I hope that doesn't take up any of my time. You may deduct it from Mr. Williams, since that wasn't a point of order.
It's a country that's chewed through armies over the centuries, that has a history of it. We've upgraded equipment, especially for these sorts of missions in the recent past. But I'm more worried about our human resources and the issues you raised about recruitment. Equipment is only as good as the people who use it--we have now made a multi-year commitment--and a chain of command is only as good as all the links.
Now the mid levels within the armed forces are “hollowed out” and we have some real challenges there. I'd really like to talk about recruitment. You say that “The department has stated...”--and I'm quoting 2.45--“...the quality of recruits takes precedence over quantity.” The Department of National Defence does their own recruiting so they make this blanket statement, and then we go to 2.41, where it says, “However, we found that the assessment interview used to measure the nine personal attributes has not been validated.” The department is not able to demonstrate that its assessment interview adheres to generally recognized technical and professional standards.
The department could not provide evidence that the personal attributes they're measuring--to determine whether or not these are the people they want in the armed forces--were valid predictors of military suitability, nor that the interview was a valid assessment tool.
Then we take a look at the aptitude testing. You refer to that in 2.35. We lose about 28% of those recruits because forms get lost. In fact, it appears that only 50% of applicants are given an aptitude test in the first 21 days, as they should be. For the rest, it can take from 90 days to a year. In fact, we lose over a quarter and not quite a third of those applicants.
So you have the department making this blanket statement. They want “quality not quantity”. We're obviously going to put pressure on quantity. We have this new mission. We have a hollowing out of the mid levels. We're losing key individuals, people being trained as doctors and engineers. We seem to have a real problem with recruitment and with matching that to commitments that this government has now made--commitments to military intervention, to a war in Afghanistan.