Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First, I think I saw the gleam in some eyes across the way when you talked about a return to soft power as the exclusive tool in Canada's foreign policy arsenal.
I would say from my perspective that we're talking about real lives here, real people. I have a cousin on the ground in Afghanistan right now as a member of the Canadian Forces.
I recall that when our troops were asked to go overseas previously, since there had been significant reductions in military spending they were sent with open-air Iltis jeeps built on a Volkswagen Rabbit chassis. They were given green forest fatigues to fight in a desert theatre. They were provided with axe handles to fend off wild dogs because we hadn't done the planning in the decade prior to that to allow our military to do the job we asked them to do at the time of need.
So I think to say we don't know what's going to happen so we should cut military spending significantly is very short-sighted. As we've heard when we've been talking about readiness, it's a requirement to have the right people with the right training and the right equipment being able to be delivered at the right time. If you take out the training and the equipment, you can't deliver the troops at the right time and they'll be ill-equipped, as they were when they first went into Afghanistan.
We've had other examples. When the ice storm hit Canada, instead of being able to deploy our troops domestically, we had to rent Russian aircraft to move our people and equipment around the country.
So that would be a commentary on what we can look to as to what happens when we don't plan, when we don't keep a level of investment in our forces that allows us to be mobile and respond to a number of different missions.
I want to go back briefly to when you said the stealth capability of the F-35 is not worth the cost. We heard the colonel say previously that the stealth capability keeps our pilots alive or will do so in these scenarios. So what price do we put on the safety and the lives of our soldiers? Should we be treating that as a cavalier...? Is that not a very real question that should be answered? Do you agree or not that stealth capability will keep our pilots safer?