CANADA BOOSTS DEFENCE WITH ELITE FORCES
OTTAWA — Canada will add hundreds of elite special forces commandos, wage cyberwarfare attacks and deploy armed drones to international battlefields as part of its military response to new global security threats.
The new defence policy review released Wednesday identified a wide range of harrowing and borderless threats, including the “grey zone” of hybrid warfare, terrorism and climate change.
The review anticipates that some of Canada’s military operations will include government-sanctioned cyberattacks and drone strikes on foreign threats, and an increased role for special forces in overseas missions. “Technology and the changing nature of conflict itself have fundamentally altered the landscape on which we operate,” Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said as he introduced the review at a news conference in Ottawa.
The review said Canada’s new, elite and futuristic approach to war fighting will respect domestic and international laws.
However, the very nature of the cloak of secrecy that envelops almost all of Canada’s special forces, as well as the active expansion of fighting in cyberspace, will likely raise questions about transparency and civil liberties.
The policy increases the ranks of special forces by 605 people. They will get new airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance tools.
The special forces are made up of JTF-2 commandos and the Joint Incident Response Unit, which is responsible for responding to nuclear, chemical and biological attacks, a contingent of 2,000 in all.
There are 200 special forces commandos deployed in northern Iraq on a mission focused mainly on training Kurdish fighters.
However, Canadian special forces have engaged in gun battles in Iraq as they’ve ventured onto the battlefield for training. In March, the government revealed that some of the special forces took part in the battle to reclaim the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIL when an undisclosed number of soldiers accompanied Iraqi forces in the city.
The review said cyberspace is becoming an increasingly hostile place with an increase of state and non-state actors posing threats, and concludes that “a purely defensive cyberposture is not sufficient.”
The review said the military will launch “active cyberoperations against potential adversaries in the context of government authorized military missions.”
While non-state actors — terrorists — proliferate and exploit cyberspace, the review says, “the most sophisticated cyberthreats come from the intelligence and military services of foreign states.”
The review doesn’t name specific countries, but highlights the threat posed by “hybrid war,” something associated with Russia and accusations it has tried to influence elections in foreign countries, notably the U.S. presidential contest that brought Donald Trump to power.
The use of armed, unmanned drone aircraft will also become a feature of future Canadian Forces operations, the review predicts, as Canada faces new threats from “weaponized” drones.
Climate change is also singled out as a threat, one that knows no borders, because it can force mass migrations of people, creating humanitarian crises and sparking fights for scarce resources.