Thank you for that question.
First let me say that every year, the U.S. Navy continuously builds, on average, 13 to 15 major capital warships, so it's not a matter of.... As our colleague Jonathan from Seaspan indicated, we're both standing up shipyards from scratch, so we're on the front end of this process, and I think five or 10 years from now, this will look different in Canada.
First of all, the U.S. has an ongoing industry that's geared up for it, and in fact the government builds 15 ships a year for two reasons. One is to support the navy, and two is that if they built any fewer, the industrial base would start to fall apart. It's not just the shipyards; it's the next tier. It's the engine suppliers and the valve suppliers and the launcher suppliers. You need 15 ships in that big economy in order to keep them alive. I think that's one of the things that Canada is going to have to go through. We'll have to determine the minimum self-sustaining level, not only for the shipyards but also for that industrial base for which we're now growing the supply chain here in Canada.
The other thing is that there is a real priority put on the speed of decision-making in the U.S., because when a ship in the U.S. is put under contract, it is because it already has a deployment date. It has already been assigned a battle group for deployment, so there's a real pull from the operational side that says you need to get that ship not only under contract but also delivered, because someone is already counting on it. I think that's the kind of mentality that allows you to build ships without having the ones they're going to replace already falling out of service.
I think there is the speed of decision-making, and I would say that one thing that does work against the system here is having authorities and responsibilities distributed through very many departments, rather than having what I'm used to, which is a single accountable officer, particularly for a program as huge as the Canadian surface combatant—somebody who can say, “Yes, in that area I'm going to go with Canadian content; in that area I'm going to go with operational requirements; in that area I'm going to go with low costs and risks”, someone who can push things forward, rather than debating over them for a very long period of time.
In a program like CSC, inflation is a real killer to a ship count, so you need speed in decision-making, recognizing that this is something that has to go on year after year after year. We're at the front end, trying to gear up for that serial production, and then we'll have to figure out how to maintain it.