Thanks for the question.
Before I begin, Mr. Chair, I would like to add to the list of people we would respectfully recommend speak to your committee. There is the chief of military personnel, who manages the officer professional development and NCM professional development system. Through him investments are made in the institution, including via such places as the Canadian Forces College, our recruit school in Saint-Jean, and so on.
I would answer your question by saying that the study of warfare, like the study of so many other large human enterprises, is vast and demanding. The more we do it, the more we understand that it demands thinkers, as well as those who can take that thought and execute it appropriately. At some point you have to do something; you can only stay academic for so long. At some point, you pull the trigger.
To build an armed forces that is trying to achieve best practices in comparison with its allies, you ask what the norms are, what its country demands of it, and what are the raw materials you start with in terms of the personnel and equipment and training. All of that is something that the armed forces leadership, and some of the people I've described to you already, do every day.
The courses that we demand of future leaders--and the more senior they get, the more challenging the courses--are intended to reinforce the idea of using the tools at their disposal correctly and wisely from a technical perspective, at the same time as being able to recognize that even the best possible technical solution may be wrong for the context he or she is in. History is replete with people fighting the last war: if you had done the best cavalry charge ever, it wouldn't matter if the other guys had machine guns.
We try, with great vigour, to avoid being in that kind of a situation. We try to be innovative and to stay up with the times. We would never want to be accused, as an institution, of placing our soldiers in a situation where they were ill-prepared, or being led in the wrong way for the context at hand. We invest a great deal in our leadership, at all levels, to ensure they do it correctly.