A key lesson for me is what I addressed at the tail end, and that is the ability to move units, homogeneous units, together to the theatre. An advance party is fine, but flying in bits here, landing the equipment there, trying to marry them up, bring them together, the whole idea is that... There's an old army expression: you never separate yourself from your rucksack and your snowshoes; when they're put on another vehicle, they will never end up where you are.
So that capability is staring us in the face with an amphibious expeditionary capability. Ninety-three percent of everything we've done in the last 50 years had a shoreline, or at least a place to unload and then move the stuff forward, as would be the case in Afghanistan.
Those lessons learned have been implemented brilliantly, I think, by the Canadian Forces, in that we didn't used to have an operations centre that controlled operations overseas and now we do. We have taken the lead, dragging, in some cases, Foreign Affairs, NGOs, etc., behind us to work together in sort of a relatively new concept—which really it isn't—of total integration of those people interested in the mission there and bringing them together in a common headquarters here in Ottawa and also in the field.