Exactly.
The other issue that I think we need to look at, which makes senior-level management loss a concern, is that the demographic profile of the Canadian Forces is far from ideal. In fact it is bimodal, if you want to put it that way. We have a very large cohort of young people, we have a very large cohort of long-service people, and we have a very small cohort of mid-career folks—and that is the future leadership of the Canadian Forces.
So we have to try to keep them—just about everybody—because the depth there is just not that great. At the same time, we need to bridge that period by keeping the long-service people, who are the experienced, more senior people, as long as possible. This is something you can't fix once you've made the mistake. That mistake was made back in the 1990s during the downsizing period, when we did not have a controlled release program or downsizing program that would have preserved the profile. But that horse is long out of the barn, and again, we have to wait for time to cure the situation.
The third issue that I think bears on the loss of senior people has to do with current conditions of service. As you all understand, we're a long way away from the time when we had single-income families. Dual-income families have been the norm for approximately 20 to 30 years. Military families as well must deal with that requirement.
One of the issues that undercuts the ability of military families to preserve their income stream is the mobility requirements of the Canadian Forces. We have a huge geography and we have bases scattered all over the country. In this respect, we're very comparable to Australia. We have about the same size of military force, and the same magnitude of geography, and they have to move people frequently as well.
That is disruptive to the income stream for families, and it's disruptive to children's schooling. At about the age of 40 or so, when they're at about 20 years of service and have kids in school, high school, or university and a spouse or partner who may be well-established in a job, the proposition of moving them 1,000 kilometres away forces decisions for them.
What we were trying to do to redress that issue as part of the retention strategy was to see whether we could develop regional career profiles that would allow people to remain for at least most of their careers in the same region. It will be a challenge. It's more achievable for the navy, which has east coast and west coast home ports, and some of them go to NDHQ at later stages of their career. It will be more of a challenge for the army, the air force, and the support occupations.
Those are really the three issues: the structural issue, the demographic one, and the conditions of service.