All right, welcome back to the Ottawa studios of Inside My Canoehead. I am your host, Dr. D. Today, we are talking about how the Canadian Armed Forces deploys in both domestic and international emergencies.
Sit back, grab your beverage. Let's get at it. So welcome back and thanks again for all of the support. This has been an epic start to the month of September.
We appreciate your ongoing high fives and everything else you're telling us about Season 8 and the great things that we've delivered so far. And so today I wanted to return to a topic that is very near and dear to my heart, being a 28 year veteran of Her Majesty's service myself, is to return and talk about how the Canadian Armed Forces deploys in some form of disaster emergency response at the request of elements of the Canadian governance system. Now, there's an international element to that. We will talk about the infamous or famous DART, depending on how you frame the usefulness of that unit, and a couple of other interesting things.
This is going to be descriptive, informative, very good, very necessary, because right now we see the CAF being deployed all over Canada in response to disasters. And we also see a great number of good articles and some questionable ones being written about the value of the Canadian Armed Forces in this role, as well as Canada's future disaster response domestic capability and what that should look like. I myself have published hours of podcast episodes in season two and three about the future of this role. And I have written dozens of pages of articles about the future capability in Canada and what that should look like.
I will continue to contribute to that because I think it's important. But as the people of Canada and my wonderful friends down south of the border, international folks, just so you understand how we do it here in Canada, because we do things differently just because we can. Right. So no problem whatsoever.
So from a big overarching perspective, Canada is the second largest landmass in the world. So our Canadian Armed Forces is roughly 70,000 total strength, regular force with another 20 plus thousand in the reserve force. The reality is our total effective strength, depending on whether you read the latest articles in the Western Standard or not, falls somewhere between 34,000 and 55,000. We are suffering a significant problem with recruiting and retention for a whole bunch of reasons that are going to be outside today's topic.
But just so you understand in reflection, that the full fighting force of the Canadian Army, for example, equals to the staffing number of the U.S. Pentagon. Just as reference, it's about 25, 26,000 all in if everybody was healthy and ready to go. However, we've produced millions of people for world war.
So we are very good at the mobilization thing. So we're quite happy that if we could probably figure out to persuade a bunch of people to join up, that would be good to get back to our regular numbers. But considering the geography and the second largest country in the world, three major oceans, we have the CAF organized into six regions. We have the Pacific, the Western region, Central, Quebec, Atlantic and the Northern region.
In each one of these are called joint task force Atlantic, joint task force Pacific, etc. Now, from a command and control perspective, they're all commanded by the equivalent of two stars, either naval, Air Force or Army commands. And so from that perspective, they have command and control over assigned units and emergency response within their regions. Now, the Army itself, the Canadian Army is organized into four regions with four major Army bases.
And on each one of those bases, the Army has what's called an IRU, an immediate response unit. And those four bases are CFB Petawawa in Ontario, Edmonton, Alberta, Valcartier, Quebec and Gagetown, New Brunswick. And those immediate response units would be infantry battalions or other combat arms units. Now, the supporting elements in the shoulder units that exist in the fighting brigade or on the base are also going to be there to support.
But the immediate response unit is tasked and based around one of these combat arms units. So that's how the Canadian military has standing capability. Now, I'll make the exception right now. We are not referring to the search and rescue capability of the Canadian Armed Forces.
They are responsible for the immediate response to life and limb emergencies across the entire nation. That is a standing running capability that runs on its own, is commanded by the joint task force, but requires no intervention by anyone else. They coordinate with the Coast Guard, civilian air traffic. They coordinate with civilian marine traffic and they use everything at their disposal.
And there are dedicated Royal Canadian Air Force assets and some of the bravest human beings I've ever met in my life are those involved in search and rescue. Phenomenal human beings that are dedicated to put their lives at risk and at times lose their lives in support so others may come home. It's fantastic. It's wonderful.
And it's not lauded enough in the nation of Canada. And I'm sure internationally the same thing goes. The search and rescue folks are incredible, but we're going to park those aside of note with the search and rescue, though, there is a major aid plan and it's called a Major Air Disaster Plan. And in at CFB Trenton, which is our principal Air Force base northeast of Toronto, is located the Major Aid equipment.
And it is designed to respond to the crash of an international airliner over Canada's north. If you don't understand the curvature of the earth, that almost all global flights are flying at one point or another over northern regions of the world. It just gets them from A to B a lot quicker. And if you look on flight radar 24 or something like that sometime, you'll see the number of planes are up there.
There's no civilization for thousands of kilometers in some square kilometers in some places up there. So Canadian Armed Forces has a Major Air Disaster kit and equipment. At one point, I was one of the platoon commanders in support of that operation. Went down, took a look at the kit, partook in the annual meeting and rehearsal that goes on.
So we have that capability under the search and rescue. So when we talk about something else that's also not well understood, if you understand how we've divided up the country, how we've assigned command and control and the fact that there are four immediate response units ready to go in an emergency. We talk about NTM, notice to move. What does that mean?
Well, you're on 15 minutes notice to move. This unit's on 12 hours notice to move. What does that actually mean? And from a unit's perspective, and I've been a member of the immediate response unit in Atlantic Canada for many, many years in my previous career.
It is the timeframe in which a military unit will depart its current location to execute a task. So if a unit is on 48 hours notice to move, that means when they're given the order to go, so all the planning, all the thinking, all the arrangements have been made and they've been given the order to move, they move in 48 hours. And in the military and like pretty much every other industry, we don't throw something at a problem without the proper planning process being done. So there is a planning lead time that must be executed in advance to allow for a proper employment of the military.
You just don't throw a bunch of people on the road and then say, we'll figure it out when you get there because you create not only logjams and road jams, you create a whole slew of other problems that cascade, making your deployment ineffective. So the notice to move is the timeframe once that planning is all done and we're ready to give the executable move now orders to the unit, they move on that now. The IRU at each one of the locations in Canada is broken down into three specific parts. One is a recce element.
The reconnaissance element is literally four human beings in an SUV and they're on four hours notice to move. So they're the ones that are going to move at a high rate of speed. Sometimes they take a helicopter. Sometimes they'll take other methods of transport, but they're the four hours.
They're going to go. Now it's normally made up of the deputy commanding officer and a few other key people. And they deploy to the location and situation to conduct a recce to make sure that the appropriate mission profile and the appropriate equipment profile is matched to the likely mission. So remember at this time, it's still a likely mission, but your recce element goes in four hours.
You then have something called the Vanguard company. The Vanguard company is on 24 hours notice to move, right? So as soon as you give them the executable, 24 hours later, the trucks roll out with the troops on board. Now Vanguard company is usually about 75 to 120 people, depending on the unit you're dealing with.
And they are a safe, self-contained unit that deploys to deal with whatever the task that they've been handed. And then the main body, which is the remainder of the immediate response unit is on 48 hours notice to move. So from that perspective, you understand notice to moves are for total purposes. Once all the planning and executable is done and everybody understands their mission, that's the timeframe the unit has to get ready.
So something else that is done in the military is called a warning order. And a warning order is a likely and probable task that's given. And that usually comes down to the IRU from the joint task force headquarters that will state something similar to likely deployment, probable mission. Be prepared to those types of statements and no move before an NMB, which gives a clear planning timeline to the folks on the ground.
Because remember, you just can't throw these people out. Because remember, if you want somebody on higher rates of readiness, there are a lot of things that have to happen to get a large number of troops moving. They don't move support of a disaster or emergency in Canada is that it is done so as a subordinate asset to provincial officials. Now, that relationship in military parlance can either be operational control or tactical control.
And basically, the element is put under operational control and OPCON is what it's referred to. And that means that the joint task force commander in the Pacific area, if the BC was the case, has operational control of that unit, and it is subordinated then to the province. The province can then assign tasks to the military unit. The province cannot break up the military unit.
It cannot tell the military unit how to conduct its administration, logistics, command control or discipline and order. So basically, the unit, the IRU gets deployed in this case to British Columbia. It is placed under operational command of joint task force, but it is OPCON to the province, which means the province says, Hey, Mr. Military guy, I want you to go up to this part of British Columbia and I need you to execute this task, right?
So then it's the IRU commander who decides how they get to where they need to be, how they're going to execute, and then how that commander is going to support the troops on the ground through the logistical network, the echelon system and all the necessary supports. It's something in the military that's referred to as mission command. And the easiest way to understand it is the colloquial saying we use all the time, you can tell me to suck eggs, but you're not allowed to tell me how to suck eggs, which means you can tell me to go sandbag in a town in Northern British Columbia, but you can't tell me how to sandbag. You're not allowed to do that, right?
So you give me a task as an Army, as a commander of a deployed IRU, I will get my task from the provincial emergency management office. I will then execute that task. I will determine how that task is executed. Obviously, I have to fulfill the mission that I've been given, but there isn't a provincial EMO going say, place the lab over there.
I want these 13 guys to go over here and fill sandbags. That doesn't happen. The Army executes the task. It's the province that gives the task to the Army.
And if the province needs the Army to stop doing that task and move over to a different one, then it has the authority to do that. So that's just the relationship that happens. So how do they ask for help? This is important.
How does a provincial government determine that it needs a federal capability? This is done through something called an RFA, a request for assistance comes from a requisite appointed authority within the province to the government of Canada for a specific asset or capability that is not resident in the provincial skill set or repertoire, but is resident with the federal government. So it could be a manpower request. It could be a communications request.
It could be a policing request for the RCMP. It could be a surveillance request for a specific military surveillance capability. It could be a strategic asset such as strategic lift. We need Air Force to go in and evacuate people from a Northern community, something along that lines.
Now that is coordinated by something called the Government of Canada Operations Center, which is located in a basement of a nondescript office building in downtown Ottawa. And it is their responsibility to coordinate the federal government's response to a provincial request for assistance. So the Government of Canada Operations Center doesn't command anything. They are a coordination and a support network that allows, that permits in bigger emergencies, something we call the continuity of constitutional government.
In America, it's just called COG, continuity of government. Here Canadians, just because we like to do things differently, we throw in the other letter just because we like to be complicated. But basically, the Government of Canada Operations Center's primary role is to coordinate that response for which the provinces have requested and to ensure the continued operation of the federal government in times of increased stress and chaotic events. So basically, they're the ones that make sure the Department of Justice is up and running and able to execute its task, the Public Safety Canada can, that Immigration Canada can, that the Department of Foreign Affairs or what is now called Global Affairs Canada can.
So it's their responsibility, the Government of Canada Operations Center to ensure that the government of Canada is executing its minimal acceptable tasks in times of emergency, which includes that for which the province. So that request comes through. Obviously, the minister approves it because it'd be a big bad day if the Minister of National Defense didn't approve the allocation of the CAF asset. And then the orders follow through what I stated there to CGOC, to the department commanders through a couple of other elements in the military that aren't important at this point.
But basically that is coordinated, it's executed, and then it follows through that command and control relationship down to the IRU or the specific asset tactical alertlet surveillance plane, whatever it may be. And then the orders are given and that task is executed. And for surveillance, for example, when the surveillance planes are deployed over Canada, they are under very, very specific legal control because surveilling Canadians has a whole bunch of legal context to it. I was never involved in that.
So I can't comment on those operations that happen in Canada other than they do happen, but I can't comment on those operations. I have no knowledge of that and no expertise in that area. So understanding that, you now understand how the CAF operates. But the keynote here as part of the bigger discussion before we jump into the DART and an international discussion is that this is one of the things the Canadian Armed Forces must do because they are known as the force of last resort, which means when there is nobody else capable of doing the task, the military fills the task.
We saw it during the pandemic for medical deployment, medical personnel that deployed to the long-term care centers and things along that. There was nobody else in the country who could do that and the military therefore had to do it. And the military has something called a no-fail mission, which I think is hilarious because I've never had a mission in the military that was a fail mission. But the idea of a no-fail mission is that there's nobody else.
If the Canadian Armed Forces are unsuccessful in their domestic response to a disaster, there's nobody else that's coming. No one, no organization, no capability, nothing. So the Canadian Armed Forces do not have the opportunity to be unsuccessful, right? Which is why the country is so, from a military perspective, is so hesitant to rely on the military because that's it.
It's like throwing in your big bet on red or black in a casino. The point is, it's simple. When you keep pulling the military into disaster response, you're pulling in your most valuable and most lucrative asset every single time, understanding that there's nothing else to replace that if it can't be successful, if it's not successful. And every time that you pull an IRU into a disaster response scenario, you're taking the IRU and the supporting elements that make it work away from their ongoing tasks.
Now, the Canadian Armed Forces works on something called a cyclical cycle, and it basically has three levels. You have a unit in operations, a unit training for operations, and a unit reconstituting for operations, right? So every unit in the Canadian Armed Forces is flowing through a three-sector cycle, let's call it. It's called by a whole bunch of different acronyms across different elements of the Army and the Canadian Armed Forces.
I'm not going to get there. But if your unit is employed overseas in an operation, for example, the unit that is deployed right now in Latvia to stand as part of that operation standing across from the Russian Army is considered to be in operations. There is a unit in Canada right now who is in what they call the road to high readiness, and that unit is working up, practicing, doing their deployed exercises and getting their skill sets together to sharpen the knife as sharp as you can get it, so that when you deploy to a theater of operations overseas, your unit is at its peak maximum performance. The Navy does the same thing.
The Navy does workups at sea to get ready for an international deployment. And the previous cycle is your unit has just returned from an overseas or an international deployment. Your unit is now reconstituting, which means it's preparing in the big picture. If it's a large airframe or if it's a naval ship, it's going into some longer-term maintenance.
The individuals, the humans, are getting rest and recovery. The humans are then going off to do some individual training to build up their own skill sets before they move again into the next road to high readiness schedule where they'll start to do collective training. And if you think this thing repeats constantly, right? Well, the IRU units in Canada are in this cycle.
The IRU is a secondary task. It's not a standalone. So every time you grab an IRU, obviously the IRU is not overseas, right? It's in Canada.
So the IRU unit that you are tasking to fill sandbags or create fire breaks in Canada was either in the process of reconstituting after an international mission, or it was on a road to high readiness getting ready for an international mission. And you keep punching the combat capability of the Canadian Armed Forces in the gut every time you pull a unit for domestic emergency operations. Now, they'll go because there's nothing more important than the home game. But every time you do that, you're impacting on the true role and responsibility of the Canadian Armed Forces and in any nation's army is to be ready to fight.
We carry guns and we drop bombs and we're meant to hurt people. We demonstrate the ability to hurt people so that people don't hurt us. That's deterrence, right? A military is strong.
It's robust. It's capable of epic levels of organized violence. When you look at that, you're like, I don't want to mess with them. And that's the deterrent force that helps international to a area of the world that has suffered a significant event and the normal primary medical care capability is not resident.
So, for example, and this is where it's been used many times, is the local capability, the local medical clinics have been destroyed by a hurricane. So the Canadian Armed Forces deploys a medical clinic to replace the regular ongoing systemic care in the neighborhood, in the community. It's not there to repair damage done to human beings from the effects of the disaster. It's there to replicate a capability that was lost.
The engineering capability is there to help clear roads, make minor repairs to make certain pieces of infrastructure useful, and obviously water purification is just that. If the water purification system was damaged or offline or the current capability where the community would get freshwater for is not available, then basically the Canadian Armed Forces rolls in, sets up a walk-in clinic with freshwater capability and the ability to clear some roads to get people around. That's what the DART is. Now, the DART is launched through a combined operation.
It used to be called the CDAT. It used to be called the HEART. I'm not sure today what it is called, but it's basically the immediate response is a small unit of people that go. Now, the way it is organized, and there was one exception to this, is the Canadian government will consider the DART upon a request from a foreign government that normally comes through the ambassador.
So the Canadian ambassador to the Philippines, for example, when a typhoon hit the Philippines and caused damage, the Canadian ambassador received a request for assistance. So that was related to the Canadian government and the HEART was launched. It's the CDAT, now the Canadian Disaster Assessment Team. And basically it is a combination of a couple of key military officers and members from Global Affairs Canada that jump on one of those cool little challengers in Ottawa and they jet to the other side of the world, sit on the ground, do an assessment with the locals, find a local region that is missing those two or three capabilities that the Canadian Armed Forces can provide.
Remember, this is not immediate executable response to save lives. This is about replicating a lost capability in a town. And usually what the Canadian Armed Forces does is because by this time, by time our assessment team lands on the ground, most of the international aid is up and running. So most of the areas of operations have been claimed by different countries or different international organizations who are executing a absolute I'm saving lives and doing emergency surgery type of response.
The Canadian Armed Forces usually takes a couple of outlying areas and we send the capability, and that's basically it. It's just an agreement between the local government, the national government, and the Canadian representatives on the ground. They bring that back to Canada, and then the Canadian government will make a decision whether to launch DART. Now, the launching of DART is a bit more complex because other than the handful, and I mean literal handful, about a half a dozen to a dozen people who work full time at the DART in Trenton, every other member of the Canadian DART is currently working somewhere else in the Canadian Armed Forces and has to be taken away from those tasks, sent to Trenton.
Now the equipment's all up and ready to go. There's very little prep time. They're very, very good at that. Then the equipment loading happens.
It's a very detailed, very well rehearsed schedule. At times, certain force packages can be added to it. Like, for example, in the Philippines, they brought a number of Griffin helicopters for mobility assets because of the isolated nature of the location that had been chosen. Those types of things are what's figured out on the ground by the assessment team, and that can be added to the force package.
But the basic package is your engineering unit, your medical unit, your command and control unit. And then you have your logistics platoon that keeps them going and you have your security platoon that keeps everybody safe, right? Because you are going into disaster area, you're going to some different areas of the world that may not have the same level of the rule of law as we do. And therefore, defense and security platoons are always necessary, even for humanitarian operations.
So that capability gets launched out the door. It gets sent internationally and it executes the task. Now, the one exception I spoke about was the response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010. And I tell you, I can give you a personal answer to this because I was a staff officer on army staff when that happened in January of 2010.
And I can remember quite clearly our colonel saying, as we were getting ready to go off on Christmas vacation around the 20th or 21st of December, that this was the perfect storm. That if anything bad was going to happen right now, it would be the worst possible time because you have to remember, this was the height of the running gun show and the fight in Kandahar, Afghanistan. So we had 3000 Canadian Armed Forces members deployed in Afghanistan. We had, at the time, 3500 training in California at an American training facility getting ready to go on to the next deployment.
We also had 4000 Canadian Armed Forces members in and around Vancouver for what we referred to as Operation Podium, which was the defense and security of the Olympics. So I know the Canadian Armed Forces as a shell of its former self, because at that time, when the big bad day happened, we had over 10,000 Canadian Armed Forces members in domestic operations committed or outside the country. I don't know if there's 10,000 healthy members in the military now that they could put in a single room if they had to. But the point being is all those assets were out the door and there was literally nothing left in the barn.
And we were all scared because, Mr. Murphy, this is how it always happens. So, yeah. Then nature dropped the big bad day in January of 2010.
So we reached around the cover and the government of Canada at the time decided they were going. They were going with a robust response to the earthquake without a request from the Haitian government, as the Haitian government was considered to be largely combat ineffective. It had largely been sidelined or destroyed. You have to also remember circumstances being Canada has the largest diaspora of Haitians in the world, and it is very vocal and well connected.
And whether you agree with it or not, I don't care. Canada's governor general at the time, Michael Jean, was Haitian. So we went in large scale. We threw the kitchen sink and everybody who didn't have an international trip booked was put in.
We sent chips. We sent planes and we sent a massive ground force of over a thousand people into Haiti for the largest disaster response the Canadian Armed Forces has ever executed. And it's funny that the two towns we went into happened to be the birthplace of our governor general and where the governor general's family lived. I know that was just randomly picked out of thin air, but whatever.
That was the largest deployment of the Canadian Armed Forces. And it was the first time and the only time the Canadian Armed Forces actually deployed surgical capability from one Canadian field hospital in Petawawa to conduct surgeries on the ground. Now, by time everything got in situ, everybody that had a surgical issue related to the earthquake was either dead or had been repaired by somebody else. A little blunt, but that's the truth.
Canada is not known for rapid deployment of anything. And even in this Haitian capability, it took a long time to get everybody and the skill sets on the ground and down there. By then, there were lots of surgeries that done, but those were surgeries for issues systemic in the population and not disaster related. But we were there for a long period of time, did some fantastic work helping out the Haitians and only lost a little bit over a million dollars worth of Canadian equipment.
Couldn't be found on our return back to Canada, but that's a different story altogether. So understand that the DART is not this magical immediate response unit that Canada retains that we're going to throw the DART at a mission and we're going to make a huge difference on the ground. Now, the DART is a political animal. It is a flag bearing animal and it is not an immediate response animal.
This is why I told you at the beginning of the commentary that my, and because I own the podcast, so here I go. My personal opinion on this is that the DART either needs to be something significant or it needs to go away because the Canadian Armed Forces has very limited capability right now and that is something that is politically difficult to get rid of. But it is something that it really is. It's just a fact.
Now it helps provide the medical care and fresh water to people that would have not only got it, not normally received it, but that's okay. That can be filled by any number of other international organizations can do what we do faster, more effectively and far more efficiently with far less people and far less equipment. We just do it in a big, bad, old, burdensome, difficult way because the army and the Canadian Armed Forces doesn't like to change. So from that perspective, I'll give you an example of what I mean.
The rapid disaster response capability of the Israeli army, and this is the government of Israel is the best in the world in this. I don't care what your feeling is of them, is they do orthopedic surgery. That is their immediate response capability with a pediatric element to orthopedic surgery. They have two planes, one with people on it, one with equipment on it.
And when a disaster happens, they launch it. Their government sits around and decides what they're going to do as the planes are flying to the destination, right? Because if you want to facilitate surgical intervention post-event, you need to be doing that ideally within 36 hours of the event. And the Israelis do.
They show up with minimal equipment. They do it under tents. They do one