Sir, it's a great point, and it's a great point of concern for our ship repair men and women, and I don't...I'll never reduce that. In fact, one of my roles is always to promote the fleet maintenance facility, ship repair, and other trades personnel to show the value proposition of their specialized trade competencies and all the times they have enabled our ships to remain operational. Whether it's following a fire in a ship in theatre off Kuwait or the breakdown of a frigate in the NATO Reassurance mission, these people go forward, meet our ships, and help our sailors keep the ships on station. I'm always on the job of valuing that proposition.
What we have is three levels of maintenance. The first line, the ship's company will do; the second line is when you have to come back to port and you need the specialized care of either a contractor or the ship repair unit; and the third line is the maintenance in dry docks, where you really get into the ship and do the most difficult and complex repair efforts, which can't be done over a week or over even a month with a ship in its second-line period.
We already have, at the second- and third-line maintenance levels, contractors doing an extensive amount of readiness for our ships. The whole Kingston class fleet, 12 patrol ships, has an in-service support contract with a civilian industry. We performance-measure them and we hold them to the guns, and our ships stay on station, adequately supported by a civilian agent.
We have a long-term third-line maintenance contract for the submarines in Victoria, and that's why the preponderance of that fleet is near that yard.
Using contractors has even worked its way into specialization areas over time. We don't maintain a great workforce of welding and cutting plate. That's a very agricultural-style maintenance capability, and we go to industry because there's so much of it in industry that we can compete for the price on a case-by-case, contract-by-contract basis.
There are areas in which naturally we should gravitate towards in-service support or local contracting. There are areas, though, as you say, with old legacy equipment or high-tech, high-end warfare capabilities for which there aren't a lot of users in the world, nor many industries adapted to that specialization, for which we want to maintain the long-term competency and evolve it as the capability grows older.
There's our role, with that very specialized area. What we have to do is take our approximately 900-person ship repair units of today and make sure that those general-sized workforces of civilian public servants—highly technical, highly operationally related—evolve into the right domains as we get the most complex warships, whether they're submarines, the Canadian surface combatant, or even some of the capabilities in the joint support ship.
But the Arctic offshore patrol ship and the joint support ship are not among the high-end, uniquely difficult systems to maintain. What we're trying to find is the right balance between a commercial solution that is responsive, based on our lessons with the Kingston class fleet, to the specializations needed in the high-end warfare areas.
I'll leave my answer at that, Art, and give you 10 seconds.