For Canada, multibillion-dollar training program is the FAcT of the matter

On the same subject

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  February 13, 2019 | Local, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR

  Chief of the Defence Staff announces Canadian Armed Forces General and Flag Officer senior appointments, promotions, and retirements

  February 12, 2019 – Ottawa – National Defence / Canadian Armed Forces General Jonathan Vance, Chief of the Defence Staff, issued a CANFORGEN announcing the list of Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) General and Flag Officer senior appointments, promotions, and retirements that will occur in 2019. General Officers (Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force) and Flag Officers (Royal Canadian Navy) lead the CAF in defending our country's values and interests, here at home and abroad. They share the responsibility for the stewardship of the entire institution, and for the profession of arms as a whole. For 2019, the total number of permanent General Officer and Flag Officer positions required to meet the demands of the Canadian Armed Forces is 116 (105 Regular Force and 11 Reserve Force). The number of senior staff fluctuates as a result of the needs of the military to meet Government of Canada and institutional objectives, which is constantly changing. Certain positions have been created to help us meet the following commitments found in Canada's defence policy, Strong, Secure, Engaged: supporting health and resilience, investments in the Royal Canadian Navy, enhancing cyber capabilities, transforming innovation for defence excellence and security, and continued global defence engagement. Biographies of senior officers may be made available upon request by contacting Media Relations. Quotes “The role of a General and Flag Officer in the Canadian Armed Forces comes with enormous responsibility. Those selected demonstrate they are capable of surmounting the significant challenges associated with leading and improving Canada's armed forces. For those leaving the Forces, they should do so proudly, as they are a testament to the qualities required to keep Canada's military strong and effective.” – General Jonathan Vance, Chief of the Defence Staff Quick facts In order to align authorities, responsibilities, and accountabilities with the US NORAD, Major-General D.W. Joyce will be appointed Deputy Commander Continental US NORAD Region, in Tyndall Florida, in a position that has been up-ranked to Major-General. To lead the modernization and growth of the Canadian Forces Health Services Group, Brigadier-General A.M.T. Downes will be promoted to the rank of Major-General and will continue to serve in his current appointment as Commander Canadian Forces Health Services Group / Surgeon General for the CAF, at NDHQ in Ottawa, in a position that has been up-ranked. Colonel J.G.M. Bilodeau will be promoted to the rank of Brigadier-General and appointed to a new position as Director General Clinical Services / Deputy Commander Canadian Forces Health Services Group, in Ottawa and will become the Department Health Advisor to the CDS. In order to enhance continental maritime command, control, and cooperation with the US Navy, Commodore S.M. Waddell will be promoted to the rank of Rear-Admiral and appointed to a new position as Vice Commander 2nd Fleet United States Navy, in Norfolk Virginia. To develop CAF/DND data strategies, policies and to lead data management governance, Brigadier-General A.T. Benson will be appointed to a new position as Deputy Director General Data Strategy and Innovation, in Ottawa. Additional capacity is required to focus on key departmental initiatives. As such, Brigadier-General S.T. Boyle will be appointed to a new position as Deputy Director General Continental Policy, at NDHQ in Ottawa. https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/news/2019/02/chief-of-the-defence-staff-announces-canadian-armed-forces-general-and-flag-officer-senior-appointments-promotions-and-retirements.html

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  November 27, 2017 | Local, Aerospace, Land, C4ISR, Security

  Presagis Unveils Three New Products at I/ITSEC

  Orlando, USA – November 27, 2017 – Presagis is introducing three new products to the training and simulation market at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) taking place November 27 to December 1 in Orlando, Florida. A leader in modeling and simulation software, Presagis is bolstering its line of sensor simulators with the introduction of ONDULUS NVG, Panorama -- an image generation platform, and VELOCITY, a next-generation solution for the production of large synthetic training environments. “By supplying simulation software to most of the top 100 defense and aerospace companies in the world, Presagis is extremely well positioned to capture the needs of our customers by innovating and developing solutions that respond directly to their needs,” explains Jean-Michel Brière, Presagis' President. “These three products – Ondulus NVG, Panorama, and VELOCITY -- not only provide our customers with more accuracy, realism, and cost-savings, but mark significant technological achievements in the evolution of our company.” Panorama is a competitively-priced image generation system that gives organizations the ability to add high-fidelity, scalable imaging to their simulation solutions. Leveraging Vega Prime, Ondulus and other Presagis software solutions, Panorama is capable of providing Out-of-the-Window (OTW), Electro-Optical (EO), night-vision goggles (NVG) and infrared (IR) views for ground, air, and marine domains. VELOCITY is a new, revolutionary way of building synthetic environments that will permit agencies and organizations to analyze and use the unmanageable amounts of data they have to automate the creation of rich, immersive 3D virtual environments. Building on the success of the Ondulus family of sensor products, Ondulus NVG gives users the ability to add realistic physics-based night-vision sensor simulation to their research, training or mission planning environments. Ondulus NVG supports both passive and active illumination. In addition to these new products, Presagis is also launching the newest version of its M&S Suite – version 17. Comprising industry-standard software such as STAGE, Creator, Terra Vista, and Vega Prime, M&S Suite 17 is set to release in early 2018 with an arsenal of new features. “The M&S Suite is a pillar in the Presagis portfolio. We continue to respond to our customers' needs by providing new features and tools for content creators, as well as wider access and more scripting functionality for developers. Every product in the suite has been improved – from Creator and Terra Vista, to the simulators and Vega Prime. The Ondulus family in particular received many improvements in the form of new detectors for Ondulus IR, and several new radar modes for Ondulus Radar,” said Stéphane Blondin, Presagis' Vice President of Product Management and Marketing. Presagis will also be showcasing its series of customizable simulators, HELI CRAFT and UAV CRAFT. In response to the increasing demand for open architecture simulators and training devices, Presagis offers virtual unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) station and a helicopter simulator. These reference platforms integrate nearly all Presagis commercial off-the-shelf simulation products and technology, and can be used as advanced start points for customers interested in building their own simulators. Presagis will be demonstrating its full range of simulation software and solutions at the upcoming Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) from November 27 to December 1 in Orlando, FL. (Presagis booth: #1762). About Presagis Presagis is a global leader providing commercial modeling, simulation and embedded software solutions to the aerospace, defense and security, and critical infrastructure markets. Presagis combines an open simulation development framework with expert professional services to help customers streamline development workflows, reduce project risks, and deliver game-quality immersive simulations. Presagis is also at the forefront of avionics software design for certifiable cockpit displays. The company serves hundreds of customers worldwide, including many of the world's most respected organizations such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Airbus, BAE Systems, and CAE. For more information, visit www.presagis.com. For further information: Stéphane Blondin, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, Tel: +1 514 341.3874, E-Mail: Stephane.Blondin@presagis.com https://www.presagis.com/en/press-center/detail/presagis-unveils-three-new-products-at-i-itsec/

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  May 13, 2019 | Local, Aerospace

  Like it or not, the U.S. needs to be a key part of Canada’s next-gen jet procurement process

  ELINOR SLOAN, CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL RICK BOWMER/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Elinor Sloan, professor of international relations in the department of political science at Carleton University, is a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. For a bid to buy a plane designed to cut quickly through the skies, Ottawa's pursuit of a future-generation fighter jet has been a long and torturous slog. In 1997, Jean Chrétien's Liberal government joined the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, a U.S.-led initiative conceived as a new way for allies to work together to design, develop and produce a fifth-generation fighter aircraft. In 2006, Ottawa signed a formal memorandum of understanding that gave Canada and the other eight partner nations the exclusive right to compete for contracts to produce such aircraft and, since 2007, Canadian companies have won more than US$1.3-billion in defence contracts related to the Joint Strike Fighter. With a production line that will be operating at full capacity starting this year, and is expected to produce about 10 times as many aircraft as exist today over the next few decades, this number promises to grow substantially. Meanwhile, Canada's nearly 40-year-old fleet of fighter jets – the CF-18s – continues to age. In 2010, the Harper government shelved its plan to sole-source buy the Joint Strike Fighter to replace them after a public outcry and a damning auditor-general's report that found significant weaknesses in the process used by the Department of National Defence. Then, when the Liberals took office in 2015 and promised an open and fair competition to replace the CF-18s, it also banned the F-35 from bidding – two contradictory positions. The Trudeau government quietly dropped that ban last year, and pre-qualified four companies to bid on a contract worth at least $15-billion: Sweden's Saab Gripen, Britain's Airbus Eurofighter, the U.S.'s Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet and, yes, Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. According to letters released last week, though, the U.S. government threatened to pull the Lockheed Martin F-35 from consideration last year over Ottawa's insistence that Canada receive industrial benefits from the winning bid. In response, Ottawa relaxed its requirement on Thursday: Where bidders once had to commit to spend 100 per cent of the value of the aircraft's acquisition and sustainment in Canada, bids will now only lose points in a three-category scoring system in the review process, instead. With such exhausting twists and incompatible statements, it's little surprise that it took three and a half years of the government's four-year mandate just to get to the formal request-for-proposal stage. But there is a way out of this morass: pursuing a back-to-basics focus on why we need this aircraft and what we need it to do. To do so, we must focus on the proposed jets' promised technical capabilities, which are paramount, and rightly weighted the highest of that three-category scoring system. The second category is cost, which of course is important to any government. The third is creating and sustaining a highly skilled work force within our own borders, a goal enshrined in Canada's industrial trade benefits (ITB) policy, which requires a winning bid to guarantee it will make investments in Canada equal to the value of the contract. Each bid is scored by these three categories, weighed 60-20-20, respectively. However, the Joint Strike Fighter program, which Canada has spent millions to join, does not fit neatly into the ITB policy. In those letters last year, the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin pointed out that Canada's ITB terms are inconsistent with – and indeed prohibited by – the memorandum of understanding Canada signed in 2006, which says partners cannot impose industrial compensation measures. The solution reached on Thursday allows that memorandum to be obeyed, but since Canada will still give higher grades to bids that follow its ITB policy, questions remain as to whether the playing field has really been levelled. All of this is important because of the growing competition between the major powers. Russian bombers and fighters, for example, are increasingly testing the boundaries of Canadian and U.S. airspace. More than ever, the focus needs to be interoperability with the United States, working together on NORAD and helping NATO allies in Europe. As a flying command-and-control platform, rather than a mere fighter, Canada's next-generation jet must work with the United States' most sophisticated systems, and include a seamless and secure communications capability – that is a critical and non-negotiable criterion. Indeed, as DND has said,the United States will need to certify the winning jet meets Washington's security standards. Some may question the federal government's decision to relax the ITB rules, and to grant this certification sign-off. But whatever Canada buys must be able to address threats to us and to our allies until well into the 2060s. Our relationship with the United States, both in terms of geopolitics and military technology, is crucial. Despite our trade tiff, the United States remains our most important strategic partner. Canada can either take an active part in our own security, or leave it to the United States. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-us-needs-to-be-a-key-part-of-canadas-next-gen-jet-procurement/