I certainly would, and that extends throughout all of our units, our service battalions and the army, our large organization, some 600 strong. Quite a few of them have been in the command of women, who have done extremely well and continue to do well in the progressions for their careers, getting promoted to general officer ranks. There are a couple more this year and, if I'm not mistaken, that will bring us up to 15.
I think those are good, but more importantly there is also, as the vice chief of the defence staff was indicating, the elimination of the types of barriers that would have prevented them in the past. That includes everything that causes a higher rate of injuries. There's the whole idea of how the kit is fitted and everything else to make sure that doesn't cause them any problems. The other aspect is to make sure that we maintain our fighting capability, and that's an important point. Sometimes people think that you're bringing it down and it's not going to be quite the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. The standards for how we fight have to be maintained, because ultimately that's what we do.
The training that these women do and are successful in doing, and then the operations they conduct, are at the same standard, which is a very high standard and very demanding. You're right that we have quite a few occupations that are more and more popular. We tend to have a lot of our women grouped in about five similar occupations. That's why we want to broaden this up. Part of it is actually to let folks know that it's available. Hence, there's the emphasis that we're putting on making sure that Canadian women have the opportunity to see just what is available to them. This where we're going to be going in the next year and a half, to put an emphasis on making sure that this is known to them.