I appreciate the committee's flexibility in allowing me to join late here today and the opportunity to address some of these important questions.
When it comes to the supply chain, the way the spring played out was that the materiel group worked really closely with the Canadian Armed Forces to determine the critical fleet needs and our critical contracts. We looked at our available sparing and where we were from an activity level and the ability to support the activity levels that were being forecast at that point.
In the beginning, we identified a reduced number of fleets that were important to the ongoing operations, the responses under way, and we were able to look at supply and our ability to provide support over periods of 30, 60, 90 days and, as time went on, further into the future. There were different approaches, different considerations for those fleets. We ran into some interesting circumstances that we wouldn't have foreseen.
I'll give you a specific example. On our wheeled light support vehicle, we found that we were forecasting a shortage of a particular part of the brake cylinder. Interestingly enough, those brake cylinders are sourced from northern Italy. Rather than finding ourselves in a bind however, the combined team was able to look at the issues we were having with the brake cylinders and apply an engineering solution that allowed us to ensure that the supply of parts remained unimpeded and that the vehicles were available for Canadian Forces operations.
The situation is different in other circumstances, where moving parts and people, for example moving field service representatives across international and even provincial borders, has proven challenging at times. It remains challenging in certain cases where we have equipment coming from offshore, but we're able—