Thanks very much, Mr. Chair. I'm going to ask the witnesses to bear with me for a moment because I'm not to going to ask the question they think I might be asking.
There was news this morning of claims by President Putin about developing new missiles. This has not been independently confirmed, but if it is, they'd probably make the NATO anti-ballistic missile defences obsolete. If that technology were to proliferate, it would make all ballistic missile defences obsolete.
My concern, which I've been expressing in committee, is that there are two paths that NATO claims to follow: one is deterrence, and the other is to make the world a place without nuclear weapons. My concern is that NATO seems to walk, these days, on one leg, when it could be walking on two.
My question to you is, how does the expertise that is gained through operations in NATO feed into the work on the reduction of tensions and the goal of disarmament? You have a lot of expertise in operations. To me, you would have a lot to say on a practical basis about how we could reduce those tensions, and how we could move forward on disarmament. Are you asked to feed into those? What is really happening?