Thank you for the question.
It goes back to readiness. Why have we been able to achieve what we have this year as far as the speed of response and the quality of response are concerned? It's because we've maintained a significant investment in the training part of maintaining fully combat-capable forces. That's really the crux of how much investment needs to be made.
To maintain those robust skills across a reasonably benign spectrum to a very complex and dangerous spectrum requires a fair amount of investment in time and energy to expose our folks to the environments in the right kind of training setting--safe but demanding--and to build that confidence and skill set so they can go out the door on 12 or 24 hours' notice, do the business, and do it successfully. For us, it's really about finding the balance in how we do that.
We have great domestic exercises that we participate in. Maple Flag is the air force flagship of high readiness training, in which we integrate individual skill sets into collective training that is very demanding, where we play out those complex and very demanding scenarios where there are threats, both in the air and on the ground. Therefore, strategies to overcome them need to be worked out, and then you also get a chance to exploit your technology and see how it works under demanding circumstances.
But we've also expanded our operations with our allies in big coalition exercises and work very closely with the army in Wainwright at their big training centre. We have a rapprochement between us right now, where several times a year we have big exercises when we deliver the same sorts of air effects that we did in Afghanistan with the army. That is one of the lessons we've learned, that we need to make sure we maintain those skills with our joint partners so we don't have to relearn them on operations in a live setting. Also, of course, it's great training for both the army and us.
We're also working with the navy to expand again and recreate a strong skill set with it as we go out to RIMPAC, which is a massive exercise out in the western Pacific that exercises all the elements of sea and air power--and some land, in fact--in a joint setting.
We are investing in those kinds of great training opportunities to make sure our people are at the leading edge of skills and are also aware of the technology they will face out there.