Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and my thanks to our witnesses.
First of all, I want to thank both of you for the range of your comments. They're different from anything we've heard before, and they will certainly compose part of the study. I'm afraid, though, that the study we agreed to was done under a bit of a false pretense. We had originally thought that our study of air defence as part of the defence of North America, together with our studies of the navy and the army, would all be funnelled into the defence policy review. We found out during the summertime, when the announcement was made that we were sending out 600 peacekeepers before we'd even defined the review, that the whole exercise was just one in public relations.
Commodore Lerhe, you mentioned that we should be planning now to help our allies in Europe. We have people in Iraq right now, and we're planning for a deployment in Africa. We have people in Ukraine, the Baltics, and other places the committee isn't quite sure of, because we've never had a briefing from the chief of the defence staff, even though we've asked him for a briefing since this committee was first constituted. Each time we have a deployment, It's not just the women and men on the ground, or in the air, or under the sea; it's the whole sustainment group behind them that needs to be in place. There's great concern that we're not going to have the ability to have all of these people in place, should we need to. As it turned out, the first phase of our study on air defence was covert so that we would not have an open tendering process for the replacement of our fighters.
In any case, another matter we wanted to bring into focus was the remedy and protection of our forces after the attack on a recruiting centre in March of this year. We were having a very difficult time recruiting people to the military, and they're leaving the military in quite large numbers. This builds into our ability to have the forces ready for the instances you described
With respect to your presentation, it's very helpful. The only information we receive, other than from witnesses, is in the news. We've had no briefings on deployments—