Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Through you to Mr. Coulon, we'd spoken earlier, and Mr. Bland had answered the question around how we equip folks and make sure they go with, as I term it, the “right tools”.
Notwithstanding the fact that they do that...and let's presuppose that we got it right and we did send the tools as we thought.... We went through the things that Professor Bland talked about, the checklist of why we're there and all that sort of stuff. But when we get there, we see that the place isn't quite as we thought; in fact, it's less so. As Mr. Bland said, you stop planning; you can sort of park the stuff.
How do we balance that with the folks on the ground who are there to help, who are looking at that material that comes in to actually engage in an operation that we're not going to engage in? How do we balance the needs of that population, which is looking and thinking that we want to escalate up, when the reality is that we're looking to escalate down? How do we make sure that we don't get into a situation of having a conflict unnecessarily escalate simply because we came over-prepared because of whatever intelligence we got?
You know, there's no fault, and I'm certainly not finger-pointing that somehow we went with too much. We thought that's what we should do.
So how do we balance that need of those folks on the ground versus what we've done as we enter that theatre?