I know members don't have the audit in front of them, but for the record I would refer to paragraph 5.39 of our chapter, on page 17, through to probably paragraph 5.43, where we talk about that in particular. If you want, you could go back and take a look at that.
Historically, National Defence has relied on the private sector to maintain and repair equipment, mostly what they call third- and fourth-line services. This involved hundreds of contracts, as I said previously, for particular fleets, and over the course of the year there were thousands of contracts that had to be managed by National Defence for all of its fleets.
In the 1990s, when National Defence had a reduction in personnel, it identified the risk of not being able to manage all those contracts effectively and efficiently with fewer personnel, so it put in place the optimized weapon systems management program. This aimed to reduce the number of contracts per fleet, from hundreds down to two, three, or four, depending on the nature of the fleet, thereby reducing the need for the number of personnel within the office to manage those contracts, and within those contracts to be clear about the accountability on the part of the contractor for delivery—what is going to delivered, when it's going to delivered, and at what cost—and hold the contractor to those commitments.
The optimized weapon systems management framework provides the opportunity for the department to rigorously manage all of its contracts and effect savings.