Thank you very much for the question.
In my opening remarks I actually said that we can't guarantee that we could respond to all six to the same extent we did in 2010. In fact, to prepare us to respond the way we did in 2010 took about two years of preparation. We stood up the operational commands—Expeditionary Force Command, Canada Command, and Operational Support Command—so as to be able to manage that period of vulnerability and to make sure that, as we were doing some of those six missions, we could still retain the capacity to do the others.
If you look at a major security event, for example, the presumption is that you would have at least six months, if not a year or two, to prepare security support for the police for an event like that. But my view is that without that type of notice, and a short notice major security event...if we were committed to another major operation abroad, if we were doing another humanitarian mission, and if we were responding to a terrorist attack as well as a floods and fires, we might tell the government that there was not an awful lot left to be providing security support to the police without more notice. That's really what I'm getting at: how quickly do you want to respond to these things?
This is fundamental to the structure of readiness for a force. With six core missions—and I agree with you, sir, that there is not one of those for which I would say, “Oh well, we just don't have to do that”—if you decide to respond to one with everything you have, you can't respond to the others. So the question is, how much do you want to have ready to hold against each of those six, and how much do you want to risk-manage against those?
Let's be clear: we don't risk-manage security of Canadians at home. We don't risk-manage day-to-day operations. These are fundamental to how we're structured and how we're ready to respond. But for some of the other responses—for example, to a humanitarian disaster, or even for a second, or a first, major international operation—we might have to decide just what level of forces we wished to commit to that operation in order to make sure we retained sufficient forces to be able to respond to others.
In modelling the future force in a resource-constrained environment, these are the types of issues that we would take to government, so that the options for shaping a force within the available envelope would be understood.
Does that answer your question?