Thanks, sir.
That is a very real challenge for the Canadian Forces and certainly for the army. I think there are two parts to that challenge. One is that processes are very demanding.
I think the ongoing studies, including General Leslie's transformation report, have forced us, positively, to look at those processes—some of those departmental, some of them Government of Canada—so that we can streamline and make them much more efficient than they are now with the accepting risk that comes with that.
The second point would be that having an annual budget as opposed to a multi-year budget is also a bit of a challenge. There is movement towards providing departments like DND, which have huge purchases amounting to billions of dollars that are not spent in a normal fiscal year, with the flexibility to move the resources because of production lines that are slowed, production lines that have other challenges, and the money that you had anticipated spending in a fiscal year will not actually be spent until the following year.
So I think it's a combination of processes that need to be streamlined as well as an acceptance of the uniqueness...perhaps of several departments, certainly from a DND point of view--one that needs a bit more understanding of an annual budget being a multi-year budget.