Q & A Session With JTF2 Commander

The Globe and Mail has published a revealing Q & A session with the commander of Canada's secretive JTF2.

Communication between Brigadier-General Michael Day, the former JTF 2 soldier who now heads Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, and a Globe and Mail journalist.

Subject “on the road” somewhere outside the country.

Date: Sept. 30, 2010

Time: Unknown

You've had 17 years to watch JTF 2 grow. Has terrorism changed?
There is this phrase. It's called VUCA. Volatile. Uncertain. Chaotic. Asymmetric. That describes the threat we think we are facing. So therefore when you say, ‘You guys do hostage rescue but there haven't been any hostage rescues,' there is no way to safely predict that's going to be the event that happens in Canada, right?

Is there is a profile of a JTF 2 assaulter?
You would never notice him in a crowd. We actually select people who do not really want to stand out. The average age is close to, if not over, 30. They are married. They have kids. They are typical Canadians. They are hockey dads. I managed my boy's hockey team for a couple of years. I can't tell you the number of guys on the teams that I saw across the bench.

In terms of “black” operations, Canada is not the U.S.
What is a “black” operation? Besides Call of Duty on my boy's Xbox 360, I have to tell you I've been in the community on and off for 18 years, and never heard that term used. An operation is an operation, right?

How about clandestine commando operations, then? Do Canadians have the stomach for that?
We have no commandos. Commandos is not a Canadian term. I don't talk about my operations in Afghanistan, but my sense is Canadians are pretty happy that we're going out and protecting other Canadian soldiers.

But remove the war context and it gets more murky.
It's an interesting question. I'm sure John Wright from Ipsos Reid could probably give you a take. I don't actually spend a lot of time worrying about that. Governments and the chain of command determine what we do and what we don't do.

There's nothing you're doing that the Prime Minister wouldn't know about, right?
All the senior leaders hear what we're doing. This idea that nobody knows – it's [expletive].

By: Shelldrake