Canadian Operational Support Command (CANOSCOM) might not garner the same limelight as its brethren in Canada Command, Expeditionary Force Command or Special Operations Forces Command, but few operations go far without it. Dubbed by some as the crown jewel in the nascent operational command structure, CANOSCOM has seen a hectic 18 months of mission activation and closure operations, in addition to sustaining the longest operation since the Korean War.
With 35 years of experience, MGen Mark McQuillan has seen many changes in how the Canadian Forces supports troops in expeditionary and domestic operations, including as commanding officer of the support element to the Canadian Contingent to NATO’s Stabilization Force in Bosnia and more recently as Deputy Chief of Staff for the Materiel Group. The commander of CANOSCOM spoke with Vanguard about new capabilities and maintaining flexibility.
What’s the most visible difference in how a mission like Afghanistan is supported versus missions in, for example, the Balkans?
I would say we have matured and better adapted to the environment. Based on the scenarios we face today, we probably have more tools available to us. Back when I was a commander of a national support element, I would have had a hundred percent military personnel conducting support. Today, we’ll have a combination of resources available, be it from military, coalition and contracted capability. For example, today we have the Canadian Contractor Augmentation Program (CANCAP), and we’ll use that tool to compliment or augment military capabilities as dictated by the operational environment within which we work.
Are there specific capabilities introduced as a result of the stand up of CANOSCOM that were not available before?
I have seen a change in dynamic in how the Canadian Forces enables operations but I don’t know that there was one specific capability that has enhanced operational support. We bring together under one umbrella a range of tools to support a joint task force as it is deployed and sustained. I also have a reach back capability to the functional authorities – materiel accountability or IT infrastructure and others – to make sure there is a coordination of effort in supporting the deployed task force. I think that is the strength of the organization. Internal to CANOSCOM, we have some niche capabilities that are not quite as evident in other places. For instance, when you go into a relatively new theatre, invariably you come up with a range of challenges: bed down requirements, environmental assessments or engineering coordination for infrastructure builds; the ability to forward project, which involves movements coordination; communications links; and increasingly today, coordination of commercial contracting support. The capability to coordinate these functional requirements exists within CANOSCOM.
To a certain extent, materiel management is still the backbone of what we do. From our depot systems across Canada, to being able to coordinate and provide the enabling pieces for structures, sustainment, movement in theatre, all of that exists within CANOSCOM. I’d like to think CANOSCOM has enabled operational commanders to be more flexible and responsive in doing their business. When you talk to the service chiefs and the commanders of CEFCOM and Canada Command, they clearly see us as an important enabler of their operations.
When CANOSCOM was stood up, there was an emphasis on developing a lessons learned process. How has that evolved and are there some specific lessons you’ve adopted from recent missions?
I think all organizations try to learn, but the military tries to institutionalize that process. CANOSCOM has a lessons learned cell to look at ongoing operations and enhance capability. And we have had success. Is it where I would like it to be? No, it probably still needs more maturing.
One of the biggest changes I saw as I came into this job was the extent to which we needed to work with coalition partners. For instance, I’m involved at a strategic level with an organization called the Quadrilateral Logistics Forum, which involves us, the U.K., Australia and the U.S. As a logistics support community we look at what we are doing in coalition operations with an aim to enhancing capabilities, whether it’s influencing NATO or just being more responsive from a national perspective. One of the areas we have looked at collectively is coalition contracting. In a place like Afghanistan, a good deal of goods and services delivery within ISAF is provided through contracting. So you need an overall framework to balance demand and ensure you are not overloading contractors or committing contract fratricide. We learned we needed to work together to develop a contract to support the Kandahar mission for things such as food and fuel. We’ve also looked at movement visibility. Afghanistan has some limiting factors in terms of transportation. With the myriad of countries involved in this type of mission, you become really conscious of how many aircraft you can land at an airfield at a given time, how to prioritize, manage and set conditions based on competing national priorities so we all achieve the desired end state.
Are we seeing specialization by certain nations in delivering logistics support in a coalition environment?
NATO operates and most coalition type deployments work under the principle that nations have to deploy with a level of independent capability to support their troops and assigned operations. There are certain classes of goods that have to remain a national responsibility, but there are commodities that can be provided from a shared perspective. Fuel management is one. While the U.S. may be a primary fuel consumer in an operation such as ISAF, there can be a shared oversight where fuel management is done from a NATO perspective. Additionally, while every nation has its own rules and regulations for contracting, they need to maintain their own expertise, but there will be levels at which we can do things together. As you start to do things better and smarter, people start to share information to the extent possible to generate efficiencies in the provision of operational support.
You have gone through a period in the past 18 months of multiple mission activations and closures, from Haiti to the High North or the Middle East. What have you learned from those?
Theatre activation is about responding to the operational requirement, but there are some practical things that always need to be done: environmental surveys, setting baseline conditions for contracting, putting host nation agreements in place to allow us to temporarily stage or use facilities and/or use resources. We’ve developed and matured our capabilities in those areas. From a logistics perspective, we want to be effective in supporting the mission, but at the same time we want to be practical in what we do. When you set up a mission, you have to be responsive to the operational commander and your lines of communication – how you move things – have to be able to meet the time sensitivities during operations.
We can execute planned events in which demands are considered in a logical, fluid and well managed process. But we also have to be able to respond to the urgent – humanitarian assistance or disaster relief such as occurred in Haiti – and in those circumstances it is resources-at-hand, and the time sensitivity of response is a lot more critical. Theatre activation and bed down becomes very much merged with the initial phases of providing assistance.
Have you created a rapid response capability, the ability to plug in support functions depending on the requirement?
Trying to understand with clarity what is required on the ground in a time sensitive environment is not always possible. For Haiti, we understood the earthquake and the devastation, but not the extent to which sea ports and airports and transportation routes were affected. So you do your best military analysis and try to be pragmatic in how you respond. The military likes to ensure we won’t fail so we tend to apply the full scale of resources and ensure we deploy with the full range of tasks to meet all eventualities.
We can kick things out relatively quickly. On disaster assistance, there is a high readiness capability in the DART and we have a support component piece of that. The CF also has plans for non-combat evacuations and major air disasters, and we designate capabilities within CANOSCOM to be able to support those.
Have you had to introduce new skill sets into CANOSCOM, information communications technology skills for example?
Effective communications are essential to all operations. To be honest we’re probably not as good as we need to be in that area. The Joint Signals Regiment provides that link of strategic to operational communications. The army, navy and air force have all developed platforms and capabilities, and they have communications suites that make them work in synch. There is a challenge, though, when we link those service platforms with corporate enterprise systems back in Canada; at times that can stretch our capability. The Joint Signals Regiment has both a software challenge at times and a hardware challenge. It is an area that is known to us but we get great support from the Information Management Group. Like your iPhone, technology changes and it needs to be updated continually and you really have to stay on top of it.
As CANOSCOM stood up, we got relatively good in quick order with theatre activation. Now, as we do theatre deactivation, we are finding that there are certain parts of what we do that need to be better defined. We have regulations for disposal, donations of materiel, salvage of materiel, but when you consider the magnitude of the closure in Afghanistan, it’s a whole other dimension. We ceased combat operations in July and the government required that we be out by December and there was a mountain of materiel that the Mission Transition Task Force had to move. So we had to ensure that the right policy guidelines, decision processes and planning were already in place to do that. We’ve learned that in some of those areas we had to get a little bit better.
Those policy changes also have to make sense with our doctrine. Our doctrine should reflect how we do business today and if it doesn’t, then we need to make recommendations to change what we do. For example, when we come together as a joint task force, we designate a joint force commander with elements of army, navy and air force. As an enabler, we believe there should be something called a joint task force support component. We employed that concept when we undertook the security for the Olympics – all support elements were placed under the commander of the joint task force support component – and we have also validated this concept on a smaller scale when we supported Canada Command with northern operations. The intent is to ensure we maximize the support both in terms of effect and efficiency in support of a deployed task force.
You’ve mentioned the increased role of private contractors. How is this managed?
Initially when we go into a theatre, we will send a combined team of military and civilians from ADM MAT (Procurement Services) to look at a range of local goods and services. We’ve found that as you provide more contracting in theatre, you need to provide the task force commander with contracting oversight so he has the expertise on the ground to spend money wisely and effectively. In Afghanistan, there was a contracting oversight coordination centre to assist the task force commander.
A second contract capability is the CANCAP program. This has been in place for a number of years and is really an augmentation capability. There are a range of functions that we will put into a contract and then ask industry to compete on; we will then pay a certain amount to have that readiness package available if there is an operation in which we are required to augment the military component that is going in.
All of this makes a task force commander something akin to a mayor of small city. And some contracts will have specific counterinsurgency aims, a strategic element, correct?
It is a complex dynamic. This is a part of contracting that is done to support the welfare or enhance the capabilities of the local inhabitants. So a task force commander has to do project management that is hand-in-glove with operational aims. He has to deal with Defence Construction Canada, DFAIT and others to manage money from various authorities, and that’s in addition to the military context in which he is working, so it can be pretty demanding. He has a sizable staff, but rightly so because of the size of the operation he is running. I’m in the back making sure that the expertise is provided as required and making sure the conduits into a theatre are appropriate.
Clearly this is a new skill set you’ve had to develop?
From a military perspective, contract management is probably one area that is still a challenge. Our civilian component is actually really good at it and that is why we lean on them to assist us. But it is one aspect of military logistics that we need to continue to enhance.
Do you require new tools?
RFID is a capability we keep on pushing. We’d like to have a scan capability as we send materiel into theatre. Warehouse management tools would help task orient the volume of demands that come through our depots. BGen Lamarre, commanding the Mission Transition Task Force, developed a common operating picture, software that allowed him to manage all the transitions and maintain visibility on what needed to come back in what priority. We keep pushing the envelope on those types of technologies, but they have to be forward deployable and able to operate in austere environments. So some technologies in our supply systems and maintenance systems need to be “ruggedized” in order to move them forward. We’re also exploring a logistics hub concept so that if we need to project and sustain, we have certain nations around the world willing to support us.
How have the Chinooks, C-17s and new Hercs change the way you operate?
I’m a really strong supporter of the air force in terms of strategic lift capability. We used to provide strategic airlift primarily from commercial means to meet our needs. Having an in-house capability of C-17s to enable operations has been huge. Helicopters are more a tactical level resource but in simple terms we’ve been able to take troops off the ground and minimize the risk to individuals. But because of volume and size, we still end up doing things such as combat logistics patrols. And that’s another lesson learned. When I was a junior officer you had a linear battlefield and a rear area that was relatively safe. Today, the support community has to be much more skilled, not just in their technical competencies but also in their field competencies. When I look at the average soldier today, their intelligence, confidence, abilities and field craft is much stronger; they have a level of field competency and experience that is head and shoulders above what the average trooper would have known back when I was a commanding officer of a battalion.
What for you are the keys to logistics support for the future?
I think the key is flexibility. If I’ve learned anything, you have to be able to respond on very short notice, and to respond to multiple demands. The Canada First Defence Strategy has six different types of missions it asks the CF to be able to respond to, and it is not good for a support guy to go into the operational commander and say, “sorry, we can’t do that.” So I need to ensure we have the flexibility to respond to a number of different missions. We need the competencies for very risky environments, and in addition be prepared to transition to contracted solutions and to work in a coalition environment. And that means maintaining relationships, developing competencies and ensuring you remain flexible to meet the operational need.
An interview with MGen Mark McQuillan