DREO in the 1990s

Field trials

Field trials are one element of DREO life that has not changed much over the last three decades. Field trials are reportedly both very challenging and very satisfying. They are an opportunity for technologists and defence scientists to demonstrate the fruits of their labour.

Field trials often provide memorable experiences. René Apps recalls when he was first hired as a technologist at DREO in 1970. Hired in June, just having graduated, in August he was sent, green as can be, on his first field trial. It involved his first flight on an airplane, first trip in a helicopter, and a month-long stay on an icebreaker.

The field trial experience varied widely. It could involve spending four days on a Caribbean beach, waiting for logistics to be sorted out before a trial could proceed, or it could involve four days of seasickness. It could involve 14 hours sitting on the nylon netting of a hammock-seat in a Hercules, or it could involve spending midday breaks tossing a line off the back deck of a military ship, fishing for salmon.

Field trials have also been, according to those whose jobs are to keep track of equipment, an opportunity to lose equipment. Evidently “misplaced in Alert” has been a remarkably common entry on inventory lists.

Field trials in the Arctic have consistently made for compelling reportage to the Canadian public. In October 1971, the Canadian Magazine (a magazine once published by the Ottawa Citizen) published an article on defence research at Alert, describing life at Alert and at the more temporary research camps in the environs. One researcher described research life in the Arctic: “We have to spend a third of our time in what the reports call ‘Maintaining the integrity of the camp’ which is really just survival, like drawing water from the lake in milk cans, pitching tents and so on. We spend another third packing and unpacking, leaving a third for our research…and sleeping.”

Mirroring this article is a more recent piece in Canadian Geographic, from 2000. It too describes life at Alert (though this article is far more visually stimulating, accompanied by the award-winning photographs of DREO photographer Janice Lang). Thirty years later, research at Alert is sill a compelling story for the Canadian public: the isolation, the arcane scientific research, the extreme working conditions do not seem to have changed much.

From DREnet to Information Operations

A recent addition to the sections at DREO is Information Operations. The history of information technology development for the Canadian military began with the development of DREnet, and a program delivered out of CRAD Headquarters.

The story of the origin of the Internet in US military research has become part of Internet lore. The foundation network for the Internet was ARPAnet, a network developed by the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) for the US Department of Defense. The goal was to create an information network that was decentralized and therefore could withstand malicious activity at any of the nodes in the network. Information could still be transmitted if one or some of the nodes were blocked or damaged.

DREnet was developed as Canada’s version of ARPAnet. It was designed as a research communications network to connect all the Defence Research Establishments. Its impetus began in two related projects in the 1980s.

In the early 1980s, John Robinson was working for CRC, involved in communications research on behalf of National Defence. Through the TTCP, Robinson got an agreement with the US Department of Defense to extend the ARPAnet into Canada. Robinson was interested in it purely from the perspective of the development of the network, but there was at least one scientist at DREA who had reason to communicate with universities in California. The ARPAnet was the perfect tool for this purpose, and this reinforced the argument to extend it into Canada. In 1983 the connections were established between DREA to CRC, and from CRC to an ARPAnet node at Rochester, New York.

Also in the early 1980s, Vincent Taylor was working with the Canadian Embassy in Washington, as a liaison officer between the Canadian and American defence research communities. From this vantage point he watched the development of ARPAnet. He believed that the Canadian defence research establishments could benefit from a similar network, and he began to promote the idea. One of the major barriers to a Canadian network was the expense of leasing dedicated high-speed communication lines. The DREA-CRC-ARPAnet project clearly demonstrated how expensive it would
be. It was just too expensive to build
a Canadian network the way ARPAnet
was built in the US.

The 1990s: A Painful Makeover

In the 1990s, three crucial components of DREO’s existence—staffing, organization, and program—all experienced drastic changes. A series of events involving staff composition, organizational change, and program change had a marked effect on the face of defence research at DREO. As all three components are interrelated, a deliberate change in one often resulted in an unintentional change in another.

To start, in the mid-1990s the federal government initiated a downsizing campaign that left no area of the public service untouched. Any Canadian federal public servant of this period can tell you how much it negatively affected morale, and how much stress was involved in the restructuring that necessarily accompanied such reductions in staff. It was no different at DREO.

However, DREO was experiencing other disruptions at the same time. For instance, there were changes in program. In 1988 the Chemical Detection and Decontamination Section was transferred to DRES. In the summer of 1994 the last elements of the Protective Sciences were moved to other Establishments. These changes occurred in concert with downsizing, as some staff members who did not want to relocate with these programs left CRAD altogether.

The downsizing predictably increased the workload of those that remained. The hierarchy was flattened, as authority and responsibility shifted to lower levels of management. Thus changes to staff engendered organizational change.

Organizational change in turn engendered changes in staff composition. At this time, CRAD was reorganizing itself to become DRDC, and addressing accountability and program planning issues. With new structures like thrusts and milestones for both short term and long-term planning and reporting, there was suddenly a lot more paperwork for an organization with fewer layers. There were no longer Directors who, before these changes, were the individuals responsible for some of the planning and reporting paperwork. Section Heads took on these responsibilities, with Group Leaders doing some of what Section Heads used to do. This increased loading on individuals may be directly responsible for the widely-felt perception that there is not as much time to chat over coffee with colleagues. The atmosphere is far more businesslike, and less collegial than it was in earlier DREO days.

The departure of the Protective Sciences division had an obvious effect on the composition of staff at DREO. But there was another less-obvious program change that has had a significant effect on the composition of staff, particularly on the work of the technologists. It was a change in program that was ushered in by the meteoric rise of the PC in the work of defence scientists. There is now an increased focus on modelling and simulation work, the great proportion of which is work that defence scientists do using PCs. At one time more of the work at DREO involved electronic equipment and apparatus built in-house, which is the realm of the technologist. Technologists built this equipment, and were responsible for managing, operating and maintaining it while on field trials. This role has been greatly reduced. The current ratio of technologists to defence scientists is the lowest ever, a little too low, in the opinion of some, drastically eroding DREO’s basic ability to build things. Many of the remaining technologists came on staff at DREO in the early 1970s, and their average age now is in the upper 40s. They have referred to themselves as “a dying breed.” Their role has changed, and is changing, and it is not entirely clear what this role is evolving into, as the research programs at DREO evolve.

The solution was to instead use a service offered by Bell Canada called DATAPAC. This was a public “packet switching network” first offered in Canada in 1978, and it was relatively inexpensive. The development of DREnet followed the development of the technology (contracted by CRAD out to local industry) that would allow each establishment to send and receive information over Bell’s established lines. DREnet became operational at the end of 1985. Within about five years the utility of the network was evident, and the expense of dedicated lines was seen as cost-effective, so the DATAPAC service was dropped.

By 1993, a large percentage of each DRE was connected: at DREO 95% of the establishment had access. The speed of the network had increased also. Whereas in 1985 the connection between laboratories used the 9.6 kilobits/second DATAPAC service, by 2001, all the DREs were connected at 1.544 Megabits/second—over 150 times the speed. In 1993, DREnet was still considered a research network, used to develop and test Internet technology, but by 2001, it had insinuated itself into the operations of the establishments to become more operational than research-oriented.

Meanwhile, research and development of network security measures was being contracted out from a program run by Vincent Taylor at CRAD Headquarters.

The program in computer security was a bit of an odd-ball program, first because it was a new area of research, not really being done in any of the Establishments, and second because at HQ most of the activities were administrative, in program management, not program delivery. For close to 15 years this program was a one-man operation, with Taylor responsible for contracting out the work.

One of the products of this program was a router for DREnet. A router is a device that directs the traffic of information in a network. Information travels in “packets”; one message may be made up of many packets. Each packet contains information that indicates where it is going, and the router reads this and directs the packet to its destination. Routers were available commercially at this time, but because Taylor recognized early on that there was a need to protect a network, the router he wanted for DREnet would provide an extra level of protection. This router would examine the packet, determine the type of information it contained, and filter out packets that had characteristics considered dangerous.

Additionally, having designed the routers, CRAD had access to the source code, and could alter it, and hence have more control over what the filter allowed into the network. The standard software available at the time would not have allowed this flexibility.

The computer security research program, delivered out of Headquarters, remained rather isolated. There was moderate interest in developing this program into something bigger, but for some time no decisive action was taken. Ultimately it was Dr. John Leggat, who was Chief of Research and Development at the time, who supported the idea of a new research section in this area. He recognized that security of networks was becoming crucial.

When CRAD recognized that the military required more research and development in these areas, it authorized the formation of a section at DREO, to be called Information Operations (IO), in 1998. The program then expanded into a two-person operation, in the persons of Brian Eatock and Roseanne Carroll. Shortly after IO was formed, Vincent Taylor was asked to join the fledgling IO group at DREO.

DREO was a natural choice as a location for these new activities, not only because the electronics work at DREO offered potential synergies, but also because DREO was the location of the network operation centre for DREnet. DREO had the further advantage of being located near the high tech firms in Kanata, which offered other potential synergies.

Entrust

Entrust is a large network security firm with headquarters in the Ottawa area. CRAD’s program in computer security played a key role in supporting the R & D that produced the technology that founded the firm.

The CRAD program had identified a need for a way to protect sensitive information in transit in a network. The standard method was high-grade encryption, but this encryption was extremely expensive. Taylor recognized, though, that a great proportion of all traffic was in fact unclassified, or merely sensitive. Taylor was looking for an effective and inexpensive method of encrypting that traffic without resorting to encryption overkill. Taylor was aware that some work was being done in this area in the UK, and was on the lookout for similar work in Canada.

As it happened, an unsolicited proposal crossed Taylor’s desk, submitted by a group within Bell Northern Research. The group was looking for seed funding for software encryption systems for PCs. Taylor believed that CRAD should help fund the project, in conjunction with the Communications Security Establishment of DND.

The promise of seed funding enabled the group at Bell Northern to go to their Board and acquire four times the funding to get this area of research started. DREnet was used to test the work as it was produced. The group rapidly expanded and soon became Northern Telecom Secure Networks, which was ultimately divested by Nortel to become Entrust Technologies, one of Canada’s high tech success stories. The Chief Technical Officer at Entrust has speculated that without that initial seed money, the project would never have got off the ground.

The Information Operations Section now comprises over 20 positions and covers three areas. “Information protection and assurance” involves methods to ensure the authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of information received in a network. “Attack detection and analysis” involves knowing when there is an intrusion in a network, knowing what the unauthorized activity is, and being able to assess the threat it poses. “Information exploitation” involves understanding what kind of attacks are possible, to stay a step ahead of the attacker.

The SMARRT New Kid on the DREO Block

In 2001, DREO welcomes a new section: Simulation and Modeling for Acquisition, Requirements, Rehearsal and Training, which has the conveniently flattering acronym SMARRT.

Modeling and simulation have for many years been among the tools used by the defence research establishments in the research and development of a wide range of military technologies. Techniques for modelling and simulation have themselves become very sophisticated. They are particularly useful to facilitate forward-looking activities such as: military planning; setting requirements for systems and equipment not yet acquired; testing and evaluating systems and equipment in synthetic environments; mission rehearsals; and training individuals and teams using simulated systems in simulated environments.

The SMARRT program will integrate the modeling and simulation abilities of all the Establishments, and be co-ordinated by the new section at DREO. It will support the new Canadian Forces Experimentation Centre also located at Shirleys Bay.

Defence Research and Development Canada

DREO in the 1990s