By Ken Pole | February 27, 2017 Estimated reading time 5 minutes, 2 seconds.
There has been a global “uptick” in Russian military aviation activity in recent years, but the number of intercepts around Canada and the United States has remained relatively stable, said U.S. Air Force General Lori Robinson, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
Based in Colorado Springs–where her deputy commander is RCAF LGen Pierre St-Amand, a former CF-188 Hornet pilot and former commander of 1 Canadian Air Division in Winnipeg–Robinson was in Ottawa for a recent Conference of Defence Associations (CDA) meeting.
Her CDA audience included Canadian Army General Jonathan Vance, Chief of the Defence Staff, one of Robinson’s two “bosses.” The other is U.S. Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis, a retired U.S. Marine Corps general who has been in the forefront of President Donald Trump’s call for increased defence spending by U.S. allies.
Robinson had suggested in her speech that the continental defence structure is possibly inadequate to deal with current threats. Asked to elaborate, she pointed out to reporters that the last major upgrades were in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Nowadays, “Russia can reach out and touch us at ranges that we are not used to,” she added. “To be able to see things further away, to be able to track them and ID them, and then to be able to engage . . . that’s one of the things that we’re talking about from a modernization perspective.”
NORAD fighters from all regions have routinely intercepted Russian bombers in international airspace for decades, mostly in the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that encompasses Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, but a NORAD spokesman told Skies that there also have been intercepts off central and northern California. But “at no time have Russian bombers entered North American sovereign airspace.”
While NORAD generally does not break down intercepts by region or type, it did acknowledge that Canadian and U.S. fighters have conducted an annual average of five interceptions of Russian military aircraft in its three ADIZ, which extend some 200 miles from the continental coastlines.
While commercial flights file flight plans and self-identify, military aircraft are not required to do so, which means NORAD sporadically tests its own response capabilities.
In a typical exercise last August, Boeing B-52 Stratofortress and Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit bombers deployed by U.S. Strategic Command were intercepted by RCAF CF-188 Hornets in the Canadian region, Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors in the Alaska region and Boeing F-15 Strike Eagles in the U.S. continental region.
While NORAD intercepts did spike to “about” 10 in 2014, the tally has since returned to average. “What is incredibly important,” Robinson stressed, “is the professionalism of . . .the United States, Canadian and Russian pilots” as both sides fly their assigned missions in international airspace.
While relatively few nowadays compared with during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the continuing encroachments do require “the right capability in the right place at the right time,” Robinson said. That included appropriate “ground-based interceptors,” part of “a continual conversation that we’re having” within NORAD.
She said the alliance currently has the necessary “capability and capacity” but demurred when asked whether she was “pleased” that Canada hopes to augment its legacy Hornets with 18 FA/18 Super Hornets, a proposal still being negotiated with Boeing despite open resistance by a group of former RCAF commanders who have asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reconsider the idea.
“What’s important . . . is not ‘pleased’ or ‘not pleased,'” she replied. “It’s ‘hey, we’re going to have capability’ and my job then is to say how do I take that capability and integrate it into the current NORAD structure?”
Asked about Canada’s professed inability to meet all defence commitments without more aircraft, she replied that “every time I’ve needed the ability to generate the force, I have not had a problem.”
However, she acknowledged that the latest NORAD-led Exercise Vigilant Shield 17, flown mainly out of Yellowknife, N.W.T., last October, had underscored “the difficulty of operating” in the Arctic. (The exercise saw the RCAF deploy CF-188s, Lockheed Martin CC-130H Hercules transports and Leonardo CH-149 search-and rescue helicopters. U.S. assets included Boeing F-15 Eagle and Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor fighters, Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers and a Boeing E-3 Sentry airborne early warning and control platform.)
Northern operations “would be another place from a modernization that I think would be something to look at,” Robinson said, adding that she would “stand by” for the Canadian government’s Defence Policy Review, now 10 months in the works, to see what “strategic guidance” it might offer NORAD.
