Thank you for the question, sir.
In part, we've covered the first one earlier, but I can certainly summarize.
How many things can we react to? It depends how big the thing is, and it depends on how long you want to keep reacting to the thing. I'm not being facetious; this is exactly how I would describe it to you. The U.S., under President Kennedy, had a policy of being able to fight two and a half wars. In that policy definition, a war was described as a front, or of a certain size, a NATO, a South-East Asia, and a little bit of something else. That was de rigueur in those days. It's a little more challenging now to do that, and most governments that I know of, including the United States, don't describe their capacity that way any more.
We have a very similar approach to that of all of our allies in terms of describing what our force structure is designed to do and, given the government policy of the day, what we would put in the shop window to be very quick off the mark; and what would be a little bit slower but, certainly, more deliberate, and how long we will sustain it. The simple fact is that we have short-notice response across Canada for search and rescue. We have short-notice response for disaster assistance around the world. We have short-notice response locally to Canadians suffering crises, floods, and so on. Then we have a slightly longer response, but still quite quick, to do something like evacuate Canadians from a threatened land. Then we have an even longer response, because it takes a bit more preparation and some specific training, to go to a place like Afghanistan.
That's getting out the door. Then there's how long you would wish to stay, and what your endurance is. You don't start your force-structuring work on a blank sheet of paper every year. We have an extant force and this force has largely been built on over the years--and sometimes not--to really achieve a significant contribution somewhere in the world, to answer your question directly. That could involve army, navy, and air force, as we did in Afghanistan—although the naval component was missing. But we could have added a naval component. In fact, it was out there but not joined up in the same area.
So we can do something big and sustained, and something more modestly sized, and a little smaller but not sustained. That's kind of how we think. The example would be our being in Afghanistan, and then Haiti comes along, and then we could still do the Olympics. You prevail upon your troops when your operational tempo--you've heard that term--is so high that you don't get a lot of time at home before you're back out the door again. We manage that very carefully, both for the sake of our families and the sake of the soldiers' ability to function.
The high water mark recently, I would say, was Afghanistan happening; the support to Canadians across the country that's still in place, including search and rescue and disaster response; Haiti; and the Olympics.
Did I answer both your questions with those examples?