From: believer@telepath.com Subject: IP: Canadian Military Ready for Y2K Meltdown Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1998 10:18:46 -0500 To: believer@telepath.com Source: NOW On Communications http://www.now.com/issues/current/News/tech.html Militia readies for millennium meltdown 2000 cyberglitch the major concern for Canadian forces By PATRICK CAIN Preparing for a civil emergency resulting from mass computer collapse on January 1, 2000, has become the first priority of the Canadian military, a general told a group of Toronto-area reservists in Meaford Sunday. That means the military is taking the millennium bug so seriously that its worst-case plan, Operation Abacus, is a higher priority than Canada's part in the NATO force in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where 1,319 Canadian soldiers (at the moment, most from Ontario) are helping enforce the Dayton Accord. "Some people argue that it is the first priority amongst many priorities," brigadier general Walt Holmes, who commands ground forces in Ontario, tells NOW Monday. "Our operational commitments in Bosnia will carry on, and so our soldiers who are either deployed to or preparing for those operations will be given the same support. "One can never anticipate what else may happen in the world to cause us to have to deploy soldiers, so the bottom line is, if nothing else from a contingency-planning point of view (emerges) it's the top priority with the Canadian Forces." The problem, often referred to as Y2K, stems from the way computers express the year portion of a numerical date, like 12/31/99. When the code that forms the foundation of modern computer software was being written in the 50s and 60s, programmers decided not to use then-precious computer space for the first two digits of the year. Because computers working on these assumptions aren't aware of centuries or millennia, they will decide that January 1, 2000, is actually January 1, 1900. Because this disrupts the computer's sense of chronological sequence, it can cause chaos and system breakdown. Since computer systems with six-digit dates control everything from electricity systems to emergency dispatch systems to air traffic control, companies, utilities and governments are pouring money and time into finding and fixing the bug. Too vast But because this involves scanning miles upon miles of computer code, some argue that the task is simply too vast and intricate to be accomplished. Rotting food, cranky nuclear reactors, banking systems run amok -- a few hours in the world of Y2K prophecy is enough to make you think a bunker in Algoma full of canned beans might be the best idea after all. Most things we depend on depend on a computer chip somewhere, and that includes deep freezes, nuclear reactors, food distribution systems, banking systems, phone switching systems, wage and pension cheques, taxes, and building management systems without which high-rise office buildings -- and therefore Bay Street -- can't function. "I can't make you feel 100 per cent confident that everything is going to function on January 1 of the year 2000," Ted Clark, the vice-president of Ontario Hydro's Y2K project, told an alarmed parliamentary committee in April. Hydro says it has 600 people working on the problem. But we don't need to wait for the end of the millennium to watch the problem unfold -- Y2K glitches are already happening. Earlier this year, the New York State liquor licence system crashed spectacularly when officials tried to enter a licence that would expire in 2000. More recently, the systems of several hospitals in Pennsylvania crashed when staff tried to enter a medical appointment in 2000. At a conference in Ottawa last week, Toronto-based senior army officers argued for a mobilization plan to deal with military involvement in a possible crisis. Mobilization plan "The recommendation from us is that we would like to see some form of commitment to ensuring that the reserves are able to respond," Holmes observes. "We just said some sort of mobilization plan, to allow us to determine what reserves we may get. (That would correspond to) Level Two mobilization." (In Canadian military doctrine, four stages of mobilization exist -- Stage 1 is the existence of the armed forces, Stage 2 is deployment of the armed forces in its existing organization, Stage 3 is military expansion in an emergency, and Stage 4 is national mobilization in war.) Among the options the military is considering is the stockpiling of food and generators in armouries against a serious emergency. "As to where they're going to go, and what the end result will be, we don't know yet," Holmes says. "It depends on the perceived threat, as we get closer to the date." Persistent rumours that Christmas leave in 1999 will be cancelled for regular soldiers are premature, Holmes says. ("They'll probably wait until everybody's made plans, and do it then," quips military critic Scott Taylor.) One important issue is what legal category military involvement in a crisis would fall into. The armed forces recognize two types of domestic operations -- unarmed assistance to civil authorities, which mostly involves coping with natural disasters like the February ice storm or the Manitoba flood, and "aid to the civil power," which implies the potential use of force. Oka and the imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970 would fall into this latter category. Humanitarian relief "The emphasis would be on domestic operations and humanitarian relief, if required," Holmes says. "We are the force of last resort, and if something happens, we are there to be called upon, but the focus is clearly on domestic (humanitarian) operations." Toronto-area army reservists in Meaford last weekend were told that riot-control training, which the militia in Toronto last underwent on a large scale in the late 80s and early 90s in the aftermath of the Oka crisis, is not on the agenda for now. NOW OCTOBER 8-14, 1998 © 1998 NOW Communications Inc. NOW and NOW Magazine and the NOW design are protected through trademark registration. ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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