Thank you, Madam Chair.
First of all, thank you to the witnesses for being with us here today, not with us in the room but virtually. Thank you for your comments.
I'm going to start by suggesting that the strength of our armed forces is in significant decline. Unless we recruit, retain and train, I am fearful that we're going to be continuing down a very dark path.
It's quite obvious that we're extremely short of the goals projected by this government's plan of being “strong” and “secure” and “engaged”, which was calling for personnel levels to rise to just over 71,500. We lack modern equipment, and that certainly doesn't help. We lack a cohesive vision for Canadian foreign policy and for the military investments needed to back up that foreign policy. It's not just the lack of material support in terms of our equipment: I want to home in on the lack of trained personnel in the military.
On my question, I'd like to start with Professor Braun.
In your opinion, what is broken and how can we fix it before it's too late?