That's a good question. In fact, as I said, requirements are built into the system and they come up, but they're not really completed until they get to the top. In fact, it was before it got to me that we began to challenge the idea that it made a lot of sense for us to buy a strategic lifter that could only lift one LAV III.
We talked to the army. We looked at the kinds of scenarios that were unfolding for the future, and we identified that a more representative load for us to lift would in fact be two LAV IIIs, and the distance from Trenton to Ramstein would be a distance that we would want to do because the kinds of places in the world we're likely to go with this would require that as the first hop, that 3,500 miles.
That's some of the background. I have to say that for a while the file was not proceeding as quickly. When the new government came in, they identified this as one of their platforms. We began to work on the file a little more, so that was probably why, in that timeframe, you saw more work being done on it. And the challenge function caused that requirement to be put in better shape, because when I signed off on it, saying it needed to be able to lift two LAV IIIs, I was confident that this was in fact a load that a strategic lifter should be lifting, and the distance of the 3,500 nautical miles made perfect sense from my perspective.
We have I think a very good, solid requirement. The one that went forward has my complete endorsement as being the kind of thing that makes sense. Especially if you're going to have a strategic lifter and a tactical lifter, you want that strategic lifter to be able to lift the big loads, cover long distances quickly, and get into those destinations you want it to be able to.