Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to both of our witnesses for being here today.
I want to talk about an issue that I've been focusing on in this study, and that's the undercapitalization of the Canadian military in general and the navy in particular. What we've seen from the last two governments has brought us to a position where we have capability gaps emerging. We have the retirement of ships before their replacements are available. My concern extends to the expressed support from all parties for a shipbuilding strategy, where the number of ships and the capabilities to go in those hulls seem to be slipping and where the timetables for delivering those ships are becoming a great concern, I think, for keeping our capabilities.
I want to start by talking about supply ships, because they're not, I guess, the drama queens of our navy, but we're not able to operate on all of these international missions without them. We ended up retiring the ships early due to a fire on one of the ships. However, we had an announcement in 2006 that the government intended to buy three supply ships, and then in the shipbuilding strategy we have two supply ships. I'm concerned, as I've said before, that the shipbuilding strategy has become a ceiling when originally it was a floor. People tend to say that we have two main coasts so we just need two ships, but obviously ships need to have time to be refit. They're out of service a certain amount of time. You can't really do this without three ships.
I guess I'll start on the west coast, because that's where I'm from.
Admiral McDonald, can you talk about what capability gaps this lack of supply ships is producing and how we're going to deal with that?