I had 22 years in the military myself as an armoured officer and as a RCEME officer and then had the opportunity to work alongside our forces in Afghanistan. I replicated the capability we had in Afghanistan at a fraction of the price, in Canada, with Canadians. What happens is that these systems just get incrementally better, smarter, easier to use, more capable.
If the issue is the defence of North America and you want to do surveillance or mapping tasks, we're there now. There's no question about it: we're there and we do it every day. If you're into mid-intensity or high-intensity combat, with the systems that we deployed in Afghanistan you're going to tread a lot, especially at war. One of the ways to succeed is just by having a lot of cheap stuff, inexpensive stuff.
As Mr. Barlow pointed out, the Americans are working on robotic aircraft at a price point that will compete in capability with manned aviation, but at the same price point. I don't know whether that is what we want as a country, but certainly for those tasks in which you just want to be out there seeing as much as you can see to inform your decisions—whether that bridge is out, whether there are folks who need to be rescued off that roof there, or whether that guy is out on that ice floe—those are things that can be done well by robotic aircraft today, at a price point that we can do now.