NORAD

1857 Words4 Pages

NORAD

To defend against the security challenges of the 21st Century ...

Air and space weapons pose a potential

and growing threat to our continent.

NORAD has developed concepts to meet the security challenges of the 21st Century. Achieving these concepts will provide NORAD the capabilities required to protect our homelands against aerospace threats in 2010 and beyond.

PRECISION TRACKING is required to detect and track any air or space threat to North America from its origin -- in space, in the air, from land or sea -- because NORAD must know exactly where a threat is to precisely engage it.

PRECISION ENGAGEMENT provides NORAD the capability to precisely engage threats throughout the full range of our surveillance coverage to ensure off-shore threat engagement well before air and space weapons threaten Canadian or American citizens. This requires agile platforms with lethal munitions to enage targets more responsively and accurately from longer distances and precise, immediate operational assessments with the agility to re-engage if required. The system will include a flexible, near real-time targeting architecture, including space-based wide area surveillance, rapid identification, tracking, and near real-time sensor to shooter links.

INTEGRATED BATTLE MANAGEMENT A system of systems providing seamless battle management to fuse information from our NORAD regions and adjacent CINCs and Commanders. This allows NORAD to receive and give effective support to our forces during peacetime and wartime. Such interoperability will become more important as sea, land and air forces create a credible NORAD defensive shield over North America.

FOCUSED LOGISTICS is an agile and responsive logistics system in 2010 to support NORAD's m...

... middle of paper ...

...would be determined only after a comprehensive review of possible implications. Moreover, as stated in the 1994 Defence White Paper, Canadian involvement would have to be cost-effective, make an unambiguous contribution to Canadian defence requirements and build upon missions already performed by the Canadian Forces, such as surveillance and communications. Also, Canadian involvement would be predicated on the proposed system being compliant with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, or an updated treaty negotiated with Russia, as well as other arms control and disarmament agreements, protocols and arrangements.

Conclusion

Canada will continue its efforts to develop a better understanding of the U.S. ballistic missile defence program. This involves ongoing consultations with the U.S. for the specific purpose of determining what a future BMD system might entail.

Open Document