Interview with BGen Chris Horner, Commander 3 Canadian Space Division (3 CSD) and Joint Force Space Component Commander (JFSCC)
The Canadian Joint Warfare Centre (CJWC) plays a critical role in ensuring the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) stay ahead of emerging threats and maintain decision superiority. In June we sat down with Col Chris Horner, who was then the outgoing Commander of the Canadian Joint Warfare Centre (CJWC), to discuss the evolution, current mission, and future initiatives of this pivotal institution. He has since been promoted to the rank of BGen, assuming command of the 3 Canadian Space Division and becoming the Canadian Armed Forces Joint Force Space Component Commander.
The discussion covers the Centre’s innovative approaches to training and doctrine development. It also touches on the importance of international partnerships and technological advancements in shaping the future of military operations.
Q: I understand that the Canadian Joint Warfare Centre had several different iterations. Can you give us a quick synopsis of how it came to be what it is today?
The genesis of what is now the Canadian Joint Warfare Centre came in late 2000 with the Canadian Forces Experimentation Centre. The Chief of Defence Staff later changed our name to the Canadian Forces Warfare Centre because we were doing more than just experimentation. We started to expand beyond concept space modelling into integration activities and broader force development.
In 2015 we became part of the Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC). For the next four years our focus was on a large computer-based exercise called JOINTEX. Each year several hundred people would come to our CJWC campus in Shirleys Bay, Ontario and participate in the operational joint command and control sphere. We experimented and gamed with the idea that we were campaigning as part of a large-scale Canadian Forces operational joint operations deployment. But in the background, we were still doing things like developing doctrine and developing concepts and increasing our modelling and simulation capabilities and different experiments tied to PAN Domain Command and Control and other things.
Q: What does the Joint Warfare Centre do today?
Our core mission is to enable decision superiority for the Canadian Forces over its adversaries now and into the future. Everything we’re focused on is taking the decision-making space for senior leaders of the Canadian Forces at that operational level and finding ways that we can improve it and make it more efficient. I’m careful to not say AI-enabled decision making because I don’t want to get into that space too much. But the idea is that we are enabling decision makers to make key strategic-level and high-operational decisions in the most efficient manner possible. The questions we ask ourselves: Are we developing doctrine for the future, and are we doing it fast enough? Are we looking at things from our joint research and analysis lens and applying different decision-making processes?
Ultimately, I can put the work we’re doing into sort of six groups. To start, we’re employing the Joint Operations Fusion Lab, and I will talk more about what it is and what it does. We are working at the technical level and the international partnership level to enhance the future interoperability of the CAF with its partners and allies. We’re working hard to evolve the conceptual component of the Canadian Forces. It’s expensive to fly fighter jets and to repair ships, so we work in the space of what more we can do in a synthetic environment, using computer-based training and actual simulators, to prepare the joint force for the future without having to make those major capital expenditures involving refits or fuel.
So, we’re enabling and ensuring access to that experimental or synthetic environment. I’m pushing the team hard to find ways for us to do doctrine development better in terms of how we can use today’s technology to help us write doctrine aligned with partners and allies as opposed to how we’ve done it in the past. And then fundamentally, the last element is the key role we have in educating the joint force and what that really means from a training aspect.
Q: How do these six groups work together?
They’re not mutually exclusive, but they are exclusive in their focus. What we’re trying to get is continuous digital improvement and enhanced capabilities. I want us to be more innovative and for CAF operations to have day zero interoperability with our partners and allies and achieve a dynamically integrated future. That’s what we’re trying to achieve as we put all those things together. Between our groups there’s some overlap and some collaboration in this effort.
Q: You mentioned the Joint Operations Fusion Lab. What is the Fusion lab and what does it do?
Explaining what the lab does – even when I describe it internally – is a complicated thing. Really, the Fusion Lab is meant to be – and I’ll use this term – a firing range to test ideas and data and system integration at the operational level for strategic decision making. We are trying to find ways to create a sandbox or an ecosystem for commanders, operators, developers, and subject matter experts to try things out. Try the unimaginable. Achieve the unimaginable That is what we are, that’s the tagline.
We do things that you can’t do on live systems, on operational networks or in a war-fighting environment. This way we can be more horizontally aligned with our digital innovation efforts across the operational, command and control, and intelligence spaces of the Canadian Forces. My key outcomes with the lab are to do things like accelerate our digital literacy or digital development, and the support structures around C2. We will do a whole bunch of trial and error and iterative development with the integration of data, integration of networks, integration of systems, fundamentally going back to how that activity is improving the decision-making capability of senior leaders of the Canadian Forces at that operational level.
Q: So, would you say that the Warfare Centre is all about building critical thinking skills, and then helping transplant them throughout various divisions of the CAF? Is that a fair statement?
Yes, I think we are. We are helping people who already have elements of these skills refine their processes to work more effectively. For example, we have a partnership with the Canadian Army in Regiment. They are doing a lot of stuff in the innovation space. They have intelligence collection and processing processes, and we’ve shown them some different tools integrated with different data. That has allowed them to increase their efficiency tenfold, and that change is happening because we’re giving them access to different applications and data sets that are conditioned in a different way.
We try not to get too technical. As you know, just doing a big dump of data doesn’t help intelligence people. The question becomes how you condition that data and create a better repository of information. By making them more user-friendly, you can streamline your intelligence processing. Previously, five or six manual steps might have been necessary, but with the computer handling those in the background, we can now achieve a more efficient process. And so, someone may only need days instead of a week to learn how to use a system that can do all these things. We’ve taken people who have never used a tool before to being fairly proficient in about 30 minutes. Suddenly they can do 10 times more intelligence processing and that’s why this is important. As you know, there are not enough intelligence analysts working today in the Canadian Forces. If I can make the current level of output of intelligence analysts today 10 times better, then in theory, I don’t need 10 more people to do that work.
Q: I think that’s important because innovation is all about creating value and I know that the CJWC is all about developing processes that bring value to those who you serve. Are there initiatives in this area you can talk about?
There are some big bumper sticker ones like de-risking the National Defence Operations and Intelligence Centre. That’s a 10-year plan and one that’s hard to easily define.
I often jokingly say that if we just hung a banner outside our new building that says anyone who uses PowerPoint will be shot on site, and if everyone believes we’re serious about it, then we’ll very quickly figure out how not to use PowerPoint. I should stress this isn’t about any personal issues with Microsoft Office products. It’s not that at all. It’s all about the processes behind why we get stuck. It’s the process behind our discomfort with briefing off anything other than a PowerPoint slide or the proverbial 11×17 paper placemat that we print out and instantaneously provide people with data that’s not real time. We don’t have a comfort in real-time briefings. That’s an institutional challenge and I think lots of people are facing it.
Now, are there technological solutions for that? Absolutely there are. Are they integrated into the CAF very well? No, they’re not. Part of what we do in that space is to figure out what the Commander of CJOC of today needs, but also what the Commander CJOC or the Commander of Canadian Special Operations Forces Command needs 10 years from now. And in the meantime, how do I make that Commander comfortable over the next 10 years? They have been part of the iterative development decision loop shrinking process for 10 years. Every day I think about what my current commander does, how he processes data personally and how he thinks. It’s different because of the way he came through the Canadian forces then someone who’s just starting as a 20-year-old today.
This is an important point. There’s a difference between people who were born at the onset of computers compared to those born after. I grew up with the Internet as it was being figured out. I was there with it, and so there’s that comfort with it. I look at my 19-year-old son who doesn’t know a world without smartphones. And when I think about that and that fundamental shift in technology, I know that should he choose to join the Canadian Forces today he would be terribly upset with where we were at in some of our technology. In his world, there’s probably an app that fixes all issues. Then I think of the people who didn’t have cell phones when they joined the Canadian Forces. A lot of those people are today in very senior leadership positions. Part of what we must do is make commanders comfortable with the rapid change of technology and give them a sense of trust that all the crazy things we’re building in the lab aren’t going to turn into Skynet from The Terminator movies, and that AI is not going to make all the decisions for them.
I can understand the fear, but I also know that in 10 years we will need to have adapted completely different processes and technological integration capabilities or we will not have decision superiority over our adversaries. I’m not trying to break the rules and we’re not trying to break the Internet and we’re not trying to do those things, but the adversaries are the adversaries.
Q: Are there any other initiatives that you would like to share with our readership?
The part we play in some ongoing experimentation exercise pieces with our major international partnership alliances is important. We at the Warfare Centre are the national lead and coordinator for a few things.
One is an event called Bold Quest. A U.S. joint staff has led this effort that has been around for quite some time and really started with how to get information from sensors to the people that shoot things, so they are able to hit targets as quickly as possible. It’s all about modernization for the army, the sensor-to-shooter link, how we share data across key Five Eyes partners to get our different intelligence, surveillance, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors to feed computers to go to our different networks across different countries to then feed into standard artillery, HIMARS or other weapon systems. How do we deliver facts effectively? That’s what we started with. And so, we’re integrated into that because our experimental networks are connected to that experimental community.
Our Canadian Special Operations Forces Command has folks doing activities as part of their force development in that we’ve got parts of the Air Force, parts of the armies, and the Joint Fires Modernization Project connected to it. It’s an exceptional opportunity alongside key partners and allies to do data integration. And then from there, how do we feed that back into a higher headquarters.
They all have tactical-level objectives they wish to achieve. And the question for us is, can we send this type of data from this platform and have it go across multiple gateways from Canada to the United Kingdom or the U.S. so they can see it and they can task one of their assets or their secret network to be able to deliver effects? It is very complicated and we’re playing a part in being that orchestrator of technical things in the middle. It helps us understand how to be better partners and allies.
That’s one initiative. On the NATO side is the Coalition Warrior Interoperability Exercise (CWIX). We’re the national lead for that. CWIX is an annual NATO Military Committee-approved event designed to bring about continuous improvement in interoperability. We’ve got 32 NATO nations plus a host of partners and partner nations participating in 16 different focus areas and different domains doing data transfer data, interconnectivity between national systems and NATO systems. And again, how does NATO get ready to be multi-domain operations-capable and achieve its digital transformation goals by 2030? We’re part of that.
Q Do you have any final remarks you’d like to share with our readers?
I’m blessed to be surrounded by a team of incredibly smart human beings. Whether that’s my scientist from Defence Research & Development Canada, my CAF members who have the entire range of operational and professional experience, or the defence team members from the public service side or my folks that are here under different contracts as industry experts or subject matter experts. It’s that fusion of talented people bringing together that wide swath of expertise that allows us to be successful.