Thank you for that opportunity, and I do apologize for it being a long response, but there is an amount of it.
What I was getting to there is that there is a period, in defining the requirements, when the requirements are in draft mode. And until the point when I actually bring the document to the Chief of the Air Staff for his signature and advance it through the department and to the minister, we have a period of refinement.
There are a number of things that we learn through that process. In this particular case, what was interesting for me, personally, through the period of May-June of last year, was that my section head, who was developing this requirement, fortunately got a posting to a flying job and he had to go relearn how to fly.
So I was dealing with a couple of majors in his section. I became much more intimately familiar with the statement of operational requirements, and I was asking some very pointed questions and was seeking some detailed answers.
In the case of the e-mails that have been referred to in the media, there are a couple of issues that are very important, and one has to do with accuracy. Regarding the one quote, which has been in the media, it took me some time to find that e-mail, because I was looking through my text e-mails. Then I realized that this was probably not from me; it was probably from somebody who wrote to me. And indeed, that's where I found the e-mail. It was from one of my staff who was giving me some of the details. And as I was describing earlier, the discussion was about track and wheel vehicles and whether we should be including the ADATS, which is the air defence anti-tank system, in our weight consideration.
The banter that has been referred to by other members around the table had to do with whether we would include the heavier track vehicles, what that could do to change the requirements, and whether that was an appropriate thing to do in terms of what we were dealing with at that time. We came to the conclusion that because the ADATS is actually of less weight than the LAV III, we would not change the wording of the high-level mandatory capabilities to include track vehicles. They would just be wheeled.
At some point later in the process, because of my personal responsibility, now, to be reviewing the SOR, I asked some specific questions about the guiding principles, specifically the guiding principle that had to do with being better than the current Airbus A-310, our Polaris aircraft. I asked how much weight that can carry over a distance of 3,500 nautical miles, and the answer was 2,800 metric tonnes. I said, well, we now have an inconsistency between that guiding principle and the high-level mandatory capability that states 19.5 metric tonnes.
We studied for a period of time what options we had to deal with that inconsistency, and we came to the conclusion that in order to get the best value for Canadians--the efficiencies I referred to earlier--and in order to provide the best long-term capability, the best representative load would be two LAV IIIs, which would leave our guiding principle as it stood. We would get something better than the current Polaris capability and provide better efficiencies and better value for Canadians and the Canadian Forces.