National Defence committee  Potentially.

National Defence committee  It depends on what new equipment you're talking about. When we talk about procurement, generally the attention goes to big platforms and big purchases, and that becomes the centrepiece. For most of us, and in the academic community it's certainly true, it's those little elements

National Defence committee  Pardon me. If I may interrupt, that's one of the dangers, where you have the flagships of the F-35 and the new destroyers or the patrol ships, which everyone is aware about because they get such publicity, but no one pays attention to these little things. They then become vulnera

National Defence committee  Basically, what I mean is that the more units you try to keep ready and extend, the more you reduce the amount of training time, depending on the overall time, that you can devote to all of them. What you end up developing over time is a force with an army, navy, air force, or jo

National Defence committee  I don't know a great deal about the specifics of combat army training. My expertise is more in the aerospace world in that sense. To see the transferability of a training scenario that centres upon counter-insurgence operations from the Afghan experience, on the assumption that

National Defence committee  Technology helps.

National Defence committee  Simulation—all this helps, but it's expensive.

National Defence committee  I'm sorry, I tend to wander on.

National Defence committee  The answer is that whether or not you cut Defence is not the issue here. Even if you don't, it doesn't mean you can have the resources and you will invest them in what's coming in the future. I think the budget cuts issue is independent of the readiness, except in the sense tha

National Defence committee  I agree. When I first drafted this, of the many drafts I went through, trying to get my head around all of the different ways you can cut at readiness, the question always came to me as, “Readiness for what? What do we want to be ready for?” That has to be decided and defined. I

National Defence committee  Thank you, and thank you for the invitation. Maintaining readiness is always a difficult and daunting task, not least because of the uncertainty surrounding future operational deployments in respect of location, conflict environment, new military technologies, and mission requir