That's a very important question because it gets down to the brass tacks of trying to look forward into what we need the navy for.
In the context of the Russian capability, where we see the Russians putting most of their money and succeeding is in their nuclear submarine program. This is the underlining security requirement for Russia. It's in their documents. It's in their forced posture. It's a maintenance of nuclear deterrence. They call it nuclear stability.
This creates an issue in that they are also developing the capability of a broader maritime reach. We've seen this with the recent deployment of their aircraft carrier to the Syrian fronts. They don't have to send a carrier there, but it's a means of showing that they have the projection of a surface capability. What this means for Canada is that there is going to be a renewed problem, and that is, as we face an increasingly aggressive Russia, we have to deal with the fact that our closest ally, the United States, is increasingly becoming concerned with the nuclear SSBN capabilities of the Russians.
Publicly, they say that everything is fine, everything is okay. We can see in their procurement, however, particularly in their Virginia class, that they are continuing to give their subs an anti-submarine mission. We are going to have to meet that type of requirement, even if we don't agree that the Russians have moved in an aggressive fashion, which I think is a false context in this element. But we see this in the American procurement, and we see this in the American force posture. It ties directly to what Professor Charron was saying about the maritime mission of NORAD.
With respect to the Chinese, probably one of the biggest threats we are going to be facing—and this is something that the Australians are very sensitive to; you can read it in all of their documentation, and you can see it in their recent decision to buy 12 submarines from the French—is that the Chinese are expected to become a maritime nation presenting a challenge to western nations. They are already moving to become a peer competitor. We can see this in both their force composition and in their statements. We can see that they're getting increasingly unhappy with the existing international legal dimension just by looking at the recent arbitration decision that went very clearly against them. The suspicion is that the Chinese, through the type of missile capabilities and submarine capabilities they are developing, are increasingly going to be threatening western interests.
If that is to be expected in the long term, what Canada needs is the best capability of responding to a submarine threat, which means submarines of our own. It's not a World War II movie where you get destroyer surface capabilities. You need submarines to meet submarines. In order to meet the Type 094s and 096s that are now being prepared and that the Chinese will be building in increasing numbers, it is imperative that we maintain a submarine capability, much the same way as the Australians have.