I'll just tidy up a few things.
GDP as a measure of defence is not a very useful measure. What it does is suggest to people what the national effort will be. It's a measure of national effort. Out of 100% of our GDP, the effort we're willing to put forward is less than 2%. That's all it means. It doesn't mean anything more or less than that, because the 2% that we put out might be a hell of a lot better than 10% put out by somebody else.
As for cyber-warfare and so on, the Canadian armed forces have been involved in electronic warfare since early in the Second World War. On the base, here at the communications school, and in units, there is a Canadian electronic warfare unit. They go everywhere the Canadian Forces go. It's not necessarily cyber, but sometimes it is. Listening to the other guy talk about what he's going to do tomorrow is always a good thing if you're a military commander, and that's what they do--they listen to people, and they've been doing it for a long time.
So joining the military and cyber into some sort of new government department might be a good idea, but you're still going to have an electronic warfare component in the Canadian Forces. You're going to have to, because you can't operate without it.
We talk a lot about--and we talked about it here--threats to Canada from different things, cyber and who knows what. I try not to let my students talk about threats to Canada--and some of them are sitting behind me, or at least they were. It's not a very good measure when you're trying to write national security policy or national defence policy.
What you need to worry about is vulnerability. The world is full of threats. Everybody's a threat. There are all kinds of threats. You can't address them all, so you need to separate out threats from vulnerabilities. What are we vulnerable to? For a quick example, the Japanese economy is vulnerable to a shut-off of oil and gas. We're not. So we need to think about separating threats from vulnerabilities, and then you act to mitigate vulnerabilities, not to shut down all the threats.
As to where we're going to go and what we're going to do in the future, we will be able to do less with less, first of all. Second, we've learned to be perhaps more discreet about where we're going to go and where we're going to send people. Don't forget, Canada doesn't go to war in these places; Canadian soldiers go to war in these places. So if I may say so, it's your responsibility to make sure, as Joel Sokolsky has said, that they're properly equipped and properly supported. And sometimes politicians will say “Sorry, we can't go, period”.