I remember all the hoopla (CBC style) when Charlottetown was "integrated" with a US Carrier Battlegroup. We had to laugh out here because: (standby for long article)
SMALL NAVIES AND NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE
Is There a Role?
Paul T. Mitchell
Naval War College Review, Spring 2003, Vol. LVI, No. 2
CANADIAN SHIPS IN AMERICAN CVBGS
One can get a sense of the challenges facing coalition naval network-centric warfare by examining the integration of Canadian warships into U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups. In some respects, this case represents the crucible, for any difficulties faced by Canadians are likely to be considerably more intense for navies outside the bonds of trust that have traditionally connected the Canadian and American navies.
FIGURE 2
MARPAC Ships
1995, HMCS Calgary 50 days as independent ship in MIF
1997, HMCS Regina Surface action group
1998, HMCS Ottawa Abraham Lincoln BG, fully integrated
1999, HMCS Regina Constellation BG, replaced U.S. ship
2000, HMCS Calgary Surface action group, PacMEF
2001, HMCS Winnipeg
Constellation BG, on-scene commander 17–24 July 02, TACON of all BG units
2001, HMCS Vancouver John C. Stennis BG
MARLANT Ships
2001, HMCS Charlottetown LANTMEF, joined Harry S. Truman BG in Med.
MIF Maritime Interdiction Force BG battle group PacMEF Pacific Marine Expeditionary Force TACON tactical control LANTMEF Atlantic Marine Expeditionary Force
The Canadian navy began arranging to insert its ships into carrier battle groups in the late 1990s in an effort to improve interoperability with the U.S. Navy (see figure 2). Initially, only West Coast ships, operating out of Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt, in British Columbia, were involved. The West Coast fleet had fewer recurring operational commitments (such as the NATO Standing Naval Force Atlantic) than the East Coast command in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Further, the West Coast fleet had a long tradition of operating with the U.S. Navy and were therefore more doctrinally compatible with it than the Halifax squadrons, which had been primarily influenced by their long history of NATO operations.
Since their introduction, the integration of Canadian ships into CVBGs has been an evolutionary process. Canadian ships began as members of the Maritime Interdiction Force in the Persian Gulf, later gradually moving into actual battle groups as mutual familiarity improved. What started first as an operational initiative eventually gained an explicit strategic stature (in the Canadian context), when it became Department of National Defence policy to improve interoperability with its allies, particularly the United States. The department now seeks to develop and maintain “tactically self-sufficient units,” capable of substantial military contributions while asserting their Canadian identity. (A ground-forces equivalent would be the role Canadian Coyote LAV IIIs, armored reconnaissance vehicles, played in Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Afghanistan.) Commodore Dan McNeil, Director for Force Planning and Programme Co-ordination, has recently remarked, “We will never be able to field strategic level forces. . . . We’re not ever going to be in that game. We’re going to be fielding tactical units. [However,] if you properly use tactical units, you can achieve strategic effect. That is what we are trying to do.”53
A revolutionary aspect of these carrier battlegroup operations has been the fact that individual Canadian ships have often replaced American ones. This arrangement has been of mutual benefit; the United States has been able to address its shortages of frigates and destroyers, and Canada has been afforded professional opportunities that it could not hope to obtain on its own. These opportunities include not only extended operations in groups larger than those the Canadian navy typically sends to sea but also exposure to assets not in the Canadian order of battle—carriers, cruisers, and nuclear submarines.
Canada has thus become a member of a select club, enjoying special access to the command and control concepts developed by the U.S. Navy as it travels down the road of network-centric warfare, as well as to military support not normally offered to allies. Finally, CVBG operations enable the Canadian navy to develop professional skills in the areas of littoral and interdiction operations, for which there is no opportunity in North American waters.
At the same time, such deployments stress the mutual dependencies and vulnerabilities that are central to every good coalition operation. For the Canadian navy, given the relative scarcity of Canadian ships (Canada has only twelve Halifax-class frigates), each unit deployed has value out of proportion to its ultimate contribution to a carrier battle group. Obviously, sending such ships into the Persian and Arabian Gulfs, as is typical, is far more dangerous than assigning them to the standard fisheries patrols in Canadian waters they would most likely be conducting otherwise. Similarly, by replacing an American ship with a Canadian one, rather than simply augmenting the group, the U.S. Navy is placing considerable trust in the professionalism and competence of Canadian crews; as one battle group commander has declared, “We need to be ready to go on game day—and when we play, every game is game day.”54 Accepting a Canadian ship into a battle group also constitutes a commitment to look after that ship.
To ensure that they are not liabilities for their new battle groups, Canadian ships participate in the same exercises and workups that all American ships do. Similarly, they carry the latest revisions of the Global Command and Control System–Maritime (GCCS-M) and conduct training to ensure that they can share and use the information and imagery distributed on that system. The Canadian navy has been increasingly challenged by such upgrades, however, due to the legacy systems on board its ships. The CCS330 system that controls the ship displays in the operations rooms of the Halifax frigates and Iroquois-class destroyers is a closed-architecture system based on a unique operating system and military-specific software and hardware. State of the art ten years ago, it is becoming increasingly a maintenance problem and, even more seriously, has a very limited capacity for integration with new systems. New capabilities, like GCCS-M, must be added to Canadian ships on a stand-alone basis. Canadian display terminals, as a result, cannot send or receive operational messages; tactical networking requires separate consoles; and the information provided by systems like GCCS-M and the Canadian equivalent of the SIPRNET, known as MCOIN III, become effectively “stovepiped.” The result is a cluttered operations room where decision makers must consult a number of systems in order to gather all the information necessary to perform their jobs—obviously not the most efficient arrangement in the heat of battle.55
Interestingly, the Canadian navy’s effort to remain abreast of the fast-moving electronics revolution in command and control technologies is not being driven by American requirements. The United States is pleased that Canada strives to prevent gaps in capabilities. However, Canadian naval officers stress, it is the long history of naval cooperation and overall familiarity between the navies that has facilitated these exchanges, not the technical “kit” installed aboard Canadian ships.56 The difficulties Canadian ships typically encounter in integrating themselves into American battle groups largely arise from the issue of accessibility.
