The difference is that the first mission—“train, advise, and assist”—is the mission that we are on. That's the scope of the mission that we've undertaken. The use of the term “accompany” is used by some nations, including Canada, to describe the difference between providing assistance—providing support in planning, providing support in such things as medical evacuation, provision of intelligence, provision of expertise in planning and control of forces—and the accompany function, where you're actually fighting with them. “Accompany” is used to describe that you are actually with them in the fight on the front line in combat.
By illustration, when we were in Afghanistan and we were doing the operational mentoring and liaison teams, that was very clearly an accompany mission. When the Afghan National Security Forces were involved in combat, not only did we mentor them in combat, but we were fighting with them shoulder to shoulder at the most pointy end of what they did.
In our mission, we are not doing that. In our mission, we restrict ourselves to the training—which I said has a predominance in the beginning—advising and assisting commanders, principally at the battalion level, on what to think about, how to contemplate the operations they're doing, and while they're fighting, to help them maintain situational awareness of where they are in relation to flanking forces, how to support them in terms of how they can call for fire, how they manage themselves better in conflict. We are not accompanying them, by virtue of that definition.
Where the assist function comes in, there's a number of different ways that we assist. One is through supporting them in their medical evacuation. Another is to help commanders maintain control of their forces, to help them keep an eye on things. Their forces aren't as well trained as we are. No matter how much training we do, there is still an element of assist that we can provide them in operations.
Another element of assist that I think is germane—and what's certainly caught people's attention—is when and under what conditions we would shoot, we would fire. It is for defensive purposes. Whether we are static and in a defensive posture or whether we are moving into an assault or an offensive operation, we have a mandate to not only protect ourselves—the right of self-defence is inherent with every soldier—but we also have the rules of engagement that allow us, in the event that there is an attack or something approaching our forces that would overwhelm us and therefore we are defenceless or approaching a point of defencelessness, to engage.