Ms. Gallant, I would be banned from the Armoured Corps--I am a cavalry officer--if I said the tanks were only a defensive weapon. They're there to help us achieve success in the mission of helping Afghans get enough security so they can rebuild their nation, and at the same time, to have that very valuable characteristic of lending greater protection in some of the very specific missions to the great Canadian soldiers who man them. They're on the ground now. We have certain workups to do before we'll actually employ them in the region, but we'll have that capability ready for them within several days, to be used by the commander in theatre as he deems fit.
We've actually got the process down. We've focused all the tanks in Canada in one unit in western Canada. That has resulted in the great synergy of being able to do training more efficiently and more effectively and generate the tank crews and the tank troops and the tank squadron necessary to go on a mission like this, rather than have it spread across the nation in three different units. We have focused the initial crew training on tanks out in western Canada, using the great training area at Wainwright, Alberta, in which we sank a lot of money to make a world-class training area that can actually replicate the kinds of situations such as Afghanistan, so we can prepare our soldiers to go in and do their job there. In fact, we're executing all of that right now. The tank crews were ready to go. We wanted to give them mission-specific training before we did send them in. That was the only reason we had about two or three weeks after the announcements were made and the approval had been given to us to go ahead with the mission. We started moving the tanks right away.
The training part--to deliver those crews to match them up with the vehicles that have had the latest modifications and upgrades done to them--was all done before they went in and has actually worked very smoothly in this case and was something that we were prepared to do.