I fully understood it, but given its technical nature, I will respond in English.
That is a superb question. It really speaks to the heart of exactly what readiness is. So thank you for the question.
What we do, how much we do of it, and for how long we would do it, and for how many missions we would be prepared to do it at any one point in time are driven by a number of things. First of all, there is broad government policy. What is it that they would have the Canadian Forces be ready to do? What is the broad spectrum that we must be ready to do? Should we be ready quickly, or should there be a period of what we would understand to be a period of development before we launch into something significant?
Therefore, this touches on the very structure of the Canadian Forces. What is it that we are structured to do? From that structure, we determine how quickly some parts of it would be ready to operate and how long it would take other parts of it to be ready to function over a sustained period of time. The best way to do this is to give you an example.
Search and rescue is something that we have a government mandate to accomplish. It is done under very prescribed set of notices to move. We must be able to respond quickly because of the very nature of the task. We have a force structure that allows us to maintain ready search and rescue response capability across the country in partnership with other government departments.
On the other hand, we must be prepared to sustain a major war, and we can take Afghanistan as an example. We maintain the ability to deploy a battle group on fairly short notice—within 60 days—to a place like Afghanistan and go acquit itself well there, with all of the enablers around it. If we wished to maintain that commitment over a period of years, as we did in Afghanistan, we would need a number of battle groups to allow for the appropriate rotation of those battle groups. With the Canadian Forces' policy of trying not to redeploy soldiers within 24 months--and you can do the math here--you would determine the size of force structure that you would want.
At the same time, there is a resource-management equation. We could estimate ourselves into having armed forces that were massive given all the potential calls upon them. Of course, the country is willing to pay for armed forces of a certain size. That size can fluctuate over time, but generally speaking, we are the size that we can be given the resources.
So you put those two together, and through policy input and the reality of the resources available to you and the nature of the task you have before you, across the spectrum of conflict, from war through to domestic response, and you then determine the best possible force posture to be in to accomplish for Canadians what is intended.
At this point in time, I would suggest to you that the Canadian Forces are well balanced to respond across the lines of operation in the Canada First defence strategy. There are six broad mission sets, from domestic operations through to international engagements, such as Afghanistan—which is a more robust conflict. We have forces attributed to all of them at varying degrees of readiness to go to achieve that task. And certainly for those things that we need to be prepared to respond to very quickly, such as domestic crises, we are prepared.