Yes, thank you. I'd be happy to do that.
The humanitarian assistance and readiness missions, which we've been involved in, in the past, resonate very strongly not only with the Canadian public, but with Canadian naval service people. When they were off the coast of Haiti, many said that they didn't want to come back and that it was the most satisfying, rewarding work they had done in their entire careers.
It resonates, it's important, and it aligns with Canadian societal values and ideals.
What it does for the military is get it ready to do large-volume, logistically demanding missions at short notice. This is a tough task. To do the planning, the scenario development, and the concept development work to identify the skills, the volume metrics, the restrictions on the system as it exists, and to plan for improvement, I think is a vitally important part of getting ready for the types of problems that the future security environment studies identified.
We are already seeing mass human migration problems. We know that cyclonic storms are increasing in frequency and intensity, and that there are fragile states out there that will look to us for assistance.
That doesn't mean the logistical capacity that you would develop for such undertakings is competitive with combat capability. This is the argument that goes against it most frequently. In fact, if you do the modelling and scenario testing, logistical deficiency is the biggest problem the Canadian military has, and to start building that kind of capacity makes it valuable in any number of scenarios that you can possibly imagine—high Arctic, far Pacific, Eastern Europe, it's all vitally important.