Thank you for that question, Mr. Chair.
Without trying to target specific countries, I think that every country out there, any modern and sophisticated country, is still looking at manned fighters as a deliberate tool of national policy. Therefore, they're making investments in significant quantities to develop capabilities. It's certainly to our advantage to maintain our own autonomy to be able to understand and deal with that technology. The challenge of technology is that as it gets developed, it tends to proliferate. It tends to go where you didn't intend it to go, as we've seen in the past where some of these technologies produced by certain nations have found their way elsewhere, which challenge us as we go around the world trying to do our business.
We certainly need to have the ability to operate in the changing technology space that's being created through national initiatives, but also we need to have the flexibility in the future. We just don't know what the future holds, as we've discovered several times over the last several years as far as predictability is concerned. So unpredictability is probably in the nature of what we're going to face. So flexibility and agility are what we need in our force. We may not be big but we need to be very agile. And to have deterrence, you must have credible tools. The numbers matter at some point, but credibility of what the capability can do is what matters when you get into these scenarios where tensions rise, or national sovereignty issues become serious.