Publications

New Challenges, New Opportunities
Annual Report for the Year Ending 31 March 2007

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S&T Results for Defence and the Canadian Forces

Force Development

During the last year, DRDC made significant contributions to the conceptualization and planning associated with the creation, maintenance and adaptation of military and departmental capabilities in the face of changing security and resource circumstances. The following examples highlight some of our successes in these areas.

Supporting the Army of Tomorrow

The "Army of Tomorrow" force employment concept is a capabilities-based operating theory that projects forward to the army of 2021. It describes the functional and enabling factors and capabilities needed by the army of tomorrow to operate in the strategic and operational settings of that era. The concept includes such elements as non-lethal means, as well as the roles of light and medium forces, the army's approach to organizational structures, and a development methodology to move in the direction of the army of tomorrow.

To support the Army of Tomorrow, DRDC used its Fundamental Investigation of Defence Objectives (FIDO) decision-support package to analyze the priorities of the capability requirements under each of the core elements of the army. With army personnel as subject-matter experts, we used FIDO to assess these elements against the army's commitment to be knowledge-based, strategically relevant, sustainable and tactically decisive. Throughout the year, DRDC personnel participated in several workshops to refine the Army of Tomorrow concepts. In conjunction with army counterparts, they produced an update to the Future Security Environment document, described enabling concepts, developed higher-level functional concepts, and helped define adaptive dispersed operations (ADO). They further analyzed and developed the ADO concepts through a series of seminar war games. As has been evident both from conceptual development and from operations in Afghanistan, Canadian land forces will be required in the future to spread resources over wider and wider geographic areas - much greater dispersion than was the case in the Cold War era.

Training exercises like this one help researchers analyze priorities of the capability requirements of the army

Army Experiment 9A was a concept-refinement experiment to study the effectiveness of ADO within a whole-of-government campaign in a complex security environment. DRDC supported this experiment by developing war-game databases for the performance of weapons, sensors and platforms by analyzing participant responses to questionnaires regarding the ADO concept, and by examining the level of dispersion and the use of lethal and non-lethal military means in dispersed operations. Traditionally the military has been associated predominantly with lethal means to accomplish its assigned tasks; for example, tank-on-tank engagements. But current and future operations will call upon our military forces to consider many non-lethal means to accomplish their objectives. This may extend to working with local populations to ensure they have sufficient security to develop their own political processes at the community level.

Planning for the future navy

It is a well-known fact that the Canadian population is aging and the size of the working-age population will decline. Future demographic projections indicate that the Canadian workforce will become increasingly diverse as immigration becomes the primary source of future population growth. Over time, Canada will witness the decline of the traditional military recruitment pool. Given the anticipated fierce competition for skilled workers, it is prudent for the navy to consider planning for a reduction in the availability of recruits in the future.

In 2006, the navy embarked upon the Future Sailor Initiative to determine the strategic human resource issues facing Canadian society and, more importantly, how these might impact the navy of the future. The Future Sailor Initiative aims to provide an analytical, strategic input to maritime force development to enable the navy to develop the future fleet in accordance with the societal expectations of the next two decades. This will be achieved through examining demographic and societal trends that will influence recruitment and retention.

The Future Sailor Initiative examines how changing Canadian demographics will affect the navy’s long-term planning and recruitment structure

To support this initiative, DRDC undertook a study to identify the societal and demographic changes that will impact the navy's future personnel and workforce. We completed the first part of this work - an overview of major Canadian demographic trends and how they are reflected within the navy recruitment population. The study examined a number of Canadian population characteristics to demonstrate the strategic impact that demographics can have for navy planners and naval recruiters.

The results of the analysis will feed into the navy's strategic planning and provide vital information required to support the decision making necessary to determine the way forward for fleet renewal. Two further studies are planned: one on the propensity of youth to join the Canadian Forces and, in particular, the navy; and the other on the impact of these demographic issues on the future personnel system.

Support to centralized force development

As part of the ongoing transformation of the Canadian Forces, the Chief of the Defence Staff created, in June 2006, a new centralized force development authority, under the Chief of Force Development, to synchronize national and joint force development activities. The intention was to put in place an integrated force development process, guided by strategic intent, which will determine the kinds of capabilities the Canadian Forces will field to meet the demands of future operations.

Through embedded staff in the Chief of Force Development organization, DRDC provided strategic analysis and a science and technology perspective to the new force development process by contributing to the creation and maintenance of the Future Security Environment document, the Strategic Operating Concept, and the Force Planning Scenarios, and by helping to identify and develop the underlying high-level concepts for future operations and capability.

The Future Security Environment document describes the world in which the Canadian Forces might have to operate in 20 years and provides a framework for the development of Force Planning Scenarios. The Strategic Operating Concept describes how the Canadian Forces expect to operate in 10 to 20 years and provides conceptual guidance for all follow-on force development activity.

The Force Planning Scenarios depict the situations in which the Canadian Forces anticipate conducting operations. They include the full range of domestic, continental and international operations across the full spectrum of conflict, and are intended to inspire the development of concepts and to provide a basis for the development of future military capabilities.

As an ensemble, the Future Security Environment document, the Strategic Operating Concept and the Force Planning Scenarios help shape the strategic intent of the Canadian Forces and drive the development of future military capability.

Improved network situational awareness

The Canadian Forces Network Operations Centre (CFNOC) handles a vast amount of information about the state of Canadian Forces networks. This includes details on incidents, vulnerabilities and network devices and how they are used in operations. DRDC perceived a need for a tool that would assist the CFNOC in interpreting and understanding these and developed the Impact Assessment Tool (IAT).

The aim of the IAT is to improve the CFNOC's capability to interpret and understand network events and to disseminate timely information among its team members. It is a software-based support system consisting of a user interface, a data model and a data repository. The data model allows relationships to be derived between network events - such as the emergence of a new vulnerability or an alert from an intrusion detection system, and network assets - such as servers and workstations. The IAT provides CFNOC team members with customized user interfaces optimized to support their particular roles.

CFNOC operators look at a topology view of software that includes the IAT capability

The CFNOC has embraced the development and the subsequent deployment of the IAT as it has provided them with increased network situational awareness. Feedback from the use of the IAT is finding its way into other projects to help ensure their success for the benefit of the CFNOC.

Entity-based modelling for human resources analysis

Over the last few years, DRDC has been developing the next-generation modelling tools to support the analysis of human resource issues within the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces. Using ARENA, a commercial off-the-shelf simulation application for manufacturing, we developed two applications: the ARENA Career Modelling Environment for modelling career progression, and the Production Management Tool to model training pipelines.

Both of these tools use an entity-based approach to modelling, where each individual in the human resources system is represented as an entity, with a select number of attributes representing various demographic and employment characteristics. While spreadsheets and stock and flow models can be useful for solving problems that call for the analysis of effects on one or two attributes, entity-based models are required to examine the interaction of policies and plans in several dimensions or attributes.

Within the Department and the Canadian Forces, these tools were successfully used to forecast individual training and education requirements; to assess the impact of career fields or restructured occupations on recruiting, promotion and attrition; to examine succession planning issues for general officers in the military; and to analyze current and future schedules for human resource production.

This approach to human resources forecasting has gained tremendous interest both in Canada and with our allies in The Technical Cooperation Program. The Canadian distributor of ARENA has embraced its application to human resources issues and has developed a niche market providing analytical human resources services to both the private and the public sectors. Statistics Canada has also embraced the approach as a replacement for their human resources modelling paradigm.

In the entity-based approach to modelling, each individual in the human resource system is represented as an entity with a select number of attributes

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