Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentation. It's good to see a couple of you again. We saw you this morning.
As you know, we're studying readiness, and it's almost like looking at a circle and trying to figure out where the beginning is. I thought, Professor Hennessy, you gave us a good start down that road when you referenced leading in with your Rumsfeld “known knowns”. It seems to me that when we ask anyone in the military about readiness, the first thing they say is “We're ready” without knowing exactly what it is they are ready for. From their point of view, readiness seems to be very much “Are you ready to respond as well as you can to what we ask you to do?” and the answer is “Yes”, and they are. But I think our question of readiness needs to be at a much higher altitude, at more of a macro level.
Professor Hennessy, you talked about the known knowns of the future security environment starting with the usual bromides--we face an emerging, complex, challenging and uncertain future security environment: rogue states, etc., and then you come to potential resource wars--water, oil, rare earths, etc., and of course the etc. would be food. This takes us to climate change, and you list a number of others.
In terms of our getting ready and knowing what we're getting ready for, you've outlined these sorts of things. Would you please give us your thoughts on the components that would make up the future CF vis-à-vis the issues you've identified to which we're going to have to respond, and what changes within the CF those would entail? Is it just what we have, but more of it?