Perhaps I could start, Mr. Chair.
Moving to performance specification is a cultural change, and that has a significant history. The materiel branch of the Department of National Defence, prior to program review, had about 13,000 people. Several thousand were research and development scientists who were split off. We had two large branches: supply and procurement, which was very professional and had a very large capability, and an engineering organization.
Program review slashed our personnel strength by 54%. We were forced to go to three integrated engineering organizations that largely had only engineers. That situation endured for about ten years. Then over the past three years we've been rebuilding our procurement and project management expertise in rank level and skill.
We created a culture of writing engineering specifications for everything. An engineer is trained to apply that rigour and that specificity to a solution. I have to say, personally, that I always disagreed with that, because that is required for certain solutions, but it is not required if you can't afford the developmental solution. If you're in the military off-the-shelf business of having great, proven solutions paid for by other countries, you have to get away from technical specifications.
To be very honest with you, it has been a difficult cultural change, and my senior managers in materiel group and I have been somewhat ruthless in saying that there will not be a detailed specification for every radar on a ship. We will go to industry and say that this is the performance we want in the operation centre of the radar picture, and by the way, make sure that it's a proven radar that's not developmental. And we'll let industry propose the best system of radar for that ship. It drives down your schedule. It drives down your technical risk. It drives down your costs. And you get good operational output.
I can kind of résumé that as being a big and ongoing cultural change—it's not finished—because I cannot see every specification, every statement of work that's being sent over to my colleagues in Public Works and Government Services.
You combine that with insisting on good, proven solutions off the shelf. You combine that with improving your project management skills and all the internal processes in the Department of National Defence. Many of those 107 months were because of self-inflicted issues within National Defence itself.
Go ahead, Liliane.