Mostly, it's at least going to be 5% and probably 10%. We don't know, but that's what's being batted around. Officials I've talked to obviously don't talk about what's going to happen, and maybe they don't know, but that's where their minds are lurking, so to speak.
You have to understand, and perhaps do, that 50% of the defence budget goes to wages for military people and for public servants; 20% more goes to the capital program to buy stuff for the future force—ships, airplanes, and all that procurement stuff. Unless you're going to cut a whole bunch of people, and that's what we've done in big wallops over the years since 1962—you save money by cutting people—if you're going to cut 10% out of the budget, you're going to have to take it out of operations and maintenance, which is about $4 billion. Do you think you can find $2 billion of cuts out of $4 billion? I don't think so.
If it's a high percentage, there will be significant difficulties reaching those objectives without taking people out of the thing. I have a paper here, written by someone else looking at Andy Leslie's work, that speaks about “personnel reinvestment potential”, which is a nice bureaucratic way of putting things. In other words, these are people you can throw over the side. In the forces and in the department, the number comes out to 10,400 people who are now, according to Andy Leslie's report, perhaps redundant to the system. That's why I say the big cuts are going to go to the reserves—4,000 people, maybe, or something like that. There's no other way to make the cuts than to go into big numbers.
The point is, when they say they're going to “reset”—everybody has to use football terms in the military these days—the Canada First defence strategy, it means that we're going to keep the objectives, but we're not going to do them this year; we're going to do them next year. It's the way I do repairs on the cottage: “Next year I'll take care of that part.” You keep pushing things off into the future, when you'll have more money. We've been doing that year after year after year: we'll keep the program and we'll get the money next year when there's more money. Do you know what? Next year there isn't any more money, and then you start again.
That's my overly pessimistic view, Chair, of the position we're heading into.