Thank you, Mr. Chair and Mr. Wilfert.
There is no question that the Department of National Defence is a high-tempo department, particularly the deployment in Afghanistan and other missions that we are currently participating in. There is a current and continued demand for Canadian soldiers because of their capabilities and professionalism.
Clearly deployability is an expensive item. The decision to purchase four C-17 aircraft, for example, allows us to not only deploy soldiers for the purposes of participating in combat missions but also respond to humanitarian missions, such as we saw in the Caribbean, such as we have seen on other occasions where Canadian Forces, along with aid workers, deploy for the purposes of humanitarian relief and assistance in times of natural and sometimes man-made disasters.
We have seen, certainly in recent years, the necessity to purchase specific types of equipment that have great utility. For example, there is the use now by most countries, including Canada, of unmanned aerial vehicles, which are a very high-tech capability that allows us to have vision both day and night. So 24-hour vision on the ground in a theatre of operations like Afghanistan has incredible preventative capability to allow us to detect, for example, the planting of IEDs in the road. It allows us, when combined with other capabilities such as signals intelligence, to interrupt and very often pre-empt those bombs from killing Canadians soldiers or civilians or to detect where they're being made or, in some cases, where the materials are being gathered to allow those insurgents to use that type of explosive device. So that is an example.
Tanks we spoke about earlier. Because of the force of the blast of some of these IEDs, going to a main battle tank...and you can ask General Natynczyk in particular about this. As a former tanker, this is something he's very familiar with—yes, still a tanker.