Thank you for the question.
I was Commodore Jung's Deputy Surgeon General for three years, so we were quite aligned in where we wanted to go. We achieved tremendous capability as a result of operations in Afghanistan and had tremendous support from the government for the capabilities that we managed to establish. My priority, given that operations were winding down and that deficit reduction must occur in this country, and given our responsibility to assist in balancing the books, is to maintain the capabilities that we've established so we're ready for the next operation, whatever it might be.
We've developed quite a breadth of capability and expertise. I want my priorities to progress in areas such as establishing an institutional memory of lessons learned and at least a minimal capability in everything that we needed in greater quantity in Afghanistan, as well as in other elements of operations that we've undertaken over the years, such as the response to the earthquake in Haiti.
First of all, we must maintain all those capabilities to some extent, and we must expand them in those areas where the lessons learned demonstrated that we had some shortfalls—for example, in modularization. I have focused a lot on modularizing and on having a much more rapidly deployable surgical capability, which may not have been necessary for Afghanistan but may be necessary in the next operation, whether it be humanitarian assistance or otherwise.
We should lighten the load. If we break up the deployment of a field hospital so that, instead of requiring seven chalks of a C-17 to move the whole field hospital before it's functional, we break that up into smaller chunks, there will be a surgical capability with the first chalk that lands, which will simply increase in quantity with subsequent chalks of C-17 flights.
There are some things like that related to the lessons learned, but the primary thing is to maintain our established capabilities, particularly with respect to mental health. We must equally maintain our operational capabilities to support the armed forces for the most extreme types of missions that they may have to undertake in future.