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Using computerized jujitsu to turn an enemy’s communications against them, tracking their troops with the scantiest of signals, it’s all part of the world of electronic warfare. INVENI ET USURPA or FIND AND EXPLOIT this podcast!
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.
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Warrant Officer Chris Price: We do not intercept Canadians or look at their other activities or anything else, so that we don't have a situation where we're ever doing that.
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Captain Adam Orton: Hi, this is Captain Adam Orton with the Canadian Army Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about the Canadian Combat Support Brigade or CCSB and Electronic Warfare. With me in Kingston is Warrant Officer Chris Price. Welcome to the podcast.
WO Price: Good day.
Capt Orton: Hi. Alright, so the first thing we usually kick off with is tell us a bit about yourself.
WO Price: I'm a reserve member of 21 Electronic Warfare. I actually joined in 1989, so I've been a member of the Electronic Warfare Unit all that period, as I have gone through. During that time, I've been to Germany; I've been deployed in Afghanistan a couple of times in electronic warfare roles. And I've spent a whole bunch of time working in different sorts of subspecialties in Electronic Warfare.
Capt Orton: So, we're kind of talking about the Combat Support Brigade or CCSB. It's a relatively new organization that has been stood up recently under 5 Div. Can you talk to us a little bit about what that is and what do you guys do?
WO Price: So CCSB is a mixed regular and reserve brigade. So it's a Regular Force brigade, but it has in it about 20 percent or more of the subunits that are actually made up of reserve components. It's done to put all the different enablers together so that we have a sort of single brigade to put together the pieces. It looks after a lot of the intelligence work and a lot of the sort of support to command parts that we need. So that's the Canadian Combat Support Brigade.
Capt Orton: And you're talking about enablers. What kind of enablers fall under that?
WO Price: So, it's made up of five main parts. There is 21 Electronic Warfare Regiment. There's the CAIR, which is the Canadian Army Intelligence Regiment, there is IATF, which is the Influence Activities Task Force that has the PsyOps and the CIMIC capabilities. As well it has a 4 ESR, which is the Engineer Support Regiment, which is Canada’s sort of high readiness engineering unit. As well as it has the 4th Artillery Regiment, which is the General Support Regiment for artillery for the Canadian Forces and has things like UAVs, and the radar.
Cap Orton: So that's like a pretty wide spectrum of different capabilities.
WO Price: It certainly is. Yeah.
Capt Orton: So, talk to us a little bit about Electronic Warfare or EW.
WO Price: Electronic Warfare, 21 EW, stood up as a regiment in 2010. And, Electronic Warfare, the things that we do to collect the enemy's activity in terms of the electromagnetic spectrum. 21 EW’s specific role is to generate forces to work in electronic warfare and signals intelligence. We do that with a number of different trades and units and pieces. But the thing that people most know us for is putting out what we call MEWTs and LEWTs, which are mobile and light electronic warfare detachments that collect the enemy's information and report on it to other people.
Capt Orton: And what does that look like when you're out in the field? Like you're out there doing army stuff; what kind of equipment do you use? How does that look like when you're in operations?
WO Price: So, it can be quite varied. So, it goes from everything such as radio reconnaissance, which can be people with tablets and special radios and a backpack, all the way up to people who are working in something which is a MEWT; a role people might be more familiar with from Afghanistan, where they see a Bison armoured vehicle suited out with a series of different electronic warfare suites to collect and report and pass information out.
Capt Orton: Do you have a lot of experience with the other elements within the CCSB?
WO Price: I have a fair bit of experience with some of the other ones. I've spent a lot of time working as a rep for electronic warfare or influence activities at the brigade and divisional level on the various exercises like MAPLE RESOLVE and the joint Ex’s series. And I also spent five years working with the Influence Activities Task Force. So, one of the things about CCSB is that we either work together when we're at those headquarters, or some of us have had the opportunity to work in different parts of the different units along the way. It certainly gives us a broad understanding of the capabilities of what needs to happen to enable our Forces on the ground.
Capt Orton: So, what drew you to working in Electronic Warfare?
WO Price: When I first joined the unit, as a reservist, right from the start, I was actually a high school student and I was thinking about going to university and sort of deciding whether I was going to, you know, apply locally for Queens or go to RMC. And a friend of mine was already in the unit, which had just stood up the year before. And I was looking at what they were doing and the things they were doing. I said, Well, this is kind of interesting. So, I joined it when I was in high school, thinking that oh the next year I'll move on to RMC, and that'll be my military career and I’ll have only spent a year with the unit. And I got very interested in what we were doing because it was unique and ended up staying with the unit and then going through education separately on my own as opposed to going in the RMC and the full-time route. And that's been a decision I sort of haven't ever gone back to.
Capt Orton: So, we're talking about education and on that note, you know, what kind of person you know in terms of soft skills and maybe life experience do you look for in an Electronic Warfare soldier?
WO Price: So, the SIGINT specialist is the primary trade in the Regular Force and the Reserve that does most of the Electronic Warfare work. And it goes through the usual testing like anybody else would for signals occupation in terms of the aptitude tests and everything else. What is specific is that if you want to work and be successful in this area, you certainly have to be somebody who's a bit more of a self-starter than we might expect in some other areas. People need to be quickly trained and adaptable to work in small teams of two and three people. And in places like Afghanistan you'd see those teams deployed quite separate from everybody else, and they're just out there working with an organization that they hadn't been part of before. And they need to be tech friendly individuals. They're always going to be working with technology. They don't need to be programmers, they don't need to be other specific sub trades in the signal’s environment. But they certainly have to be very comfortable working on computers and with tech and antennas and power generation and putting all that together with a tactical goal in mind, not just for the sake of the equipment.
Capt Orton: And what does the training look like?
WO Price: The training's broken up a couple different ways. So, there's the sort of background trade training that everybody takes, which would be the DP1 for SIGINT specialist that’s four months long. And once that training has been completed, most operators when they first come to the unit have a series of other courses that they need to take before they get into the high readiness cycle, which typically takes about seven to nine weeks of additional training.
Capt Orton: Does that break into different specialties? Like I know, different trades; I'll talk about Infantry, for example, because that's my background. But you know, you have people who go into jump courses or you know, reconnaissance or something like that. Is there an equivalent kind of branch in terms of the Electronic Warfare world?
WO Price: There isn't a long-term branch. So there's not like a managed sub-occupation or something along those lines. But what there is, is a series of experiences where people have been in, they've done different jobs and different experiences, and they've had the opportunity to go through managed readiness a couple of times in different roles. And they've built up that sort of background experience to go through.
Capt Orton: Can you elaborate on what managed readiness is a little bit?
WO Price: So, managed readiness is the Army's set up for how it is that we prepare to go overseas and prepare people for deployment. For a unit like 21 Electronic Warfare and the other units in CCSB, often they're the only unit in Canada doing the particular role that they're doing. So, they are always on the high readiness part of the managed readiness cycle, as well as force generating the people up through the preparation phases. So, we have three parts to the cycle. And with 21 EW, there are always different people at different parts of the cycle. So, in fact, we're structured and organized to always deliver forces to be able to be deployed, and also to support other people in their training areas as they prepare to go through.
Capt Orton: I think it's also worth talking about it, because I don't think we talked about it up to this point in the podcast, that the Army typically operates, like you said, on a cycle, often referred to as PCF Cycle, or Primary Combat Function Cycle, where you go through the process of, you know, you deploy, then you come back, dig a little bit of downtime, do some training, then do some mounting exercises and stuff like that to prepare to deploy. And then you kind of go through that cycle. And then different chunks are doing that at different times. So roughly the same concept.
WO Price: The same concept, and 21 EW was specifically previously organized to do that, in terms of we had three internal squadrons, they were matched to each of the brigades and they would sort of match what the brigades were doing in the high readiness cycle. With the change recently, to move to a six-month cycle, we've actually moved away from that, so that we have units that are directly in support. And they will cycle people through more as individuals than as a whole unit in order to make sure we have the right numbers of people always ready to meet the requirements of the Army.
Capt Orton: So, coming back to the CCSB really quick, as it stands right now CCSB falls under 5 Division which is headquartered in Nova Scotia. And here we are in Kingston, and we're talking about a lot of these moving parts; that's pretty dispersed for an organization that generally we might see concentrated in some space. Can you maybe talk about how that works, and how it all kind of comes together?
WO Price: So, when CCSB was moved to 5 Division, 5 Division didn't have at the time a full time regular force brigade that was part of it. So, 5 Division had CCSB given to it when it stood up as the right place for it to be housed. And it makes some sense because the engineer and the gun unit were already located in Gagetown. So, they were located in 5 Division's AO as it went through. CCSB, the other three units were already here in Kingston in their nascent stages as they went. So, it made sense to make the headquarters for CCSB here in Kingston. So really, in the two locations where they are, the regiment is spread out in different subunits across the country, but they're not the prime unit, they're subunits of it. So, it's this command and control that here all comes to Kingston as well. So, it is interesting because there are people coming from different areas. And you know, the simple logistics of being a Canadian soldier of okay, whose time zone are we having this meeting in. Certainly, it becomes an interesting thing, because I just got an invite for, you know, a 7 a.m. web conference because it's on Newfoundland time, and that's how that's going to work out. So, it adds some interest to planning and other organizations. But with the tech and everything that's in place, pre-COVID even, we're able to communicate daily, as if the person was in the next office.
Capt Orton: Yeah, and I think we've definitely evolved a lot in terms of decentralized operations where we have those capabilities to kind of communicate with each other and I know particularly the Army as a whole is moving forward on operating in smaller or maybe a little bit more independent subunits that have that reach back capability to communicate with a centralized organization or headquarters of some sort. Do you have any good stories you want to tell us about Electronic Warfare to like suck in all the people that are listening to that, you know, that may want to jump in on this?
WO Price: Electronic Warfare has been really rewarding for me, especially for my time in Afghanistan when I was primarily working in force protection. So, I was doing a specific role of counter RCIED. And it was certainly quite a challenge to do that, because it was a new capability that we were putting out at the time, and to be able to take all the work and the time that we'd spent previously, I spent a lot of time doing ECM roles, previous to that. And to be able to put all that together and work and do it in Afghanistan was quite rewarding, because we're able to say, you know, we did something, we achieved something, and it was quite measurable at the time. And that was a fantastic opportunity. One of the things about Electronic Warfare, because we can't tell everybody about everything that we've done and where it's been all the time, it's reassuring to know in different areas that you've had the work and the experience and that you actually knew, or your unit or your command knew the results of what you were doing and could see it and the commanders could see it. And not always was it known everywhere else, but it was well known. And you were told it, and it was well worth it to have known that.
Capt Orton: It's funny, because it makes me think of conversations we have all the time, and particularly about signalers, where if signalers are doing their job right, nobody ever talks about them because the radios are working, and everything's great. But the minute that doesn't work, that's when you start hearing about it and people are like: “Oh, signalers”. But really, it's just kind of the nature of working in the background and kind of just making sure everything's running nicely. You know, sometimes you don't necessarily get that recognition that you otherwise would get. And it seems like that's one step even further removed from that is because of operational security and different things, you're buried even deeper into that. And yet you're doing all these things in the background that probably contribute to the effort pretty dramatically, but people just don't really know about it, because it's fairly secretive, let's call it.
WO Price: Absolutely.
Capt Orton: So, understanding maybe operational security limitations, can you talk a little bit about the equipment, maybe not specific in details, but like, what it all does, like how it all works?
WO Price: Well, certainly, I mean, the job is to explore and exploit the electromagnetic spectrum. So that's intercepting radio communications and reporting on it. And I mean, that's no secret that that's what Electronic Warfare does at its base. So, we can certainly look at a number of different ways that's done. And there are certainly all different types of receivers and different computer systems that are used to control those, and work in different types of environments to get against different targets. How those are put together, and how we network them. And sort of the specific targets that we're going after is where it becomes, we can't discuss that with people. And what the capabilities are and where they're going. But it's easy for people to see what they would do to start, because if you look at how you would, you know, how do you listen to a radio station at home. And you're just moving that up farther and farther and more advanced until you get to the point that you're doing Electronic Warfare.
Capt Orton: You know, what's interesting also is when you're talking about this, it makes me think of certain domestic operations that I've been on or that I know people have been involved in, and kind of the challenges of making sure we're not interfering with Canadians' privacy. A good example is we've had observation stations up in domestic exercises, that they have incredible visibility, they can see like kilometers out and stuff like that. And there's always the challenge of making sure that nobody's, you know, breaking privacy and like, you know, spying on somebody in their yard or whatever. I know that we go to great lengths to avoid that. How does that translate to the challenges of training for Electronic Warfare in Canada, and kind of being able to exercise that without accidentally infringing on somebody's privacy or something like that?
WO Price: Well, at the heart of that is, we do not intercept Canadians or look at their other activities or anything else. And the way that we train and prepare people is to go out and actually create all our own targets so that we don't have a situation where we are ever doing that. We just go out and create the target environment that we need to train for the skills that we need to prepare people for.
Capt Orton: So, the Electronic Warfare Regiment out in the field in Wainwright, and they're setting up to do an exercise. What does that look like?
WO Price: It looks like it's us getting to be at the level four, level five sort of exercise where you've put all together, you know, we've done our sort of squadron level work beforehand back in Kingston, or with the brigade perhaps at their home station. When we actually get to Wainwright, we're able to put it all together and actually work in an environment where there's a lot more activity going on. We're certainly able to integrate the teams into their supported units and move them around and get to have that equivalent of the fire and movement in the Electronic Warfare world. It is a challenging environment for us and it allows us to do a lot of work where we bring together a number of targets that we produce ourselves and everything. So, our guys are out there and able to work and be challenged. And sort of have that difficult environment where they have to really do the analysis to find the target and put it all together and provide a good product.
Capt Orton: As we look at, let's say, Electronic Warfare over the past 20 years you have, I mean, I'm not an expert on the subject, but let's say you have various types of radio spectrums and things like that. Now we see ourselves in more of the digital age, let's say the past decade. There's an increasing amount of, let's say, digital tools, you know, things like drones, and Facebook. Have all these things changed the way that we approach Electronic Warfare? And, you know, where do you see that going in the future?
WO Price: What is core for everybody to remember is if it's an emitter, it's an emitter. And if it's something that transmits as a radio, it transmits as a radio, and if it does it, it can be found. And there's no amount of technology that's ever going to change that sort of base piece in the background. And that's how we look at it. We're locating signals. And if you have something that makes signals, we're out there to find it.
Capt Orton: You know, this reminds me of, I think of like different situations, particularly the Americans there, I read an article about that, where they discussed using detection to identify locations of soldiers just based on the electronic devices they were carrying. And it discussed kind of fairly elaborately how they would actually, before deploying on these exercises, soldiers would be pretty closely monitored for what electronic devices are carrying, and what they were allowed to bring into the field because their Electronic Warfare capability was identifying locations of individual soldiers and by clusters and things like that and compromising their security. What would you say to soldiers heading in the field? How can they prepare themselves to prevent being vulnerable while on operations?
WO Price: OPSEC is key. And we certainly need to follow the plans that are put in place for particular operations and training to make sure that what we're doing as individuals doesn't affect that OPSEC or what's going on. So, in different areas, that means that when we train, we really need to get used to training with the equipment we're supposed to be using, and not that sort of friendly factor where people like carrying stuff around, that is what they had before. So that people are used to working with just the equipment they need, and not bringing things with them that in fact would lead to OPSEC breaches. And either because of the device and the emissions that are on that device, giving away where you are, or other things like how there's EXIF data with locations that are tagged in it that later get posted on the internet. And lots of stuff that's been in the media in the press that people have talked about. And these are all real things that happen all the time. And we all need to work to make sure that that stuff's not happening.
Capt Orton: That's a great point. Anything else you want to add before we wrap things up?
WO Price: One of the things that sort of, we talked about how to become a member of the Regiment, which was a question that we talked about earlier, one thing that I didn't really mention or touch on too much is the fact that because we are both regular and a reserve force unit, that people have a number of different ways to get to the unit. Regular force, of course, it's with the career manager. And people come and go from the Regiment a number of times in their careers based on their trades and what they're doing. But it's also because we have the ability as a reserve unit to hire and take people in directly. We certainly bring people in a number of different ways to the unit, there's a sort of traditional reserve hiring units. But one of the things that we certainly see a lot of is component transfers, where we're getting people who actually have component transferred out of the reg force, when they were perhaps unhappy with the trade they had before, or deciding that it was time to switch to a more part time environment, and certainly took the opportunity to move to a trade that allowed them to participate in Electronic Warfare and in some cases even moved to Kingston because of it, to get involved and go that route. And it's a very sort of successful career path for a number of people. And another unique thing we have is being a mixed regular and reserve unit, is that several people who component transfer into the regular force from the reserve, in fact, are working with the same unit immediately after their component transfer or a couple postings later down the road. So, we walk down the halls and we really are an extended family in terms of being both regular and reserve force. And it's the term of service they're working right now as opposed to how they identify in the long term.
Capt Orton: I like that you bring that up too because if you look at the kind of where the Army's heading, major changes are always a challenge within our structure and how we operate. But I know the Army is working towards trying to make that barrier between, you know, components transferring from the regular reserve and back and forth a little bit easier in order to allow people to work with shifting priorities, you know, be it family, or deployability, and things like that. And so, it seems like that's already a good starting point for trying to make that happen.
WO Price: Absolutely.
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Capt Orton: Awesome. Well, thanks very much for sitting through this interview and working with me.
WO Price: All good. Thanks a lot for having us.
Capt Orton: That was Warrant Officer Chris Price from the Canadian Combat Support Brigade. And I'm Captain Adam Orton, for the Canadian Army Podcast. Don't forget to check out our back catalogue of episodes. There's a lot of good stuff in there. And as usual, stay frosty.
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