Getting into Cold Water

I have been an Arctic skeptic since moving to Canada not because I think the Arctic does not exist but because I think that the threats there are fairly low and Canada's ability to deal with any threats there are even lower.  However, as things melt, and as my own interests in Canadian defence require me to look inward-ish/upward (since Afghanistan is over for Canada and there will be no new big missions anytime soon), I am taking the Arctic more seriously.

So, when I got an invite to go to a breakfast at the Norwegian Ambassador's residence to chat about such stuff with a visiting three star general, Lt. Gen Morten Haga Lunde, head of their equivalent of CJOC--the operational command headquarters--I said yes.  I figured I would learn a lot in a short period of time without having to do a heap of literature review, and I was right.

I cannot speak to who said what specifically since it was held under Chatham House rules, but I can report some of the things I learned along the way.

• In the intra-NATO debate about how seriously to take the Russian threat in the aftermath of Crimea, count on Norway to be on the very serious end of the spectrum.  Proximity breeds concern but not contempt as the Norwegians reported that the Russians take NATO capability seriously, such as the accuracy of the Libyan air campaign by non-US countries.  So, the Norwegians want NATO to look at ye olde plans and come up with some new ones since the old ones were overcome by events in 1989-1991.
• That the Norwegians are sensitive to Canada's Harper's concerns about NATO-izing the Arctic.  The Norwegians would like to see more NATO activity up in the high north--more training, more doctrine, more exercises and the like--since it is a difficult "battlespace" and because the Russians take NATO seriously, but they seem to get that Harper prefers bilateralism way up there.  So, the Norwegians are developing both bilateral and multilateral networks.
• Once again, I learned that the thing that really scares the navies operating in the high north ... is tourism.  That cruise ships are sailing the near Arctic at a very high frequency, and that if anything goes wrong, real help will be far, far away.  Rescue ships simply cannot move that fast, and there are limits both to the number of helicopters and to the capabilities of helicopters to deal with ships with hundreds, if not thousands, of tourists.
• China is surprisingly chummy with ... Iceland.  The Norwegians had a series of examples of very tight ties between Iceland and China in the aftermath of Iceland's financial crisis.  This would, of course, alarm anyone who read Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising since Iceland was pivotal to command of the North Atlantic.  We should be less alarmed since China is a long way from having any kind of fleet that could do much in the Atlantic, but it does demonstrate that China has a long term game and takes advantage of any opportunity that presents itself.
• That herring and cavier are actually pretty good.  I avoided most of this stuff in my one trip to Oslo nearly ten years ago, but when in the Ambassador's residence, one embraces the food no matter how early it is. 
• A note on gender: I went to a meeting of Women in International Security-Canada  last night, so I could not help but notice how the Scandanavians do this stuff far better.  Not only is the Norwegian Ambassador, Her Excellency Mona Elisabeth Brøther, an incredible sharp woman, but the J-5 (head of strategic planning) for the Operational Commander was the first woman to command a submarine.  Not the first Norwegian woman to command a sub, but the first woman to command any sub.  At least, that is what we were told. 

I moved to Ottawa in part to be more engaged in the world via the Canadian foreign affairs and defence folk--the Canadians working in and near government.  It has also meant multiple opportunities to interact with those who are based in or visit Ottawa--the Norwegians, the Dutch, and so on.  As an International Relations scholar with a deep curiosity about the world, I find these interactions to be very, very interesting.  I have also found that the non-Great Powers in Ottawa have great teams of diplomats and military officers who do a terrific job not just representing their countries but engaging the broader Ottawa IR community.  To use the hackneyed phrase that everyone used in Afghanistan (except the Americans and the Germans for different reasons), these folks know how to punch above their weight.

Learning from Tragedy

I think it was mighty appropriate that I spent 9/11 this year learning about another tragedy that showed both incompetence and heroism: the attack in Norway on the government buildings and the youth summit on an island on a lake on July 22nd, 2011. 

I was invited to a series of events organized by the academic outreach folks at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to present the findings of the Norwegian Commission on the 22nd of July.  Laila Bokhari, a political scientist, served on the commission and presented the findings at CSIS.  Check out the report as it has an intro and conclusion in English.

The story is well known: Anders Behring Breivik built a car bomb, placed it near the main government buildings, and after the explosion he drove off in another car, went to an idyllic island on a lake and proceeded to shoot 69 young folks who were members of the youth division of the party that was in power.  A total of 77 people killed and many more wounded.  A very shocking event to Norway and beyond. 

CSIS and various members of Canada's security community (Public Safety, RCMP, etc.) were interested, as the Commission did a thorough job to evaluate how Norway handled the situation--before, during and after.  The short answer is that Norway did rather poorly in some important respects and did well in others.  How so?

• The government had decided to create barriers so a car bomb could not be placed so closely to the government buildings, but this was never implemented.
• The police received a report shortly after the explosion with details about the likely perpetrator and even the license plate of the car, but this was left on a yellow post it note and not shared for at least an hour.  Given that they have enough data to figure out that the perpetrator passed by three police units on the way to the island, there is good reason to believe that he should have been stopped before killing all of the kids.
• The police did not, as Bokhari put it, push the big button--they did not set up roadblocks after the explosion. When the first reports of the attack at the lake came in, it was seen as not that important or even perhaps real as the government building attack was seen as The Show even as they knew from others' experiences that there are often simultaneous or secondary attacks.
• This leads to one of the big findings--Norway had heaps of the standard procedures that would have worked well if invoked.  But they were not invoked.  More on that in a second.
• The police, when alerted to the shooting on the island, responded quickly but could not communicate with each other as their radios did not work well together.  Nor did they have GPS maps in their cars so it took a while for the three sets of first responding police teams to coordinate.
• But they had only one boat, so they piled onto it, overloading, rather than borrowing civilian boats.
• The Armed Forces were ready to help, but in a domestic crisis, they could only respond if asked by the civilian authorities and the civil authorities did not ask until hours later.
• The medical folks responded much better--more quickly, getting everyone mobilized.  
• The police, apparently with union concerns/restraints, didn't mobilize everyone.
• The civilians proved to be a huge boon--helping out with the boats, rescuing folks themselves as they went into harms way.
• The leadership messaged well to the public and beyond.
• The intelligence folks missed some of the warning signs since the guy had been talking about his hate and buying up chemicals to get some notice.  

Why did Norway not follow the training, the exercises, etc?  Well, for one thing, many folks were on vacation so the person making many of the calls was not the Deputy but the Deputy's Deputy, which meant he or she had no training or practice.  He or she did not know where the manuals and plans were, where the checklists of what to do were.  Wow.

And this goes to one of the reasons why governments in general screw this up and some parts work better than others.  Governments often have officials cycle through various posts, so those who get training move on and are replaced by those with less.  Also, the medical folks deal with emergencies every day and big ones frequently and constantly drill and live this stuff.  The police folks, at least in Norway, did not so much. 

Breivik's timing was driven by his declining funds--he was running out of money so he needed to attack sooner rather than later.  So, the bomb blew up next to largely empty buildings.  A late Friday afternoon in summer.  This worked both for and against the government---less casualties at the bomb site but less experienced personnel and understaffed posts to work the second attack. 

While there are many good recommendations in the report, I am suspicious about how much will be implemented.  It is an election year, there are the usual actors that are more interested in other stuff than effectiveness (gun lobby, unions, parties).  I pointed out to Bokhari a book by Amy Zegart, Flying Blind, which explains why the FBI and CIA failed to fix themselves despite heaps of recommendations. 

Oh, and I learned something else: CSIS has a big, big building: