They're doing it very well. I'm really pleased with what I see in terms of the lessons learned when I visit. In my day, when we went to Cyprus, where I did three tours and had extended leave on most of them, you didn't even ask the previous unit for any advice. If you did ask for advice, you normally got it from a document that was written four years earlier by earlier rotations. That's how backward it was. Now they're turning around within hours.
On the lessons learned in Afghanistan, the folks in Kingston turn that thing around and it goes back as direction or advice, or whatever, almost immediately. They've done it extremely, extremely well.
As far as lessons learned on a more macro basis, I think the one I would emphasize is the size of the units. Nobody's ever going to ask for a 500-man battalion to go overseas and participate in one of these operations. There's always going to be somewhat of a balanced battle group, as they call it now, of around 1,000 or 1,100. When I was commissioned, battalions were 1,100 strong, and we have kept reducing and reducing them in size.
It's a tiny army. I'm just speaking of the army now, which is said to be just over 20,000, but it's not 20,000 deployable soldiers. I know people are tired of hearing me say this, but I repeat it over and over: if you march the army into Maple Leaf Gardens and order it to sit down, there will be empty seats. I'm an honourary chief of the Toronto Police Service, and we have 2,000 more cops in Toronto than we have infanteers in the Canadian army. The numbers are tiny—and they do magnificent work.