It's difficult. On the one hand, if you have shorter tours of duty, given the small size of our army it means that people are going to have to rotate back into theatre much sooner. The advantage of a longer tour of duty, nine months or a year, is it allows other people back here in Canada a little bit of extended time before they have to start gearing up for training, so they have perhaps a little more time with their families and stuff.
The flip side of that, though, is that the longer you're in theatre, the more you're exposed to traumatic events. And we know that it doesn't have to be just one traumatic event. We know that the cumulative effect of stress can actually cause PTSD or other sorts of OSI.
The ideal--and it's what I had recommended way back in the nineties--is that the individuals have a minimum of two years, but preferably three years, in between the tours. The problem is that often there are certain MOCs or occupations for which there are just not a lot of trained people. When I was still in the military in Edmonton, I heard of people getting off the airplane and being approached to actually go back on the next tour.
So I agree with General Dallaire on recruitment. The military needs more numbers in order to better space out and spread out the stress exposures for its troops.