The G7 conference in Kananaskis was by far, one of the largest security operations staged on Canadian soil with a virtually unparalleled level of complexity given the number of nations and security agencies involved.
Added to that challenge, was the rugged terrain of the Rocky Mountains, which made logistics and communications that much more complex than if the G7 had been held in an urban environment.
Calgary-based defence firm Tacteris was able to provide their 3d geospatial software to the G7 operation, allowing for mission planners to access real-time information and plan accordingly for the safety of G7 participants.
“You have this complex security operation, and you want to know where all your allied security partners are. The RCMP are driving around, you want to know where they are. If you’ve got helicopters in the air, you want to know where they are. You want to know where your army units are, and if there’s snipers scaling the hills, you want to have access to where they are,” said Sundeep Kharey, Vice
President of Business Development at Tacteris.
That information was provided by a U.S. developed system called the tactical awareness kit (TAK), which allows for federated information about the location of personnel to be shared amoungst security partners—which was then able to be accessed with Tacteris’ software to allow for mission planning to occur.
“Really what the challenging problem is, ‘I know where everybody is, but now I need to plan that next thing? How do I plan just based on knowledge of what’s going on?’ So that’s where our technology really shines,” said Kharey.
Overcoming legacy software limitations
He said that G7 planners had come up against the limits of what TAK could provide, so they turned to Tacteris after a successful 2024 test of the system with the Canadian Armed Forces in Kingston.
“This is where I really credit the Canadian army leadership, where they basically said ‘look, we tested this piece of kit. Why don’t we see if we can use that kit for the G7,’”Kharey said.
“A lot of the planning had already been done. A lot of that friction had already been experienced, but there was this real push to say, can we get that Tacteris kit in here and see what it can do?”
On the ground, the ability for Tacteris’ geospatial system to allow for Canadian army soldiers to quickly assess and display terrain and then show how that same terrain would affect operations, was immediately taken up.
In one case, Tacteris’ CEO Sean Dunn was able to demonstrate the system to a sniper cell who immediately took to using the software.
“They were like, ‘hey, tell us about this stuff.’ They looked at it, and in 10 minutes and they said, ‘this is phenomenal. What would it take for us to get our hands on this?’ Sean was like, ‘well, you could just take this laptop here.’ He hands it over to them, and they took it into the mountains that day and put it to use right for planning and situational awareness,” said Kharey.
“Your plan never makes contact with reality. It changes immediately, and you have to be able to respond, and that’s what our software allows them to do.”
He said that everyone from the signallers to the snipers, and the chief of staff took notice of what Tacteris was providing.
“Overall, we’re very pleased with how Tacteris technology was integrated on short notice,” said Major Casey Gergely, Commanding Officer, 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group Headquarters and Signal Squadron.
“It proved its value and introduced us to a much better tool for HQ-level operations. The staff are fully on board.”
Changing world demands novel solutions
Kharey said the changing face of battlefields was putting pressures on militaries worldwide to rethink where to place command staff, and how to plan operations.
“In Ukraine, it became very obvious that the days of having these big, complex buildings that represent your headquarters with all sorts of IT infrastructure and all sorts of computers networked together, those days were coming to a close. Because what that is tantamount to is placing a shoot here mark on your headquarters,” Kharey said.
“Setting up this brigade headquarters in the field, it’s a recipe for disaster. So, what came out of that was this need for adaptive dispersive operations, which is you need to be able to walk into a warehouse and say ‘this is our headquarters, and be able to set up all your infrastructure right there and then.'”
He said the Tacteris system provides that capability.
Getting the call on short notice was novel for the world of the defence industry, however, being able to integrate new software features over 10 days to meet the demands of users, practically unheard of, Kharey said.
“We had a field service representative in Kananaskis, talking back to the engineering teams. We put out something like nine software releases in that period, just responding to what we’re noticing, and how the folks out there were using the software, how they wanted to use it, what needed to be done. By June 9, we had done our work,” he said.
“The stars really have to align to have something like that happen. But what it really spoke to at the end of the day was the enthusiasm and engagement that we got from the Canadian Forces, and our willingness to show up and say, We’ll do whatever it takes. To get this working.”
