That does, however, contradict the statements that were made and the assurances that were given by the Department of Defence that they would not be at the front lines. We have them there.
General, the other question I have is on the number of sorties that our CF-18s have been flying in Iraq. The most recent information from the government's website says 262. As Minister Nicholson said this morning, only 25 of them involved air strikes. So we have more than 90% of the sorties performed by the CF-18s not resulting in air strikes.
We also of course have reconnaissance aircrafts, the CP-140 Aurora, doing reconnaissance work.
It strikes me as a layperson that this is not a particularly good use of resources if it's supposed to be an air combat operation. We had said at the beginning that our concern was that there would be a shortage of targets very soon. We were advised of that by military experts, and I think you and others said the same thing after the mission started.
Is spending on this kind of operation a good use of resources when there are so few air strikes involved?