In this second of a three-part series on military technology, Business Edge correspondent Tom Keenan looks at some of the training and research being undertaken at the Defence Research & Development Canada (DRDC) Suffield, Alberta. Next week, Keenan reports from Canadian Forces Camp Julien near Kabul.
Suffield, Alberta, may become the world's premier facility for urban warfare training and testing if a proposal made recently to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gets approved.
Suffield, Alberta, may become the world's premier facility for urban warfare training and testing if a proposal made recently to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gets approved.
The folks at Defence Research & Development Canada (DRDC) Suffield already specialize in the really nasty stuff - chemical and biological warfare threats, along with robotics, landmines and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
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| Photo courtesy of Defence R&D Canada – Suffield |
| Suffield’s Counter Terrorism Technology Centre provides scenario-based training in management of various incidents. |
They pepper their conversation with acronyms and jargon. For them an IED is an improvised explosive device, like you might meet on the street in an area of civil unrest. A thermobaric weapon is a kind of vacuum bomb that has effects comparable to a nuclear weapon, but without the radiation.
Out there in the southeastern corner of Alberta, they're busily sharing their specialized knowledge with those who need it.
"We trained over 1,000 personnel last year at our Counter Terrorism Technology Centre (CTTC)," says Lt.-Col. Daniel Drew, a senior military officer at DRDC Suffield, "and that mandate is growing every day.”
Students include military personnel from many of Canada's allies as well as Canadian civilian emergency response personnel such as police officers and firefighters.
A day at the CTTC is guaranteed to get the trainees' adrenaline flowing. The program is conducted in a "live agent environment," so the trainees are encumbered by those ridiculous- looking but necessary protection suits.
"It's usually done in complex scenarios," says Drew. "They have to go into a situation, assess it, deal with casualties, determine what's in there in terms of radiological, biological and chemical agents, do the medical work, evacuate people and basically shut the place down.”
Now, DRDC Suffield wants to add urban warfare to its training arsenal. In his presentation to the NATO brass at their recent Calgary conference, Drew noted that the global security environment has changed from one of well-defined battle zones and peacekeeping operations to a situation of "multiple threats/chaos" involving terrorism, insurgency, disaster assistance and nation building.
Canadian companies that have overseas employees can attest to the volatility of the offshore environment. One day your expat staff seem relatively safe, and the next day they're clambering onto planes in evacuation mode.
"Our intent is to build sort of an all-singing, all-dancing, world-leading facility that will allow us to do training, at one end of the spectrum, and research, trials and evaluations at the other end," says DRDC's Drew. The planned facility, he adds, will be unlike anything else in the world, even the high-tech war simulators of the U.S. military.
"What's different here is that we would have an advanced facility in an environment that is unique. Suffield offers an environment that is not available anywhere else in the Western world. It has to do with airspace and the use of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum in addition to our relationship to the R&D community.”
To put it another way, commercial and private pilots are forbidden to fly over the place, so you don't have to worry about damaging a passing Air Canada jet, or some nosy cropduster flying by at the wrong time. As for radio transmissions, you can do as you please on the open prairie. You're not likely to mess up some taxi company's radios like you would in a city.
In addition to its relatively remote location, the Suffield property is among the largest military training grounds in the world. Seven of Europe's largest training fields could all fit nicely into the 2,700-sq.-km Suffield training area and experimental proving ground. "We're sitting on space that's just crying out to be used," says Drew.
The training and research facility could cost in the vicinity of $50 million. Drew notes that Canada currently sends around that amount each year to NATO and says he'd like to "claw back some of that money to build infrastructure in Canada.”
Drew also says the Americans would like to have access to a facility such as this, "because we can do things here that can't be done anywhere else in the world.”
The proposed facility, which is still in the early planning stages, would span about eight city blocks, built up as high as five storeys. It would have some areas of normal development, with subways, and trains, but also streets of rubble and bombed-out buildings.
"We could actually have the 'Three Block War' set up right there," says Drew, referring to the currently accepted description of modern warfare.
Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military newspaper, described the Three Block War in the Iraqi context:
* On one block in Baghdad, soldiers are meeting with local officials, teaching them about democracy.
* On the next block, they're rebuilding damaged infrastructure.
* On the third block, they're in a firefight.
Drew gets excited at the possibility of having this facility for experimentation as well as training.
DRDC Suffield already has an extensive program of military robotics, as well as UAVs, and this would give them an opportunity to test their limits in a realistic, and changeable, urban warfare setting.
The business community should be excited too. The project would be a boon for construction companies and some serious contracts for high-tech equipment might emerge.
"We've got a burgeoning unmanned aircraft industry growing up here in Medicine Hat," Drew says. "There's all kinds of spinoff things.”
DRDC reports several companies, including CDL Systems of Calgary that develops software for unmanned vehicles, are already benefiting from this work.
Medicine Hat recently played host to an Unmanned Vehicle Systems conference attended by more than 200 delegates from as far away as Japan and Germany.
Rob Renner, the area's recently re-elected MLA, noted that while unmanned aircraft were currently used mainly by the military, "with relatively small modifications, these things could be used to fly up and down pipelines to look for oil spills.”
Most people don't realize that this kind of sophisticated training is being done in a quiet corner of Alberta.
But, if the NATO proposal gets approved, "trained in Suffield" might be a badge of honour worn by elite soldiers and first responders around the world.
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
