July 14, 2020 | Local, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security
To ensure that the women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces have the capabilities required for Canada to be Strong at home, Secure in North America and Engaged in the world, this policy commits to significant long-term investment.
This includes $33.8 billion for 52 critical new capital projects.
In addition, the policy provides $74.2 billion for existing assets and previously planned equipment, infrastructure and information technology projects. As part of Strong, Secure, Engaged, these projects underwent a thorough costing review, which resulted in the provision of an additional $5.9 billion over 20 years on top of what had previously been budgeted for these projects, to better reflect their true costs. In total, this new vision for defence provides $108 billion for the development and acquisition of capital equipment over the next 20 years.
All of these projects have been costed and the costing methodologies used were independently verified by five external accounting firms. Throughout the process, Defence also worked with costing experts from Deloitte who brought expertise gained from its involvement in recent defence reviews of close Canadian allies. This rigorous and unprecedented process ensures that the vision laid out in this policy is credible and realistic.
Table 1 reflects the planned use of the accrual budget over the 20-year horizon of this policy. It is important to note that this table does not represent the total cost of all planned equipment acquisitions. For example, the first new Canadian Surface Combatant is not scheduled to be delivered until 2026, followed by the remaining 14 ships. As these ships have an expected service life of 30 years, much of the accrual costs will be incurred outside the 20 years reflected in the table.
Furthermore, as these are 20-year estimates, there needs to be flexibility to adjust the accrual budget to reflect changes in major capital projects. The process to adjust or re-profile these estimates over time is through the investment planning process. Defence will publish the next Defence Investment Plan in 2018. The Defence Investment Plan will include all approved capital projects under the policy and will be updated every three years. This will help ensure that Parliament and Canadians can clearly understand future changes to the budget, and deliver on the Government's commitment to transparency, results, and accountability.
| 20-year - Accrual basis | 20-Year - Cash basis | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | Investments to fully fund and complete planned projects table 1 note1 | New investment Strong, Secure, Engaged table 1 note2 | Total planned projects and new investments | Total planned projects and new investments |
| Royal Canadian Navy | 14.6 | 2.9 | 17.5 | 53.5 |
| Canadian Army | 10.1 | 8.8 | 18.9 | 23.2 |
| Royal Canadian Air Force | 26.4 | 20.1 | 46.4 | 64.4 |
| Special Operations Forces | 1.2 | 0.4 | 1.5 | 1.2 |
| Joint/Emerging Domains | 3.4 | 1.2 | 4.6 | 9.7 |
| Infrastructure | 4.5 | 0.4 | 4.9 | 12.0 |
| Total Capabilities | 60.1 | 33.8 | 93.9 | 164.0 |
| Accrual Expenditure for Existing Equipment and Infrastructure table 1 note3 | 14.1 | - | 14.1 | - |
| 20 Year Total table 1 note4 | 74.2 | 33.8 | 108.0 | 164.0 |
Table 1 Note 1
Strong, Secure, Engaged commits $74.2 billion over 20 years to fully fund 281 projects that were planned, but for which Defence had insufficient funding to acquire. Adequate funding has now been allocated to deliver these core equipment projects.
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Table 1 Note 2
Strong, Secure, Engaged commits $33.8 billion over the next 20 years to 52 new equipment, infrastructure, and information technology projects for the Canadian Armed Forces.
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Table 1 Note 3
This amount ($14.1 billion), on an accrual basis, represents previously acquired equipment and infrastructure. As they are already in service, there is no future cash requirement to purchase these assets.
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Table 1 Note 4
Totals may not add up due to rounding.
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Below is an overview of capital funding commitments in Strong, Secure, Engaged, described in terms of investments in the Royal Canadian Navy, Canadian Army, Royal Canadian Air Force, Special Operations Forces, Joint Capabilities and Infrastructure.
The Government will provide $17.5 billion to fund equipment projects for the Royal Canadian Navy over the next 20 years. This includes:
The Government will provide $18.9 billion for Canadian Army equipment projects over the next 20 years. This includes:
The Government will provide $46.4 billion to fund equipment projects for the Royal Canadian Air Force over the next 20 years. This includes:
The Government will provide $1.5 billion to fund equipment projects for Canada's Special Operations Forces over the next 20 years. This includes:
The Government will provide $4.6 billion for joint capability projects in domains such as cyber, intelligence as well as joint command and control over the next 20 years. This includes:
The Government will provide $4.9 billion over the next 20 years to infrastructure projects across Canada in order to maintain the necessary portfolio of real property holdings. This includes:
August 29, 2023 | Local, Aerospace
Chinook helicopter that crashed, killing two pilots, was in the process of descending and making a left turn when it entered Ottawa River.
August 5, 2019 | Local, Security
This month, DARPA will bring a demonstration version of a secure voting ballot box equipped with hardware defenses in development on the System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program to the DEF CON 2019 Voting Machine Hacking Village (Voting Village). The SSITH program is developing methodologies and design tools that enable the use of hardware advances to protect systems against software exploitation of hardware vulnerabilities. To evaluate progress on the program, DARPA is incorporating the secure processors researchers are developing into a secure voting ballot box and turning the system loose for public assessment by thousands of hackers and DEF CON community members. Many of today's hardware defenses cover very specific instances or vulnerabilities, leaving much open to attack or compromise. Instead of tackling individual instances, SSITH researchers are building defenses that address classes of vulnerabilities. In particular, SSITH is tackling seven vulnerabilities classes identified by the NIST Common Weakness Enumeration Specification (CWE), which span exploitation of permissions and privilege in the system architectures, memory errors, information leakage, and code injection. “There are a whole set of cyber vulnerabilities that happen in electronic systems that are at their core due to hardware vulnerabilities – or vulnerabilities that hardware could block,” said Dr. Linton Salmon, the program manager leading SSITH. “Current efforts to provide electronic security largely rely on robust software development and integration, utilizing an endless cycle of developing and deploying patches to the software firewall without addressing the underlying hardware vulnerability. The basic concept around SSITH is to make hardware a more significant participant in cybersecurity, rather than relegating system security only to software.” Under the SSITH program, researchers are exploring a number of different design approaches that go well beyond patching. These include using metadata tagging to detect unauthorized system access; employing formal methods to reason about integrated circuit systems and guarantee the accuracy of security characteristics; and combining hardware performance counters (HPCs) with machine learning to detect attacks and establish protective fences within the hardware. One team from the University of Michigan is developing a novel security approach that changes the unspecified semantics of a system every 50 milliseconds. Currently, attackers continuously probe a system to locate these undefined sections and, over time, are able to create a system map to identify possible hacks. By changing the construct every 50 milliseconds, attackers do not have enough time to find those weaknesses or develop an accurate representation of the system as a whole. To evaluate the hardware security concepts in development on the SSITH program, DARPA – working with Galois – is pursuing a voting system evaluation effort to provide a demonstration system that facilitates open challenges. The program elected to use a voting system as its demonstration platform to provide researchers with an accessible application that can be evaluated in an open forum. Further, the topic of election system security has become an increasingly critical area of concern for the hacker and security community, as well as the United States more broadly. “DARPA focuses on creating technologies to enhance national defense, and election system security falls within that remit. Eroding trust in the election process is a threat to the very fabric of our democracy,” noted Salmon. While protecting democracy is a critical national defense issue, SSITH is not trying to solve all issues with election system security nor is it working to provide a specific solution to use during elections. “We expect the voting booth demonstrator to provide tools, concepts, and ideas that the election enterprise can use to increase security, however, our true aim is to improve security for all electronic systems. This includes election equipment, but also defense systems, commercial devices, and beyond,” said Salmon. During DEF CON 2019, the SSITH voting system demonstrator will consist of a set of RISC-V processors that the research teams will modify to include their SSITH security features. These processors will be mounted on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and incorporated into a secure ballot box. Hackers will have access to the system via an Ethernet port as well as a USB port, through which they can load software or other attacks to challenge the SSITH hardware. Since SSITH's research is still in the early stages, only two prototype versions of the 15 processors in development will be available for evaluation. “At this year's Voting Village, hackers may find issues with the processors and quite frankly we would consider that a success. We want to be transparent about the technologies we are creating and find any problems in these venues before the technology is placed in another venue where a compromise could be more dangerous,” said Salmon. Following DEF CON 2019, the voting system evaluation effort will go on a university roadshow where additional cybersecurity experts will have an opportunity to further analyze and hack the technology. In 2020, DARPA plans to return to DEF CON with an entire voting system, which will incorporate fixes to the issues discovered during the previous year's evaluation efforts. The 2020 demonstrator will use the STAR-Vote system architecture, which is a documented, open source architecture that includes a system of microprocessors for the voting booth, ballot box, and other components. It also includes a verifiable paper ballot, providing both digital and physical representations of the votes cast within the booth. “While the 2020 demonstrator will provide a better representation of the full attack surface, the exercise will not result in a deployable voting system. To aid in the advancement of secure election equipment as well as electronic systems more broadly, the hardware design approaches and techniques developed during the SSITH program will be made available to the community as open-source items,” concluded Salmon. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-08-01
September 18, 2023 | Local, Land
The 16th edition of Canada Army Run, presented by BMO, brought together thousands of runners and supporters to the streets of Ottawa.