Thank you for your question, sir.
We have eight hours, do we?
Let me offer a couple of thoughts on that, sir.
First of all, in terms of future security environment, we do work across the department and the Canadian Forces to make judgments about security trends, not just in defence, but in other aspects of social and economic development that may affect the future security environment, so we can shape our forces to be ready for it. We also compare notes with allies and we work as whole-of-government in coming to these judgments.
It is very, very difficult to predict the future. What I can say is that we've come to the shocking conclusion that the future will be just as unpredictable and fraught with security challenges as the present, and that our best strategy is to prepare our forces to be flexible, to be combat-capable, to be interoperable with our allies, and to be resilient in warfare.
Now, when we look at things like cyber threats and this type of thing, what we're talking about principally from a Canadian Forces standpoint is making sure that our forces are survivable in the future warfare environment. So we're doing a lot of work in that domain with the rest of government and within the Canadian Forces to understand the types of vulnerabilities that we have in our systems, and to strengthen them against attack, to make sure that in the information warfare domain we will prevail and we will triumph, and to make sure that as emerging capabilities are assessed around the world in terms of military capability, the Canadian Forces are in the position to remain world-class in terms of our ability to operate in potential future environments.
I can also say that in the area of cyber warfare it is very much a growth industry. It is a big concern, we all know, of our government and of our allies. We continue to partner with our allies and with the rest of government to understand that developing domain and to participate where we can in it.
I'm not sure that this gives you a great detailed sense of what we're tackling, but I can say that within the force development domain, I have put a team together to do this very thing, and to make sure that as we're shaping future forces they will be compatible with that threat environment and with our allies to operate in the future.
In terms of lessons learned in Afghanistan, particularly in intelligence, I think the biggest lesson we learned was that when something happens, it's too late to try to throw a team together to assess intelligence. We put an all-source intelligence centre together in Afghanistan, and we evolved it over a number of years. As we repatriate that, and we have repatriated that, we don't want to disperse that knowledge and those practices, that doctrine, and that structure back into our institutions, so that we can just pull it all together again in the future. So we are looking at how we would keep a core of that. You can only afford to keep so many people sitting around waiting just in case, but we are looking at keeping a core of that so that we could reconstitute it quickly. We have a large number of people ready, trained, and available to repopulate it for a new mission, should that be required.
I'll also say that domestically we've learned an awful lot about managing information, managing support to law enforcement, which is principally our role in major security support and this type of thing, and an all-source information management centre, separating intelligence from criminal intelligence, from situational awareness, in a way that is consistent with Canadian law. It's something we worked an awful lot on before the Olympics, and that stands us in good stead moving forward.
I hope that starts to answer some of your questions.