Yes, absolutely. That's a critical point. As you and Dr. Charron have pointed out, often when we face financial crises, the first thing that goes is training because that's the budget item where people can say, “Okay, as long as we can still get the procurement projects going and as long as they're paying for the individuals, the expense of the personnel, we don't have to worry about training and we can cut that back.”
I think there has to be a mechanism in place, and I've seen a couple of instances where commanders have tried to say to the political elites, “We need more training, full stop; the amount you've given me isn't enough.”
The Coast Guard also faces this. I want to be very clear on that context. They tended to say, “Yes, sir, or yes, ma'am, what we're going to do, and we'll cut back on training.”
There surely has to be some mechanism at one point, and this can't be open or arbitrary, where the commander says, “No, this is a crisis; we need to keep it going and I think you're making a bad decision.” I don't know if we have that necessary capability that we can have that feedback from the commanders in the context.
We also have an interesting development from a longer-term perspective in terms of our new procurement. In most instances, most sea capabilities are going for much smaller crews, so we may be in the growing situation that for the individual sailors who go to sea, the crew sizing is going to be a lot smaller, and that may give us the capability of sending those smaller crew sizes out to sea. Of course, once again, how this transpires and works out, I'm not an expert in that field that I can say, but if in fact we do succeed in making crew sizes a lot smaller, we should be thinking very seriously about how much we're extending, but the extending of course then means that we have to have a very robust repair and mid-life extension issue. In other words, the more training you do, the harder it is on the sea frame, and that means further repairs in that particular context.