Thank you, Chair, and thank you General Deschamps for coming this morning.
When General Natynczyk was here, he said that we absolutely needed 65 airplanes. He was quite forceful, in the way that General Natynczyk can be quite forceful. Yet, we have the minister this week saying there's still time before 2013 to decide on the final number.
The problem is that if you fix your budget at $9 billion and deal with what seems to be an ever-escalating number—the latest of which is $141 million to $145 million per plane, which the U.S./U.K. purchased from Lockheed Martin in a batch of 30 aircraft—you'll end up with about half the number of airplanes you said that you needed. Something has to give.
Could you under any scenario survive with 30, 35, or 40 airplanes?