Thank you, Chair.
My thanks to both of you for a helpful presentation.
Colonel MacDonald, I want to say that your paper of last year was one of the few I've read that actually contained some insight into military financing. I find papers coming from the Department of Finance difficult enough, but the overlay of military financing on other financing really becomes confusing. The first thing I noticed in the paper was that the main estimates, what we're going to get next month, are kind of like a guess. It's sort of a pin the tail on the donkey exercise. Actually, the real juice is in the supplementaries. Over the last six or seven years, the supplementaries have been roundups of about a billion a year, on the average. So you start out with your budget and you add in your supplementaries.
Why do we have to do it this way? Why can't the military tell the Department of Finance what they need, what they can live with, and how much money they will actually need to get by on for the fiscal year ending March 2013?