Thank you, Chair.
Just to go back to what's already been expressed in different questions, we've been looking at this for several years...clearly Colonel Burt and his team, and the folks before him as the program was evolving from 2001 and so on. Once the government decided in 2008 that we were going to replace the CF-18, then that gave us the impetus to finalize our views of the future requirements.
So the analysis had been ongoing, but clearly now that we understood the government wanted to move to a new generation of fighters for the future security environment, we were able to complete our analysis and then do a final check, looking around to make sure that we had looked at every possible opportunity out there for us to look at what we were going to table as our requirements.
It's safe to say that we certainly considered how we would approach this option. Something that didn't come out is we have three major missions. The minister has kind of mentioned them, but we have to defend Canada--clearly, number one--North America, and then of course there's peace and security as part of our contribution abroad.
We can't really afford to buy three airplanes to do those three big missions. It's been brought to bear, do we really need stealth to go to intercept or deal with something like a Bear and so on? Clearly there are ranges of options. Unfortunately for us, our ability on a resource basis to afford multiple fleets to do the really high-end stuff and to do, maybe, the less demanding stuff is not there.
If you look back at the history of the air force, we had thousands of fighters in World War II, hundreds and hundreds in the Korean War, still hundreds in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. We're now looking at 65. Therefore quality does count, because to do multi-roles in multi-domains, from high-intensity, high-demand environments that we can't predict, to maybe the home scenario, which doesn't necessarily require all those skills sets or all those capabilities, we have to consider that. Obviously, a mixed-fleet option for us is not affordable.
So the requirement is there. You could meet the requirement by having multiple fleets, but that option was not viable, just from a resource perspective. The F-35 meets all the needs and is affordable. So to us that was a very compelling argument.