Certainly. Thank you for the question.
I can give you an example in the case of training. It is becoming increasingly important that we exercise our forces within coalition or alliance constructs to ensure that we have the degree of understanding about how our allies and coalitions work, how all the parts come together, and how the technology binds it and brings things together. Something as simple as being able to pass a live, streaming image from one part of a coalition to another becomes increasingly important if you're concerned about precision, if you're concerned about intelligence gathering, if timeliness is of importance, and so on.
One of the things I do to support the CDS--and I'm not alone in this--is in helping design the Canadian participation in international exercises, where we bring together army, navy, air force, and other enablers on international exercises, either of our making or of international bodies' making, or other countries' making. We participate in that and ultimately manage the lessons-learned process that accrues as a result, which then could affect the way we operate or some of the equipment we have, and the decision-making about that. It might be something as simple as a software upgrade, through to needing to look at something completely different. So exercising is experiential.
We all collaborate—my staff, the assistant deputy minister of policy, and others—internationally in terms of mounting responses to crises. That's a given. There's lots of deconfliction that occurs both in terms of mission and scope refinement as we approach any mission.
In terms of readiness, we really do rely on the experiential pillar and exercises, and feedback from other nations as to what they've learned. We have a great insight right now into how our allies in Afghanistan functioned and what they learned in operations at Kandahar and Helmand, and so on. We try to incorporate those to the best of our ability.
We operate internationally--and it's not just my staff's responsibility. For example, I head to Washington later this month to participate with seven nations on a Multinational Interoperability Council, which is sort of a NATO-minus group that consists of seven nations interested in sharing information about how we can operate better together. That proved invaluable as we mounted operations into Libya, because these same nations were represented.