Well, sir, first of all, how do I measure readiness? This has been a fairly challenging aspect of managing Canadian defence for some time. We have historically left it to the heads of the army, navy, and air force to measure their levels of readiness and to confirm that to the centre.
Readiness is measured in terms of the capacity to survive and succeed in missions at a very high risk and a high level of complexity, the capacity to survive and achieve mission success in a lower level of risk and complexity, and the number of units that are not at either of those two levels of readiness and are in fact generating towards or have just cycled out of those two levels of readiness.
We have established that common metric across the Canadian Forces, notwithstanding that if you're talking about an army unit, it's really quite a different thing to measure than a navy ship, or an aircraft, or a squadron in the air force. But those are the basic and strategic levels of readiness that we have focused on.
We have typically asked the heads of the army, navy, and air force to produce as much readiness as they can with the resources they've historically had—that we either bump up a little bit or take down a little bit each year—and to tell us what is the effect of fewer resources or what effect they can achieve with more resources. So we're really managing that kind of 10% band.
We're doing a fundamental review now of the readiness requirements of the Canadian Forces so that we can establish 100% of the ready forces we need in order to be able to conduct those six missions concurrently, and so that we can take to government what are the types of trade-offs we're facing in a resource-constrained environment moving forward.
I would say that we always hold a number of ships, a number of aircraft, and a number of army units at high readiness, that is, they are ready to deploy into high-intensity operations and fight and win for Canada at home or abroad. I can say that the number at that high readiness is consistent with our commitments to NATO and consistent with our view of the threats. As things change, we can cycle more units into high readiness with the right amount of notice. As resources become more constrained, we can shift readiness out of one service or one type of platform and invest it in another so that we can compensate for it. But that's how we go about measuring it.
We do it in two domains. The first is current readiness. We track current readiness now against our expectations in those domains: high readiness, standard readiness. We do that weekly. Generally speaking, the service commanders report that. We also track it in the future domain. This is when I say we're doing the work to establish that readiness baseline for the future so that we can do resource planning around it, and we can make sure we have committed future resources against the cost of readiness in the future, moving there.
You ask about resource allocation. Historically, we have allocated resources based on what we used to do and have asked people to produce as much readiness as they could. Now we've become more prescriptive and far more specific. We will be continuing to develop ways of measuring degrees of readiness that relate not so much to the basic judgment of commanders as specific criteria that will have been met; this, however, is a complex business, and particularly with the introduction of new platforms and that sort of thing, it will be an evolving business moving forward.
Finally—and it has taken a while for me to get to the question you say everyone is most interested in—how are we doing compared to a year ago and how are we doing compared to 10 years ago? One year ago we were generating 3,000 Canadian Forces members to deploy to Afghanistan about every six months, between six months and a year. It depended on the rotations. We had a road to war where, with those 3,000 deployed, we saw another 3,000 who were getting ready to deploy and a further 3,000 who were being identified and being given the basic components of readiness so they could start on that road to war. There are quite a lot of people engaged in that readiness stream.
So I would say the Canadian Forces, between that requirement and the other challenges in 2010 that required us to raise our level of readiness, to hone it, and to be prepared, were at the highest level of readiness and the highest level of operational capability we've been at since probably after the Second World War, if not during the Second World War. But as I said in my opening remarks, that was a bit of an artificial benchmark.
My view is that we are less ready today because we are reconstituting and we are shifting into a more realistic steady state of readiness for the Canadian Forces, which will be affordable over the long term.
We're looking at some adjustments as well. I would put the Canadian Forces today against any other military in the world. I'd say that 10 years ago I would not have been able to say that.