Thank you very much.
I wanted to talk a bit about procurement because it's the elephant in the room that we all hear about. As you know, Mr. Graham, you were on defence policy review. Essentially we hadn't done a situational analysis of the Canadian Armed Forces and our capabilities in a long time—about 20 years—which we did conduct the first year.
Vice-Admiral, you've mentioned it previously that often what happens is experts who are saying, “Okay, we need X, Y and Z.” We're talking about capital projects here. We know that these take a long time, maybe too long in terms of getting that statement of requirement, the RFP, the actual procurement, the operations, the training, everything that goes along with it. We're talking multi-year projects. We talked a bit about the multi-partisan aspect of it. Given the fact that we are running essentially governments at the same time that we're doing procurement that's going to take more than four years, more than one mandate, we have that policy lurch when we have changes in governments.
We know we're in the situation that we're in because successive governments have not invested adequately in the Canadian Armed Forces. We are in the situation we are regarding replenishment at sea because procurement wasn't done. We know that the F-18s should have been replaced years ago.
What is your recommendation given the fact that we know that this takes a very long time for some reason here in Canada to get military procurement. I've talked to many Canadian Armed Forces members. I'm Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence. I hear about boots, rucksacks, right down to....
What are your recommendations? This is something that has been occurring over many decades. What would be your recommendation now that we have strong, secure and engaged...? We have forecasted for the next 20 years, procurement and sustainable funding for the Canadian Armed Forces. Is this going to be able to finally solve the problem?