I think it just highlights the problem. We have to have a certain type of conventional military force, because conventional military challenges remain. Investing in esoteric threats doesn't always seem cost-effective, and we have an organization that is used to just lumbering on with potential types of missions. In many ways, that has worked and can work and in fact has to work, because we don't know the future.
You can go back through Canadian history. The Canadian navy, on the eve of the Second World War, was told that its mission was coastal defence, that it would not operate on the high seas, and the United States would take care of Canada's ocean borders. Within 12 months of the beginning of the war, the navy was operating across the Atlantic. The United States had withdrawn from the Atlantic, and Canada was well on its way to mastering operations on the high seas globally. So no one could prepare for that.
I think that is just a reality of military planning in a vacuum with resource constraints, because all sorts of scenarios are possible. How much do you wager? The best response is to have a very agile organization, and it really takes agile people who, when faced with crises, are able to cobble together respectable responses.
Would some of those challenges need real capacity-building now in a new way? If you look back over the past 15 years at the capacities that were built at the national level for intelligence sharing, for command and control, for some of the types of roles and missions that are outside of the normal rules set, we see a much more robust armed force. Trying to capture how robust it has become is a challenge, because all the changes that have gone on are not well known to the outside world. I'm not even sure most of the Canadian Forces understand all the changes they have gone through in 15 years.
Part of it is having an organization that is even self-aware of what just an operational tempo has required them to do, because to most of the organization, those changes would be invisible. That's part of the cognitive problem.
So is there a crystal ball and a set answer? No.