One qualifier I have—and I hope you'll be briefed on it, or ask to be briefed on it—is that Canada is basing a lot of the statement of requirements for its new ships on a superb modelling capability at the Maritime Warfare Centre in Halifax, where we do top-level work. It explains in arithmetic detail why you need a missile that goes so far against a threat. We do have a very strong capability there.
I'll also echo Ken's thoughts.
I hope you hear more on this, but four years ago, we killed the security and defence forum. This was a program that ran at about $2 million a year, it was run by DND, and it passed to 10 selected universities, which had to bid on this program. They each got about $200,000, but they had to say they were going to put at least x professors at work on defence issues, they were going to train at least 10 post-graduate students, they were going to have four conferences, and they were going to produce 20 books. This program was running for about 25 years. The auditor general examined it in spectacular detail, twice. It was discovered to be one of the best values for money in a department, and we killed it. Now, if there's a little lingering event and you put up your hand, then they'll throw you some popcorn money for your next conference.
David Perry was paid by them. He is the most prominent and knowledgeable defence critic in Canada. There was also David McDonough. One half of the policy analysts in DND all came out of the security and defence forum training.
What are you going to get? Very soon you're going to have people commenting on defence issues who, quite candidly, aren't fit to take out your garbage, because they don't know anything and they're not trained. Return the SDF.