National Defence committee  I will ask Ms. Norton to answer your question.

National Defence committee  With respect to my responsibilities for the force posture and readiness of the type of capabilities we use in the DART, they were all at the requisite readiness levels and postured to deploy. I can't offer commentary to General Devlin's testimony at the time. I can just tell you

National Defence committee  I'm sorry. It's not my responsibility or role. I couldn't even offer an answer to that. It's really the chief financial officer's responsibilities, ma'am. I'll have to defer to his expertise.

National Defence committee  I'll repeat that all of the assets associated with the deployment of the DART were at requisite readiness levels and trained and postured to deploy. I think that's the only way I can answer that.

National Defence committee  I think General Noonan is probably best placed to answer that, as the joint operations command looks after the posture of those forces. I'll defer to him.

National Defence committee  Within the Department of National Defence, in our annual operations and maintenance budget, all of the training of that unit and the various units that make up the DART are within the defence budget. Quite often, when we're sent on operations at government direction, that will ei

National Defence committee  Since I'm not the departmental chief financial officer, I'm not positioned to answer questions with respect to those effects. I can only say that in this case, the DART deployed in the minimum amount of time. We were there well ahead of many allies and continue to do great work,

National Defence committee  Thank you for that question. We've talked about the notice to move in this case, and the posture of the DART. As I've said, certainly the commander of CJOC has the ability to posture those forces to respond even quicker if the likelihood of that deployment is going to take place

National Defence committee  In fact, the use of defence forces is a crown prerogative that extends from government decisions and direction to the Minister of National Defence and then to the Chief of the Defence Staff.

National Defence committee  I think our colleagues are probably best placed to answer that since they lead most of that coordination on our behalf.

National Defence committee  The ISST left on the 10th. We can deploy the ISST and do a reconnaissance that would suggest that the capabilities of the DART are not appropriate to the task. It's important to have those first eyes on it to understand that the deployment of the rest of that DART team is posture

National Defence committee  In this case, yes, it's all a time in space equation of how quickly we could get it there as well as the capacity to support that deployment. In some cases, you wouldn't actually have the infrastructure and operating airport so that it would not be able to deploy all of these cap

National Defence committee  That's an excellent question. I think in this case it's important to recognize that we went precisely where the Philippine government asked us to go. I think if you would have seen the path of the storm and the devastation involved in the area that we were operating in, it would

National Defence committee  Thank you for that question. In fact, I'll do a quick description of the military thought on that, and then I'll pass it to colleagues from DFATD. One thing we have done quite well is we have learned from previous deployments of the DART. At each deployment we'll take stock of

National Defence committee  Yes, certainly. As I said, there's only a limited pool of the types of aircraft of the size and capacity of the C-17 that are available on the market, and it is a very competitive market. If I were to get into contracting mechanisms and they were available, we would be certainl