Thank you very much, Chair.
General, thank you very much for appearing today.
I have a couple of apologies. The first one is for being in and out of the meeting during your presentation. I do apologize for that. I'm sure you can appreciate that with the NDP A-team running for leadership, the B-team gets handed everything, so I'm juggling a lot of things. I do apologize for that. Also, I'm going to ask a question and it may have been asked when I was out of the room, so if that's the case, I apologize in advance.
Having said all that, I'm also going to preamble my question with this. I'm so new to this file that I'm not even sure of the right way to ask this question, so it could be completely discombobulated. I'm just going to put it out there as best I can, General, and please do with it what you will.
In terms of readiness, I want to ask a couple of things. One, I'm just curious; oftentimes we hear references to the American military forces and how many fronts they're able to sustain at one time. So with that kind of concept in mind, I know you always have to start with where you are, but if you were starting with a blank page.... Or actually how do you do it in terms of standing here? How do you calculate how far you can stretch, knowing that you have to keep certain things in reserve for different matters that could happen? How do you approach it from a readiness point of view in terms of how many things you can react to?
My second question is this—and you can see why I preambled about not knowing the right language. How much of a challenge is there to maintaining readiness, when at the same time parallel to that, you're either ramping up or ramping down a significant part of our armed forces—that is, Afghanistan?
Those are my questions, General, and again thank you for being here.