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What will Canada's combat mission in Iraq be, and how dangerous is it?

What will Canada's combat mission in Iraq be, and how dangerous is it?

A lot of rhetoric has been fired back and forth over the Canadian Armed Forces new mission in northern Iraq, their fourth combat deployment in 15 years following the 1999 Kosovo and 2011 Libyan air campaigns and the extended Afghan mission.

But if Canadians were looking for clarity, they didn’t get it during Parliament’s debate this week. Not from the Harper government’s scaremongering about the existential threat of the Islamic State, nor Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair’s warnings of an impending quagmire, or Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s glib phallic allusion.

What exactly are our warriors going to be doing over there and how much danger will they be in from the ruthless IS killers?

Public details are skimpy. The Department of National Defence’s web page for Operation Impact, as the mission has been dubbed, provides only press-release levels of information.

The air component comprises of up to six CF-18 fighter-bombers, two four-engine Aurora surveillance aircraft, a Polaris aerial refueling tanker and 600 personnel, all staging out of an established Canadian base in Kuwait, on Iraq’s eastern border.

Up to 70 soldiers will also join American counterparts to provide strategic advice and support for Iraqi forces, mostly Kurdish peshmerga fighters who’ve put up the stiffest resistance to IS forces after the Iraqi’s army melted away, leaving most of its equipment.

The mission will be supported by Canada’s CC-130 Hercules and CC-177 transport aircraft.

Analysts have said the mission is low-risk, though Prime Minister Stephen Harper, perhaps anxious not have the effort dismissed as tokenism, says it’s not entirely risk-free.

So how risky is it, then?

CF-18s are old, but not out yet

Let’s start with what Justin Trudeau refers to as the “aging CF-18s,” all of which went into service in the mid-to-late 1980s. They first saw action in the 1990-91 Gulf War against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. It’s even conceivable one or more of the jets now headed to Iraq was part of that campaign, though their pilots today were probably toddlers at the time.

But for airplanes, getting old is not the same as some middle-aged guy who discovers his bad knees mean he’s no longer got game.

The remaining CF-18s (some 77 out of the original 138-plane order) have undergone complete airframe overhauls more than once, engine replacements and upgrades to their avionics and weapons systems. They’re estimated to have 30 to 35 per cent left on their useful service life.

“I have just not bought into what people are saying in terms of aging F-18s,” military analyst George Petrolekas told Yahoo Canada News.

“If you were to ask me this question in, say, 2020, I would say to you, yeah they’re probably getting pretty old in the tooth right now. But today, 2014, I just really don’t think that’s an issue, and particularly not in the environment that they’re flying in.”

Petrolekas, a retired army colonel and former adviser to then-chief of defence staff Lt.-Gen. Rick Hillier, said the commander of the RCAF, Lt.-Gen. Yvan Blondin, wouldn’t sign off on the deployment if he considered the fighters unreliable in combat.

“There is always the possibility [of a malfunction],” he says. “You have brand new airplanes that have been hit by a bird that go down. But the probability of a mechanical failure is next to zero, in my opinion.”

[ Related: Conservative MPs approve combat mission in Iraq despite Liberal, NDP dissent ]

ISIS militants present unknown degree of danger

Just how much of a threat the Islamic State’s weaponry presents is an open question.

The evidence so far suggests ISIS has some conventional anti-aircraft guns and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). They’ve brought down Iraqi helicopters, including one unarmed transport this week, and reportedly hit a U.S. fighter, forcing it to land in neighbouring Turkey.

But analysts like Petrolekas doubt ISIS, which captured vast quantities of Syrian and Iraqi arms during their offensive, has the kind of sophisticated long-range SAMs designed to hit aircraft at the altitudes the CF-18s and Auroras will fly.

“And if you have those large SAM systems then you also have to have a radar capability,” Petrolekas noted. “And the minute you turn on the radar, that can be seen.”

Radar-controlled SAM systems are magnets for attack jets that specialize in taking them out but they still present a potential threat, said historian David Bercuson, director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Strategic and Military Studies.

“They will all be careful until they can see completely what the IS capabilities are,” he said in an interview.

Quick-response combat search and rescue teams backed by their own fighter escort are always loitering in the neighbourhood, ready to pluck a downed pilot from the ground, sometimes in less than an hour.

The CF-18s, which will go to work in about three weeks, will be delivering laser-guided munitions from altitudes of up to 40,000 feet and distances of 16 nautical miles (about 30 kilometres) from the target, Petrolekas said.

The Auroras, whose original role was patrolling the oceans looking for Soviet submarines, will used their sensing gear to spot ISIS forces for the fighters to target.

Far from the only planes in the sky

Navigating the nuances of coalition air warfare might be just as tricky.

The Canadian air contingent is part of a coalition cobbled together by the United States and co-ordinated by a U.S. commander based in Bahrain, Petrolekas said. It includes planes from the U.S., Britain, France, Belgium, Denmark and Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Bahrain.

While overall supervision of the campaign falls to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), each coalition member is responsible for its own forces. A constantly changing list of targets must be vetted to ensure they’re legitimate, then filtered again through each nation’s command structure to ensure it complies with its rules of engagement (ROE), which may differ. For instance, Canada for now has ruled out attacking targets in Syria.

“Every nation in a coalition generally and clearly articulates what it won’t do and will do,” said Petrolekas. “For example, the U.S. commander in Bahrain knows that Canadian airplanes won’t go to Syria and so simply won’t task them for those missions, but will task U.S. or Gulf country airplanes.”

An officer from the Judge Advocate General (JAG), essentially a military lawyer, is part of each country’s vetting process to ensure the target lists conform to international law governing armed conflict.

Pilots have the final say about whether to deliver their bombs based on what they see.

“In the Libyan campaign there was something like half to two-thirds of airplanes that came back that had not dropped weapons for whatever reason,” Petrolekas said.

The multiple levels of approval needed before targets can be attacked should not slow forces’ response times, he said.

“The Combined Air Operations Center in Bahrain was actually the same one which we used to produce the target lists for the NATO mission in Afghanistan,” said Petrolekas, who served in Afghanistan as well as at NATO headquarters.

[ Related: Canada sending several dozen military advisers to Iraq as NATO ramps up defences ]

Ground operations using elite Canadian talent

Canada’s contribution to the ground war on the surface looks safer but also holds the potential for “mission creep,” that overused cliché.

The government has authorized up to 70 advisers to work with local forces. Though it’s not been spelled out, they likely will come from the Combined Special Operations Regiment (CSOR), which has been likened to the U.S. Army Rangers, and possibly Joint Task Force 2 (JTF-2), Canada’s elite commando team.

CSOR, whose members have a wide variety of ground-combat skills, has a cadre of experienced trainers. One of its roles is delivering military assistance and “defence diplomacy” to friendly nations. Small teams have worked for years in countries from Africa to South America.

“There’s just not a lot of publicity about it,” said Bercuson.

Their role in Iraq will be to help improve anti-ISIS forces’ tactical co-ordination and communication, and train them to use unfamiliar Soviet-era weapons systems donated by former East Bloc countries such as Romania and Albania.

This is supposed to happen well behind the front lines.

“The government has been extremely clear, in my view, that none of the Canadian advisers would be used in proximity or in a combat function at all,” said Petrolekas.

But history suggests circumstances can change.

The United States was drawn deeper into the Vietnam War after its military advisers began working with their South Vietnamese clients at the pointy end of the conflict.

Closer to home, Canada’s Afghanistan commitment included working directly with Afghan forces in the dangerous Kandahar region before moving into a training role in Kabul.

Moving Canadian advisers closer to the front, with an increased risk of being killed or captured, would require a change in policy and perhaps another debate in Parliament, Petrolekas said.

“Unless the government actually changed that and acquiesced to something greater than that, I don’t see that occurring,” he said.

But Bercuson is skeptical the Harper government would necessarily go back to MPs.

“They go to Parliament when it’s convenient to go to Parliament,” he said. “The Constitution says nothing about them needing to get parliamentary approval to send combat troops.”

Bercuson said the Conservatives went to the Commons to modify the Afghan mission in 2006 and 2008, but not in 2010 when it decided to extend the mission to 2014.

With a federal election scheduled for next October, and a snap vote a distinct possibility, politics will be a key factor in what the Harper government decides to do, he said. What will happen as the Iraq mission’s deadline approaches next spring with little evidence of progress against IS?

“Right now polling is showing Canadians are behind an aerial mission but who knows what they’re going to think six months from now,” he said.

What could change things is Canadian casualties.

“If you saw one of our pilots beheaded on TV who knows how that would change the dynamic,” Bercuson said. “It could go either way. All bets are off when you see that. But the chances of that are slim to none.”