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Understanding the threat and the battlespace are critical in supporting the commander and ultimately, the warfighter.
This podcast is for and about soldiers of the Canadian Army.
Its primary goal is to provide them with useful information through thoughtful and open discussions that reflect their mutual interests and concerns.
Though soldiers are our primary audience, the topics covered on this podcast should be relevant to anyone who supports our soldiers or who has an interest in Canadian military matters.
[Fast paced music plays]
Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery Price: Sometimes an attack doesn’t happen. Is it because of factors out of our control? Or, is it because we made it more challenging to attack us? And then the enemy’s calculus changed and said: “Yeah, we’re not going to be successful.”
Captain Adam Orton: Hi! This is Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. Planning for military operations is a complicated process. But getting the right information at the right time is one of the most important parts. And that’s where intelligence comes into play. My guest is Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery Price who’s the Director of Intelligence for the Canadian Army? Welcome to the podcast, sir.
LCol Price: Thank you very much.
[Music ends]
Capt Orton: You know, I remember reading, like, Tom Clancy as a kid and thinking, like, intelligence collection is Cold Era, spy wars, and James Bond jumping out of airplanes. And now that I’m actually in the Army, I realize maybe it’s a little bit different than that. How does it all work?
LCol Price: Well, you’re not wrong with the thought that it’s you know, there could be Cold War kind of things. What we do is we try to take a systematic approach to the battlespace. You know the days and age of World War I where it was: “Right lads, come on over the top. Home for tea and medals” is gone. There’s going to be on the modern battlespace any number of assets that are flying over the battlespace, interpreting the battlespace—from an electronic warfare - signals - intelligence kind of battlespace, or just people coming in off the street to come and talk to us and bring us information. So we’re going to try and do absolutely everything in our power to best describe the battlespace and the operating environment in which we’re going to be going into. And more importantly, to describe the threat that we’re going to be facing.
Capt Orton: With that being said, how would you define Intelligence?
LCol Price: So, Intelligence is actually defined as the end product from a focused and directed collection effort, where we take raw material, raw information, and we put it through a systematic, analyzed approach to ensure that information is true, it’s unbiased—we’re discerning fact from opinion. We put it through this analytical process, and then we send that information out to decision makers in the hope that we are able to provide timely, relevant, actionable decision-quality information and intelligence for senior decision makers.
Capt Orton: You know, you talk about bias. And especially, I think, in the world that we live in now, like, misinformation is a big hot button topic. How do you filter through those biases? Like, what is that process that kind of takes this information that you’ve collected through these various sources, and spits out into something that’s analytical—and hopefully non-biased?
LCol Price: You know, that’s a really good question. And I think that gets to the world we live in today where everybody can hop on to Twitter and make a statement. And the question is, you have to look at the source of that information. Who is the source? Does that person who is presenting that information—do they have a bias? Do they have an agenda? Do they have an idea that they want to put forward and plant in your brain? So, when we look at news agencies, we sit back and go: “Okay. Is this an article coming out of. let’s say, Reuters, or The Wall Street Journal?” They have fact checkers. They are not going to produce or print a blatant lie. They will fact check everything that they’re doing; they’ll double and triple check it. And so you can trust those individuals with, you know, they’re probably presenting a fact.
Compare that to an agency run by a foreign government that is using the media as a tool of propaganda. Well, you have to ask your question: “Is the information being presented factual? Did the event actually occur? And is there an agenda that the person wants you to follow and to imbibe?”
That’s the way we do it. It’s not an easy process. It’s more of an art than a science. We have to look at it, we have to look at the facts and separate what is difference between fact and opinion.
Capt Orton: And I would imagine that having multiple sources that you can correlate against will create opportunities where you can assess maybe the differences between those pieces of information and maybe come up with something that’s true.
LCol Price: So one of the really challenging aspects we have is, one, you never trust a single source. Only from the perspective, again: one fact coming out—you never trust one picture. You never trust one person saying something unless it’s a very authoritative source. For example, our political leaders, I mean, if the Prime Minister stands up and says something, you can pretty much count on that. But, you never trust one news story. You always want to have multiple sources to confirm. And so when we bring all that information back in, we can say yes, we now have three or four different sources telling us that there are tanks in that town. And it may say there are tanks in that town or there were tanks in that town twenty-four hours ago. They’ve moved. Now we have to reassess the information and develop a new collection plan to figure out how we’re going to confirm where those tanks are now.
Capt Orton: And that kind of in an interesting way, we talked about this in a different podcast, about the OODA Loop. Right? Observe, orient, decide—and act and the speed at which that whole process takes place. That clearly figures into that process. Like, when you’re using your tank example is, if that is moved, you now have to go through this whole process again. And then try and stay ahead of it so that you can make effective decisions like operating in your battlespace.
LCol Price: Absolutely. And one of the challenges we have with the volume of information that’s being thrown at us on a daily basis is how do we parse through all of that information to shorten that sensor-shooter link. Because the days and age of: “Oh, there’s an objective and we’ll hit it, you know, twenty-four hours from now”—it’s almost got to be instantaneous, of, you know. A remotely piloted vehicle is flying. They see a grouping of tanks. We have to be able to go and maybe switch over to the artillery and say: “Hey, we need to get a forward air controller or forward observation officer; let’s start getting you know, artillery on that objective quickly, or getting fast air fighters onto that objective. Because it’s very time sensitive.” So the faster we can connect that shooter to sensor link, the more effective we will be on the battlespace.
Capt Orton: You talked about some of the mechanisms, but how does that machine work? Like, how is it in-cell structured? Or, how does—within the Army Headquarters—how does that mechanism work?
LCol Price: So, first and foremost, the intelligence cycle starts with direction. We need to get direction from the commander to say: “I want you to look at this area. I want you to look for the following things.” I will then take that and develop what's called Priority Intelligence Requirements. Those are the big questions I need to figure out. Then I can start developing a collection plan and say: “Okay. I think the enemy is going to be in such and such location. I think they’re going to do a left axis attack or they might do, you know, a full-frontal or they might come on right axis.” And so I will develop courses of action. And I will try and define the battlespace in which we’re operating; I will try to describe the battlespace in which we’re operating in terms of the terrain—the weather effects that it’s going to have on the battlespace, manoeuvrability. I’m going to identify manoeuvre corridors, likely avenues of approach—all of that kind of stuff. And then I will develop the collection plan which will act in conjunction with the Intelligence Surveillance and Target Acquisition Plan—the ISTAR plan. I will work with the other elements within the headquarters to say: “Great. We need to send a recce patrol to look at that bridge. We need to send engineers to look at that embankment to see whether it’s a possible fording site.” And so I work in conjunction with the G3 staff and the operations staff to be able to task those assets to collect that information. And that all fits into the myriad plan. The reports start coming back into the Intelligence section and into the—what’s the ISTAR Coordination Cell, the ISTARCC. And then we start looking at all of that information that is there and trying to derive meaning from it. Then we can do the analysis portion. Once that analysis has occurred and we have a finished product and we have gained knowledge and understanding from that information, now comes the task of disseminating that information and getting that information to the people that need to know it—whether it’s a senior decision maker or a troop in the trenches. Our job is to make sure that that information is gone out. Because if we have a secret and we just keep it amongst ourselves, well, we’re not providing value to anybody. My job is to ensure that our soldiers are as effective as they can be on the battlespace. And my job is to support operations and support the warfighter.
Capt Orton: You know, I think something—as a young soldier in particular, maybe you don’t appreciate as much—you know, it’s like: “I had to send out the reports, you know—hourly reports and this and that.” And it’s always feeding that information up the chain of command. It’s like: “Man. Where are they always on me about this?” That information needs to go to other places so that it can be used to make decisions.
LCol Price: Absolutely. And I can’t stress this enough that every soldier is a sensor. Every mark one eyeball that sees something on the battlespace is essential to the fight. I’ll give a very tangible example. And this dates quite some time ago. But in Afghanistan, I remember talking to patrols—we’d be driving through a town and they’d say: “You know, last time we drove through the town, everyone was really happy and very friendly. And this time when we drove through, not so much. It was really—something was off. kids weren’t playing in the streets.” And to me, that’s a combat indicator. That means that there’s been a change in the environment. Okay, what’s going on? And so, in this one instance that I’m thinking of, we actually started spending a little more time in that town and realized that, a month ago, there was no presence of fighters that wanted to do us harm. A month later, we were looking at the indicator and saying: “Hey, something’s not right.” Sure enough, we started to see more and more indications that there were fighters coming into the small town. And it was changing the feeling of the town and therefore raising our risk and our threat as we’re going through that town.
So, every soldier on that battlespace, if you see something, report it. The reason we send people out to do patrols is to collect that information. And that information gets fed in. And sometimes, you know, and I use the example of, to me zero is a number, because zero is a confirmation that there’s nothing there, as opposed to it's blank. You know, when you go when you pull out your credit card statement, and the system is blank, it doesn’t mean that there's no money there. When you see zero, it means that there’s no money there—it’s confirmed. And that’s really my job is to go with the confirmation as best I can based on facts on the ground. So, the soldier on the ground. The more they can feed us information, and the more that they can feed the Intelligence machine by writing your reports, bringing your pictures back, tagging your photos, talking to the chain of command, the more success we will have on the battlespace.
Capt Orton: And you reference a couple of things as part of that process, too. You talked about, obviously, enemy tanks or enemy movements. And you spoke a little bit about terrain embankments, because that can affect friendly and enemy movements. What are the kinds of things that you’re looking at as part of this process?
LCol Price: So, my job really is to focus on the three main factors of the weather,
the enemy or the threat—however we choose to define that—and the terrain. So we talked about WET: weather, enemy, terrain. And so weather obviously, we have meteorological technicians that are now within the Intelligence branch. And they let us know what’s going on in the battlespace. And you sit back and go, well: “Does the weather really matter?” Ask your average ground panning soldier. Would you have liked to known that it was going to be minus fifteen and raining or snowy? Yeah. And especially as you get higher up, we all know we live in Canada, we understand that conducting operations in July is very different than conducting operations in January. Rivers will be frozen, you can go over battlespaces, the terrain is much harder. It’s harder on soldiers to be able to operate in that environment. So, perfect example, artillery for the big one: wind. We all know that the minute that the round leaves the end of the cannon—the end of an Howitzer. Well, it’s nature’s foil to determine where it goes. If there’s heavy winds and gusting you might have to adjust your fire. So those are kinds of things that we look at.
When we look at terrain, we look at is it mountainous? What are the woods? What’s the soil content? Because there are areas that we know we might not be able to send tanks because the soil is too soft. So, if our tanks go into an area and get bogged down, and now require extraction, well, we effectively have a reduction in mobility. Well, that will significantly impact a commander’s plan. If he or she knows that they can’t go into a certain area—and it’s going to bog them down.
The last one, we look at the enemy or the threat. And we can define the threat in any fashion we want. So, when we’re talking about a domestic operation, the actual weather itself might be the threat in the instance of a hurricane or the ice storm in 1998. It was the weather itself was what was working against us. And so we needed to work on that. But when we look at a tangible enemy, or a threat force from that perspective, we really look at the enemy, or that threat from three different perspectives. We look at the enemy’s capability. Do they have the capability in terms of equipment, personnel, training, logistics, finance, the right troops at the right location at the right time? Are they masked? So, do they have the capability to actually launch an attack or be operational in that zone? We then look at whether they have a stated intent? Do they have an intent to go force on force with us? Or, is it just bluster? And the last thing we look at is is there historical precedent? So I can stand up and say: “Hey, you know, I’m not happy with governments and I’m gonna have a demonstration.” Well, I’m one person, I don’t have a lot of money. I don't have a huge cohort of people all around me. I haven’t done this before. So the threat is significantly less.
Look at an organization like Al Qaeda, who stood up and said: “We want to take out the Twin Towers.” Well, this was a very well financed organization. They had motivated dedicated people that were capable of doing things. And they had already attempted to attack the World Trade Center on numerous occasions. And so when you look at it, you go okay, one threat is much more credible than the other because of the fact that they have capability. They have historical precedent, and they have a state of intent.
Capt Orton: And, it’s interesting that you’ve mentioned this a couple of times too—is the credibility-reliability factor in, kind of, making these assessments is—there’s a certain level of accuracy to be provided. And also considering the stores providing that information, I imagine that figures in some sort of dimension there.
LCol Price: The challenge we face in Intelligence is that it is an assessment; it is in effect an educated guess based on the facts that we have. And so, we can assess that something may happen. But, we will never come out as an intelligence professional and say that this will happen one-hundred percent definitive. It may happen. It has a higher probability it will happen. Chances are it will happen. So, we try and couch language in terms of probabilities, because there is always a reason that things don’t happen. We may have reliable information that somebody wants to attack us; they have the capability to have the stage and intent. And they wake up the next morning and decide today is not the right day. Well, there is no way for me to know that there are impeding factors preventing an attack from happening. What I can do is look at the facts and say: “Yep, this looks credible. This is of concern. We need to take actions to mitigate this threat.”
Now, where it becomes challenging is sometimes an attack doesn’t happen. Is it because of factors out of our control—that the attack didn’t happen? Or, is it because we mitigated those factors, increased our defensive posture, made it more challenging to attack us, and then the enemy’s calculus changed and said, “Yeah, we’re not going to be successful. We’re not going to happen today.” So it’s a bit of a chicken or the egg question. Did the attack not happen because we were really good? Or were there factors outside of our play? I would hope that it’s because we’re really good. And we took the appropriate actions, and I made and my staff made the appropriate recommendations to a commander to mitigate that threat.
Capt Orton: Well, it kind of comes into the factor of also just being a hard target. Right? So, if you can inform in mechanisms that may affect that enemy calculus, like you said, and the combat arms, people on the ground have the ability to implement those measures, then you’re constantly, you know—we talked about the OODA Loop earlier on is, you’re also getting inside of their decision making process. And then that can affect the outcome—like you said, just inherently by changing how you’re doing business.
LCol Price: Absolutely. I mean—and a perfect example, unfortunately, is anyone who was in Afghanistan, we always talked about the white Toyota Corolla. A suicide bomber on a white Toyota Corolla. Well, the fact of the matter is we had historical precedent of people who had used white Toyota Corolla to attack us. We probably had information suggesting that it was a white Toyota Corolla. And so, you run that gamut, where the one day you don’t report it, is the day that it actually happens. And then the Intelligence staff is stuck with the guilt that: “Hey, I knew this happened; I didn't say anything.”
And so we will err on the side of caution to ensure the survivability of our troops. Our entire ‘raison d’être’ is to ensure the survivability of the troops and the effectiveness of the troops on the battlespace. And so we will do what we can with the information that we have, trying not to be alarmist to provide best advice to the commander and his or her staff and the rest of the troops on the field.
Capt Orton: With this being said, how does this connect into the international community? Because, obviously, like, in a global information environment like that we exist in right now, you know, information sharing is critical. And there’s so many different avenues of collecting information. How do the international partners come into play with that?
LCol Price: So, we are part of arguably the largest Intelligence organization in the world. And that is the Five Eyes partnership. And that is a partnership that is with the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, and Canada. We share information for the mutual benefit of each other. We are also part of alliances like NATO and NORAD. So we share information with our NATO partners that is of interest to them. And all of this information is there to assist each other and ensure that we have a well-informed picture to ensure the safety, the security, and the stability of our operations—wherever they may be in the world or at home.
Capt Orton: What’s the most interesting part of your job, or one of the most interesting parts of your job as it stands right now, would you say?
LCol Price: That’s, I mean—that’s a really hard question to answer. What I find absolutely amazing is seeing the amount of information that is out there. And how much information is actually available on open source intelligence, which is information that’s available in the public domain. If you spend some time and research effectively, you’d be amazed at the amount of knowledge you can acquire that’s out there. Yes, we have classified systems and technical means to acquire information. But we could probably get eighty to ninety percent of what we need from open sources right now.
Capt Orton: So, it’s interesting you mentioned that because there’s a lot of examples of information gathering and crowdsourcing. Like, there’s—every month, there’s something popping up on Reddit where a bunch of people get together. I think one of the best examples was they were trying to find the location of a flagpole. And through a bunch of different efforts, they were looking at contrails of aircraft and managed to locate this flag in the middle of nowhere. So, open source has a lot of applications, even in just normal day-to-day internet life.
LCol Price: Yeah, and I’ll use a really good example. And I think this is good with regards to personal security. You see on things like Facebook or Reddit, and they say: “Hey, let’s have a fun competition where we say: “Let’s post the name of our first dog, the name of our first car that we own, and the name of our first grade teacher.” Well, what you’re effectively doing is answering all of the questions that a credit card company is asking you as personal security measures for your credit card. And so, I would say to anybody out there, be very cautious about providing too much information out in the public sector, because one piece of information on its own is not that worrisome. But multiple pieces of information from multiple sources starts to become a really powerful tool. And so, be very cautious of what you’re putting out there publicly on the Internet. Because there are people watching—there are people very interested in what we do. And certainly, from a national perspective, as Canada, we are part of the Five Eyes, we are a senior NATO partner, and we are right next to the largest military industrial complex in the world. People are very interested in what Canada is doing. So we need to be very cautious of what we do and what we put out there on open source.
Capt Orton: So you hear a lot about things being classified. What does that mean? And what are some of the challenges in dealing with classified Intelligence?
LCol Price: One of the challenges we face in the intelligence world is that a lot of the information we get is from sources that we want to protect. We also oftentimes want to protect the method in which we collected it. So the information itself is important. But the method that we use—did we use a human source? Did we use a remotely piloted vehicle? Did we use electronic warfare, or a piece of very high technology equipment that we don’t want to demonstrate our capabilities to the enemy? So, we want to protect that as much as we can. So that’s why we tend to classify things.
The other thing too, as I mentioned before, we’re part of alliances in NATO and the Five Eyes and NORAD. And so, oftentimes other countries will share information with us. Well, it’s a bit like—if someone lends you your car, you don’t just go and lend it to anybody on the street, you say: “No, I’m going to protect that car.” You’ve got to be smart about it. So if someone is giving us information, we have to protect it. And oftentimes, they will give it to us, but they’ll dictate the terms on which they’ll give it to us and dictate the terms of the security classification. So that’s why we protect things. That’s why we classify them. And it’s—I’ll be honest with you, there are times it’s a pain. It’s really frustrating to have, you know, I've got information, okay—but my job is to get the required information to the people that need it as quickly as I can. As I said, there’s no point in me holding information up at the top. And you know, you see the movies: “Oh, I can’t go to you. You’re not cleared.” Yeah, no, if you’re going into a firefight and you need the information, we’ll find a way to get it to you. Don’t worry.
Capt Orton: So, with regards to the intelligence environment, what kind of jobs are there in there? Like, obviously, we have the officer and the NCO dynamic. Care to explain that a little bit more?
LCol Price: Yeah, so my job as an Intelligence officer is not necessarily to be the best Intelligence analyst. My job is to drive and fight the Intelligence organization to respond to the commander’s needs. So I’m involved in collection planning. Yes, of course, I’m involved in some analysis. I have to be a good analyst to understand what’s going on on the battlespace. But I’m driving that information and really doing the staff function and the leadership functions. Where we have information exploitation operators at the very lowest level, those are our privates and corporals. Those are the nuts and bolts of the Intelligence infrastructure. Those are the people that are receiving the information. They’re collecting that information and putting it into databases so that it’s retrievable, it’s findable—we can analyze that information. And then we start having specialties within the intelligence field. So you can have what's called an imagery analyst. This is a two-year long course. And it is someone who does nothing but looks at imagery—analyze it to derive meaning from it. We can have a signals intelligence specialist; they also do electronic warfare. And they are specialists in understanding the electromagnetic spectrum and information that is flying around and all of the radio signals and all of the data that’s coming through and they focus specifically on that. You can have a geomatics technician who is actually part of the engineering function, and their job is to produce maps and understand terrain and the effect. So you can have meteorological technicians who are looking at the weather. There are any number of trades that fall within the intelligence umbrella. But, all of them—highly specialized, highly trained, a significant amount of education that goes into it. But some really, really interesting stuff. As we say you know, they make movies about what I do.
Capt Orton: Nice. So, if we look at how the Army is evolving and doing the modernization thing, and looking at digitalization, what impact do you think that's going to have on the Intelligence branch?
LCol Price: It’s going to have a huge impact. When we look, you know, twenty years ago, we didn’t have things like Google Earth—or Waze, which is like a traffic finding utility on your phone. Nowadays, through crowdsourcing, we can go down. And using Google Earth and Google Maps, you can find a restaurant with a satellite image imposed onto a grid-referenced map; it’s got Yelp reviews. And if you go down far enough into it, you can grab things like a lat long and an MGRS number. Great reference for that location.
Where we’re really going to see things as things evolve is much more of an involvement of artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s going to be those algorithms where we’re going to be able to take millions upon millions of data points, and rather than an individual having to go and look through them individually, we’ll be able to parse through them using an artificial intelligence algorithm. It’s going to change the way we do business. It’s already changing the way we do business and technology and digitization is going to become the future.
Capt Orton: For someone who wants to get into Intelligence, what would you say to them?
LCol Price: Do it. It’s a really interesting trade. There are any number of challenges. Like anything, we’re short staffed. We need smart, driven, motivated soldiers, sailors, air personnel, and CANSOF personnel operators to come in and work with us. What I will say is that it’s one of the most demanded trades at the recruiting centre. I know that pilots—because everybody wants to be Top Gun and fly fighters, and I don’t blame them—but our Intelligence Officer is number two at the recruiting office. It is an incredibly challenging job. It’s an interesting job. And fortunately, I think it's a job that’s going to be a growth industry for the foreseeable future.
[Music starts]
Capt Orton: Thanks so much for taking the time to unpack all this for us and explain what it all looks like. Thanks for coming on the podcast, sir.
LCol Price: Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Capt Orton: That was Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery Price, Director of Intelligence for the Canadian Army. If you’re looking for a career in Intelligence or in any other trade in the Canadian Armed Forces, visit Forces.ca and take a look at all the cool jobs there. They’re waiting for you.
I’m Captain Adam Orton. For the Canadian Army Podcast. Orton out.
[Music ends]