creates more difficulties and challenges than just getting to a sustainable level then being able to surge past that level for a specific time. That is where we want to be.
The Chairman: It appears to us that, over the past 10 years, we have been on continual surge and that the price we will have to pay over the next 10 years to get back from it will be extraordinary.
Gen. Hillier: I agree entirely.
Senator Atkins: Does the military provide any incentives in the recruitment of people in technical trades so that you are competitive with the private sector?
Gen. Hillier: Yes, we do. We have a variety of attractions, including financial bonuses, that are used to help us make headway with highly-skilled trades in particular. For example, dental hygienists are offered a bonus upon joining as well as various other attractions, which could include acceleration in rank, to make it more attractive to join us because we need that skill set badly.
Senator Atkins: Has the military done any studies on the demographics of the kind of recruits you appeal to these days?
Gen. Hillier: Yes, we have done demographic surveys, studies and analyses to see where we need to go. We know a variety of intuitive things. One is that we are recruiting from the major urban areas. That is not bad when you think that we will probably operate in major urban areas around the world. However, we get different types of individuals from the city than from the country. We have to ensure that our training systems and acclimatization work well to bring those individuals in.
We do not yet appeal nearly enough to the ethnic minority groups. We have not established the contact and the thorough trust to be able to explain who we are, what we do and why it is worthwhile to consider us as a career option. We need to represent the demographic in our country much better than we do currently. That is something else we are determined to do better at.
We know what youth we want and we know where to find them. Now we need to build the communications tools to establish contact with them in a better way than we have so far.
Senator Atkins: Do you compete with the RCMP and the city police forces?
Gen. Hillier: Yes. With the shrinking youth demographic in our country, unless we ensure that every young man and woman in the country at least considers the Canadian Forces as an option, we will not succeed in the way we want to. We are competing not only with the RCMP and other police forces but also with almost every other employer of choice.
Senator Atkins: Is the pay equivalent?
Gen. Hillier: The pay and benefits are not the issue they were before SCONDVA, and this committee came to our assistance in the late 1990s. I believe that every one of our people would agree that we offer a competitive benefits package. In some skill sets we want to offer more to attract people, but a variety of things will entice people, pay and benefits being only one of them, and we can compete in pay and benefits.
The Chairman: I would like to talk about money. When we reviewed your impact statements for 2005-06, we came up with a shortfall of $970 million. We see in the budget for this year $500 million with a $34 million clawback, which leaves you with $466 million. If you subtract $466 million from $970 million, you are still short. For next year we see the same sort of problem. You will have the same impact statements and your funding only goes up by $100 million.
We do not see where you will get the money to meet these deficiencies.
Gen. Hillier: In the first two years, it is not there. It is as simple as that. We did not get into this situation in one or two years, and we will clearly not get out of it in one or two years.
The Chairman: We will see a significant atrophy in the fleet and in the equipment in the army and the air force over the next two years.
Gen. Hillier: I do not believe we will see a significant atrophy in the next two years. We must have some clear prioritizations included in the costs of $970 million for infrastructure and things like that. We need to focus on the operational fleets that are essential to conduct business at this point in time and ensure that they are at the level of operational readiness that we need.
We need to take some risks in the rest of the program, and that includes some of the infrastructure. We need to define what infrastructure we will not need in the longer term and let that part run down and eventually get rid of it. I am not yet ready to do that last part, but that is where we have to go. I do not disagree with anything you have said, but we need to clearly focus on where we need to put that money to be successful in our operations for the next two or three years.
The Chairman: Admiral McLean sat in front of us six weeks ago, and we went through every platform in the fleet, and not a single one was not deficient. We do not see any programs in place to fix them. We do not see where you will have the money to fix them.
Gen. Hillier: We will do the best we can with the money we have here, senator. We will prioritize and ensure that, when we need a task group from the navy, we have the ships necessary at readiness to go off and do that business. In some cases, we will have to take risks with priorities and tie some others up if necessary.
As we go through and focus and target it, I think we can take the risk in the short term that we will not need all our ships sailing at the same time. It is a management readiness process. We do not need all of them at sea at any one point in time. We will have to do it from that perspective, with clear decisions in hand as to what we can deploy for operations.
The Chairman: We have seen that for the last decade now, and you are saying we will see this over the next five or six years, and this will be part of the life of the Canadian Armed Forces.
Gen. Hillier: You will see it over the next couple of years to a certain extent. However, we have put significant money into the normal operations and maintenance budget and into national procurement, which buys a lot of parts and gets the ships more ready than they have ever been before.
However, as we change the Canadian Forces, we have to ensure in the longer term that we have the efficiencies to pile on at the same time. In five, six or seven years from now we do not want to be facing the same challenges in sustainability across the Canadian Forces.
The Chairman: When we were last in Trenton, 19 out of the 32 Hercules were not serviceable. The committee had lunch with enlisted personnel, and at my table were two technicians. I went through the usual questions. I asked, ``Is this what you normally eat? What have they told you not to tell us?'' After I put those two questions, I said, ``Tell me what it is like. How long have you been in?'' They had been in about 18 years. I said, ``Do you plan to stay in? Is it going to be a career?'' They both said they were going to leave. I said, ``Well, it cannot be the pay. You just had a really good raise.'' They said the pay was terrific. I said, ``How about Trenton?'' They said Trenton was a terrific place to be. The problem was the work. They did not have enough people to fix the planes, nor did they have the spare parts to fix the planes. What will you do for those aircraft technicians in Trenton?
Gen. Hillier: The air force has been intently focused on how to increase the rate of production of the air force technicians. In the short term, it will probably not satisfy those young technicians, but at least they will see a light at the end of the tunnel.
We put a significant amount of money into buying spare parts. Those air men and air women know that if you order parts for a C-130, you are into a three-year waiting time. The demand for C-130 parts around the world has escalated dramatically because of international operations.
How we can shorten the wait time now that we have some money, how to have the parts available for those technicians to put in the aircraft and keep them operational, is now being looked at in detail. We are putting the money in to get more parts to get those aircraft operational, and we are looking at how to get the parts as soon as possible in the high-demand international world in which we live.
Senator Banks: Given the balance you have been talking about, the relationship between the highly skilled trades on the one hand and the people at the pointy end of the stick on the other, our committee recommended that the Canadian Forces needed to have a fully functional, operational complement of 75,000 people, which we take to mean there should be about 90,000 folks in the complement. Are we wrong?
Gen. Hillier: I do not know. I like your figures, but I do not know if that is the exact number we need. I simply cannot tell you. I would love to be able to say, ``Yes, that is exactly what we need.'' I do not have that figure. If I did, I would give it to you.
Senator Banks: We came by that by looking at the tasks given by the Government of Canada to the Canadian Armed Forces and looking at the number of operational people it takes to support people on the ground doing the job, rotation, LOB, et cetera. We did the arithmetic assuming that the tempo of operations was going to stay at approximately the same level, without any new ones being added. To do the job that was needed then, that is how many people we needed. Are we close or wrong or out to lunch?
Gen. Hillier: Let me come at it from a different angle. We have had a commitment of 5,000 regular force minimum and 3,000 reservists. I want to get that part largely implemented before we start looking at the overall demands, or at least get it on track flowing the way we want it.
We have a lot of work to do ourselves inside the Canadian Forces before we come to anyone and say, ``We will need a large number of men and woman, more than we have now.'' We have to be much more effective and efficient in how we do our business.
We have a large reserve component. Our ability to use those people in the reserve component is at best poor. We pull a number of them in and use them on operations, but the trials and tribulations in our system that we have set up over the past years make it extremely difficult to use them.
Perhaps some of those very technicians might leave the regular force to go into the reserve component. If they decide to do that, we sometimes make it more difficult for them to change components than we do for those who join as civilians off the street. We have to change that, and we have to change how we use reservists overall.
I have a feeling, but I do not have the statistical data to back me up, that over the past decade, we have been conducting 100 per cent operations with about 50 per cent of the Canadian Forces being used on those operations. Be it a sergeant, an officer, a soldier or an NCO, I have met numerous members from all parts of the Canadian Forces on operations somewhere, and they say, ``Sir, I have been trying for an operation for the last 10 years.'' On the other end, I have met an NCO from the Royal Canadian Regiment or coming off one of the ships saying, ``It is my fifth tour. My wife said that is it. One more and I am out of here.''
We have to balance those two aspects. There is a variety of things we need to change. Reducing the number of people in our training system and not available for operations is part of that.
Senator Banks: Every time we have gone to a place where training was going on, we found the training was not able to be done with the intake that now exists, never mind 5,000 more and never mind replacing the people who are going to retire. The function was unable to be done even at the present level, because the folks who knew how to fix that widget were over in Bosnia or in Afghanistan fixing the widget, so there was nobody left here to train. I am exaggerating for effect.
Gen. Hillier: You are not exaggerating by much on some of the high-tech trades, senator. We have gotten to a point where we are eating our young, if you will, by going around in a circle. That has been a real challenge, although we are breaking out of that cycle now. We have not broken out of it completely, but we are breaking out and you can see where we are making progress. We are not fast enough, but we have increased the number of people in those low- density, high-demand trades. We now have a handful of trades in the critical categories. We have looked at different ways of training them and, therefore, reducing the demands on some who are trained in doing the business here. We have not made complete progress but we are on track to do much better at it. I am referring to the high-tech trades.
In the combat arms trades, yes, we can carry on and do the routine training. Vice-Admiral Jarvis has responsibility for that. For our mission task, the army commander looks at the bubble and decides how we train those. The high-tech trades will remain a consideration for years to come and we will have to stay on it.
Senator Banks: How far off is the end of that tunnel?
Gen. Hillier: Five years. In fire control systems for example, by the time you get an individual trained to the required level of capability and with sufficient experience to apply the skill sets, you are looking at a three- or four-year investment. As those people come in the door, we have more of them in the training system. The op. tempo reduction has helped us get through this by placing more people to train them. That has given us a start, but it will be five years by the time we get through this in the way that we want.
Senator Banks: We have dug ourselves quite a hole, have we not?
Gen. Hillier: We sure have; and it took us 40 years to do it.
Senator Banks: The first thing you do is stop digging.
Senator Munson: I am sitting on the left wing over here. However, recently there has been a war of words between two ex-generals, Romeo Dallaire and Lewis MacKenzie, on Canada's participation in Darfur. How did you and your colleagues reach the conclusion on Canada's commitment in Darfur today? How do you strike the right balance?
Gen. Hillier: Yes, we have struck the right balance. Much of what was recommended to our government in military options came from me with the assistance of smart young men and women who helped me shape that. It was to enable the African Union to build and meet the demands of their mission as effectively and efficiently as possible; to reinforce what they were already doing; to make them successful at it in the best manner possible; and, at the same time, to keep the number of Canadian Forces men and women in uniform deployed down to a minimum. We are still not sure what that number is, but it is certainly less than 100. We have 19 in Sudan right now and another 12 en route as part of the UN mission in Sudan. We have several planners with the AU headquarters in Ethiopia. We have work to develop the training and to assist them with it.
A donors conference took place last week that included the multilateral organizations such as the UN, NATO and the EU, as well as various countries, to see how we could do things effectively, such as some of the training for the Africa Union, and help to develop and make decisions on the ground. We offered a balanced number of men and women — a small enough group to be welcomed by the African Union and by Sudan but large enough to enable them to offer help.
Senator Munson: I presume our soldiers will be armed.
Gen. Hillier: If they go into Darfur, they will be armed, absolutely.
Senator Munson: Why put our soldiers at risk?
Gen. Hillier: You would have to ask the Government of Canada about that. Much of our help can be provided outside Darfur, but some may be required in Darfur.
Senator Munson: I assume you are opposed to the idea of 10,000 troops from NATO, including Canada, being sent.
Gen. Hillier: I am opposed to 10,000 troops from Canada going into that part of the world, certainly.
Senator Munson: Defence policy suggests there will be a closer working relationship with other government departments. The committee was in Kabul recently and those who were there did not see much of the close coordination among the Canadian military, diplomatic and development elements in that area. General, I understand you are going to Kandahar.
Gen. Hillier: I have been there and I will be going back.
Senator Munson: How will you make that work? We did not see it working.
Gen. Hillier: I do not agree entirely because I worked that system directly as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, and I have been involved as the Chief of Land Staff and the CDS. There are three levels. There is the strategic commitment, the tactical commitment with the troops on the ground, and a piece in between called the operational level. At the strategic level inside Afghanistan, we have a superb relationship that is functioning on a daily basis with Foreign Affairs Canada and CIDA. In Afghanistan that works superbly with the senior Canadian, which was me for a time, with the Canadian ambassador and with the CIDA representatives on the ground to ensure that Canada is getting the best bang for its military commitment, dollars invested and diplomatic efforts. At the strategic level, a good chunk has worked well.
At the tactical level, we have worked closely with CIDA such that they give our units some monies for local developments in an effort to build good relationships in that region and improve what is going on in the lives of those folks. That worked well over the past months and years inside Afghanistan.
We need to work on the regional piece. As we look at the renewed commitment to Afghanistan, we are taking command of the regions south and conducting operations there. We need to look at what Foreign Affairs and CIDA can do to help develop that complete region and to ensure that the Canadian flag has a high profile and that there is diplomatic weight, and that the money flows in. After that, we would work with other departments that could play a significant role. For example, from Agriculture Canada, three veterinarians working in Afghanistan as part of our PRT would be worth their weight in gold. Police offers are always worth their weight in gold, particularly the professional officers that we have in Canada. Transport Canada is helping to develop the regional air flow and trying to get it back to a normal level. We have engaged in those discussions. Part of the content of the defence policy resulted from the frustrations that many I, other leaders and soldiers have voiced. There is a deficit and that is why it is there.
Senator Munson: Should we not have more soldiers in Afghanistan?
Gen. Hillier: We will have more and that will begin in August with the PRT.
Senator Munson: I know that but in the last little while it seems that some of the testimony of the people on the ground in Kabul would indicate that there are not enough.
Gen. Hillier: I disagree with that. I know what the structure is and I know the job. There are more than sufficient numbers in place to do the job. In fact, I am a little concerned that we have too many there for the job required. I am a little concerned about the ratio of the number of people required to support versus the number of people who operate.
Senator Munson: Could you explain that?
Gen. Hillier: We have to be more ruthless when we put an operational footprint on the ground, to say what is actually required to support that. If we put 200 men and women in uniform, having another 500-plus contractors to support that in theatre is something that draws my attention right away. If we have more jobs to do on the ground, let us pull out of this group first.
However, as we go into Kandahar, as we go into the PRT in August with a greater commitment of a task force and brigade group, we will carefully watch how we shape the amount of support we put in versus the number of operators. That is always a challenge.
The Chairman: I was going to phrase the question differently from the way Senator Munson phrased it. If you have 200 at Mirage and almost 700 in Kabul and your product is 14 reviewers of training and a Recce squadron and some intelligence, that does not seem like very much.
Gen. Hillier: Which part does not seem like very much?
The Chairman: It does not seem like very much product for the folks you have in the country.
Gen. Hillier: It actually is, but it is not enough to satisfy me. I tend to agree with you. I have taken some steps and actions, both for Mirage and for the support piece on the ground in Afghanistan itself. We have to be more agile and flexible. We tend to go in and staff an organization to meet the highest possible flow. In actual fact, there are rotations of troops in and out. We have to be much more agile to be able to adapt to that footprint — go in large, reduce it, go back in large and reduce it, et cetera.
We have a lot of work to do on that one. I am not satisfied that we are at the level we want. We will use the upcoming PRT, and then the deployment of the task force and brigade headquarters with the other pieces of it, to see what we can shape.
The Chairman: Our impression was that just to operate a camp the size of Camp Julian, involved a fixed cost in terms of the number of personnel. Some of the folks there seemed to be stressed about the amount of work they were doing. Those protecting the camp itself seemed to be stressed about the work they were doing, and it seemed to be structured to support a great many more people than you had there. What will you do when you move to Kandahar?
Gen. Hillier: The first thing is that we will not build a camp the size of Camp Julian. We have to be much more in touch and in contact with the local population than a Fort Apache in the Bronx would lead us toward. As you watch young men and women go out to the gate at those camps, you can see the stress levels rising. They are effectively isolated from the population until they go out on patrol or to do something specifically. That is not a good thing. Therefore, we will not end up building a large camp like that.
We will work in a multinational environment in Kandahar, where we know some other nations also want to do the force protection aspects. Therefore, we would not have the same onerous tasks. We will look at the way we support the men and women, where we base them, how we base them and how we support them in order to get down to the most frugal and effective number possible that still allows to us conduct operations. We can do better than what we have done.
Senator Munson: Are we capable of going out anywhere in the world on our own without any support from any other nation?
Gen. Hillier: I would ask you, senator, to do what?
Senator Munson: To keep the peace, to preserve the peace.
Gen. Hillier: I cannot conceive of any operation that we would be doing — either peacekeeping, peace support or full combat operations — that would be anything other than multilateral and multinational. Every nation is in exactly the same context — they will work as part of a multinational effort.
What I found personally was that multinationality was a clear indication to the people on the ground of the international community's will, and it became a powerful enabler itself. As an example, there were 37 flags in ISAF when I was there. I think we would want to be inside of that multinationality in every operation we conduct, unless it is absolutely impossible.
Senator Munson: I have two other short questions. The defence policy outlines a number of factors governing any decision to deploy the Canadian Armed Forces overseas. One is a clear exit strategy or desired end state. Is there an exit strategy for Afghanistan? What is the exit strategy and desired end state for Canadian Forces' deployment in Darfur?
Gen. Hillier: I think there is an exit strategy for Afghanistan that is very clear. It is for the exit of us, Canada, from Afghanistan. That does not necessarily articulate, therefore, going up and down in what you might have in Afghanistan at any one point in time. It is what is defined in the Afghan constitution, which, with our support, they developed. It says they want a stable, democratic Afghanistan that is part of a more stable region and that includes a variety of things within it — with a professional police force, with an Afghan national army and all of that — based on an economy that has a per capita income of more than $1,000 a year because greater than $1,000 a year you normally do not become a drug-producing and exporting country. That is the end state: a stable, democratic Afghanistan that can look after, by and large, its own affairs, a solid country that is on its way to becoming a nation. That is three to five years out, minimum. My belief is that we will be there for awhile. The number of soldiers, sailors and so on that we want to have there are, of course, what you debate.
We have a strategy going into the south part of Afghanistan that we are working with a variety of close friends and allies as part of that. We are working within the NATO context, and our exit strategy is part of a successful NATO mission, that is, we will go into the south part of Afghanistan. We have committed for a certain period of time, and we have told all concerned with whom we work that that is indeed our window for this period of time. Then it becomes the coalition's and/or NATO's responsibility to have the subsequent forces to be able to continue that mission while we either regroup, pause, go off on a different mission, or else continue at that same level or at a different level. There are several approaches to it, senator.
Senator Munson: I have one other brief question that deals with what you talked about, the multinational approach. Canada is part of it but we do not seem to get the recognition in many places for what we do. Do you worry that our soldiers are depleted in a way that they are being asked to do too much in too many places?
Gen. Hillier: I cannot tell you the number of times that I have actually groused about that. It led me to a belief where we had to ruthlessly focus on one and then a second large mission, as opposed to a whole variety of smaller ones. I give you the example of the former Yugoslavia during the early and mid-1990s, where we had thousands of soldiers on the ground, hundreds and sometimes thousands of sailors at sea and hundreds of airmen and air women. They were parcelled out in such a way that, on the radar scope of NATO, the United States and a variety of other countries, they were all but invisible. From our own country's perspective, it was an enormous investment. I just felt we had to do much better than that
My belief is that, in order to have the opportunity to influence regions and countries like Afghanistan and Kosovo, we have to concentrate our resources. That is one of the reasons in a defence policy and Canadian Forces' vision, we are determined to have a Canadian Forces' approach to these operations so we can utilize the best assets as one Canadian investment into an area, with a greater profile, greater credibility and, therefore, the chance to get the leadership that allows you to influence the development of a country or a region. That has been one of my frustrations over my career and one of the ones that I believe is well within our power to change fundamentally.
The Chairman: How does that square with going to Darfur with 80 people?
Gen. Hillier: Eighty people is manageable and doable while we concentrate on the bigger operations. We will always do those smaller pieces, without question. We have been doing that in the Golan Heights — 140 people for an enormous period of time. That has been a key part of the success of that mission and I think we could continue to maintain that. Now there is some optimism that we will not be at that same level much longer there.
We can be in those kinds of spots with relatively small numbers, less than 100, particularly if we shape it with the right kind of people. If we always take the low density, high demand technical trades and send them over, we cannot do it. However, if we can shape it with the right folks, as we can in Darfur, we can continue to play a part where help is needed and where we have the characteristics that are needed also. We can do that and at same time, do those one or two larger missions.
Senator Banks: We are past our time. I have a couple of short questions.
You said a minute ago that when the forces move the provincial rehabilitation team into Kandahar that the force protection function will be somebody else's, not ours. Does that mean that the Canadian Forces will be relying upon the protection of somebody else?
Gen. Hillier: If I said that, I misspoke a little bit. The provincial reconstruction team will go into its own camp, which is in the centre of Kandahar, and they will provide in that team the necessary measures to look after their force protection in and around that camp — so they will do their own. When we go into the Kandahar airfield, in that bigger footprint in February, 2006, that will be part of a multinational effort.
Just as in all the other places we go, you end up with certain nations doing the force protection, by and large, and with you, as a nation, doing a inner cordon around your own, which is much easier to do given that you are inside a greater protected area and, therefore, it is much less costly.
Senator Banks: Do you get to express an opinion about whether you are comfortable with whoever it is that is protecting you?
Gen. Hillier: If I am not, we will do it ourselves. I have a commitment to those young men and women who we ask to do dangerous things, and that commitment is that we will ensure that they are set up for success to do it and reduce the risk to them to the minimum possible while they are doing it. That is my commitment. If I am not comfortable, we will do it ourselves. We will get this right. There is no doubt in my mind. This is not new to us. We have done it before, and we will get it right.
Senator Banks: In respect of everything that we have talked about here today, that is to say, bringing things into doable control, you have had for some time now four CDS action teams, as they are called, looking at how to do this. They are addressing the questions of command and control. They are addressing the question of capabilities and force generation and the whole business of transformation. When do you expect to hear from them; and when do you expect to be able to put their recommendations, which are reported directly to you, into operation and give them effect?
Gen. Hillier: First of all, I hear from them every day, whether I want to or not. These are active, aggressive people. They are on a mission. They want this to get moving, and they want it to succeed.
We have four CDS action teams that we started towards the end of February, just after I had all my general and flag officers together to walk through what was articulated in our defence policy and the Canadian Forces vision. We use the term ``transformation.'' It is a much overused term. We have used it from everything from changing our socks to some significant radical restructuring. We will change the Canadian Forces, though. The Warsaw Pact, looking to the rear to going to what is the new threat, that ball of snakes, organized crime, terrorism, militia forces, that kind of thing is the real threat we face every day. That is what we deal with, and we have to be prepared to be successful.
The command and control team has been laying out for the Canadian Forces what is the logical command and control structure for the Canadian Forces this year, so that we can be successful in what we have to do on behalf of Canadians.
I gave them six principles to use. The first one was a Canadian Forces approach as opposed to an army, navy, air force approach. That is, a Canadian Forces operational entity, and a Canadian forces approach as opposed to army, navy, air force. Then, a command-centric approach as opposed to a staff approach, that is, commanders who have a clear and defined responsibility for certain things to be accomplished with a command team focus on it, not a massive staff, an amorphous staff. That is the second part.
Senator Banks: The two things you mentioned are huge changes.
Gen. Hillier: They are fundamental. The third one perhaps is an even more fundamental change, if you will. It is a command and control system that will facilitate the use of mission command versus risk aversion. Mission command we use in the military to say: Here is what I need you to achieve. Here are the resources to do it. Here is my general guidance. You discern what you have to do. Brief me and then go and execute it. In short, I am telling you what effect we need, not how to do something.
I need a command and control system structure that facilitates that kind of business. We attract, recruit, train, experience and educate incredible young men and women and make them commanders. We need to have a command and control system that empowers them to go out and do what we have prepared them to do. I need a command and control system that allows us to have accountability and responsibility as opposed to a staff matrix, which is a challenge when you are trying to say: What did I ask you to do, and have you accomplished it? I need a command and control system that is focussed on operations versus the institution only, ops primacy, in short.
Lastly, I need one that is regular and reserve, not one or the other. We are not two families in this great Canadian Forces. We are the Canadian Forces, and we need one that has that.
They are working through that now. They have offered some options such as a special operations group, an international commander, a Canadian expeditionary forces commander, and an operational support commander. All of that supported by a much more streamlined staff in National Defence headquarters and a very precise J staff. That is simply the way we set things up.
Senator Banks: You must already have experienced this, but you will experience a huge push back from that in the middle levels. People who are used to being in control do not like changes like that. How will you get past that?
Gen. Hillier: and I have talked to a lot of the folks, 10,000-plus, across the forces, and 100 per cent are in favour of where we are going in the Canadian Forces and the vision and implementing it and getting on with it. They tell me that it is about time. Almost without exception, everybody says that we need to do this. As for my part, with a few more people and a few more bucks, my part is good. There is a little bit of the ``not in my back yard'' attitude.
We will have to make some tough decisions, senator. We will do it with the leadership and do it based on 10 years of operational experience, cutting our teeth over this past decade on operations. We have 7 million personal lessons that we have never yet implemented. We will have to do it based on all that and a logic flow that follows the six principles here.
We have leaders, from section commanders right through to CDS, who want to do this, and we need to get on with it. Will there be a lot of resistance? Of course there will, because we are a massive institution, but we need that command and control system so that we can be successful.
In June, our general officers will get together and talk through the various bits and pieces of it and make sure we are all synchronized as to where we are going, stand up Canada Com as soon as possible, stand up the special operations group as soon as possible, and in 2006 look at standing up the international commander and an operational support commander and switching to a joint staff system.
The force generation piece was the second team, how you prepare forces, and the whole change is not just army, navy and the air force preparing upwards, as I mentioned earlier on when we talked about managed readiness, but actually a Canadian Forces approach downwards to help shape what the army does, what the navy does and what the air force does. We want one Canadian Forces operational entity. That is the second team.
The third team is defining what capabilities we need. At the air, land, sea interface, which is our focus going forward here, what do we need in the way of capabilities to be most efficient and successful? We want to be able to lay out in an adjunct to the defence policy statement a capabilities paper which specifies what we need. That is a lot of work for team number three. They have laid out a process to take all of our capabilities and measure them against this process and determine priorities. Is priority one that air, land and sea interface, or is it something else? We have started doing that now.
The last one, and I believe you had a chance to talk to General Dempster and he might have mentioned some of this, was the institutional alignment. We cannot do this in the Canadian Forces. This defence policy statement is a significant change. I will not use the term ``transformation.'' It is a significant change. We cannot do it in the Department of National Defence. This has to be the Government of Canada saying, ``We want to do this for Canadians.'' There is an institutional alignment here, a change in a variety of things on which we will have to work hard.
To go back to the initial and opening remarks here, we have to bite off these things in digestible bites as we go along, but we have to start chewing pretty rapidly because we have a lot of work to do and we want to get it done.
Senator Banks: You have an ``or else'' at the end of your suggestions, I am sure.
Gen. Hillier: No, senator.
The Chairman: Thank you, General Hillier. This is a good note to wrap up on. You have brought things together for the committee in a useful way, and we are grateful for that.
We wish you success. We are aware of the magnitude of the challenge that you face. We want you to succeed. We have a message for you to deliver to the men and women you command, and that is the pride that Canadians have in the work that they do and the respect that we have for them. We hope that is a message you can convey from Parliament to them. Every day, we see them in action, and our pride for them and our respect for them grows, and we would like to convey that to you on their behalf and we hope that, as the occasions arise, you can say you heard it here. On behalf of the committee, I thank you for appearing before us.
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We will continue in camera in the adjacent room.
The committee continued in camera.