MILNEWS.ca News Highlights – 6 Jun 11

• Here’s hoping for a full and speedy recovery. “Two sailors were injured as a Canadian submarine hit bottom near Nootka Sound, off the west coast of the Island. HMCS Corner Brook, under the command of Lt. Cmdr. Paul Sutherland, struck bottom while conducting submerged manoeuvers during advanced submarine officer training, said Navy spokesman Gerry Pash. “The submarine’s crew, in accordance with their training, brought the submarine to the surface, conducted an internal damage assessment and carried out a series of safety checks. Two sailors suffered some bruising as a result of the incident. No fuel was released into the environment,” Pash said. “The boat is now underway and scheduled to return to Esquimalt tonight for further assessment,” Pash said. An investigation will be ordered to determine the cause of the incident. There were 60 personnel on board at the time of the incident which is a lot for the sub which would normally carry a crew of 49 plus a few trainees, Pash said. They were doing advanced officer training which is probably the most challenging training exercises conducted in submarines because it focuses on developing the skills of potential submarine officers,” Pash said ….”
• Afghanistan (1)  The hockey meme appears, again, in coverage of CF troops overseas.
• Afghanistan (2)  A bit more history from the early days of the mission from Postmedia News’ Matthew Fisher.
• Afghanistan (3)  “…. In terms of lasting achievements that can be listed to offset Canada’s cost in blood and gold, the growing strength of the insurgency makes any such tally premature. And however historians record this conflict, as an intervention or a war, in the future, it will not be defined as a “victory” for the US-led allies.”
• Taliban Propaganda Watch:  Almost 20 claimed killed in attacks across Kandahar, Uruzgan and Zabul.
• Today’s the anniversary of D-Day and the Normandy landings – message from the Governor General/Commander in Chief here, the PM here, the Defence Minister here and the Veterans Affairs Minister here.
• Yesterday was Canadian Armed Forces Day – message from the Governor General/Commander in Chief here, the PM here and the Minister of National Defence here.  A bit more on this here.
• What’s Canada Buying? (1)  Some editorial advice from the East Coast on how shipbuilding contracts should be parcelled out:  “…. Let’s not rattle on about what we’ll get from the big contract. Let’s make an honest case on what a good deal Canada gets by choosing the Halifax bid. Let’s agree right now the Irving group should win the contract by guaranteeing it can produce the ships on time, on budget and with unassailable quality assurance. Anything short of that is nothing more than special pleading and entitlement. We don’t “deserve” the contract. Arguing that Nova Scotia should get the work because we need it is just as bogus as Duffy’s implication that voting Conservative should make the difference. The Irving shipyard should win the lead contract based on its capabilities, its record of building naval ships, the investment of its owners and their sincere commitment to deliver value for money for Canadians. There is no other fair and just measure by which these contracts should be awarded ….”
• What’s Canada Buying? (2)  “BAE Systems has conducted factory acceptance testing of the first of 14 57mm MkIII naval guns for the Department of National Defense (DND) in support of the Canadian Navy’s upgrade of the Halifax class frigate. The 57 MkIII serves as the main gun for this ship class and the ongoing upgrade program will deliver much-increased versatility against an ever-widening range of threats. Tomas Erlandsson, director integrated systems for BAE Systems Weapons in Karlskog says: “The upgrade from 57 Mk2 to 57 Mk III makes these guns as capable as our highly-advanced 57 Mk3, including the ability to fire the sophisticated 6-mode programmable 3P ammunition. This program, together with the recent contract to build the 57 Mk3 for the US Navy Littoral Combat Ship program, results in a stable foundation for naval gun production.” ….”
• Russian eyes in Canadian skies. “A Russian Federation aircraft will conduct an aerial observation mission over Canada under the Treaty on Open Skies between 7 and 9 Jun 2011.  A Tupolev TU-154M aircraft, which arrived at 8 Wing Trenton yesterday will conduct an unimpeded observation overflight of Canadian territory, in fulfillment of Canada’s obligations as a State Party to the Treaty on Open Skies. The Treaty on Open Skies is one example of how Canada exercises its commitment to reducing the threat of armed conflict by increasing trust and confidence though developing greater openness and transparency amongst states. The Treaty on Open Skies, entered-into-force on January 1, 2002. Canada and 33 other nations has exercised its treaty rights in having conducted a number of observation flights over other states, including the Russian Federation, Belarus, Croatia, Georgia, Ukraine and Bosnia and Herzegovina ….”
• “A Canadian citizen will learn (today) if he will be extradited to France to face murder and attempted murder charges in the 1980 bombing of a Paris synagogue. On Oct. 3, 1980, plastic explosives strapped to a motorcycle ripped through the Paris synagogue on Rue Copernic, killing four and wounding dozens. Witnesses placed a man resembling Hassan Diab at the scene, though his passport put him in Spain at the time of the bombing. But the battle to keep Diab in Canada would appear to have been already lost, thanks to a handful of handwritten words on a hotel card and the nature of extradition law. In February, Judge Robert Maranger ruled admissible a questionable French handwriting analysis that supposedly links Diab to the bombing ….”
• “Tahawwur Rana is a 50-year-old Canadian businessman in a heap of trouble. For the past three weeks, Rana has been on trial in a Chicago courtroom charged with several counts of providing material support for terrorism. U.S. federal prosecutors have presented extensive wiretap and surveillance evidence they allege connects Rana to both the 2008 Mumbai attacks and a plot to murder journalists at Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper. The Danish paper enraged some Muslims by publishing controversial cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. In the coming days, his American lawyers, Patrick Blegan and Charlie Smith, will begin to mount a defence. But Rana’s personal fate is being overshadowed by sensational evidence that threatens to poison Washington’s already troubled relationship with its erstwhile ally Pakistan even further — evidence that appears to show that despite repeated denials, the Pakistani military is secretly training and financing militant groups ….”
• “The prime minister and the president of the United States took time out from the recent G-8 meetings in France to discuss perimeter security. The Deauville talks between Barack Obama and Stephen Harper are the first time the issue has come onto the radar since early February when the two launched a commission to look into the issue -hardly surprising given assorted political distractions like wars and elections. But the government’s throne speech Friday places the issue back on top of the agenda. The topic is vast, complex, and carries massive baggage. How (for instance) are Canada’s immigration interests to be squared with the Americans’ when our domestic workforce is shrinking and theirs isn’t? How does that affect efforts to rationalize approaches to refugee and visa policy? ….”

MILNEWS.ca News Highlights – 4 Jun 11

• Karl Manning, R.I.P.:  Funeral set for today in Chicoutimi.
• Libya Mission:  Aboard the HMCS Charlottetown as it monitors the Mediterranean and the playoffs.
• Afghanistan (1):  “It’s too early to roll out the victory banners. Even though the combat mission in Afghanistan ends soon, Canada’s work is not over, and a national commemoration has not been confirmed. “It would be odd to have a great ceremony of ‘marching away’ because that’s not what we’re doing,” said Douglas Bland, a professor in the school of policy studies at Queen’s University and an expert in defence policy. While they will no longer be in combat, some Canadian Forces will remain in Afghanistan to train the Afghan army and police force until 2014. Bland said he expects the return of Canadian soldiers from Afghanistan at the end of the year will be marked “quietly” with remarks from officials and probably special recognition on Remembrance Day ….”
• Afghanistan (2):  Postmedia News’ Matthew Fisher has been in and out of Afghanistan more than once, and shares this wrap-up series of articles about the history of the mission here and here, with a timeline of the mission here.
• Speech from the Throne  Here’s what the Government had to say about it’s immediate plans for the CF in the 3 Jun 11 Speech from the Throne:  “…. The Canadian Armed Forces play a crucial role in defending our sovereignty and national security. As the Canadian mission in Afghanistan transitions to training, diplomacy and development, our Government joins Canadians in honouring those who gave their lives and in recognizing the sacrifice and achievements of all the men and women, both military and civilian, who have served and continue to serve in Afghanistan. Our Government will continue to recognize and support all veterans. Today, as North Africa and the Middle East are being transformed by their people, the Canadian Armed Forces are standing tall with our allies to protect civilians in Libya. Our Government will hold a parliamentary debate on the future of this important mission ….”
• Building Big Honkin’ Canadian Ships (1):  “One of Britain’s leading defence companies says it could still work with Canada on building new warships, even though the Harper government has slammed the door shut on collaboration with its NATO ally. A senior executive with BAE Systems told The Canadian Press it may be early days, but his firm and the British government hold designs for several warships — and they would be willing to share them with Canada in some sort of arrangement. The overture comes in the face of the Conservative government’s repeated declarations that its one-year-old National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy will be a made-in-Canada enterprise. And it will further anger Canadian shipyard workers, who have said that any collaboration with Britain would be bad for them. Canadian ships will be built in two yet-to-be selected Canadian shipyards, the government maintains. It even went so far as to publicly rebuff the British government’s lobbying for a joint ship building venture earlier this year ….”
• Building Big Honkin’ Ships (2):  “Premier Christy Clark will go to Ottawa this month as part of B.C.’s campaign to make a “big splash” as it champions the lone West Coast bid for a major federal shipbuilding contract. Details of the trip are still being worked out with the Prime Minister’s Office, Clark said in an interview Thursday. “It will be a focused agenda . . . and one of those focuses is going to be the shipbuilding contract,” Clark said. “It is fabulous news that she is heading out,” said Jonathan Whitworth, CEO of Vancouver’s Seaspan. Seaspan, owner of Victoria Shipyards, Vancouver Shipyards and Vancouver Drydock, is vying for a share of the 30-year, $35-billion national shipbuilding procurement strategy. Two main contractors, one for combat vessels and one for non-combat vessels, will be chosen ….”
• Building Big Honkin’ Canadian Ships (3):  “It makes strategic and practical sense to build the next generation of Canada’s combat vessels on the West Coast, retired Rear Admiral Roger Girouard, former commander of Maritime Forces Pacific, said Friday. “South Asia, East Asia are going to be where things happen for good and for ill,” said Girouard, who retired from the military in 2007 and now teaches human security and peacebuilding at Royal Roads University in Colwood. “Having numbers of ships and capacity to support those ships on our West Coast, I think for Canada, is geo-strategically a no-brainer,” he said. In just over a month, a shortlist of Canadian shipyards will submit bids to build large vessels within the $35-billion national shipbuilding procurement strategy ….”
• Saving some military history from the trash heap – literally. “Thanks to the thoughftul actions of a good Samaritan, a precious piece of Canada’s military history has been salvaged from the dump. In March, Sylvan Lake resident Cade Graville found a scrapbook and a row of medals from the Second World War at Red Deer’s municipal waste management facility. This week, Graville brought the artifacts into the King’s Own Calgary Regiment Museum. The exceptional find has stunned officials of the Calgary museum. “To have something recovered from a landfill of this importance is incredible,” said Bruce Graham, collections manager for the museum ….”

MILNEWS.ca News Highlights – 7 Mar 11

• So now, some media are reading “Kabul-centric” when it comes to talking about Canada’s upcoming training mission in Afghanistan to mean “base in Kabul, but not necessarily ALL in Kabul.” “The federal cabinet is being asked to decide quickly on the specifics of the Canadian military training mission in Afghanistan as other countries jockey for prime classroom instruction posts, say NATO and Canadian defence sources.  National Defence will present its recommendations to the Conservative government in the very near future and will ask to deploy “a small number” of troops at regional training centres in addition to stationing soldiers at classrooms in the Afghan capital.  “We’ll need to start laying down our markers by April in order to get the slots we want,” said one defence source.  The locations under consideration include the western city of Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif in the north and Jalalabad, near the border with Pakistan …. a certain obfuscation crept into the message in January. Officials and ministers started telegraphing that deployment would be “Kabul-centric” — meaning it’ll be based in the capital but not exclusively in Kabul.  In fact, each of the regional training centres under consideration is ranked safer than Kabul, according to the military’s threat assessment. The Afghan capital has been rocked by a string of attacks this winter, including a suicide bombing last month that killed two people at the entrance to a hotel ….”
• “Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were hospitalized for traumatic brain injury between 2006 and 2009 at almost three times the rate of Americans fighting there in earlier years before the war escalated, according to a National Defence study obtained by The Globe and Mail. The military attributed the “significantly higher” hospitalization rate to “the risky nature of our Kandahar operation” in a report acquired under Access to Information …. The total number of Canadian soldiers diagnosed with TBI was only 83; seventeen of those were classified with a “more serious forms of brain injury.” Still, the study found the hospitalization numbers taken from the trauma registry database at Kandahar were “significantly higher than the expected rate,” amounting to a hospitalization rate of 71 per 10,000 deployed person-years of all Canadians serving in Afghanistan for the three years ending in 2009. That compares with a rate of only 25 per 10,000 for U.S. troops in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2007 – before the increased fighting in recent years and last year’s surge of American troops in heavy combat regions ….” Again, MSM writes a story on a report, without sharing the report.
• Some of the latest (a few weeks after the fact) from the CF’s media machine on what’s up in Afghanistan: “Operation HAMAGHE SHAY (“Same Team”) took place in Panjwa’i District from 16 February to 18 February 2011. Led and largely planned by the officers of Kandak 6, 1st Brigade 205 (Hero) Corps Afghan National Army (Kandak 6/1/205 ANA), its primary objective was to clear the village of Nakhonay and the surrounding countryside of insurgents and their stockpiles of weapons, bomb-making materials and illegal drugs ….”
• “Nearly 100 Canadians are still trapped in strife-torn Libya as fighting intensifies and rebel forces battle their way towards the capital city of Tripoli. Foreign Affairs confirmed Sunday they were in contact with about 90 Canadians and looking for ways to get them home safely. On Saturday, Canada managed to pluck nine Canadians, along with U.S., U.K. And Ukrainian citizens, from Libya using a C130 Hercules military aircraft to take them to nearby Malta. Some 330 Canadians have been evacuated from the North African nation so far ….”
• Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff:  Setting up a no-fly zone over Libya = “major military offensive” “….”I don’t think you can understate the severity of a no fly zone scenario,” (Gen. Walter) Natynczyk told CTV’s Question Period on Sunday, describing the process involved as a major military operation.  “Before you can fly and ensure the security of a region you have to dismantle the air defences on the ground. That includes the runways and the aircraft on the ground, and the command and control facilities on the ground. That is a major military operation; it is an offensive operation.” ….”
• Academic:  Setting up a no-fly zone over Libya = “a significant escalation in the West’s involvement in a conflict” “Canada and its allies have an obligation to step in and take military action in conflict-stricken Libya, including the enforcement of a no-fly zone, if rumours of mass killings of civilians prove to be true, a Canadian international affairs expert says.  Roland Paris, an expert in international security at the University of Ottawa, acknowledged that establishing a no-fly zone in Libya — a hot-button issue on political talk shows both in the U.S. and Canada on Sunday — would be a tricky sell in the Arab world, but adds that information trickling out might make a significant military intervention necessary …. Paris said a no fly-zone, which would include disabling runways and destroying Libyan anti-aircraft installations, would be a significant escalation in the West’s involvement …. But if reports of human rights abuses and fighter jets being used to quell the rebellion — all currently being investigated by the International Criminal Court — prove to be true, intervention needs to be strongly considered, Paris said ….”
• Hello, hello, hello, what’s this about Russian news agency Pravda spotting a Canadian accent being spoken by Libyan anti-government forces as proof that NATO’s goin’ in with imperialist guns blazing? “After NATO’s acts of terrorism in recent years, after the blatant disregard for human rights and human life when depleted uranium rendered swathes of Yugoslavia uninhabitable and destroyed the futures of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, would it surprise anyone to learn that Libya is a NATO campaign?  What NATO is capable of, we have already seen in Yugoslavia, what the West is capable of, we saw in Georgia. We have seen the blatant barefaced lies, we have seen indiscriminate acts of murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity, all glossed over by the controlled media. So would it surprise anyone that NATO is indeed operating in Libya? ….  Interesting it was that the eastern and western borders were secured (Tunisia and Egypt) over which equipment and men poured, interesting it is that already two teams of NATO special forces have been captured inside Libya (Dutch Navy Force and British SAS), interesting was SKY News’ interview with a “front-line rebel” speaking in a broad Canadian accent ….”
• About those NATO special forces captured inside Libya…. “A British diplomatic team, including six soldiers believed to be SAS, have been freed two days after being detained in eastern Libya. The men are understood to have left Benghazi bound for Malta on board the Royal Navy frigate HMS Cumberland. It is thought the special forces soldiers were with a diplomat who was making contact with opposition leaders ….”
• More news on the latest in Libya here (Google News), here (EMM News Brief:  Libya),  here (NewsNow), here (BBC) and here (Al Jazeera English).
• The next “You Should Be Outta There” hot spot, according to Canada’s Foreign Affairs Ministry:  Yemen. “Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada advises against all travel to Yemen. The level of risk to foreigners is very high. Canadians in Yemen should review their circumstances to determine if their continued presence is warranted and seriously consider departing Yemen by commercial means while these are still available ….” More from MSM on the advisory here and here, and the latest news from Yemen here (Google News), here (EMM News Explorer) and here (NewsNow).
• ‘The Conservative government is slamming the door shut on a British proposal that the two countries work together in building new warships.  “Canada will not be pursuing collaboration with the United Kingdom on our new surface combatant fleet,” Jay Paxton, a spokesman for Defence Minister Peter MacKay, said Sunday.  Paxton was reacting to comments made by London’s top diplomat in Ottawa, who told The Canadian Press that Canada and Britain could make better use of scarce public dollars by collaborating on new warships.  British High Commissioner Andrew Pocock said that with the economic crisis exerting pressure on defence spending everywhere, it makes sense for Ottawa and London to be discussing ways to co-operate on replacing aging frigates in their respective navies.  “We live in a much more financially constrained world. Every government faces a challenge in making its defence and other spending go as far as possible,” Pocock said in an interview ….”
• Who’s allowed to bid on the Standard Military Pattern (SMP) Vehicle part of the CF’s Medium Support Vehicle System Project (MSVS)?  Check here.
• “Canadian defence researchers are investigating how brain signals might distinguish hostile intent from everyday emotions such as anger and fear. Though there is still much to learn, the goal is to push biometric science beyond identification techniques to a new frontier where covert security technology would secretly scan peoples’ minds to determine whether they harbour malicious intent. “This ability can be used by members of the military and the security forces to isolate adversaries prior to commission of actions,” according to a research paper posted on the federal government’s Defence Research and Development Canada website ….” Since I can’t find a link through which Postmedia News is sharing the paper, you can Google the title of the paper, “Biometrics of Intent: From Psychophysiology to Behaviour”.  As of this posting, though, the Defence Research and Development Canada publications page doesn’t seem to be working.  Until it gets working, here’s a summary of the paper:  “In the current defence and security environment, covert detection of adversarial intent is becoming increasingly important. However, valid and reliable detection of adversarial intent is contingent on the ability to discriminate this intentional mental state from related stress-induced negative emotional states. A preliminary theoretical framework is proposed that extends current knowledge about the psychophysiology of emotion toward achieving this aim. This framework takes as its starting point two assumptions: First, biomarkers in the autonomic and central nervous systems can be combined to predict specific emotional states. Second, the establishment of a normative psychophysiological and behavioural databank for specific emotional states can be used to measure the extent to which individuals deviate from established norms. Building on our understanding of the psychophysiological underpinnings of emotional states, this framework can be applied to isolate the physiology of intentional states.”
• On a related note, the CF’s also done research on reading hostile intent by reading faces.