Canada Navy Canada Surface Combatant (CSC) Program

[oldcpu]

A number of news reports, have posted on L3 Harris being awarded a contract for VSS, which I missed until earlier today:

Irving Shipbuilding awards L3Harris VSS work on Canada’s River-class destroyers

and

A New Lens on Canada’s Naval Future: L3Harris Secures Key Contract for River-Class Destroyers

Both articles more or less say the same thing, albeit with different titles, and some text wording differences. Below is clipped/mixed from both articles (and not a pure quote).

Canadian shipbuilder Irving Shipbuilding has awarded tech company L3Harris a contract for work on the visual surveillance system (VSS) for Canada’s River-class destroyer (RCD) fleet.
...
This VSS contract, awarded to L3Harris, is a network of cameras, sensors, and control units that allows for real-time situational awareness, diagnostics, and ship-wide automation ...
...
The VSS ... Combining cameras, sensors, and control units into a unified network, the system provides real-time situational awareness and diagnostics across the vessel. Its integration with the IPMS ensures seamless ship-wide automation—even under degraded communications conditions. For naval operations, that means persistent awareness and survivability across uncrewed, minimally crewed, or fully crewed platforms.

There is not much more about the technical functionality and planned use of this on the River Class.

If I may take a speculative stab at this, I believe it is mainly for 'safety' and 'security' of the warships, but not nominally for combat, although there may be damage control monitoring benefits (speculation by me). I speculate, in peace time, by having VSS, it means possibly only a few harbour watchkeepers need remain on the warship in harbour, and they would be in a control area on the ship where the various feedback from the VSS can be monitored. They would have visual viewing of many compartments, and the external upper decks of the warship, so to be able to spot anything inappropriate. And if something appeared wrong, they could immediately via phone call in rapid response help.

I posted previously about the planned Gigabit Ethernet Data Multiplexing System (GEDMS) for the River Class Destroyer, and I speculate that this VSS could be integrated into, and use the GEDMS for its data transmission internal to the warship.