ME digest

Staying Interoperable. Operations in Afghanistan for the past 12 years have helped American and Canadian forces become as interoperable as they’ve ever been, both with their equipment and their personnel , Canadian Armed Forces Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Tom Lawson says at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event. “The challenge is to capture that in doctrine,” he says. Lawson notes that the long-term, real-life operations have helped bring the two together in ways that traditional training hadn’t previously, so he hopes that maintaining high-level cooperation on large-scale exercises will keep the two militaries as close as they are now. “Tactically, I think that will come easily, but we’ve been engaged at the very highest levels operationally and strategically as well, and that will come through some larger exercises. The Americans hold [Rim of the Pacific Exercise] of course off the West Coast, and Canada seeks to be and expects to be a very large part of RIMPAC and the senior leadership there. And also in our large exercise, JOINTEX, held every two years, we seek and I’m sure we’ll find a willing group of American leaders who will come up to help us with that.”