Thank you.
Welcome to the committee, and thank you very much for your presentation.
We've extended the mission for another two years, so it will go at least until 2011. We have a limited number of soldiers in the army, so obviously the rotations are going to continue. I've looked at this, and people will be sent back to do second, third, fourth rotations in Afghanistan.
The U.S. Army has just done a study on the issue of stress on soldiers and how it increases as they do more than one rotation. In fact this study says that more than one in four American soldiers show signs of anxiety, depression, acute stress, post-traumatic stress disorder after going back for the third or fourth time. Obviously this is going to continue to be a problem.
It sounds like we're doing the same kind of combat missions, now, that the Americans are doing. This will be an increased risk, I take it, for soldiers who are redeployed over and over again. I'm wondering how many Canadian soldiers are returning to Afghanistan for a second, third, or fourth time, and whether some kind of action will be taken, over and above what you've talked about, for those who are entering perhaps a third or fourth rotation.