Yes, sir.
I confirm that uninhabited aerial vehicles are becoming more and more an important part of situational awareness on the battlefield at the level of individual units, at the level of formations, and in fact at the level of nations.
But let me step back before I talk about that and say that modern warfare requires accurate weapons, it requires a speedy response in defence and in attack, and it requires agility. But the core and the centre of gravity of modern warfare capability is information management, because accurate weapons are useless if you don't have accurate information.
In fact, in a modern warfare environment, the idea of conducting an attack on scanty information borders on illegal, and we're highly conscious of our responsibilities in warfare. So information management is critically important. Information management relates to the collection, analysis, and processing of information, turning it into understanding, and disseminating it to those who need to know it.
The All Source Intelligence Centre is an important part of that analysis and dissemination, but on the collection side, every component of a battlefield, regardless of whether it's in the air, on the ground, or on or under the ocean, is a sensor for gathering information, as are other sources of intelligence. They are brought together and fused into an understanding of the picture.
We found in Afghanistan, as we have found in other domains—in Libya and many others—that uninhabited aerial vehicles are a tremendous asset in collecting information, in monitoring activities and movements, in fact, and in some cases in delivering weapons. The advantage they have is that you can put them at a higher degree of risk because they are uninhabited. The disadvantage they have is that they cannot make judgments. You have to connect the instrument with some way of making a judgment about the information it's gathering so you can control it.