Thank you, Chair.
Thank you both for coming.
I'd like to engage Mr. Alexander's question further, but I'm not going to. It's always a truism that an army marches on its stomach. The truth of the matter is the military marches on its budget. So as budgets go up, military spending generally goes up. As budgets go down, similarly, military capability therefore goes down as well, which is exactly what's happening in the United States and pretty well every other nation on earth. So the actual lower levels of readiness are going to be dictated by the government's ability to raise funding. If we read the newspapers and listen to what Minister Flaherty and Minister Clement are saying, it's something in the order of 5% to 10% across the board. I have an extraordinary amount of skepticism as to whether that will actually occur, but nevertheless the government is in fact lowering its own level of readiness if in fact there's a direct correlation between money spent and readiness, which is, as you properly point out, not entirely a direct correlation.
However, having said that, I did want to go to what I thought was an extraordinary presentation by Colonel MacDonald earlier. I assume you were in here. He made a pretty vigorous, and I thought far more eloquent defence of the F-35 than anything I've ever heard from a government minister. His argument essentially was that stealth kills non-stealth. He cited some study showing that the unprecedented kill record of 144 to zero justified the acquisition of the F-35.
So I'd be interested in your response to what I thought was a fairly articulate argument justifying the government's, I would say, almost bizarre commitment to this program. If we put aside all of the issues of industrial benefits, and put aside who knows what the price is going to be, and instead focus on the military issue, I'd be interested in your views.