I'm going to speak just to land operations.
The fundamental competency of our people to perform land operations is based on our capacity to do ground combat. From that capacity we adapt to perform the missions and tasks required for a mission. If that includes training and educating ourselves in counter-insurgency, we do that. As a matter of fact, counter-insurgency is part of our professional curriculum for understanding conflict in general. So we train to be proficient in combat operations, somewhat in the context of a cold war--but not fully in the model of a cold war--to create a baseline of adaptability from which we can adapt to whatever scenarios we're presented, and then we close the gap between our baseline and what a specific mission requirement demands of us.
So our competence comes from our capacity to do combat. With a specific mission like the counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan, we look at that and we close the gap--the professional knowledge gap, the professional skill gap, and the team-building gap--to make sure we then enter that theatre ready for that specific task.
We are doing that now for Afghanistan by transforming our training institutions to actually present the Afghan scenario to our training audience. So if you were to see the Manoeuvre Training Centre at Wainwright today preparing our forces for Afghanistan, you would see Afghanistan in Alberta. You would see Afghanis in our training area. They look an awful lot like Canadians hired to role-play Afghanis, but they are role-playing Afghanis. They will represent the full range of threats our people will see, like improvised explosive devices and terrorist extremists. They will represent the non-combatants on that battle space. They'll represent the international actors that we'll interact with in theatre.
So we replicate the operating environment to the best of our ability before our people go, so that they actually play it out here before they live it out there.