Sir, the only thing I would say, in addition to what the minister has said, is that when you need strategic airlift, if you are leasing it or are getting a piece of the NATO pool or are trying to beg or borrow it from friends and allies, everybody else in a crisis all wants it at the same time, and it's very difficult to get. Your flexibility and ability to be successful in what a country decides to do with the armed forces is not guaranteed.
The second part is that the leased aircraft cannot carry everything we necessarily need to carry. A great case in point is the armoured and engineering construction vehicles we just put into Afghanistan—a fundamental part of the reconstruction piece in southern Kandahar, a fundamental part of building Route Summit, for example. You can't carry those in our C-130s; you cannot carry them in most of the leased aircraft. You can carry them in the big Antonovs, but then the third point becomes that those big Antonovs and other leased aircraft can't land in all the airfields where we are.
As an example, when we put those heavy engineering vehicles in, we had to carry them to an intermediate staging base on an Antonov, and then we had to borrow from friends the airlift to take them into Kandahar. As a result, we could not guarantee when we would get them.
So I would say, sir, to own versus to lease a portion of the strategic airlift gives you the flexibility and the agility at the start of a crisis, when people—perhaps in the worst days of their lives—need some help—