I'll break out from the land first. I'll work backwards and then I can come back on the land side.
It's early days, but here's where we're at. The commander of NORAD, the NORTHCOM group, understands very well the development of capability that Russia has embarked on over the last 15 years and that dynamic. Concurrent with that, we follow very closely developments around the world, developments of extremist organizations and the like.
So the question that came with staff—whom I have going down there all the time, and likewise coming up here, who are involved in tri-command staff talks and who work in syndicates—is that we're a learning organization, to hark back to comments that I made very early in the meeting. We try to do this and are very sincere about doing it. As we run exercises towards continental defence—both on what you would view as traditional military threats but also other threat scenarios—we try to do things better and we postulate questions and challenge ourselves.
Admiral Gortney was championing a concept for the evolution of NORAD. I think it's early days and ultimately whether we do this is up to the Chief of the Defence Staff. I haven't formulated my recommendation to him, but, ultimately, it's his responsibility to provide that advice to the Government of Canada. I don't know where that will go, but I think there is great value in continuing to explore it, even if all that it ever does in the outcome is to make us better at doing what we do today. How can that be a losing proposition for Canadians? There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, a lot of things that need to be teased out.
On the land side, just to bring it down, it's not as clear as it is in the air piece. We have NORAD, we have well-defined terms of reference and we understand that. Even on the maritime side, perhaps work still needs to be done to ensure that the leadership understands what we have in place and how that values citizens across both sides of the border.
On the land side we have a different construct that is often very difficult for U.S. leadership to understand. We have a regional joint task forces. We're a thinly populated country along a border with the United States, and lines of communication on our continent run north-south. As a division commander down in Atlantic Canada, I knew very well all of the adjutants-general of all of the National Guard elements in the New England states. I had a great deal in common understanding, because the way of life in the Maritimes is very similar to that in the core New England states. I understand that concept. So it is all the way across the country.
So we have a regional task force where on any given incident, the land component commander whom we designate is also one of my regional joint task force commanders. We're very good at dealing with being double and triple-hatted in responsibilities, as long as we ourselves understand what we need to do.
General Eyre is the division commander out west for the army. He's a regional joint task force commander. He can also be a land component commander for a particular crisis, and we have other ways of tackling the problem. So I think we're in early days of trying to understand this. If it's to develop a model simply to make it easier for the United States folks to understand how we're organized, then I'm not sure where the value is in that. So we will really tease out what the value propositions are and show how these make Canadians more secure, how they make us safer, how they enable us to respond to crises. We have a lot of work to do on this one, but we are committed to looking at and making sure that we do business better.