Yes, you posed a question that keeps me awake at night, because those threats are real and our ability to respond to them is challenged by the challenges to our readiness: challenges to our equipment readiness and challenges to our numbers. The reconstitution of the Canadian Armed Forces that I've previously talked about is going to be fundamental to achieving that readiness into the future: rebuilding our personnel strength with the right occupations and the right culture, focusing on operations and operational concepts that need to be put in place, and working with allies.
One of the things I didn't mention before in terms of the reconstitution is reconstituting our relationship with allies. I firmly believe that one of our competitive advantages is being part of a system of like-minded allies and partners we can work with.
Finally, there's the modernization piece: continuing to invest the right staff into our modernization projects, as well as the new fleets of equipment that need to come in, making sure that we can get the procurement done on those and making sure that we have the force structure right for that. As we face increasing threats to our continent, the continental defence—NORAD—modernization piece is going to be absolutely critical as well, having infrastructure that we can operate out of in the Far North so that we can project capabilities up there.
You're absolutely right about what Russia has done. They have occupied many of their previously closed Cold War bases, opened some new ones and put in place what's called an A2AD, anti-access/area denial strategy, which basically gives them pretty firm control over their part of the Arctic Ocean. It's very similar to what China has done in the South China Sea.
We have to take a look, and we're developing the concepts as to how we can better operate and how we can better project our forces up to the extremities of our country. It's a multi-faceted approach, and it's a long answer to a very complex question.