I'll take the first question first.
It's a very good question, Mr. Bezan. I think there is a great importance that we place, especially currently, on domestic manufacturing.
Starting in the nineties, we made some choices. These were choices that were made by the defence department and others that essentially amounted to exporting quite a lot of our production. Our domestic manufacturing facilities and capabilities—and therefore workforce—dramatically dwindled in the ensuing decades.
Here today, we find ourselves in a situation where, for much of what we need for things, such as the materiel we're supplying to Ukraine, we've found that we did not have a strong industrial base here in the U.S. To ramp up production on something that has been turned off or turned down is a very big challenge. As you know, industry cannot turn on a dime. Starting up a production capability, starting up a facility, can take 18 months to two years. We're finding that we're now having to take steps to try to reverse those trends.
In some cases, it may not be entirely practical to do everything on U.S. soil, so of course we have to rely on nearshoring or friendshoring, these other concepts of working with allies and partners, which also have additional benefits of working together with a common goal and ultimately having greater interoperability of our systems and other things. There's a great opportunity for that.
To your point about my opening comments, on trying to seek innovation domestically where it exists, I think we—and I would presume Canada, the U.K. and others—are finding that one of our greatest strengths in the western world is that we have incredible innovation in engineering and a lot of scientists and tech talent that we need to leverage. We're attempting to do that now. When we look at near-peer adversaries, we're seeing that they don't have quite that talent, so we need to make sure we leverage this while we can, before those other forces do catch up.
We're also seeing—