At this time, it would be challenging for me to describe anything that would be a potential deployment. We certainly monitor worldwide where we think we would have to increase our level of interest and start to do planning for our own asset visibility. What happens if this happens or that happens, or this and that happen together? Can we sustain it logistically, and do we have the command-and-control apparatus in place to do it?
I'll give you a real-world example. Here we are in Libya. Suppose our deployment there had gone on to the end of the mandate that we had there until December, and at the same time there was a requirement to evacuate Canadians elsewhere in the region, because of the influence of government forces and revolutionary forces. Would we be poised to prosecute one operation and at the same time assign additional forces to the evacuation of Canadians, or would we have to deploy additional forces to do that? This speaks to the heart of readiness.
We have a ship deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. She was operating under Operation Mobile for Libya. Would we have another ship available back home to deploy to do something else in the region, or would we have had to reassign that ship from one operation to another? I don't have the answer for you, because all of the factors were not complete. That's one of the things my staff and I do. In the joint staff, we ask “what if” continuously. So when the call does come, we have a considered response, not just something off the cuff.
Ships and aircraft are one thing. The logistics—command and control capacity, working with our allies, finding a place to bed down, and so on—and the science of warfare take a great deal of effort. We want to be well poised at all times to be able to respond.