The Head Of Canada’s Navy Wants To Blow More Things Up

OTTAWA — The head of Canada’s navy has grand ambitions about blowing more things up.

Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee is pushing to expand Canada’s aging, modest fleet — from Arctic patrol ships and a couple of polar icebreakers to a new class of destroyers and a dozen new submarines.

But in an interview with POLITICO, Topshee described a successful experiment that turned a remote-control vessel, about the size of a boardroom table, into a lethal missile.

The test explosion off Canada’s Pacific coast last summer involved one Hammerhead vessel packed with munitions ramming another. Topshee called it “an earth-shattering kaboom” — the result of a challenge he'd laid down for senior navy leadership to boost navy capabilities.

“I'm trying to get everybody to recognize that if we wind up in a fight, we need to be able to weaponize everything we have,” he said.

Canada’s new Defense Industrial Strategy was slated to be revealed this week, with Prime Minister Mark Carney off to the Munich Security Conference to deepen economic military cooperation with allies. The prime minister paused those plans after a mass shooting in northern British Columbia.

For now, here’s Topshee on creating a more lethal Royal Canadian Navy, fit for purpose in a world he says is currently “pretty out there.”

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

What keeps you up at night?

I've got 35 years of training to deal with the situation in the world, which is pretty out there right now. What's my No. 1 concern? How do I ensure we have the maximum readiness within the Canadian navy despite the state we're in at the moment.

I wish we'd had ships that were not at the end of their design lifespan. I wish we had infrastructure that had been properly maintained and supported for the last 30 years. I wish we had the number of sailors that we needed right now.

I can wish all sorts of things, but the reality is, we have what we have — and the world is not going to wait for us to get what we need. It's going to be the world it is right now. So, how do I maximize what we have right now? How do I create an attitude within the navy that we're going to solve our own problems?

How have you been impacted by the shift in the government spending more on defense? 

It's a reflection of just how deep a hole we've dug ourselves over the last — God, since the end of the Cold War, effectively. … We are where we are.

In the two years that you've been in command, how have you seen the navy progress to deal with this period of global disruption?

One of the proudest achievements I have is, I challenged my team to use a couple of our target drones — to weaponize them and to demonstrate that if we needed to, we could turn them into offensive weapons. They exceeded my expectations ... how quickly and effectively they were able to do that.

The big milestone I'm really proud of is [moving] the River-class destroyer into full-rate production. That's the future of the Canadian navy, the major surface combatant we've delivered and commissioned, and the sixth and final of the Arctic offshore patrol vessels.

While [the AOPS] were built to go up into the Canadian Arctic and do other things, they've become the answer to every problem we have. They're just such good ships in general. So now what it reminds us is, we just don't have enough ships.

Every day I'm asked, "Can you send a ship here? We need a ship to do this?" And it's like, "OK, well, these ships were intended to be in the Arctic every summer." I'm struggling to be able to do that, because they're needed everywhere else as well.

How do you deal with that?

I say: "This is the impact, if you want to do that: This is the opportunity cost."

Do you have a more ambitious timeline for the River-class destroyers and also the new fleet of 12 submarines?

For River class, it's to deliver nine of them by 2040. That allows us to retire the Halifax class [frigates]. And one of the biggest things about the investment the government has made in defense is that we've got the money we need to sustain the Halifax class to that transition point.

It still is a world-leading anti-submarine warfare ship. It's not going to go inside the South China Sea in a period of conflict, because very few surface ships, if any, are going to go there. But is it the right ship to defend the Atlantic and Pacific approaches to North America against a Russian or Chinese submarine threat? Absolutely, it's exactly the right ship for that.

That includes the Arctic?

Around the Arctic, the challenge we face is that all surface combatants, with very few exceptions, have no ice strengthening. So the Halifax class was built, it was to 6- to 7-millimeter steel thickness.

What gives me confidence is ... in Canada, there are firms now capable of designing warships, and so we're hopeful that this is a realistic thing.

There's some areas where we're going to have to go international because we just don't have radar, air search radar manufacturers in Canada and things like that. But by and large, we want to make sure that that ship is as Canadian as it could possibly be, and deliver it as quickly as possible.

And steel as well, I guess?

Well, steel is a challenging one, so ideally, yes, all of our ships would be built out of completely Canadian steel. But when we talked to the steel manufacturers in Canada, we realized that even if you took the entire book of business for every Coast Guard, a navy ship that we're planning to build over the next 30 years, we're talking about a couple weeks at most of production for our steel manufacturers. This is not game-changing amounts of steel.

What’s the most important capability you need?

The biggest opportunity for Canada is in the submarine acquisition.

Either of those two submarines will be fantastic, and there's tremendous potential for Canada to make a really good deal that delivers more than the submarine the navy needs and Canada needs, but also real industrial benefits to Canada.

As I've told the prime minister and others, as soon as the decision is made, the very first jobs to be delivered in Canada will be building the purpose-built maintenance facilities in both Halifax and in Esquimalt for those submarines. And those will be built with Canadian steel.

Is there anything that can be done to speed up delivery?

We've asked both preferred suppliers, Germany-Norway and [South] Korea: Are there options that would give Canada an interim submarine capability that would exceed what we have right now?

And so that's part of the process of evaluating the two options.

Can you explain how you managed to weaponize your drone vessel?

We have a target that we use. It's basically like a little jet boat type thing, the size of this table. [We’re sitting at a boardroom table.] It's called a Hammerhead.

We can use it as a target, and then we'd shoot at it, and it simulates a small boat trying to attack a ship.

They look a lot like the sort of surface drones that Ukraine sent into Russia and Sevastopol to attack Russian ships. And so I challenged my team. I said, "Can you do that? How do I take that, fill it full of explosives, and drive it into something else?" Because I'm trying to get everybody to recognize that if we wind up in a fight, we need to be able to weaponize everything we have.

You saw the Ukraine situation and thought, "Can we figure out a way to use that here, if we need it down the road?"

Exactly.

And so I said, “I have something that looks a lot like that. Can I weaponize it?” And so we did. And the team, inside two months, took one of the Hammerhead targets, used it as a target, took another one, filled it full of explosives, figured out how to put a first-person view onto it, got a satellite downlink and then, using another of our aerial drones, found the first drone and drove the second drone into it, creating a, like, as I said, an earth-shattering kaboom.

I guess there could be a good business case for Canada getting into the drone business?

So the challenge for Canada is, and what we want to be able to achieve is under the Defense Industrial Strategy, is what Australia achieved with Ghost Shark.

But we haven't figured out how to bring together the autonomy and Canadian innovation to create what the Australians have got with Ghost Shark. They went from that, which was just a small scale technology demonstrator for, you know, I think about $50 million to a $1.7 billion Australian contract to build a whole host of dozens and dozens of Ghost Sharks, a tremendous capability that will help patrol all of Australian waters. It's exactly the capability we need in Canada.

Would that work in the Arctic?

Kraken Robotics builds the batteries for Ghost Shark, so a Canadian company is building a lot of the batteries for that. There is Canadian tech in that. But Cellula uses a fuel cell, and fuel cells are likely more robust and effective in an Arctic environment because battery performance diminishes in cold water.

So, I'm really keen to either buy a Ghost Shark or replicate it. Actually, my preference would be, why can't we build the same thing in Canada?

​​Can you talk about how you view the new posture with NATO in the Arctic with our Nordic allies? Given that the U.S. is turning into a bit of a question mark right now in the north?

Our change in position in the Arctic predates any changes in the U.S. administration.

Initially Canada and NATO, neither of us had any interest in NATO in the Canadian Arctic.

What changed is actually the recognition — and it began in 2014 with the seizure of the Crimea by Russia — is: Jesus, this threat's real. What are we going to do? Because Russia’s clearly not prepared to follow rules-based norms around not invading other countries. So that started a discussion resolving the dispute with Denmark over Hans Island.

I've talked to my Danish counterpart a number of times. The Arctic is really, really hard; the North American Arctic is incredibly hard to operate in. And so if we're going to try and manage that region, we need to work together at every opportunity.

The one thing that Greenland offers us is close cooperation with Denmark is Nuuk, the only ice-free port year-round in the North American Arctic. There is no other one. Iqaluit freezes over, and Iqaluit is a tough port. Churchill is awfully far away from everything and also freezes over.

I've heard you talk about your view of history in speeches and other forums. This recent 80-year period of stability that we're all thinking about, do you see that as almost like an aberration?

Yes. It's a historic anomaly. The closest equivalent would probably be maybe at some high points of the Roman Empire, and Pax Britannica after 1815. And to be clear, just because I say, you know, Pax Britannica — 1815 to the First World War — does not mean that the world was peaceful. There were an awful lot of wars of conquest.