From my perspective, these are really fundamental. The construct in theatre has changed. Our forces were very much consolidated into the Kandahar airfield initially, with a few camps here and there, but now that we're going out more with forward-operating bases, then it changes the construct on how you operate in that theatre.
If it's the case, then the support has to change, and what's happening is we have many support convoys that are moving from Kandahar in long areas to resupply those forward-operating bases. You know right now the type of threat that we're facing, so every one of those convoys is a key target. In fact, that's what we are learning from this theatre. It's not only combatants who are targets; everybody is a target in this type of assymetric warfare, especially support trade logisticians and so on who are doing those convoys.
We used to call them resupply convoys, and now we call them combat logistic patrols, because they have to be fully embedded into the operations with the proper force protection. These are very difficult to do, and they are being challenged day in and day out, and being shot at day in and day out. So using the medium- to heavy-lift helicopter would alleviate many of those road moves we are doing to resupply those entities spread over the area.
Obviously, that helicopter would not do it by itself; it has to be a force package. And we can have the help of other nations to make sure this group of helicopters has the proper protection to do the air delivery. Air delivery would really help out in this process.
Bringing back casualties is also fundamental. Now we rely very much on our neighbours' assets, on our allies' assets to do that, but at one point it's our own casualties and it would be good to have our own autonomy. This is why the Chief of the Defence Staff is pressing very much to get those capabilities very fast. We need those to do a much better job and to make our people much safer.
With this, I would say precision airdrop could also be greatly beneficial from a support perspective for those FOBs. All those aspects have to be looked at, and we have to improve our capabilities based on the type of threat we're facing.