Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Before you start the clock, I just want to point out that the last time Mr. Burt was here was when we passed my motion on doing a study on force protection. That was back in March. Here we are several months later, and we've had times when there have been no meetings called by the chair, and we still haven't had an opportunity to have one single witness to talk about how we protect our forces when they are either at recruiting centres, armouries, or on base. It's unfortunate and downright embarrassing that we haven't done that yet, when that motion was passed unanimously by the committee.
I'll start my questions with Mr. Burt. It's good to see you again.
You almost contradicted yourself. You said that there are no state threats but then went on and painted a picture of what Russia and China are doing. Really, it's downright scary the threat they pose to us here in Canada. I really appreciate what you've laid out on the naval threats facing us here in Canada.
Of course, we're going through the request for proposals right now for the future surface combatants. There was a report released just this morning by Dr. Danny Lam. His concern is that the design of the existing hull or the vessel that's out there today, does not have the capabilities to deal with the threats you so clearly laid out: ballistic missile capabilities; the sensor arrays we're going to need, which take a lot of energy and require an on-board ability to generate that type of electricity; and new direct energy weapons, such as lasers, rail guns, and things like that that are going to come online.
Do you feel that we need to broaden this and look at adaptability and modularity as we go into the ship design of our next surface combatants? As Dr. Huebert suggested when he was at committee on Tuesday, maybe we should only be building a ship for today, and then look at doing something different. Rather than doing 12 or 15 ships of one design, we should be adapting as we go through the building process over the next 20 years to take into consideration new threats and new technologies.