I think the key word here is “balance”. We've known, since time immemorial, that time away adds to the stress and that time away with risk added to it adds to the stress even more.
When I was a brigade commander in Petawawa in the mid-1990s, the families used to tell me that they didn't mind a deployment into Bosnia for six or seven months at a time, but it was the three- to five-month workup training added to that that led to a year of separation. They said they'd actually put up with the tour, if they could do away with the pre-deployment training. So we worked significantly to reduce that time away, when people were back home in Canada. We trained them locally as much as possible; we trained Monday to Friday and they were home on the weekends. We had some success with that.
When we got into the Afghanistan operation, however, we realized that we had lost a lot during the intervening decades since World War II and Korea. In order to do justice to our young men and women, and to their families, and to give them every chance of going into Afghanistan and being successful in executing the missions that we asked them to execute, and at the same time being ready in all the ways I talked about in my opening remarks, we actually had to expand that front-end pre-deployment training in a huge way so that the risk to them was reduced to the lowest level possible. We did that, and that added another stressor. But we did it after considering all the risks that would occur if we didn't do it.
We have now reached a stage where we have sufficient experience across the Canadian Forces, particularly in the land forces that are executing the bulk of that mission, that we are now cutting the pre-deployment training. I just had conversations with the army commander, Lieutenant-General Leslie, and we are now reducing that pre-deployment training, and therefore the time away from home, by six to seven weeks, which is a significant chunk of time. We're also doing more training and more front-end preparation in the local training area as much as we possibly can, and constraining to one very specific pocket a major deployment in western Canada.
For the rotations themselves, we guarantee 12 months back home in Canada, unless there's a very real reason, and then we have a discussion with those individuals. The reality is that it's between 18 and 24 months for much of the Canadian Forces and actually longer than that for the majority.
We have some small parts of the Canadian Forces that have closer to 12 months back home in Canada, and that's the part we'd like to stretch out. We do that in a variety of ways: by having taskings from outside the army in a huge way by asking if we actually need a soldier in that job or is this a skill set that a sailor, airman, or airwoman could bring in, and therefore task from outside, to reduce that stress level on soldiers; by keeping tours, ideally, with somewhere between 18 and 24 months guaranteed at home with their families, and guaranteed at home so they don't have pre-deployment training kicking in for long periods of time; and we try to keep the duration of rotations at what we believe is the maximum best-value duration, and we know that somewhere between six to seven months is about right.
We get a great return on the immense investment we put in for the build-up and train-up. We get a great return in-theatre where people take a couple of months to learn the environment and then that last couple of weeks they are really focused on handing off to the next individuals coming in. So we want the maximum amount of time when they're at their very best to get the effect. So we know it's around six to seven months, and that's what we're trying to stay to. I think we're going to be successful at doing that for most of the folks, particularly the battle groups themselves outside.
So the combination of right tour lengths, right periods of time back here in Canada with their family's support in the right way between those tours, and to actually intelligently and ruthlessly shape the pre-deployment training to reduce the time away from their families as much as possible allows you to be able to carry on careers over a significantly longer period of time.
I will tell you that one of the things we are looking at is having folks spend one or two basic engagements at four years each in the combat arms and then moving large numbers of them into combat service support trades around the Canadian Forces, so that their next missions are very different from those. So there are a variety of measures. But a sailor, a soldier, an airman, or airwoman, is going to expect to spend their time deploying, and we're asking how we can do that in balance so that we have a healthy family, a healthy individual in uniform, and actually have conditions set for success in the longer term.