Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses today.
I'd like to try to take advantage of the fact that we have a historian here with us today and ask a couple of questions.
Admiral Murray, you gave us what I guess one would call a “doctrinally sound” presentation on the issue of readiness, and you talked about the issue of balance. It seems to me that when you go through the six missions set out in the Canada First defence policy, the issue of balance really comes up when you look at numbers five and six. In terms of this discussion of readiness, they seem to be the flies in the ointment here. How do we deal with those missions in terms of readiness?
Your discussion of balance seems to assume, and my own perception is that we keep coming up against this in the discussions, that our history is going to repeat itself, that we've been in Afghanistan for ten-plus years, training. So in terms of readiness, our balance has to anticipate that we will have another Afghanistan and have to be able to fight another mission of that nature.
My question to you, to start, Professor Windsor, is how do we use history to inform what we can anticipate in the future? Is there, in your view, any inevitability to having to be ready for another Afghanistan or another major international operation requiring boots on the ground and a very significant army, for example? Or are there lessons we can learn from that history that may inform a different perspective on the issue of balance of forces, for example?