Thank you for your question. Thank you for your service. Thanks for training that platoon. It's good. I'll check and see how you did. I'll let you know.
Our objective, as the senior leadership of the armed forces, is to increase by 1% per year over the next 10 years from our current rate of 15%. I think we were out in front of most of our allies in terms of the percentage of women in the armed forces, back when it started to become a big issue.
Efforts have been made to attract and retain women, but they haven't necessarily gone far enough. In fact, I've issued an order to make it 1% per year for 10 years to get us to 25%.
In and of itself, I think that is fairly draconian because of the steps necessary to make that happen. I think over 1,400 women will need to be recruited into the armed forces.
We'll have that candidate pool available to us, I believe. It's a question then of how we value potential recruits. As we progress in the years and decades ahead, as warfare evolves and the types of jobs that need to be done evolve, the value proposition will be less and less. It will make it more obvious why you could get to more parity.
You mention a goal of 50%. I don't know if you misunderstood me that we're going to 25%. I wouldn't deliberately stop it at 25%. If it goes beyond that, that's fine.
I believe I have bitten off a lot. In fact, I have asked a lot of my chief of military personnel command to get us to 25%, just given where we've been, where we are, and the fact that we want to evolve at a much faster pace than we've evolved at before, but we also want to make certain that we learn lessons along the way to ensure we're successful.
The worst thing we could do would be to conduct this evolution in such a way as to make it difficult for the next 25%. I have been encouraged by some, as we have spoken about our targets, which have always been 25%, to reduce my target goal in order, at 15%, to appear to be closer to it. I reject that out of hand. We're actually going to try to get to 25%.
However, it's going to take a great deal of effort. It's going to take resources and a different approach to recruiting. It's going to take a retention strategy that understands there are many ways to serve, many different career paths, and that the standard template we have used and understood—and some of those templates have existed since the 1950s and 1960s—will no longer work. They're underpinned by policies that underpin many of the policies that affect resources and how we compensate people and so on.
Much of it is in my hands. Some of it will be in the hands of my colleagues in government. However, I do assure you that we will try and I think we'll succeed.
Your first question was on whether we have gone far enough, and you introduced the question with the terrible things that have happened around sexual assault and harassment. I thought I heard you say--