Sir, there's been a lot of discussion around what we are trying to do, which is essentially to use 100% of the Canadian Forces to do 100% of our deployed missions, specifically focused on the one in Afghanistan because that's where most of our deployed people are. The deployed missions are the ones with the most stress, the most demand on our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and airwomen and their families. The intent is first of all to have a better tasking mechanism across the Canadian Forces. In the past ten years we've probably used a total of 40% of our Canadian Forces to do 100% of those missions.
We've not been as effective as we need to be at reaching right across. When we need logistics people, or military policemen and women, or intelligence officers, or signallers, or all the supporting enabling trades, we need to reach right across the Canadian Forces and use them for operations also. It has always been the same people in the combat units who have carried the burden, and what we want to do is be much more effective and much fairer in using everybody.
We want, first of all, to use them in their primary roles, and that's a key part right there. So we're reaching right across the Canadian Forces. In part, we can't do that because during some of the financial cuts that we've taken in the past, which were pretty brutal to us.... For example, we took a lot of money out of our posting budgets, hundreds of millions of dollars. We posted people to combat units, posted people to headquarters or training schools, and we thought it would be a good thing that they would stay there longer than in the past. It was good stability for their families, good stability for them. Over ten years, we've realized that the negative implications of that are enormous. That is to say, those folks posted in combat units carry all those deployed burdens on their shoulders, and we don't have the money to facilitate the exchange of people, put the lessons learned from the operations into training schools, take the people who have had training school deployments or employments and put them into our combat units. That's only part of it.
Secondly, we're looking at a way to take care of those precious infantry men and women, combat engineers, gunners from the artillery, and of course I would be remiss if I didn't say the crewmen and crew women from the Armoured Corps, who really are at the point of contact with the Taliban. What we want to do is use everyone we have across the Canadian Forces to fill out the units, so we don't have to ask people to go back more than once unless it really is an urgent need.
In other words, sir, we look at taking them out of National Defence Headquarters, taking them out of other headquarters, other training establishments, and putting them back into the combat units and backfilling in those spots where we absolutely need to--we'd actually like to slice a little bit off there--with navy or air force personnel to pick up some of that slack. We look at our recruiting pool, how quickly we are recruiting people for those combat trades, and are there people in the recruiting system right now that we could, for a two-year period, put into some of that combat training to train them completely as infantry men or women and use them for a period of time before they go on to where they want to go as a primary MOC. We're using reserves and offering men and women in the reserves, many of whom you mentioned--that's the example you mentioned, sir, from the regiment in your area--who desperately want to go on this mission because they believe in it, giving them a better opportunity to sign up for a longer-term contract, or do a very quick component transfer into the regular force.
In short, we're doing a plethora of things. I've only named probably about 5% of that. We're looking at how we share the burden completely across the Canadian Forces, so that no one man or woman has to carry an inordinate amount of it on their shoulders.