Mr. Chairman, may I supplement that? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Strahl.
What do we need to be ready for? Uncertainty. And I don't mean to be trite by that. If we just look at the news today, who would have thought we'd need to be getting ready to send a foreign minister to Burma, and who knew that we'd have to be getting ready for continuing revolutions in the Arab world, which are so very uncertain?
CFDS, the Canada First defence strategy, maps out that in fact we do have to be ready for everything. You talk about threats and vulnerabilities. Of course, vulnerabilities can become threats pretty quickly.
We're always trying to anticipate. We've been told to make sure the home game is safe and that we can do everything we need to protect Canadians; make sure we're there for our continental partners, for the United States, and that includes, as Kerry was saying, looking at the Americas; and then make sure that we need to do what we need to do out in the world.
You asked about whether we need to be ready for full spectrum operations? Unfortunately, we're in an era where there's much more uncertainty and instability than anything else. All of the old kind of givens have shifted. So at the moment we're getting ready for everything from the traditional kinds of military conflicts, because they still exist in the world—and we've seen that, as we've been engaged in things like Libya and Afghanistan—right through to, as you point out, the new sorts of challenges out there, which are cyber asymmetric threats. You have to look at everything. That's the “what” to be ready for.
The question, really, in the readiness bit, is how do you get ready for it and what's your level of ambition with regard to your ability to deal with it? That's where you start to get into the realm of “you can't do everything all the time”—even the United States can't. But how do you offer those niche capabilities? How do you make sure that your response is a joined-up response so that you're not just looking at the military? This is because, in many cases, the best instruments we have are going to be early intervention through development assistance, effective diplomacy, getting the CBSA out there, doing the corrections thing. The military is a very finely tuned instrument, also an expensive one, and you want to deploy it when you really need it.
I don't mean to be trite in my response at all.