Thanks, Rob, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Dion.
The process of initially loaning the German Leopard A6 tanks in the spring of 2007 unrolled very quickly. It wasn't clear what we could specifically do in terms of plows and rollers in that period of six weeks to two months.
I do recall having a meeting in Germany with Rheinmetall, which is the designer of the support vehicles. Their engineers said to me quite specifically that they were confident they could push plows and rollers. At that time we did not have full technical information about the Leopard tanks.
As the Office of the Auditor General staff have said, it became clear to our engineers, in discussion with KraussMaffei and Rheinmetall later, that there was uncertainty about the structural strength at the front of the tank to specifically take the force of putting the plow in the ground. I know this is very technical. There was a question of whether or not at what point we should have transmitted that information to Treasury Board Secretariat, having already drafted the Treasury Board submission.
We did not feel, when we understood there were going to be difficulties of that small number of tanks, that it was substantively changing the purpose of loaning the A6s and getting them to Afghanistan quickly. The primary purpose, as General Leslie can talk to, of getting the Leopard 2A6s there was force protection of what we call a gun tank—not a tank that's actually pushing a plow or roller but a gun tank that can move in close support of our LAV III Coyote and Bison vehicles, and if necessary take a hit from IEDs or RPGs or any armour weapons and survive those much better than the Leopard 1.
We had taken a significant number of casualties in Leopard 1s. In the fall, starting in August 2007, we put Leopard 2s in theatre. Virtually all of those casualties ceased to occur. We had two soldiers injured in Leopard 2s compared to a fairly significant number of Leopard 1s.
We continued to work on the plows and rollers issue with the engineers of KraussMaffei and Rheinmetall, and have subsequently designed adaptors ourselves for Leopard 2s to push rollers. Because we're not going to return those A6 tanks to Germany, we've been allowed to actually make the modifications permanently to some of those gun tanks. I admit we still have a problem with the force entailed to put the plows on the Leopard 2 tank, and we have a separate project that is much more rigorous, much more methodical, that will solve that problem for us over the next year or two.
I know that's a long and technical answer, but it was not a technically simple question at the time.