professor christine blasey ford has agreed to testify this week before the senate judiciary committee about her sexual assault allegation against supreme court nominee brett kavanaugh. judge kavanaugh will also testify at the hearing. we'll have live coverage thursday, starting at ten o'clock a.m. eastern, here on c-span3. also online at c-span.org and on the c-span radio app. c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies. and today, we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and public policy events in washington, d.c. and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider.

senate foreign relations committee chair bob corker will talk about u.s. foreign policy, the midterm elections and civil discourse this afternoon. he'll be at an event with former health and human services secretary, sylvia burwell, who's the current president of american university. live coverage starting at 1:30 eastern time here on c-span3. after that, the senate health, education, labor and pensions committee will hear testimony from local officials about the cost of health care in rural areas in the united states. live coverage starting at 3:30 p.m. eastern on c-span3. next, a discussion about space cooperation between the u.s. and canada. officials from the u.s. air force space command and royal canadian air force space command discussed how the two countries can work together on military and security operations in space. the wilson center organized the

conference. okay. well, thank you so much. i'm really excited to see this audience just kind of got filled all of a sudden by a bunch of military people, so that's very cool. so i have the honor to introduce our two guests today, our two panelists. so i'm going to start with brigadier general kevin wale. he's the director general and component commander for space for the canadian defense ministry. he brings with him a really diverse military background that starts in 1986. and over the years, he's flown a bunch of rotor craft, including the kiowa, the twin huey, the apache. he's had a number of staff positions, such as training in headquarters, he's done a ton of work in engaging with allies in exchange for the u.s. army that landed him at ft. hood, texas, and integrating special aviat n aviations attachments in afghanistan, and somehow now

he's landed himself doing space operations. so let's welcome general kevin wale. and we also have with us mr. sean barnes. he's the assistant vice commander of air force space command you've held that position since april, right? um, so, when vice commander major general thompson moved to the pentagon, i guess that's when that whole gig started for you. >> yes. >> but his experience with air force space operation stretches back a lot farther than that. he retired from the air force in 2013 as a colonel and he built up a resume there of space and icbm-centric operations or roles. and he's also held positions such as the air force's deputy director of planning, as deputy director of its legislative liaison office, and most recently, before he took his current role, the assistant deputy chief of staff for space

operations. so i'm thrilled to welcome you both. and as i understand it, you guys have presentations before we get into some q&a and you know, hopefully a lot of audience q&a. so, general, would you like to start with your presentation? >> sure. i'm going to go to the podium. >> cool. >> so i'm happy to be here today and describe to you what i can honestly say is an exceptional collaboration -- collaborative relationship we have with the department of defense on the u.s. side. to build on what's been said already on the civil and commercial side, i'll add the canadian defense lens on this. the title of my first slide is really my mandate. with our new defense policy that was released about a year and a half ago, we really need to accelerate. i'm impressed with what's been built, but we really need to accelerate, not just in canada, but across the allies. we need to collaborate, because that's one of the quickest ways

we are going to establish resiliency and the mission assurance that we need, to sustain our capabilities and to provide a deterrence -- a deterrence effect to anyone that would be interested in compromising our capabilities. and yet for the first time ever in canada, we've been given the direction to defend our capabilities, because they really have become critical infrastructure. i thought what i would do first is just kind of give some highlights and i could give you pages of this, but these are some of the highlights of the level of collaboration that we have between canada and the u.s. on the defense side in space. you've already heard about the long history back to the early '60s and now i heard today, even before that, including norad and alouet missions. we have over 30 cooperative framework missions on military projects or different levels of cooperation in sat com, in science and technology, in isr,

and all kinds of capabilities. and that's significant between our two nations, alone. we get together formally, although we're in constant contact and certainly informally, at least quarterly, we get together biannually and have formal dialogue at the strategic level on how we're cooperating and what we want to progress and how we want to move forward. we have routine interaction in the combined space operation, five is organization, of which i have been the chair of the working group, and we are seized with increasing our level of collaboration, so if something happened in space today, we are prepared to collaborate as allies to do that. our new defense policy, strong, secure, engaged directs me specifically and my chief of defense has passed me in the hallway on occasion and directed me to do this specifically, work closer with our allies, including, of course, the united states, to ensure a coordinated

approach to access to our space capabilities. there are over 30 real canadian air force members posted in u.s. -- over 16 u.s. units, conducting space missions, whether it's missile defense, working in the combined space ops center, under norad, af space, or other arrangements, including for the first time ever, and by the way, the joint space operation in vandburg just transitioned to a combined space operation center. i was there for the transition and for the first time, a non-u.s. officer, one of our lieutenant colonels, is the deputy commander of that organization. and we'll rotate that role now with at least the united kingdom and australia working in that combined operations center. and then our current planned sat come isr, and other capabilities that we either provide or collaborate on for our capabilities. so again, that's just a highlight. i could go on for a long time. but that gives, hopefully, an

indication of the level of collaboration we have on the defense side in space. you've already heard about how far back this goes and certainly, i can add the norad voice to this. but what i want to use with this side is just an indication of, i'm one of the poster childs of what's wrong with how fast we're moving. i have a 30-year career, mostly flying helicopters. i've benefited from space my entire career, whether it was communications, navigation, isr products that were delivered to me, i never gave it a second thought. until i was handed this role a year and a half ago. and let me tell you, i'm a little bit embarrassed of what i didn't know, so i'm certainly trying to help my organization and anyone that will listen to us of where we're at, where we need to go, and how fast we need to go. so before i was born, there were only a half a dozen man-made object in space.

and now there is certainly the congested, competitive nature of space, which i don't need to belabor with this office, there's now approximately 1,600 operational satellites. before i retire, there will probably be on the order of 10,000. the contested piece, it's not only things like direct dissent capabilities that can take out satellite capabilities, i'm concerned about cyber, i'm concerned about my ground networks. everything in space is a computer and operates on a 1 or a 0 and that's a big deal if it's compromised in any way. and the competitive piece, you've heard all this morning about the benefit, the risks and opportunities from industry. we really need to do better at integrating that into military capabilities. the fourth "c" is the convergence of all three of those. any one of those can drive a sense of urgency for the level of collaboration that we have. the convergence of all of those really makes it really over the charts, as a compelling argument. so what that means to us in the military, first of all, is

opportunity. the cost of entry is dropping to get capabilities into space. there's game-changing innovation, there's tech demo satellites on orbit now that can take video from space. the technology transfer that's been talked about, what it meanses to all of our nations and the civilian applications of what's developed in space, the economic development for all of our countries, the interplanetary exploration. and from a military point of view, i'm being a little bit tongue in cheek here, but we can see almost everything as we're doing our whether it's humanitarian peace support or conflict operations, to be able to see what's going on is your first step in conflict awareness. every time i receive a briefing from an industry partner on an amazing innovation they're working on, i'm very excited for what it can do for my forces. 30 seconds later, i get terrified about who else might have that capability, and that's where you get into the risks, right? opportunities for us, but adversarial access to space is certainly growing. innovation is certainly

outpacing policy and procurement processes in government. collisions in counter-space activity, obviously a concern. that freedom of maneuver that we've had until now in space, that i've taken for granted, we can't take for granted anymore. we have to do things to ensure it. we have to enforce those treaties and norms that have been around for a long time, but we probably haven't had to enforce them until now, which is really pushing the bounds on some of our legal assessments and how we operate. and if we can see everything, they can see everything. imagine trying to move a naval vessel now anywhere on the planet without someone on the internet being able to see it in realtime? that's a significant deal for us, from the military operations. you have already heard what space means to canada and from a defense point of view, you know, second largest landmass on the planet, the population of roughly california. to say that we can benefit from comes, isr, navigation from satellite is certainly an understatement.

all of that sense of urgency and context was fed into our new policy statement, which came out with a framework of, we know we need to be strong at home in canada. we need to be secure in north america with our north american partners. we want to be engaged in the world, where it makes sense. that red line across the bar, i can't think of any of those missions that don't involve space capabilities. not one. and that's recognized in our policy. the approach that we're taking at a strategic level is, we know we want to be better at, anticipate, adapt, and then act. and the red circles there are specific space capabilities that go into that construct. this is an overview of the whole policy sort of outline. i'm not going to go through it. i put it up here -- and you see in red, those are the specific space capabilities that were

highlighted in the policy. you look at the increase in funding over 20 years. this pushes us towards a level of ambition that we haven't seen since the korean conflict. it's going to take us 20 years to roll this out, and i highlight it as well, because some of my space projects, i'm focused on operational capabilities. some of our space projects are not going to be delivered in the time i want them for operations, but we had to make tough choices on how we phase this as a force. we need some strategic discipline and how we roll this out over time. and if i use an example of every one of the projects, whether it's people, army, navy, air force, or special forces, all of those projects have to be phased in time when the money is available and within the capacity of even our government to sustain, because even in some cases, the pipeline of the government approval processes, this plan could eat up the entire pipeline, just this. and there's a lot of other government departments to weave in there. so that's one of the contexts

that we have to deal with, with our space capabilities. specifically, what the policy has directed is defend -- you will defend and protect those capabilities. and that means a lot more than what you might think, and i'll talk about that briefly. we're investing in employing a range of space capabilities that will highlight specific direction. you will work with partners with national interests on space issues. you will provide leadership where you can in influencing those international norms and responsible behavior in space. that's for everyone's benefit. and then, a lot of cost -- of world-cross r&d and a lot of integration and collaboration with the united states on that realm. the defend and protect framework that we're using, we're shamelessly stealing a u.s. product of this taxonomy of what

mission assurance means. you see the left there, there's also things like reconstitution. so now we're getting to the point where if some system is compromised, you could have one -- if it's cheap enough, on the shelf, and just launch it up again. and again, that's a deterrence effect. and on the resilience side, you know, disaggregation, proliferation, distribution, as was mentioned, don't put up one big battle star galactica, maybe put up a few cheaper ones. working with allies. if an adversary knows we're so tightly collaborative and they would take out an allied system, we're just going to offset it until that system -- that allied system is replaced. again, that's a pretty effective deterrent effect. and things like servicing that we're kind of tacking on here, if we're going to be soon at a point where we could go up and if a system is damaged and we

could just go up and repair it, why wouldn't we do that? so we're getting into this type of capability. and as a force, we're going through an analysis of, you know, thanks for the direction on defend and protect. this is everything it means. we're going to figure where we're at and make recommendations to my commander on where we should be going, including our level of collaboration with allies like the united states. if you look in the center here, this is sort of my cheat sheet of collaboration, both internally and externally. so in the center, you now have the royal canadian air force, which two years ago i was handed the space domain -- functional leadership for the space domain. our capabilities were built under a joint construct and they were just handed to the air force. and we're certainly all in on taking a leadership role in this domain. so now the royal canadian air force has functional leadership on air and space domain. if i go up, i've got my canadian space operation center. you see the outcan space ops, those oso, those are those

canadians embedded in u.s. units. my space operation center is integrated in my command center in our joint operations command, the equivalent of our co-can command with links to our government ops center. in the bottom left, we have joint-based support teams, so we deploy space experts to advise our forces and coalition forces, to give them those links back into all of those space capabilities that we're integrated in. in the bottom center there, a lot of interaction with industry partners, and interaction with the canadian space agency and others, there's a lot of tentacl tentacles. i've learned in a year and a half, when you get into the space business, the level of interdependency across agencies is just off the charts. and in the right, in the purple, those are the other internal organizations that also contributed to the canadian armed forces space mission. so certainly, i have canadian army and navy individuals posted

on my staff and they're critical to this joint capability. and we need them. our information management group runs our satellite operations centers, once we procure the capabilities. our intelligence command deals with imagery in isr and those kind of things. so it's not just this core air force piece that is involved. i call it the defense -- canadian defense space enterprise. it really is an enterprise, but our air force now has the lead. in the upper right, there's the combined space operations center, with certainly the u.s., uk, new zealand, australia, and with france, germany, and japan starting to work their way into that organization. and if you see under the u.s., you certainly have great ties with unbelievable relationships with stratcome, joint force space component mound and after space. and we're linked 24/7. as a matter of fact, the commander of my air force just offered strat com for the can

squawk to become a continuity of ops backup. i know there's internal backups, but that's the level of integration we want to get through. and in that ops center, there are about 8 to 12 canadians working in that ops center on on any given day, in a room like this, a quarter of those people might be canadians doing c-spock business. so quickly on capabilities. we already have collaborative capabilities on the advanced ehf and wjf systems. so canada is a partner on both of those. currently, we're getting our tactical sat com through commercial and talk sat, case by case arrangements. those are long-standing and progressing. planned sat com, we're in the final stages of trying to negotiate a former military sales on the navy mule system, so we can get out of that ad hoc approach to the tactical

communications capability and get an arrangement with the u.s. so that would make canada, if we're successful in this, the first and only ally on that system. and that's a benefit to both countries, when you think about north american defensive operations, north com, norad, anything else. it would be really nice if we were all on the same system. and if you know anything about the muos capability, it's going to drive the type of radios we get, how we communicate and everything else. so we're really hopeful to wrap that up. you heard about our polar communications. i've flown helicopters in our high arctic a couple of times in the early and mid-'90s. it's a really lonely -- and i'm happy to hear there's more comes coming. it's a really lonely feeling when you leave your point of departure and you're not going to talk to anybody else until the end of the day. we operate over the north all the time, we adjust and find ways to do it, but that's not acceptable anymore. we want the same kind of communications we have across canada and the rest of north

america, we want that in the north. certainly, the u.s., norway, and denmark are interested in collaborating on that. and just a point on that. one of the ways we're trying to to open ourselves up to new space, when we just did our dialogue with industry for kind of options on how they would see this, we didn't go out and say, i want a big satellite that hovers up the north that does this thing. we said, i need this kind of kmup communications for this kind of town with these kind of collaborative allies involved. you tell me how you would do it. public/private partnership, managed service, a bunch of little satellites, whatever. we're not telling you how, what we need, please innovate and give us the best business case to move forward. and we're chewing through those responses right now to see what we might choose to move forward on that.

we're the only non-u.s. satellite integrated into the space surveillance network. thrilled with what that's providing and this is us doing our part to integrate into that situational awarps eness in spa. isr planned collaboration. so you've heard about radar sat consolation mission. that's a canadian whole of government mission, of which defense is only one stakeholder. but we've gotten a polar epsilon, too. we've got ground stations that we will add to the complete network of ground stations, that's going to be used for that whole government system to get the military data that we need. we've already got a follow-on program, before this one even launches. we start the follow-on program, to see -- to design what's going to launch after that capability. you've heard about the our capability, our repeaters we're putting on the u.s. gps system.

and we just released a request for information with the follow-on to sapphire, which we're calling surveillance of space 2. we not only want to sustain what we're doing, but stand what we're doing. and again, we want out and said, we need this kind of service for, i think it was ten years. it can be one satellite that lasts ten years. it can be a satellite every two years, a cheaper satellite. it can be ground-based, space-based, industry, you tell us the best way to do this with the kind of contribution we want to make. that's a quick summary. and again, i have very clear and direct orders on accelerate, collaborate, and defend to implement the space elements of our strong secure and engage policy. thank you. [ applause ] >> excellent. that gives us a lot to chew on later on, but for now, let's move over to sean. >> thanks very much. good morning.

and i'm glad i've decided to take a little bit of a different approach than kevin, because if i had decided to say, here's where we're collaborating, my slides would look a whole lot lake his slides would. >> that's good, right? >> exactly. it's almost a as if we coordinated this. so one of the things that strikes me is we've talked a lot about collaboration on projects and in forums. let me take a moment just to explain to you and illustrate through my career where the u.s. and canada has collaborated. in every single assignment i've had in the united states air force, except in my first assignment where i was an icbm watch officer, i've worked with canadians or worked on specific canadian/u.s. issues. so my first space space assignment, i was assigned a u.s. space command working in cheyenne mountain and working hand in glove with canadian officers and canadian ncos to protect the nation from aerospace and missile warning

and missile threats. so we worked hand in glove on th that. my next assignment was at 14th airport, where i was in charge of setting up exercises around the world to integrate space and in every one of those exercises, there was canadians involved, whether that was in thailand, in alaska, in japan. those were all multi-national and working with our canadian partners was absolutely critical and invigorating. my next assignment was at air command at staff college where we had canadian officers as well. and my assignment after that was my first assignment at the pentagon, where among other things, i worked to ensure that we could bring canadians, australians, and brits into our space-based missile warning center at buckley. and so we set up that program, we set up the arrangements, and we have since that point forward, connolly had a canadian presence at buckley air force base.

i went from there, let's see, where did i go after that? let's see, so that was, my first assignment at the pentagon. then i went to tooly air base. and at tooly air base, and i also got to fly a helicopter over the arctic, which, it is a very lonely place. and when it's not dark, it's very light. and among the three people on my crew was a canadian officer and two canadian ncos. i went from there to national war college, where again i worked with canadians on -- at school there. and then from there to the joint staff, where again, i worked a variety of collaborative issues, having to do with space exercises and having to do with combined space programs. i went from the joint staff out to colorado springs, i many first '06 assignment and i was sitting at my desk when the

chinese launched their a-sat. and i had a canadian on my staff to help me explain to the general what had just happened and explain, you know, what it was that the air force was going to need to be able to do with that. and it wasn't long after that where i was sitting at any desk again where i got a call from folks at iridium, where they said, we had an iridium satellite that went silent, can you figure out what happened to it, immediately followed by a call, saying, we're seeing a bunch of debris. and i was again glad to have a canadian officer there who was there to help me explain what happened. and that was theiridium and cosmos collision. then i went from there back up to the pentagon for my last

active duty assignment, where again i worked with canadians on a variety of different subjects. and today, while i don't have a canadian on my staff, i work very, very closely with canadians who are assigned to different positions on the air staff, working space issues. and so, in a more personal level, it's not just about the hardware and software and program, it's the people you work with. so unlike dr. byer, i do work for someone, and they said, here's your speech, you will read this. actually, that's not quite true. i wrote my speech or i had great help writing the speech. and they said, okay, yeah, you can read that. so it was general george patton that once said, don't tell people how to do things. tell people what to do and let them surprise you with their results, much like kevin said. and so our civilian and our commercial partners are

certainly surprising us. thank you very much for that. and they're surprising us with truly imaginative and innovative ideas. and it's not just ideas, but execution and the results from these ideas. and it's critical that we foster and protect an environment where that innovation can continue to flourish. so there were questions earlier about what's the role of government in this? and i think that's a big role of government, to set the environment fto allow these companies to be able to flourish. in order to allow this spirit of innovation to continue, the military must sustain a robust national security space enterprise that preserves and protects both the national security and commercial business interests. we do this by deterring our adversaries from taking action against our space programs, protecting and defending our space assets. this is where kevin and i differ. he uses the term, defend and protect, and i use the term, protect and defend. >> it's okay. >> as you all know, business

relies on some level of certainty. space is already an inherently challenging physical domain, and i don't need to go into all of the things that could go wrong with getting a satellite in space or operating that satellite in space. those are problems for engineers to solve. however, we cannot ignore the geopolitical issues that exacerbate this uncertainty. and it's coalitions of like-minded governments that are responsible for mitigating these types of concerns. deterrence is our foundational ability to freely exploit space. and any theory of deterrence relies on the adversary's perception that their offensive actions will be inerveffective and/or will be met with an overwhelming response that imposes unacceptable costs and impacts. it's the fact of our political coalition that's foundational to this deterrent. and again, norad being the only

bi-national command in the world. the practical value of our coalition in space increases our resilience and our ability to withstand adversary actions. our coalition space forces demonstrate the capability and the capacity and the credibility needed to ensure deterrence through exercises and war games. such as the upcoming multi-lateral schriever war game that you heard spoken about earlier. not only are we showing and telling the world what we will do, to both our allies and our adversaries, but we're also practicing to be able to get better at it. my secretary and the chief of staff of the air force have recently directed actions that will allow us greater ability to share classified information with our closest allies, and to review how we developed space programs with an eye towards enabling allied partnering from the very beginning. these actions will further strengthen both the political and the practical aspects of deterrence. we hope deterrence solves our problems, but let's be clear. that's not always the case. and that's when we must ensure that we've got the ability to

defend ourselves. certainly by now, you've all heard the phrase that space is now a war-fighting domain, from every level of our government. the u.s. is adjusting our focus from space operations in a benign environment to space-fighting operation and toward that end, we're building a defendable architecture and capabilities to defend that architecture. as outlined in the u.s. national strategy for space, we'll continue towards peace through strength and any harmful interference or attack on our critical opponents of space architecture will be met with a time, place, manner and domain of our choosing. we'll continue to deter our adversaries, protect and defend our assets, and be prepared to take the civil right to the adversary, should the deterrence fail. now, i've heard concerns that there is a danger that the d. d. will focus too narrowly on the war-fighting aspects of space operations, at the expense of providing the vital space

capabilities to the war fighter operating in the area, on the ground, at sea, and within cyberspace. and i can tell you within my personal experience, that has not been the case. rather than, i've seen extraordinary space warriors, like these, operating, protecting, and defending capability capabilities like these. in places like this.

supporting people like this. conducting operations like this. toe protect our way of life. to protect those that are just looking to be able to live in piece, to protect the way that u.s. and canada and others have learned to live. and frankly, to prevent this and

have a whole hell of a lot more of this. so with that, we look forward to the panel discussion. thanks. [ applause ] >> okay. i'm really excited to be able to turn this for questions, but as the moderator, i get the prerogative to ask a couple myself, first. general wale, you mentioned in your speech that you want to see acceleration across allies. and i think on the u.s. side, that's also a big goal. so for both of you, what areas do you see as the most urgent or the biggest opportunities for the u.s. and canada to cooperate on space issues? >> so i guess i'll make two comments there. well, i guess kind of the same comment. sean alluded to the reduce of availability and those kind of things. happy to hear sort of monikers

and something like, you know, let's move from no foreign to yes foreign. we -- you know, it's surprising to me, being new to the space game. it's surprising to see the level of security and classification issues we run into, notwithstanding our exceptional level of collaboration on things like releasability of information, where on any coalition operation i've ever been on, whether it's army, navy, norad, it happens. but yet, in space, because it has developed as a -- because we've kind of taken for granted our superiority in space, we haven't had to do the sharing, we know now to do this. we know how to do this sharing and norad just passed 60 years of collaboration. and we need to translate those behaviors and norms into the space realm. i don't know if you want to add. >> kevin, i think you're exactly right. and that would be the one place where we've got the greatest opportunity is to be able to do that better. we in the united states air

force have had an unfortunate tendency to design programs as if they would be u.s. only, to begin with. and then as we recognize, hey, it would be great to have this partner or that partner, we looked at, okay, how do i make adjustments to that program? i think that that's not the best approach to do that. and we need to take an approach where we start from the beginning, believing that we're going to have coalition partners as a part of that. and then, if there needs to be some specific kinds of technology or piece of equipment that's got to be protected as u.s.-only, we figure out a way to do that. that's not the approach that we took with our current command and control system and that is a significant problem. and we're working our way through that, and our senior leadership is committed to ensuring that the next command and control program that we have is one that will be coalition as a basis starting point. >> and i would just add, things like the transition of the jspoc

to cspoc, there's a real-world example of how fast we're trying to move and the forcing functions that all of us are trying to put in place to enable this transition that we're talking about. >> you both are echoing things that were brought up at space symposium by others and there was some talk, you know, about, you know, opening it up so that there could be more information sharing, so there could be more joint training. have you guys seen some of those initiatives bearing fruit already, so is there still kind of a long way to go? >> so i think the answer is yes to both, right? absolutely bearing fruit and the cspoc is a great example of that. and as i've explained throughout my career and the folks that i've worked, we've always managed to make it work, but we shouldn't have to manage to make it work, it should be designed in from the beginning. so there is a lot more room for improvement on that, but from my perspective, i think we are starting to see the fruits of our labors. i will be meeting, actually, very soon with the intelligence community, because they have

broken the code on this very, very clearly. and i won't go into tall the details, other than to say, their sharing relationship is deep and robust and habitual. and it's one we're going to work very, very hard to mimic. >> yeah, so one example, i guess, that comes to mind is, with canadians embedded in u.s. operation centers, there was a c2 system recently changed, and because of the security -- because of the way it was designed and the security classification, they weren't going to be able to fulfill their job, to fulfill their role embedded in that center. i highlighted that through the right channels, got up to the commander of stratcom and it was sorted. it was adjusted. you know, nondisclosure agreements, there's ways to -- a way was figured out to make sure that that happened. so it's happening in realtime. as well as looking at changes in the way we do business, though we do all of our other business together. >> and both of you brought up, you know, there still seems to be a ways to go in terms of

acquisition, building things from the ground up, to be able to, you know, be used by both countries. what -- what goes into deciding where to collaborate on acquisitions or developing new technology? and where are you seeing places where there are still broarrier? >> you know, what goes into deciding? i think the way it should work is we, we should collaborate from the very beginning. and as the air force is standing up, what we call the air force weapons integration system, the afwic, we're going to include international partners as part of that endeavor. so they will be in on a very early collaborating and planning pieces. from there, we can understand jointly and in a collaborative sense what sort of capabilities

need to be developed and where there are challenges and shortfalls across that collaboration and coalition space. so you have to sort of start there, as opposed to, that's a really good widget, we would like to buy that. or that's a really good widget, we would like to sell that, and oh, by the way, lockheed and boeing would like to sell that to you. >> so it's challenging enough even in your own country. and i'll use the constellation mission as an example. a whole program of which defense is only one staple, there are a lot of other departments in canada that have a stake in that system, to herd those cats, in one country, to get a system fielded, that's one thing. when your talking about something like five eyes, you're talking about classification, you know, sharing between canada and the u.s. is one thing, when you bring in all the five eyes, france, germany, japan and others, that's a lot level of complexity. it would be nice to have a system, a five eyes capability

organization, where we could field as allies one space system that services a few countries. very difficult to do that politically, industry equities and everything else. normally what happens now is one country takes a lead and you look for partners. that's the way it works right now. and i kind of want to ask the elephant in the room type of question. obviously, it's congress that's going to decide whether space force actually gets made, but the u.s. is already reorganizing its military space infrastructure, creating u.s. space command as a unified combat and command, creating a new organization for acquisition, and i was hoping that both of you could talk about those changes and what

that means for u.s. and canadian cooperation? is this a good thing, does it bring you further into alignment? or are there some concerns? >> every country needs to organize under the context that makes sense for them. and if i use tactical aviation as an example in canada, in canada, everything that flies is owned by the air force. i've flown with the u.s. army. the u.s. army owns their own aviation in canada. that makes sense in the canadian complex. right now in canada, it's been given to the air force. that won't change the level of collaboration and how we collaborate. that's a national decision, and we'll collaborate with whatever -- however the u.s. decides to organize. >> yeah, and not going into the details of what a space force might look like and how we're going to get there, but you're right, congress will be in the driver's seat in terms of what it decides to authorize, i think

it's critical that in the planning of that, that we keep in mind the challenges -- the challenge of our allies on that. the united states government is very large. the united states government is very diverse and often very conflict e complicated for our partners to understand what are the right touch points? as a matter of fact, i sometimes learn about my own government from our partners. it's actually really quite common that that's the case. i said, ah, when you were with dazy katae, what did he have to tell you? and i'll learn a lot. so i think it's critically important that as we develop a set of options that will eventually be approved by our leadership a to go forward to the congress, that that's mindful of the international relationship that has to be able to occur. >> awesome. so, questions, anyone? this gentlemen back here.

>> i have a question about -- [ inaudible question ] my question has to do with reentry detections. really, a two-part question. one is, how do the u.s. and canada coordinate responsibilities for that? and i know that's probably classified, but where are we now on distinguishing between an icbm and a meteor? >> yeah, do you want me to take a stab at that? >> go for it. so first of all, it's actually really easy to distinguish -- >> -- a milestone gift of policy and politics. we are so grateful to jeff and samaraa for their generosity, vision, and ongoing commitment to american university. at american university, we understand that