That is also an excellent question.
It depends on the size of the commitment overseas.
Perhaps I can put it to you in terms of something that we've already had an example of. We were in Afghanistan continuously for over five years, in Kandahar, with a small brigade of some 3,200. At the same time, we were able to mount a 2,000-person task force in Haiti. At the same time, we had forces apportioned and preparing for and executing at the Olympics. Again, they numbered over 2,000. Those were challenging times for the forces. They certainly stretched our capabilities.
While all that was going on, we maintained our search and rescue posture and maintained the ability to respond to Canadians in crisis anywhere in the country, from the north all the way across the board.
If I may, the challenge with the question of how many operations we can do overseas with the force structure we have is that we need a definition of what the operation is. What is the context? Is it full-out war fighting? How big do you wish to be there?
We can go almost continuously, as we've seen in Afghanistan, at the size we were. If we were to be bigger in Afghanistan--in other words, if we wanted to deploy a full brigade and additional resources--then the chances are that we would not have the force generation ratio behind that to be able to rotate it continuously without changing some factors. One of those factors is how long you would stay.
You saw the U.S. Army having to go from 12-month deployments at the height of the Iraq and Afghan wars, with an army the size they had, to 15-month deployments. As you do the math and you figure it out--that is, as you bring soldiers home and give them a period of rest, retrain them together, and then send them back over for the rest of the time in theatre--at some point you will see that your armed forces aren't big enough to do that within the factors set. One of these factors is the time you would have any individual soldier stay there.
So it is a great question. It speaks to the force structure what we have to conduct operations, how best to poise ourselves, and where we make our investments.
I would just add one point here that I think is useful. There is a tendency to look specifically at the large pieces of the Canadian Forces: the battalions, the ships, the aircraft. Becoming increasingly important, however, as warfare becomes more complex and more challenging, are the enablers that allow forces to operate effectively.
Take the command and control and communications capacity. You cannot work in an alliance or coalition effort now without having very sophisticated capacity and technical ability for command and control. You cannot manage the kind of firepower that was just employed in Libya without having extremely good access to remote ISR, the ability to see, the ability to use the network of satellites to protect yourself in a cyber domain and to provide yourself with the intelligence you need, and so on.
So it all comes together. In fact, some of those enablers, certainly in the Canadian Forces, are the ones that are of relatively low density and need constant investment to ensure that the larger, brawnier pieces, if you will, are able to function effectively. There's no point in putting a battalion somewhere or a ship somewhere if it doesn't have the intelligence architecture around it so that it can operate smartly, with precision and so on.